When Thugs Cry showed up in my attic apartment that I lived in when my mooseknuckle was forced into an insulated closet and white stuff blanketed the earth for a good chunk of the year. I had a chinchilla and was gone for a few days. A good friend of mine was taking care of it. My attic apartment was one room. I had no control over the heat or AC. I had one window, a bed, a dresser, a closet that was turned into a kitchen, a bathtub that was angled the wrong way so it never drained completely and a toilet that didn’t have the right amount of water set in the bowl so it was pretty disgusting despite the fact that I cleaned it 2-3 times a week.
If I remember right, my rent was $250.
I returned to this slice of heaven late at night. My front door was locked. I entered and my chinchilla started running around in her cage (she never quite got used to me coming home). I walked in a couple of steps and then stopped. I immediately noticed the video that was stacked on the end of the row on top of my dresser. Where the hell did that come from? It was, of course, the video pictured above.
My downstairs neighbors were “gangstas,” as in they had rap names and listened to their music loud during the day and would tell me all about it. I even enjoyed the company of some dude from Texas on their back porch. We drank cognac and he told me all about his gangsta life and how he was a big rap star, just nobody knew who he was in Logan.
I blamed the gangstas from downstairs. The ones that hung around all the time were about 13. I assumed they had crawled through the open window and watched the video and then accidentally left it. I was a bit more protective of my apartment for a while after that. Until one day, I recounted the story to my coworkers and on Mr. Anderson started busting up laughing. I knew immediately where the video had come from.
I never watched it all the way through. The 15 minutes or so that I viewed were pretty bad.
Looking at it now, it may seem that one of the MCA logos was inspired by the cover.
I guess we’ll have to ask Joey about that.
Last week, one Mr. Anderson commented on a picture of mine with a video from the Reverend. I was unaware of the Reverend’s work, but seeing that I am a deeply religious individual who attends the Church of the Holy Alliance of the Mooseknuckler almost every Sunday, I checked it out.
I think the Reverend will be accompanying our Sunday School lessons from here on out.
Why am I sharing this with you? More importantly, why are you still reading? Well, you see, KB and I decided a long time ago to purchase a “small” house. This small house is what you all affectionately know as the Mooseknuckler Cycling Alliance Social Lounge. We wanted a small house for a couple of reasons. 1. Our mortgage is ridiculously low, which means we get to travel and adventure and do other things that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to if we had to pay more for our house. B. Less space means we have less room to fill up with shit. Or so we thought.
We began a long process yesterday of de-shittifying the Lounge (I’m positive that is a word). Let’s just say that we failed at reason #B.
For example, I have eight, count them eight Frog Hollow beanies. Why? I don’t know. Most likely because Cimarron gave one to me, one to KB and then left 2 or 3 at the shop and my head was cold so I grabbed one. Regardless, I have no need for eight Frog Hollow beanies. None whatsoever. And to be honest, I had no idea that I had eight Frog Hollow beanies. They were stuffed in my hat box in the back of my closet, so you know I wasn’t using them. They were just stuff inside a box that was cluttering the back of my closet.
Another example,
What the fuck is that? You might ask. That is a logo I drew for my band, the Paranoid IV. Yup, I was in a band for a couple of months. I was the lead singer/lyricist. We never played a gig and really only had one song that was somewhat done. But shit, we spent a ton of time in my dingy basement pretending to be musicians. That logo was drawn on a folder. Inside that folder I found three pieces of lined paper that was full of handwritten words. The top of the first page is the title, “FRI 5/24/96 Otter Creek 7:33.” The folder contains three pages that I wrote during a fishing trip to Otter Creek in ’96. It contains some interesting details about that trip. The fact that I woke up to a drizzle and was able to then test out my new raingear. Or when my dad and I got up early to do some bait fishing and after two hours my hands were so cold I couldn’t put the cheese on the hook anymore. Life shattering stuff for sure.
I don’t consider myself much of a hoarder, but I can’t make myself throw away anything I’ve ever written. This means that I spent a good chunk of yesterday morning going through old journals and notebooks, laughing at the shit I had penned and trying to get KB to read it. I even have a journal that goes back to when I was in elementary school. There’s some awesome shit in there…
I was quite surprised at how much stuff we really had. Books that hadn’t been opened in decades. Pictures, journals, pots, cups. Holy shit, we have a lot of cups. Backpacks, I may have a hoarding problem here as well. We took the kitchen from full, down to only needing three cupboards. All of it stuff we hadn’t used in at least a year or never.
Of course, all this stuff got me to thinking about how it ended up in our house. The fact that at some point, we decided that we needed that stuff. We paid money for it and then stored it. Or someone else decided that we might need it and bought it for us. And then we stored it. It’s amazing how easily we justify purchases, how quickly we part with our time in exchange for things we will probably never use despite our assurances to the contrary. It’s pretty awesome how well marketing works to convince us to buy shit. We spend our lives laboring away to pay for a mortgage for a house that we use to store shit. We exchange our time for money and then turn that money into things we will never use. It sits in our house and then we throw it away. No wonder there are so many of us that feel this whole system is a failure or at the very least, a total and complete waste of time. Because we waste our time to buy things we don’t need and never use.
Down with shit, up with more personal time!
Seeing that KB and I are unloading our valuable goods that we have never used. We are having a yard sale this coming Saturday, so that you can all exchange your money and time for things that we didn’t use and you probably won’t either. If you would like to see our shut, be at the Lounge from 8-12 in the AMs. If you would like to sell some of your shit, be here a little before that.
Just don’t come expecting to buy When Thugs cry because that’s one thing that we will definitely need in the future.
P. L. and R.
