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Put the finishing touches on the copy-edit manuscript for my '70s baseball book yesterday afternoon. They say Edward Gibbon took a stroll in his garden after finishing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; since I was staying in LA for the weekend, I had no garden to stroll through, so I took a celebratory nighttime walk down Wilshire Boulevard, between the post office on Detroit and the LA Country Museum of Art. And I took my camera with me...
Since 'tis now officially the season for Christmas tunage, here's a feature I did for ShockHound on 12 Christmas albums that not only don't suck, but might actually enhance your holiday. (Though, to be on firm legal ground, I should state here that I don't mean "enhance" in the 4-hour erection sense. And you should really see a doctor about that shit, anyway.)
I ended last week in a pretty foul mood, the result of numerous work and book deadlines colliding with dawning awareness of the mega-hassles that the next major change in my life — i.e., selling the desert pad and moving back to L.A. — will entail. Saturday was beautiful, but the sunshine alone could not lift me out of my doldrums. I needed to smile. I needed to laugh. I needed to rock. I needed at least one really cold beer.
Thankfully, all of the above things were within my reach — for Wonker were playing on Saturday night. The retarded brainchild of one Bones Wonker, Wonker the band deliver the Misfits-esque punk-metal goods with little regard for things like eardrums, subtlety or dignity. Taking a break from their recording sessions for Too Dumb To Die, the long-awaited full-length debut that they've been working on since 1993, Wonker made a rare live appearance at Friar Tuck's Bar & Grille (I'm guessing the "e" has to do with the fact that the establishment was built to resemble a miniature medieval castle) in the no man's land between Claremont and Pomona. 909 reprazent!
Crowded together on the venue's tiny stage, the quintet cranked out one would-be hit after another — "Psycho Bitch," "Brain Taco," "Girls' Night In," etc. — in a cerebellum-shredding twin-guitar assault. They played a song about people who die while masturbating to internet porn and come back as zombies ("Gutbusters"). They played a song that courageously linked vegetarianism with the evils of pre-marital sex ("Eat Meat [But Not Mine Until We're Married]"). They played not one but two songs about hookers. They played an electric kazoo solo. They were fucking awesome.
All of which surely would have sufficed for an evening's entertainment in itself — and yea and verily, I smiled, laughed and banged my head more during Wonker's 25 minutes onstage than I had all week, and felt a million times better for it. But there was yet another treat to be had: Namely, the opportunity to watch some of the locals face off against each other in the most disgusting game of beer pong I've ever witnessed.
Well, truth be told, it's the only game of beer pong I've ever witnessed. It's been a long time since I've played drinking games or hung out with people who do; so while I'd certainly heard of beer pong before Saturday, I had no idea how it was played. For those of you similarly in the dark (or who just take your drinking too seriously to make a game out of it), the two teams set up a bowling pin-like formation of plastic beer cups (with beer in them) at opposite ends of a ping pong table, then try to toss a ping pong ball across the table into one of the other team's beers; if they succeed, their opponents have to chug the beer that the ball landed in.
In this case, both teams (a girl and a guy versus two girls) had cups of water at their respective ends of the table, ostensibly to rinse off the ping pong balls between shots. I say "ostensibly," because neither team seemed particularly vigilant about their ball hygeine, even when the balls bounced off the table and rolled around on the floor. This wasn't some highly polished, regularly swept wooden tavern floor, either; the table was situated in ye olde tavern's semi-enclosed beer garden/smoker's porch, whose pockmarked asphalt floor was covered with dirt, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, chewed gum, AIDS and H1N1 viruses, etc. My friends Rusty, William and I were so grossed out by the sight of the wet balls bouncing around in the filth, we refused to touch them even when they rolled to a stop at our feet. Instead, we'd just gently kick them back to the players, who'd pick them up, make (if they remembered) a half-hearted dunk in the rinsing cup, and then resume play. "Plop!" Drink up...
Somehow, the most poetic part of the whole thing was that the one guy who was playing — and who was clearly the ringleader of the whole beer pong tournament — was a beefy, fratty type sporting an Ed Hardy-esque t-shirt with "That's How I Roll" written across the gut, and a dice motif on the side seams. Just like Wonker, it was so deeply wrong, it was beautifully right.
My friend Heather sent me a message via Facebook today: "How does it feel to be eligible for Super Saver shipping?"
This could only mean one thing, of course: My forthcoming baseball book (awesome cover pictured above) is now available for pre-order via Amazon. Which, considering that I have a very vivid memory of when I first decided I would try and write it (about, oh, ten years ago), feels pretty amazing. To say the least.
It also feels a bit "cart before the horse," as I am currently up to my elbows in going through the copy-edited manuscript and making some final tweaks before it heads off to the printer. But hey, don't let me stop you if you feel like pre-ordering it...and it's apparently coming out in late May, not June as I'd previously mentioned, which means you'll get it in plenty of time for Father's Day...
