gettin ready for a (hallo) weenie time

sorry to have bummed people out so much with my last entry that i lost a follower. i mean honestly, that's kinda lame that i can't say things suck when they do, but whatever. you were probably only following my blog to win a contest or somethin, anyway.

trying to force a smile on my face and have fun this weekend, because DOGGONE IT i deserve it. our radio station masquerade ball is saturday where we will present the legendary DICKIES and josh and i will get all costumed up (stay tuned for photos).



then as we all know sunday is finally HALLOWEEN so hopefully i'll spend some time with family and watch my brothers make little kids scream when they stop for candy at my parents house. maybe someone will cry again this year.

have a fun and safe halloween weekend, y'all! here's some of my favorite clips and songs to get ya in the mood:


("hold on, i'm gonna put the phone on my bionic ear.")


(sometimes i still can't believe i got to see this band last year. BEST. SHOW. EVER.)


(the disco scene at the end is the best part)


(screamin' lord sutch)


(a family favorite)


(munsters theme, surfin' style?! yes, please!)


(the best!)


(round robin)


(i have a copy of this movie but have yet to watch it...what better time than now?! it looks rad!)

rough times

i want to be here, but all i can think about is the crap i've been dealing with lately. in a weeks time i've lost an aunt and a friend (and fellow college radio dj). my aunt was the mother of my two cousins, who are like my sisters, so this whole thing has been especially hard on my entire family. the friend died unexpectedly--was found unconscious yesterday morning, was on life support with failing organs by nightfall, and had died by the time i woke up this morning. death is never easy, but it seems even harder to wrap your head around it when the people involved are so young. both were in their forties.

sorry to be such a bummer, but i'm in a rough place right now. don't be alarmed if you don't hear from me for a while. hope to be back soon.

vintage halloween

among the dozens of collections i have is a big soft spot in my heart for vintage halloween decorations. the saying is true -- they just don't make 'em like they used to! recently i found a bunch at work and it made my DAY! some are in better shape than others, but a few are in near-mint condition. love em!














(this one's my FAVORITE!)


(vintage masks)


someone also found an old photo scrapbook in the basement at work and it had a bunch of halloween photos from the 50s/60s. how great are these?!












i know i've been saying this forever, but look for a new "inside hotel hot trash" post coming up next!

question mark tries to bite meatloaf

at work there is all kinds of crap laying around that i have no idea why we ever had in the first place. one of these things was the autobiography by meatloaf, which i picked up and started reading one day on my lunch break to pass the time. i have no interest in meatloaf whatsoever (in fact i can't stand him, musically OR visually) but the book is actually very funny and i like that its a lot of short stories instead of one long memoir. here is my favorite part so far, about a band i heart. i like it because it only proves that question mark really IS as weird as you would imagine him to be. i mean, come on...the guy is like 70 and he still wears belly shirts. and he got his name legally changed to QUESTION MARK. dudes gotta be a little off his rocker. as told by meatloaf...



...basically, i was just hanging out in LA. i don't have a clue what i was doing for money. still had a little left over from the band, i guess.

and i had a lot of odd jobs, but definitely the weirdest was looking after question mark. ? and the mysterians had had a monster hit with "96 tears" in 1966. a cult classic. what they'd been doing for the last three years, however, was something of a mystery. question mark was a bit of a mystery himself.

he and the rest of the mysterians came from that same area in michigan that i'd just left: midland bay city, saginaw. popcorn blizzard actually cut a couple of demos in the same studio where they had recorded "96 tears."

the organ player was like 12 years old. and question mark at that time, in the sixties, was around 36 years old, at least. he looked ancient.  pete woodman was friends with these guys and he knew question mark was a real handful. so when they came to LA to play gigs at gazzari's on the strip, they naturally want to keep him from getting unhinged. they hired me for the 2 and a half weeks to be question's bodyguard. to be his minder. they saw how big i was and figured i could control him. wrong.

according to the sources around the band, he sniffed glue. i never personally saw him do it, but he had a lot of it. ya know that airplane glue that came in tan tubes? well, let's just say he had lots of tubes of glue and no model airplanes. they tried to keep him under control but said he'd sneak out of the hotel to trash rooms, break beds and tvs, and throw things out the window.

they put me in the room right next to him. i never got any sleep. i was up 24 hours a day with this guy. he was fine during the day when everybody was moving around and stuff was going on. and on the days of the shows he seemed to be ok. he never said anything. basically, he was just led around from place to place in his wraparound sunglasses. i don't remember ever having a conversation with him. if he did talk, he spoke spanish. so that was another reason i didn't understand him.

i had a key to his room and at night i would listen at his door every hour on the hour just to make sure there was nothing going on. one night i heard strange noises coming from question's room. i unlocked the door and went in. he was prowling the room and muttering terrible curses and some unseen demon. broken chair, broken lamp. i grabbed him and took him into my room. he'd gone completely feral - he tried to bite me. i threw him on the bed and called the mysterians and together we succeeded in subduing him. kinda. i mean, he tried smoking pot to calm himself down but only succeeded in throwing up. he was a mess. i thought i was a mess. it's a weird self-help cure. take care of someone in worse shape than you are.

broke my funny bone

something has been bothering me lately: the realization that my life isn't as funny as it used to be. i'm not entirely sure why this is, but i suspect that some of is has to do with the fact that my cousin beth and i are not as inseparable as we once were. somehow we were always getting ourselves into these tv sitcom situations full of slapstick humor and too many bodily function jokes. we used to do things like give each other hickeys on our arms and then convince my mom that our boss was hitting us with a paddle ball at work every time we were caught talking, leaving the bruises on our arms. or we were cutting class to go to the science building and play frisbee with kitchen pot holders that beth inexplicably kept in her bookbag. or we were making bets where the loser would have to snort really loud in class the next morning during rollcall when it was totally silent in the room...

(FYI: the loser, and in effect the snorter, was me.)

but it can't be just this, because life still doesn't seem as funny as it used to be even when beth and i ARE together. did i lose my funny somewhere along the line? did i grow out of it? why did i used to have an online diary that was entertaining enough that perfect strangers began to wish they knew me in real life? (hi, dara!)

i was just going through said diaryland diary and i became even more depressed about the state of affairs and the lack of funny these days.  i guess i should just be thankful that i can look back on a time when life was, indeed, funny and appreciate it for what it was. beth and i would still like to write a book based on "the list" -- a list we began compiling back in 1994 of everything we think is funny. EVER.

but damn it if i didn't wish we still did things like make dainty cucumber sandwiches and show up at a random friend's doorstep to deliver them, or create new words for the english language like personal nasty.

personal nasty: noun. a fart that only you can smell.

2nd annual WCSB halloween masquerade ball!

as most of you know, i work at (read: volunteer at) this really cool student-run radio station out of cleveland state university called WCSB. last year we had the idea to throw a free halloween costume party/show to show our listeners how much we appreciate them (and just because we like to party, dammit). being the first time we tried it and not knowing how well it would go over, we hoped for a decent turnout despite all the other halloween plans people had. in the end, i think we had around 1,000 people and it was AMAZING! my brother accurately described it as, "a scene from a movie." there were so many people in (awesome!) costumes and the theater we rented was decorated (by yours truly!) in bags and bags of spiderwebs. we had awesome bands, like the legendary ZERO BOYS, mr. california, the homostupids and sungod. a few wcsb djs got to play records between bands and i was one of them. i will never forget dj'ing a show alongside the zero boys while i was covered in blood and dressed as a pregnant (and dead) sharon tate.









this year, we're ready for round two. if you're anywhere around the cleveland area, you might want to reserve this date on your calendar! what's better than seeing THE DICKIES at a halloween masquerade ball, you ask? why, seeing the dickies FOR FREE at a halloween masquerade ball!

WHEN: saturday, october 30th
TIME: 9pm
WHERE: cleveland public theater on detroit road
WHO: sloth, puffy areolas, nunslaughter, and punk legends THE DICKIES!!!

there will be a costume contest, booze and snacks, a specially brewed wcsb beer, wcsb djs, and more mayhem than you can shake a dead chicken at!

hope to see you there :)