this is getting old and so are you...

Teenage angst has paid off well, though I'm not so bored and not that old yet. Life's gotten more interesting, even as it's settled into some kind of conventional routine.

I remember hearing on the radio about Kurt Cobain but I was eleven and didn't pay much attention but when Layne Staley died, it wasn't unexpected but still heartbreaking and me and my fellow slackers mourned together on a rainy Tuesday in the basement of Tri-C.

Every time someone talks about "The Voice of a Generation" I'm wary because not every person born after 1970 is an angsty suburban cracker and we tend to project our likes on the rest of the world just like our boomer overlords. My younger cousins don't know who Kurt Cobain is, and because people on the Internet don't know how to read, the first search on Youtube comes up as "Smells Like Team Spirit" which sounds like a hilarious trainwreck of a customer service program.

I know that the cryptic lyrics and perfect squalls of guitar spoke to my lonely soul who'd just discovered the guitar and music at the same time, tuning my dad's instrument down to D and a half step to play like Jerry Cantrell.



Who needed boy bands and love songs when there was cathartic angst to wallow in?



I learned how to play that song from a guy who went to rehab, and did the painting below my first year as an art student, and it hung in every dorm room and apartment I lived in until I moved home in '06 and it sat in a portfolio stuffed with old projects and band posters I forgot I owned. I see more hipster kids with flannel shirts than usual and know that the inevitable revival will eventually happen.

edgy

I missed my train and got to stand on the platform waiting to go home with no book to read and more DHS/TSA/transit cops than there were commuters. I've been seeing a lot more of this and I don't know why it makes me nervy, why I feel encroached upon. What the heck is up with the guns strapped to your legs dudes? Seriously. It creeps me out. I wonder how the woman getting on behind me wearing a hijab feels and avoid eye contact with everyone.

I'm relieved to get back to the car and the tunes, the routine of art-making, melting copper with copper, scraping off the firescale with stone, making mistakes and being overly ambitious with a form I've only begun to experiment with, trying to figure out what color to add next week since I'm going for something vaguely bronze-age looking.

Equilibrium restored, coming home to put together a playlist for tomorrow morning, heat up some dinner, try to figure out how to get the hair cut because it's getting split-endy and don't want to freeload on my sister-in-law. I have a benign neglect relationship with my keratin, hence the really long tresses in my teens that were more of an 'it just kind of grew' thing than any kind of subcultural statement.

I feel like I missed all those female memos that everyone else got, since I was reading Alternative Press and Guitar World instead of Seventeen and have no clue how to do makeup or do anything seasonal wardrobe-ish because that kind of thing is kind of boring and more than a little intimidating. I only started buying shoes other than black low-top converse when I got a Real Job four years ago and kind of couldn't get away with that anymore.

And as if I wasn't already hopelessly stuck in 1994, I'm kind of going for the Shirley Manson look sans crimson since The Powers That Be would probably frown upon such capriciousness. Garbage is more or less pop music for people who wouldn't have been caught dead in 1995 listening to Top 40, but darn it, I like my slick production and big hooks with the overdriven guitar every once in awhile.

call me crank

Frustration with rank incompetence is a constant struggle for yours truly, but thankfully the ratio of awesome fellow peons to those who give us a bad name is pretty stacked in favor of the former.

I've been deprived of my art-making sanctuary this week, and miss the visceralness of twisting wire and shaping clay greatly, but having a flash drive full of cathartic tuneage of the heavy variety, potential rockingness of some kind and cousins coming in this weekend, some cinematic greatness arriving from another bibliotheque, and fabulous department soiree leftovers of the fruit/veggies/swanky cheese have turned my surly mood into one that's a little less curmudgeonly. As lame as it sometimes gets, there's a lot of things in my life that are good and it could always be much much worse.

an attractively packaged bad idea

Dear Chris Cornell,

I've expressed dismay before, I'm assuming I'm in your target demographic as an aging late-to-the-party lover of most things rock-and/or roll, and my blue-collar Clevelandtown roots mean that I don't have any qualms of hipsterdom in admitting that I love overwrought 90's kings of angst/substance abuse and was once so enamored with downtuned guitars that I probably have freshman year mixtapes with the likes of Creed and Days of the New (statute of limitations, dear readers! A decade ago, it was either this or Limp Bizkit on the radio, and I had yet to discover college radio and more subculturally acceptable/superior sounds).

I still like the big Seattle bands, but those last two Soundgarden records were pretty damn amazing, with enough heaviness and intricate minor key melodies to warm my Led Zeppelin-loving soul. Your solo record was overwhelming but that's because there was no Kim Thayil. I think a few of us tried to like Audioslave despite the name, but it was really boring and never got as rifftastic as it could've. And then as if genericness wasn't bad enough, you hooked up with Timbaland and became the creepy old cracker at the club.



Since anyone with any sense can see the huge amount of suck here, though in your interview with spin you think this is some of the best work you've ever done, you're cashing in on the filthy lucre and nostalgia tripping to get the old band back together.

As far as I know, nobody in your band is dead, but I have a feeling that I'm not going to be pleasantly surprised as I was when Alice in Chains got a new singer and put out something that was pretty good. Heck, even snakedancing Scott Weiland has embarrassed himself less than you and still put out a record with some actual guitar and songwriting instead of singing about bitches at the club.



Guess it keeps me from getting nostalgic for the nonexistent golden years.

I don't go broke, but I do it a lot...

My younger sister and I had a conversation about drugs the other day and she was shocked that I've never smoked weed because I "seem like the kind of person who would," which is something people have said to me ever since high school because I was relatively mellow, drew trippy doodles in a sketchbook, was incredibly skinny and long-haired and listened to weird music.

She hangs out with a bunch of suburban hippie and metal kids who are probably a lot like my friends at her age, who skateboard, get stoned, and listen to Black Sabbath and Sublime but she's somehow never heard of Cheech and Chong, which my dad and I introduced her to over Christmas. Kids these days.

Caffeine is my mom's vice of choice and while she swears she's not addicted, she can't go a day without her coffee. I used to make fun of her but then it became my drug of choice as well. I didn't start until I got my first and current "real grown up job" and found that I really did like the taste of black coffee.

It got to the point where it didn't matter if it was good coffee or not just as long as I had it, and I soon realized that between work, Saturday mornings with my mom, and Sunday mornings at church where there is always good strong coffee, thanks a pastor who drinks espresso by the cup and the Ethiopians, I now drink at least 2 cups a day.



"We just ran out of coffee" on my 4am day is a scary sentence to hear because if I don't have it, I'm either sleepy or cranky and can get by but it's just not the same. We put our five dollar bills together so I could make a run across the street at 7:30 in the morning to buy a pound of house blend much to the amusement of the baristas who live off our culturally acceptable addictions.

Now we're stocked up for awhile and I had this totally guilty look when the head honcho came in early while I was in the middle of my early morning coffee ritual / 15 minute break I never take.

Upon return, I was rewarded with a copy of 'Dirt' since mine disappeared around the time all the drama went down and I moved out and I drove out to the burbs to meet up with the family for my uncle's annual New Year dinner. It blew my mind again and reminded me of recording "Down in a Hole" and "Would?" off WMMS onto cassette tape, listening to the radio with my dad, and conversations with my crew of friends back in the day wondering why Layne Staley is dead and Dave Navarro is still alive.



I worried about my little sister and some of the really negative stuff she was listening to coupled with the whole unhealthy self-image propagated by girls on the Internet who think that emaciation and cutting is sexy.

Then again, my musical diet in high school was almost exclusively dead or might-as-well-be-dead rock stars, coupled with the writings of Poe and Hawthorne with most of my art done with colored pencils on black paper.

I still think that Conor Oberst and these whiny indie kids who claim Hall & Oates as their biggest musical influence ever suck, but my boomer coworkers and hipster friends think that what I like sucks too. It must be one of those generational things. Then again, my dad likes this song just as much as I do.

the customer is always...

The first time I saw 'Clerks' I was in a Kent State dorm room with a guy I'd just met right after I transferred from a school where the only permitted R-rated movies were "Braveheart" and "The Passion of the Christ" and where if you were in a guy's dorm room you had to have the door open, feet on the floor, and the lights on during certain visiting hours. It's no wonder I didn't last long there in the middle of nowhere.

It felt weird knowing that such bizarre rules did not exist, moving from there into what was almost a condemned building (broken windows, destroyed bathroom fixtures) with bushes covered in cigarette butts and all sorts of general debauchery and substance abuse.

But there's a place in my heart for Kevin Smith's characters, because unlike most movie characters, they reminded me of real people in a real setting that didn't seem all that far removed from my own economically depressed suburban world, with its dead-end jobs, unluckiness in love, obsession with pop culture ephemera (classic rock in particular), and lack of interest in upward mobility with a preference for perfected slacking.

Having always worked in customer service as a zoo ticket taker, seasonal retail salesgirl for two dreadful weeks when I was 19, and public sector peon for most of my life, the maxim that 'the customer is always right' is often wrong.



Though certain individuals claim to have "adopted" some of my coworkers, at least they don't have the option to do this, though it would be entertaining. I understand the whole respecting other people and cultures and lifestyle choices, but sometimes this gets a little pretentious or assumes that we're more narrow-minded than we actually are.

in which we become our parents someday...

When we were young, we knew we were born too late, grew our hair long because we didn't bother cutting it, borrowed our dads' flannel shirts, dyed our hair, grew up on the ever-present classic rock which gave us a love of total 70's unhipness.

We tried to find meaning in the last gasps of the alternative era, realizing that Bush and Creed and Staind really weren't all that good and worked our way backwards through labels like SST and Dischord and Sub Pop wishing we could have been around back in the day when you could see good bands cheap at the Euclid Tavern and we had to content ourselves with reunion shows with replacement singers and new bassists and watching clips on Youtube.

We mourned when Layne Staley died, got each other obscure 80's punk band shirts and Squirrel Bait records for Christmas, and when my friend touched Mark Arm's hand at a Mudhoney show it was like he touched the hand of God. We created our own scene, which was one elaborate inside joke that nobody else got involving jokes about Ross Perot and Stabbing Westward.

We'd argue over our favorite Led Zeppelin albums and whether or not Rush was awesome, and give each other a hard time for our guilty pleasures and were obsessed with the documentary Hype! whose soundtrack we rocked out to on the way to prom because nothing sounds more romantic than the Melvins or songs like Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick."



We wanted to be DIY and start our own record labels, wanted to do what we saw on the east and west coast here in our dying rust belt town as the towers fell on 9/11 but everything here had already tanked as it was. We were nostalgic for an era that had its own share of disposable pop music and generic rock bands, but we ignored them.

Our bands weren't anything special, our shows at school gyms didn't happen because the guy in charge of getting keys got busted for weed, and some of us went on to become scenesters and substance abusers, some of us moved away, some of us grew up and quit music, and others of us only sing at church or on karaoke night.

Now we're the same age as our fallen heroes. Those of my friends who joked about being dead by 27 are now heading towards 30. If we can't be Kurt Cobain, we can be Eddie Vedder. The thing that's hard about this age is that we've got enough life behind us that mistakes we made in our youth will follow us for the next four decades and yet we're still young and dumb in a lot of ways in a culture that makes it easy. We've branched out too, finding out that there are other amazing and undiscovered sounds that came out pre-1967 and weren't created by suburban white guys with guitars.

I get the feeling that Generation X is going to inflict our cultural consciousness with Tupac, Nirvana and "indie rock" the way that their parents beat us over the head with Woodstock and the Beatles, but it looks like my younger cousins don't know who these people are and think Green Day is this cool new band, and some of my little sister's friends have jumped into the straight-edge scene so it'll be interesting to see how all this plays out. The classic rock station is playing "Enter Sandman" now so I'm assuming Jane's Addiction won't be too far behind.

Dying young is far too boring these days...

Stone Temple Pilots / Scott Weiland Comedy and Laser Spectacular

I planned to get a crew together to relive our middle school musical years by going down to the usual spot to check out the Stone Temple Pilots, but it ended up just being me & Vanessa for the musical tailgating adventures. A terrible local band played before Cage the Elephant, and we watched various characters debate the best way to hop the fence, while a lot of people who looked like they were in their 30s filed in below us.

One guy gets in by wearing scrubs and saying he's part of the EMS crew but he got kicked out, and then a ghostly pale older metalhead guy in a black cutoff t-shirt started talking to us about "killer songs," Salvador Dali, Alice Cooper, "The Man,"("the cops are always hassling the hippies and the artists, the poets and the freaks. tryin' to keep us down maaan..." and so on.

People are serious about this tailgating thing. There were lawn chairs, minivans with the backs opened up, coolers of beer. The cops would drive by or perch on top the hill above with binoculars and while this wouldn't have bothered me before, the sight of the blue and white cars makes me jumpy but they didn't bother anyone.

Evidently there were hundreds of people down here for 311 ("They come through every year") and there was a great crew for Slayer earlier this summer and some of the guys are regulars and come down here for everything but were especially saddened that it rained during REO Speedwagon the night before. I'm thinking about coming down again for "Fake Sublime" in two weeks just for the people-watching awesomeness that could ensue.



I forgot how many of those songs were in constant rotation on the radio when I was in high school even though by then they were getting close to a decade old. They were one of those bands that really wasn't held in the same regard as others, but seemed to have some kind of universal appeal in the burbs. One of the girls in my English class in 7th grade explicated on "Lady Picture Show" and another friend of mine used to bellow "STONE TEMPLE ROCKS" at inopportune moments, and my dad was a big fan of "Interstate Love Song."

The light show alternated between being interesting and having that look of those Windows Media Player visualizations with names like "Vortex" or something someone's kid did in Photoshop and often made no sense whatsoever. Scott Weiland's weird white boy dancing and stage banter was absurd as only a recovering 90s junkie can be ("and, uh, this song, is like, off of Purple. I think you know it... Uh, yeah, we actually practiced our songs again before, uh, going out on the road... yeah Cleveland, like those were the best years of my life.." and they played all the hits and a few I didn't expect (though I would've loved a few more off "Tiny Music"), like their cover of "Dancing Days" that I've always loved.





And I enjoyed the crowd of bros and their lady friends watching the show with us, and the odd ones that showed up too, like the quiet guy in khakis and sperry topsiders who showed up by himself and knew all the words to "Dead and Bloated," and the couple slow dancing on the bed of a red pickup truck to "Plush."

It felt like such a Cleveland night, with the strange mix of characters hanging out in a barbed wire parking lot in the industrial part of town looking down across the valley to the stage singing all the songs and clapping and saying "no way in hell I'm paying $60 for that show" while singing lyrics that don't make a whole lot of sense in a totally unironic way.

starting over from scratch...

I took the best art class I ever had at Tri-C my senior year of high school. My art teacher was part-timing it between three different schools and would sit in the middle of the room while we workedand tell stories about Jamaica and Mexico and her three previous husbands and hanging out with Sting and would let us listen to almost any music we wanted to. It was a fun three hours every morning, and I learned how to take my mediocre skills and translate them into something that worked.

Me and my classmate Tony would bring in all sorts of CDs as we were feverishly discovering new sounds and figuring out what we liked, climbing out of the teenage nu-metal abyss into adulthood. It was a great group of people who didn't shred each other's work to pieces and I found myself using many of her techniques in my own art later on.

She was a huge Morphine fan, and told about how the singer had a heart attack on stage a few years back. I found a couple of their CDs at the library a few years later and was hooked on the sound that really didn't sound like anything else. On a hot summer night two Junes ago, I played a huge chunk of "Cure for Pain" my second night on the air, and it just felt so perfect.



Tomorrow night I'll be hitting up the Beachland Tavern to see the surviving members of that band with my longtime friend who like me loves all things 90's.

"People always try to give you free advice, and that's something I've always tried, but you get what you pay for that's what I say, and now I'm paying and paying and paying..."

given to fly

Friday night I was on a front porch with some friends drinking tea and watching the storm come in until the temperature dropped and the rain got horizontal.

And after a Sunday afternoon of attempting to create a garden out of the sides of the fences in my back parking lot, and taking my own photo walk, Frank picked me up to go see Pearl Jam downtown.I haven't seen him since we saw the Dirtbombs back in '08 and we caught up and reminisced about back in the day and where everyone is now and how everything's changed since then.

I've never seen Pearl Jam before, somewhat avoided it for economic reasons and also during the Bush II years when the albums weren't so great and there was a lot of political ranting that I didn't feel like listening to.

But I like this last record and despite the steep ticket price, the show was good and long, one song after another that I loved and never expected to hear live... amazed that Eddie Vedder still has that kind of energy and I also realized throughout the course of the night that I know all these songs but I still don't totally know what he's saying in half of them... guess I'm not a real fan, hmmm?

They were the soundtrack though for a lot of us growing up in the burbs and these songs brought back so many memories of cutting class and driving around Cleveland listening to the radio with my dad in a beatup 1985 Pontiac 6000 station wagon, borrowing his wornout flannel shirts (I still have one by the way, but my roommate told me I'm not allowed out of the house in it), banging on a crappy acoustic guitar and a friend of mine singing "Last Kiss" on a hot sticky day, shelving library books to my tape of "Yield," angsting out to "Black." The first time I heard "Even Flow?" Damn.



There's a part of me that loves a good nostalgia trip and gets sentimental over weird things, but I'm so glad I'm not 19 anymore and hanging out with people based on if we liked the same bands or both looked weird because now that I look back on it, a lot of those people really weren't all that nice.

anyways, this is what was played...

Wash, Hail Hail, Corduroy, Got Some, In Hiding, World Wide Suicide, Force Of Nature, Immortality, Go, Even Flow, Army Reserve, Unthought Known, Daughter/WMA, Sleight Of Hand, Johnny Guitar, Do The Evolution, The Fixer, Why Go, Just Breathe, Given To Fly, Leash, Porch, Wasted Reprise, Life Wasted, Black, The Real Me, Smile, Alive, Indifference

sunny days and 90's nostalgia

I took a walk on the lunch break and basked in the sun that has decided to shine on this gray and rusted city. Everyone was outside and it almost felt like some kind of weird local holiday with us total strangers greeting each other with "Isn't this beautiful? Just when I thought I couldn't take any more..."

Ended up getting interviewed by a Plain Dealer reporter about my feelings on the weather.

I'm so used to gray skies and general ickiness that it doesn't bother me that much but days like this when the sun feels like your friend and not something that will probably give me cancer someday are just so awesome.

Kinda really excited that Pearl Jam is playing here in May though it'll probably sell out like it always does before I get tickets... my radio connections don't extend to the arena.
I wish someone more exciting than Band of Horses was opening, but I have an unashamed love of all things grunge and 90s since I heard this song on the radio when I was 15.



It did take me awhile to figure out what most of the songs on "Ten" were about because I never really paid attention to what Eddie Vedder was saying, I just loved the guitars and the energy and the way his voice does that squeal thing when he's trying to sound earnest and hit the higher range. For subject matter involving mental illness, school shootings, and incest, the song still sound, well, more upbeat than they should.

On a less upbeat note, evidently the surviving members of Morphine are touring and coming to the Beachland in May which I'm also pretty thrilled about... Since I'm too young to remember these bands in their prime, I'm looking forward to this too. Morphine's music gives me the shivers in the best way and I never thought the saxophone could sound so heavy.



And I'm totally looking forward to another summer of ill-advised Cleveland adventures, potential road trips, hanging out at Edgewater at every opportunity, wondering what this year will bring since it never seems like there's a dull moment.

all your music has too much guitar

My sister listens to indie rock. I honestly debate the rock tag and could maybe question the indie part of it too. Part of this is generational because I'm old and one can only listen to so many manorexics moaning over shimmery guitars.

Part of this is probably me playing the guitar and being far more excited by pyrotechnics and primal noise. If I had a college radio slot back when I was 19, I would have been playing the following instead of African pop and trip-hop. Sometimes I want to fill in on someone else's show so I can indulge my noisy urges, but that kind of thing just doesn't sound good at 5 in the morning.

I worshiped Fugazi all the way through college and would still love it if they'd get back together to record an album or maybe play a show somewhere within a hundred miles of Cleveland. I know they've got better things to do, but one can still dream. The jukebox in the basement of the Student Center at Kent had "Red Medicine" on the jukebox even though some of that feedback could clear the room.





Quicksand bridged the gap for me between what was on the radio and what the older kids at Tri-C were passing onto me. One of my art teachers hated this album and threatened to break it in half.



I still love Sonic Youth's guitars but couldn't get into it when I saw them at Kuyahoga Fest a few years ago. It was also raining really hard, the stage was far away, and Derek and I were huddled underneath his track jacket while everyone around us got really high. People on acid in the rain is lame, no matter what your parents say about Woodstock. That might have something to do with it.



I still find it hilarious when I hear parents talk about how their kid is "an emo." I also know that their kid probably has no clue who this band is.



I'm not as angsty as I was, but I still love some bitter pop-punk and this cut off the Clerks soundtrack is the best Fleetwood Mac cover ever.



The world would be a much better place if the radio played Jawbox instead of Candlebox. Just sayin'



When I went to DC a few years back, we ended up at some now-defunct gallery/venue where I bought the first Jawbox record on vinyl and ended up talking to the door guy who was so excited to meet someone from Cleveland because "so many awesome bands like Devo came from there."

And lastly, because this post needs more estrogen besides bassist named Kim, Kristin Hersh gets mad props too for acoustic loveliness and rocking well into middle age.

alive in the superunknown

I haven't done much all week, coming home and crashing on the couch, not going anywhere except to the store to get Theraflu and gallons of orange juice for me and the roommate.

I was finally able to get out of my blueness this weekend, going back to Parma to hang out with my mom and then hit up my old familiar haunts from my adolescence, visiting the library I used to work at as a page, giving up on the clothes racks at the Goodwill but finding copies of "Dirt" and "Superunknown" to rock out to in the car on my way down to Cuyahoga Falls to catch up with some people, pick up the roommate, and take a long drive with some good tuneage. It's amazing therapy and now that the weather is getting colder, I'm totally ready to dig out the flannel I more or less permanently borrowed from my dad.





Sunday was fabulous, as Lindsay and I went to see Neil Gaiman speak at CPL. Of course he was wonderful and read to us from his new book and talked about how he loved C.S. Lewis and Lord of the Rings as a kid. The people-watching was fabulous and we ducked out during autograph time to grab a pizza at Georgio's because we were starving.



I got Neil's autograph for Randal and then we went forth to get lost in East Cleveland and she took pictures of overgrown lawns and random signage. I would've too if I'd been able to find my camera that morning. Everything seemed to be glowing and golden even if we were in an area that most would see as anything but.



And for some reason I feel like posting this for the heck of it because it's just good in that fuzzed-out early 90's should've been bigger Northwest kind of way.

the sky resembles a backlit canopy with holes punched in it...

So last night I called up a few friends and we decided to catch the Incubus show downtown at the amphitheater. As we learned last year, when we checked out Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, there really is no point in paying insane ticket prices and service fees and dealing with large crowds of people when you can sit on the guardrail by the bridge just across the railroad tracks and the acoustics are perfect.

There were other likeminded people with the same idea, friendly assorted hippies and metalheads having a musical tailgate party with lawn chairs and beer who came around and told us we could see better over by their side. It was a perfect night, clear and warm, the skyline and the bridges lit up, and listening to great songs and nostalgia tripping to back in the day.

I was a huge Incubus fan in high school, back in the days when I was wearing really baggy pants and too much jewelry, when that was about the only good thing on Clear Channel and I had yet to immerse myself in college radio. Some of the earlier albums sound a little dated now, but their sound has evolved so much. I guess they're like the Soundgarden of my generation, huge albums with a lot of hits, and enough weirdness to keep it interesting. Hopefully Brandon Boyd doesn't go the way of Chris Cornell.



But they put on a great show, it sounded perfect, and we were also massively entertained watching high school kids attempting to sneak in by shimmying down the bridge onto the other side, climbing the fence, scaling trees, and jumping over the restroom while being chased by beefy security guards in yellow shirts.

A good time was had by all, and it was just what perfect summer nights in Cleveland are made of... cheap thrills, good people, sweet music.

Setlist (youtubes for some of the favorite cuts)

Pardon Me
Nice To Know You
Anna Molly
Stellar
Megalomaniac
Circles
Love Hurts

Just a Phase

Drive (acoustic)
Make Yourself (acoustic)
Dig (Acoustic)

Redefine
A Certain Shade of Green
The Warmth

Quicksand
A Kiss to Send Us Off
Wish You Were Here

Aqueous Transmission


Encore:
Are You In?
A Crow Left of the Murder
Let's Go Crazy (Prince cover)

today I hate everyone

Some people need to grow up and get a life and stop thinking that everyone's out to mess up their day. That's not what I do, and I can't help it that you're unhappy with your life.

"And if I hurt you I am sorry that was not my intention..."

blast from the past

Don't know how I stumbled across this, but someone has old Camcorder footage of Marc's Funtime Pizza Palace, the low-budget answer to Chuck E. Cheese, where I attended numerous grade-school birthday parties that were spent eating greasy pizza and playing endless games of skee-ball by myself because I really wasn't friends with any of the kids but it was something to do.

I'd come home with prizes like cheap Chinese fans that always broke a day later or those necklaces they used to have that looked like seashells and contained bubble-blowing liquid that reminded me of the Little Mermaid, which had come out around that time. Back then, it was the best place ever, and it never seemed weird to me that the puppet show was out of sync and the moonwalk was always broken whenever I was there.



But yeah, this looks exactly how I remember.

grrl

It's imaginary boyfriend time again here in Cleveland.



What's creepy about this picture is how this almost resembles me in real life.

What's also creepy is how people kind of assume you're their best friend or that you might be a potential romantic interest even though they'd already graduated from high school by the time you were born. Yeesh.