beautiful, funny, sad & true

Wow, it seems like every time I go a day or two between entries, and I’m planning what to write about next, I always have a super-weird dream that fills in the gaps nicely.

Last night’s dream I don’t remember linearly enough to tell it all, but what I do remember needs to be captured, so here you go.

I’m on tour with a band, and we’ve just played a show in Denver, on our way to Salt Lake City.  We each drove separately, for some reason, and I’m out in SLC, looking for a place to eat dinner.  I park at a restaurant, walk inside, and see a glass of DewFromMountains on the table, and to me that means only one thing:  Ozzy Osbourne must be here, somewhere.

Sure enough, he walks around the corner just then, and I introduce myself.  “Hi, I’m Todd.  I’m a guitarist. . .YOUR guitarist!. . .(pause). . .Kidding!  Zakk Wylde is totally your guy.”

“Zakk doesn’t play with me anymore.  I found a new kid who’s fourteen years old, and he’s amazing.”

We end up hanging out, eating dinner together, and then he sort of comes along with me while I check into my hotel room and everything.  I start to unpack my clothes and guitars and amps and stuff, and I call one of my bandmates.  “Hey.  You’ll never guess who I’m hanging out with right now. . .Ozzy!  Osbourne!. . .I know, it’s crazy.  Hey, what time’s our show tonight?”

“It’s already over.  You missed it.”

“Get OUTTA here.  It is not.  Over.  It’s only 5:30; what kind of show is over by 5:30?”

“This one.  So we’re packing our stuff up right now.”

“That’s so lame!  Well, sorry about that.  I guess you guys can just split the money between you, and leave me out of the pay for this one.”  I hang up and tell Ozzy that I missed the show.  I tell him that my mom lives here in Salt Lake City (which she doesn’t, really) and that we can go eat and do laundry at her place.  The dream changes, and we’re at my mom’s place.  No one else is home, and I start to pile up my dirty laundry.  Her tiny little kitten (which she doesn’t really have) starts to run through the room and claw at our clothes and guitars.  I tell Ozzy, “We need to keep that kitten out of here.  He sprays, and he’ll destroy all our stuff.”  I grab the kitten and put him next to the back door.

I walk back into the other room, and find a T-shirt that one of my bandmates has made, for us only, to commemorate the tour.  It’s white, with a bunch of colored boxes with comic-style writing that tells inside jokes and rhymes.

“B_ _ _ _ _ fails!”

“7 + 5/2 – (the ‘square root of’)12 = Rawk!”

“And B_ _ _ _ _ is not a dork!”

I start to tell Ozzy that I can’t remember where I left my rental car, and that I’m worried about how I’m going to meet up with the rest of the band.  He laughs and tells me that I’m welcome to crash at his hotel room if I need to.  “Thanks,” I say, “but that won’t really solve the problem.”

That’s all I remember.  You can tell this was a dream because I was actually looking around for a place to eat while I was in Salt Lake City, whereas if I was awake I’d be heading to the Sego Lily Cafe over in Bountiful, which is my favorite cafe ever.

I need to start taking drugs, so that I can have an excuse for all these weird dreams.

OneYearAgo

When I was seventeen/eighteen/nineteen, I was in a band called Iron Horse. I’ve written about them before. Making videos and TV shows was among our favorite hobbies, and since one of the members of the band and one of our close friends worked at various television stations, that was a pretty easy itch to scratch.

Our friend would film us at shows, at rehearsals, out on the town, anything we wanted. He was very good at what he did (he’s even better now, by the way), and he was always up for trying new ideas, or coming up with his own too.

One of the ideas we dreamed up was to make a spoof of all the action-packed sports drink commercials that were all over TV at the time. We thought it would be funny if there was a drink that not only looked like urine, but actually tasted like it as well. And so, Tinkle was born.

The Tinkle commercial starts in slow motion black-and-white, with two guys sweeping a driveway with large push brooms, and the caption “Manual Labor” appears at the bottom of the screen. The guys wipe the sweat from their respective brows and walk toward the cooler, whereupon they find themselves both reaching for the single remaining bottle of a sports drink. The camera pans in tight, and moves from person to person:

Guy 1: “Only one Tinkle left.”

Guy 2: “Play you for it?”

Guy 1: “You’re on!”

Cue music: It’s the strummy guitar part from the Rush song “YYZ.” (It’s the part that starts at 1:42. . .) The scene cuts to the two guys playing maniacal one-on-one basketball, for about twenty seconds, with one of the guys sinking the winning lay-up, punctuated by the last four notes of the song. The voice-over says, “He shoots, he scores!”

The jubilant victor runs over and reaches into the cooler for the bottle of Tinkle and takes a huge swig, only to spit it out in disgust. “This stuff tastes like PISS” is what was actually said, but once we started writing this little scene, we decided that our families would probably see this, and the public, and it also might be funnier if we actually didn’t say ‘piss’. So we came up with the idea that the winner would say the word ‘piss’, but the voice-over would say something different. The catch was that the winner would keep trying to say the word ‘piss’, but he would always be foiled by the voice-over, no matter how many times he tried. So the word we ended up substituting was “WEE WEE.”

Incidentally, that was another huge discussion we had; what to substitute for the word ‘piss’. We came up with all the usual euphemisms, and I even recall the phrase ‘yellow liquid bodily excretion’ (or something similar) being bandied about too. Luckily they were all vetoed, because ‘wee wee’ is really childish and funny.

So here’s the result:

“This stuff tastes like (WEE WEE).” The winner is surprised that his word is censored; he tries saying ‘piss’ again, but ‘WEE WEE’ is what is heard. He tries again. His mouth is clearly visible, saying the word ‘piss’, but ‘WEE WEE’ is heard again. He looks around for the source of the overwhelming voice, and tries again, in vain: ‘(WEE WEE). . .(WEE WEE)’. . .aaaaaand, fade to black.

Caption, in yellow: “TINKLE: For athletes who can’t afford to lose those precious body fluids.”

You see, this is high comedy.

Why did it occur to me to share this?  Well, because the phrase ‘This stuff tastes like (WEE WEE)” randomly popped into my head the other day, and just thinking about it made me laugh hard enough that I sent a text message to Blaine to remind him about it. He laughed hard enough that I thought it was worth noting and sharing here as well.

Ah, if only I had the technology to upload the actual video (which is trapped on antiquated VHS) up here into my blog. I know that it exists, I just don’t own it yet. It will be a good day when I do, however, because it means you’ll get to experience all of this flotsam and jetsam first-hand, without me having to write it all out in script form.

OneYearAgo