Say what you will about America being overconsumptive and materials-obsessed…but American Halloween kicks ass.

Here’s the exciting events in DC and VA this weekend.

Tonight is Zombie Prom, a house party that has a cool idea, cool flyer if nothing else. Scroll down a bit to see the flyer. I think it is actually at this bloggers’ house. Show up and tell ‘em I sent you.

The Cremaster Cycle is making a rare appearance in Richmond this weekend. My friend Alison and I will be leaving DC at 6 am on Saturday, driving to Richmond, watching the series, coming back, partying at tnight, then heading BACK to Richmond for the rest on Sunday. Any of you wanna join us, buy tickets here.

Sunday night, there’s trick-or-treating on Embassy Row. I hear the Russian Embassy gives out vodka shots and Belgium hands out some slamming chocolate. For real.

Anything else cool happening this weekend, let it be known.

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Ever since I started tracking the hits on this blog, things have gotten a little nuts. Now that I can actually see who’s checking in every day, I’m obsessed with creating new and interesting content on a daily basis. I can’t write without an audience, and now that I’ve got one, I’m hungry for more. I am officially losing my shit.

By night, I’m trying to create some sort of interesting emotional backdrop to my Australian adventures. I’ve gotten a few requests from readers, and I really want to honor them.

By day, I’m trying to generate audience attention by promoting local events (only good ones), blogging about being frustrated at work and weird shit that happens in the men’s room. Also I have a full-time job as a banking researcher.

To reiterate, I fell in love online with an Australian woman, sold everything to get there, then it freaking worked out so I stayed with her for nine months and lived in Western Australia as an illegal alien. I worked as a furniture mover, stonemason, kangaroo shooter, dishwasher and freelance writer. Now I’m home working a fulltime job as a researcher in Washington, D.C. There’s a globetrotting, gore-soaked romantic coming of age story for your mind in there somewhere.

In order to honor those requests, I am trying to fictionalize an already incredible story for those who have no time for navel-gazing. I’m trying to extract bits of my own life for the world to read and it’s actually fairly difficult and terrifying. Not that you would know, because most of it is parked on my hard drive to be edited and re-edited until it’s probably just a haiku about universal yearning.

Adventure is extreme discomfort, experienced vicariously. Readers have to connect emotionally with the characters in a story (which is in this case, me, my girlfriend and my actual life) without feeling like they are just reading someone’s diary. You people also need to stay just distant enough to be able to have big laugh at my expense.

More to the point, I feel like this blog is a fictionalized version of a life in progress. It’s told in a staggering blur of flashbacks and realtime, so that if it were a movie, you really would crave the comparatively mainstream narrative utilized in Memento.

I’m fictionalizing everything in here in order to make it a) funny b) attractive to those who make magazine, book, or movie deals, and c) hurt less when I get rejected and criticized. If you’re feeling a), or have the power to do b), let me know by either leaving a comment or emailing me directly at jeff.simmermon@gmail.com. If c) is more your thing, I can’t really stop you, can I?

This is serious business. It’s cutting into my workplace productivity and my sleep. But I feel like this is my shot at my real creative life. Working as a banking researcher is a thrill-a-minute and all, but I ultimately want something else.

Long story short, I’m so grateful to have people read this thing. I can see every hit that I get, and it’s like a tiny valentine every time. It validates my existence every time I hear that someone actually forwarded someone I don’t even know something that I wrote. So when I go a couple days without posting, it’s pretty serious. Please, just stay patient, keep checking in, and toss the insecure dragon that is my ego as many feedback tips as you can.

Thanks.

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My friend Mitch Dilswhistle (not his real name) lives in Boston. Mitch is a shy man who draws no attention to himself at all apart from having flaming red hair.But for some reason he attracts gregarious urban histrionics like free wine draws art students.

This makes the experience of being his roommate truly spectacular…I don’t think we ever had an entire meal on our front porch uninterrupted by some sort of ghetto hijinks.We don’t live together anymore, but I got this letter from him the other day:

Why do drunken homeless people and other miscreants think that I want to party with them? I was waiting for the train yesterday and saw a man in a black and red flannel jacket lurching around way down at the other end of the platform. The train didn’t come. I started reading the newspaper. A few minutes later guess who was sitting next to me, shamelessly reading over my shoulder.

This dude took special interest in Ashlee Simpson’ s Saturday Night Live performance and reenacted the event for everyone who had not seen it. He played the role of the band, Simpson, and himself while watching it.

An ice cold bottle of vodka played the role of the microphone, his dick, and itself. As the train rattled into the station, he closed the show by gargling the word “pan-to-mime.”

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dance.fever
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

After pissing and moaning about earth’s overabundance of wack DJs, I’m thrilled to report the resurgence of the filters to filter the filters–DJ Trapper Keeper and DJ Panty Raid.

Panty Raid steals wack DJ drawers ’til the break of dawn, ruining the crotches of faux-vintage jeans forever while said wack ones dream of twisted-up keyboards and rock-solid beats. Trapper Keeper locks those stolen drawers up tight for future reference in a three-ring binder complete with retro turquoise grid pattern to lock away the stolen undies tainted by the tainted t’aints of weak platter rattlers.

They’ll be doin’ it for real at Spilt Milk, tonight at Club Red on Connecticut and Jefferson Avenue, below Fuddruckers. It’s free as you want it to be from 10pm to 2am, the dynamic ambiguously hetero duo thumping out old-school electro primitivo, doo-doo funk and all types of sideways jams that you never heard that sound so familiar.

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Legendary radio DJ John Peel has died following a heart attack while on holiday in Peru. Here’s the story.

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Here’s a letter from Clarence, in response to my question, “How exactly does one sneak stuff into prison?”

Couple o’ ways to get shit in. Arrange something with the guards in advance. But you pretty much have to be one of the top 2 coolest people in the joint to pull that off, because these guys take no shit. Professionally.

Apperently the way to go about it is to get clearance for some stuff, preferably related to what you want to bring in. Such as, get clearance to bring in some PBS documentaries. VHS only, cause you know those lil bastards will steal a dvd, break it into several knives, and then send some fools to the infirmary. Once you have the clearance you get yourself a cart (which also needs clearance) that can carry a whole buncha shit, and then wheel the whole jank in when you find a lazy guard. This absolutely incredible English teacher has smuggled in over 2,000 books that way.

We had a speaker today. Remember the Dylan song, and Denzel movie, Hurricane? Well the other dude that was with Hurricane Carter that night gave his rap today. Got the same charge, triple homicide, as the Hurricane, only nobody knows about him cause nobody wrote a song about him. Good stuff.

And here’s where I met the first chump. After the speech I turned to another teacher and let him know it was good stuff. He then told me the speech was “horseshit,” and that “he was blaming the white man for all his problems.” Well, if there ever was a guy who can blame his problems on the white man, its this dude, because after being convicted solely on race, he served 28 fucking years for a crime he didn’t commit. Mind you, the dude who said this was a white guy surrounded by dozens of violent black guys and their equally violent “protectors” with sticks. Unfuckingbelievable. In our curt conversation after that he then brought up how the Patriot Act needs to be strengthened and how abortion is morally wrong cause “it doesn’t work out for anybody.”

I need to keep tabs on this motherfucker, cause I think he may be redefining all that sucks.

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Meredith Bragg opened for my band, the Stop-Motion Skeletons in Richmond, VA 2-ish years ago. His sounds are gentle and tender, belying the heart of a nice, happily married guy who nevertheless sings songs that will break your freaking heart.

Meredith Bragg and The Terminals are performing at DC9 tonight with Carol Bui and The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers. DC9 is located at 1940 9th Street, NW, Washington, DC–show starts at 9, costs $6.

If you miss this one, you can catch ‘em at the freaking Kennedy Center on Monday, November 22nd. They’ll be on the Millenium Stage, 2700 F Street, NW Washington, DC. Show starts at 6PM, costs free dollars and free cents.

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My Cousin’s Roommate Is Spinning Right Now
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

At least twice a week I get an email that says “come out to XXX cafe on Friday night, my friend XXX is spinning, he’s really great!” Then I get there, and there’s usually like 20 people there, talking, drinking and just sitting around. The reason there’s only twenty people there is because everyone else’s friend is a DJ too. While the tunes are invariably better than Clear Channel Radio, it’s usually not worth biking in the rain to hear your friend’s friend DJ. Having just moved to DC and not being much of a dancer, I’m just now learning this the hard way. My new personal policy is never to see a DJ that can’t get a bigger audience than a public school gym teacher.

Maybe DJ culture is a byproduct of chaos theory as applied to popular music: as time progresses, entropy exponentially accelerates the proliferation of bands, songs, and singles. It’s all so overwhelming that we need someone to be a responsible musical filter for us so we can get up from the stereo and just have a good time. But the entropy applies to DJs too. Now that the laws of chaos have accelerated wack DJ reproduction, I need a filter to filter the filters.

Please don’t get me wrong, I like a good DJ as much as the next guy. Good DJs and good bands are precious and rare and they’re equally valid forms of expression. But I think that DJs are hitting the critical mass stage that bands hit in the late 90s. By 2001, you just couldn’t be bothered to go see your roommate’s band,and I think it’s coming around again.

Being a good DJ means having the right taste for the room and having the perfect combination of records on hand to move the crowd, make ‘em laugh and occasionally ache with nostalgia. The records one owns are crucial to DJ success. So many that “spin” now rocked to Fugazi’s “Merchandise”in the 90s…we’ve come a long way from singing along to “you are not what you own.”

While taste and record collections matter now, DJs of the future will eschew turntables altogether. They’ll just have 2 AM/FM receivers, headphones and a mixing deck. All night long, they’ll scan the bands to boom out the perfect clips from broadcast radio, with no interruptions and no commercials. Maybe the songs will get cut a bit short when BTO is playing on one radio and the DJ finds a new Missy Elliott track on the top 40 station, but it’ll be more thinking on the feet, more immediate judgment calls. Innovators can scratch with static and emergency broadcast practice tones.

Twenty years from now my kids will get emails delivered directly into their spinal fluid that say “come out to club XXX, my friend XXX is supposed to be there. He programmed the jukebox at So-and-So last year, and he’s got the best taste in music. Tonight he’ll tell you what to like if you buy him drinks.”

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Van Heusen Sounds Like This Picture Looks
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

It’s Friday, post-lunch, and you’re all antsy to do something besides work. I am in a burrito-induced coma, having inhaled the whole thing at my desk so I could get a post up in time for the “traffic jam” And I Am Not Lying, For Real experiences daily between 2 and 4 pm.

Here’s a bit of DC news, first of all:

The tremendous and hilarious Van Heusen will be channeling danceable metal thunder at the 9:30 Club Saturday, October 30th, opening for Super Diamond. They take you back to a magical time when hair had meaning and I was in grade school…the last time I saw them play, Dave Pollock/David Lee Roth (link goes to his site, incredible artwork) was wearing the nastiest skintight pair of white pants in the world. The waistband and the base of Dave’s cock met at the same sweat-soaked place on his body…he seriously kept pausing between songs to fix his wig and shift his package around. That in and of itself was hilarious, but with Caselli’s flawless renderings of Eruption in the background I nearly lost my mind. Jawdropping. Be there.

This phone call totally evokes the spirit of ancient Van Halen, Napoleon Dynamite, and this post–pure hilarious fuckwittery. I nearly shot black beans through my nose.

And really, what’s happening here?I found the page on my way through David Rees’ website. Rees does Get Your War on, a comic strip so amazing and influential on me personally that I have already linked to it like 800 times on this blog. Look at this, and just keep reading the advertisements. It’s the most hilarious, fucked up advertising I have ever seen, and I can’t even tell if it’s for real or not.

I gotta go. I gotta go to the bathroom. I want to read something, but I can’t be seen taking reading material into the bathroom. Some brave souls do, but they leave it right on the floor. It does look weird, carrying reading material out of the bathroom at work. You may as well just stand on a nearby chair and announce that you just dropped one off.

If I could have taken these into the bathroom, I would have:

1)Hunter S. Thompson’s take on this year’s election.

2) This story about a guy who actually deposited and cleared a bogus junk-mail check.

Sometimes people leave articles about sports printed off the web on the men’s room floor. Sneaky sneaky, because they totally look like real important documents on the way in. One time I found the Express (free Washington Post digest) on the floor. Score!!! Another time, someone had jammed a copy of the Economist into the top of the paper towel bin. I stood there looking at it forever, trying to decide if pulling it out of a pile of mostly dry-ish paper towels and reading it on the can was nasty or not. Then someone walked in and I had to just leave or else be that weird dude in the bathroom.

Okay, I gotta go and I am not lying.

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As you may have noticed, I am a bit tardy with the Australian saga update. That’s because I decided to actually do the job I am paid to do at work. As I mentioned before, the contest is over, but it’s real hard to stop playing.

Most newspaper columnists turn out more or less 1,000 words a week…I gotta pace myself or fry. It’s coming, though.

Here’s an update from my man Clarence, trainee history teacher in Richmond’s juvenile prison.

Shit got real in the big house this week. Had a straight up riot on Tuesday. I couldn’t see most of it, but it sounded bad ass, believe you me. Here’s a nice perk of prison teaching though: riots mean a lock down, which means we teachers just chill. All the teachers have a bunch of movies for these sorta days, so we just watched Jurassic Park and Shawshank Redemption (I know) until it was cool to go.

Here’s another tip I learned. Can’t afford a tattoo? No problem. Simply get a paperclip, and then work it with some sandpaper until you have a proper jailhouse needle. Use some antibacterial Dial soap to sterilize. Then steal an ink cartridge from a printer and just poke the shit out yourself until you get the tattoo you always wanted.

Also, I met a bona fide murderer today. I know there’s a bunch in there, but this is the first guy I know for sure. He’s got 20 years and then 50 suspended after that if he fucks up again. I suspect it may be difficult to motivate this gentleman to compare and contrast the Federalist System with Jeffersonian Republicanism.

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