Dear Democratic primary,
You make me tired.
Please end as soon as possible, because I really don’t care who wins. Because I have this (very odd and potentially false) sense of confidence that no matter who the nominee is, he/she will beat John McCain.
I’d like Barack to win just because I think he’d blow it out of the water, but at end of the day it does not matter.
Just stop.
Love,
DAN
Odds and ends that didn’t fit anywhere else.
On a side note, this whole project was inspired by this first track. I played TATU at a local watering hole a few months back, just because I wanted to fill the bar with awfulness. Less than a minute into the song, an employee of the bar unplugged the jukebox to stop it from playing.
More than any other category, I think Power Pop defines “Room Clearer” for me. Whereas many of the previous songs were bad songs that I found myself liking, these are songs that I start out liking and then feel bad about it later.
At least one of these songs really spoke to you back in the day. Don’t even front.
For our first installment, we’re going to start off with a bang. Below, you’ll find ten tracks that are all awful in their own unique ways. Some are too cheesy to embrace (#1), some have just not aged well (#3), while others were pretty spectacularly wretched when they first debuted (#7).
I strongly recommend watching the YouTube clip for #10.
(PS — a lot of you may find yourself saying, slightly defensively, “Hey! I love that song!” To which I say, “Yes. Of course. We all do. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s mostly awful.” I think the best Room Clearers are effective because there’s 10-20% of you that actually likes it.)
I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I am very much against the complicated straight guy handshakes. I thought of this while watching John Stewart and Jake Gyllenhaal greet each other during Jake’s recent appearance on The Daily Show.
I just can’t keep up when meeting young straight fellows and they greet me with a complicated series of shakes, finger-grabby thingeys, fist-knocks, etc. It’s too much — I just can’t keep up.
As a red-blooded gay male, I know what I like and what I don’t. I like my t-shirts fitted, my parfaits with blueberries and raspberries and my hand-shakes direct, straightforward and uncomplicated. Please cut me some slack.
I’m really against whistling on deserted streets.
Last night I was walking around downtown on one of the side streets that connects 15th and 14th and there was a guy in the distance whistling a meandering, lonely tune. In instances like this, the part of my brain that escalates bad situations to crises went into overdrive. I’m not going to get murdered for my wallet, like a normal person. It’s going to be some sort of circus freak with a bundle of candy canes in one hand and a paper bag with a head in it in the other.
But that didn’t happen. Luckily.
Summer vacation has blown thus far, as it has entailed:
Send boys, chocolate, mix tapes, or some combination thereof.
One Friday night a couple weeks ago, my friend Mary had a birthday party at a swanky lounge-type establishment near Dupont Circle. It was poised to be good night — I had a belly full of Alero (my favorite Mexican restaurant), I was wearing my olive-colored (I know this because that’s what it says on the label) American Apparel shirt that fits me too tight, I had my entourage of ladyfriends. In short, the night was ours.
We entered the venue and I was the second person of the group to head up the stairs to the club. The staircase was sort of long, with a landing in the middle. I walked up the stairs, my hand on the railing, and as I walked across the landing the heavy metal railing became dislodged from the wall. It was to heavy for me to hold up — especially with the suddenness of the separation from the wall — and it fell to the floor with a sound like a single gun shot.
If you are wondering if this was an omen — yes, it was.
The bouncer daintily put his hand over his chest, informing me that, yes, I had scared the crap out of him and, no, that’s never happened before. When I looked back, there was a giant hole in the brick wall. Regardless, we were somehow allowed entry.
We cozied into our party’s location in the corner and set up camp — K with her vodka tonic, Lara with her scotch and soda, me with my Jack and coke. We were ready to go.
A bonus to the evening, it turns out, is that we had a hot waiter. Upon calling a sexual orientation conference, we decided that he was, in fact, my team. This would be confirmed by the fact that in our interactions we had several little flirtatious glancies. Before long, I was in the surrounded by people urging me to go for it — like a group of 7-year-olds coaxing the weakest of the bunch to devour a centipede or box of crayons.
Soon, though, when Lara had gone to the bathroom (taking extra-long, so she claims, to leave me vulnerable) the waiter came over and introduced himself. We established some preliminary communication — names, locations of work and home — and the flirt was very much on. I forgot his name immediately after he said it. For the purposes of this blog, I will just call him Johan.
After our conversation, I decided that I would give him my number — so I wrote my cell on the back of my card and clenched it between my fingers and tried to not let it get all clammy. When he came over with our check, I gave it to him and there was even some exciting back-touching involved. Exchanging numbers with people, particularly in a bar-type establishment, is so unbelievably not ‘how I roll’ — I was super-excited and proud of myself. I was all “Way to go, Dan! Way to pick somebody up at a bar! Gold star!”
The next day he called while I was at a play with K and we played a little text message tag, eventually deciding to meet at the Fox and Hounds — my favorite bar in DC. I would be departing from Adam’s Morgan, he would be departing from the Chinatown area and we would meet at 12:30. Already, this was seeming weird.
At the party I was at, Kristin’s Cinco de Mayo fiesta complete with make-your-own quesadillas and frozen margaritas (really, there’s not much more I want out of life than make-your-own quesadillas and margaritas) I was busy hyping up the big event, considering pretty much everyone who was at the event the night before was also at this party.
I was talking to one of my gays (a dancin’ gay — for those of you keeping track of my various factions) and I happened to mention that Johan had a Utah area code, to which he said “Gay mormons?!” And then we actually shared a high-five. I’m kind of convinced that gay mormons are to gay men what girls in Catholic school uniforms are to straight men. A very bridled sort badass purity — their white short-sleeved dress shirts, their bicycle helmets, their faces full of idealism and good intentions. You just know they’re waiting to go wild.
So I depart the party and I get two identical texts informing me that he’ll be late (strike one). Eventually, he arrives and is accompanied by no less than eight cronies — most of whom were straight and of the chest-bumping variety. He went on to explain that not only were he and his friends from Utah, but they were all Mormons (or ex-Mormons, depending on how you think of it). To this, I tried to conceal my glee. What I said in reply was “Oh, really?” But what I meant was “Oh my God! Let’s talk about the special underwear!”
After about fifteen minutes in the bar, it’s clear that I’m probably his third or fourth priority. First priority is his gigantic cell phone (he works for a certain red-nosed Massachusetts Senator) — one of those gigantic contraptions where you can negotiate with Kim Jong Il, deliver a baby and do a sudoku at the same time. Second priority is talking to all the friends (who, actually, were all quite nice), about doing his mission in Russia and how he loves the language. In fact, he said he “needs to marry a Russian” so he can speak the language. To which I was all “Well, screw you Boris.”
Eventually, as he grew more and more distracted, I just started asking his friends point blank if he sucked. None of them really responded “no.”
And so I made my hasty departure.
True story.