Mom, I’ll send that thank you note.

I couldn't make it at Police Academy so now I have to go camping with this frickin' robot.

Funny you should mention the jogging/blogging connection, Dave. Last night, I actually went running for the first time in about two weeks (and I’m not even trying to impress chicks).  Oddly enough, I found again yesterday that I work better, not only while running but, as with my last blogging experience, while blogging.  I think there’s something about replacing distracted and unfocused time during which one might read Matthew Yglesias or — more often — look up music videos on Youtube, with time that one is actually trying to gather and compose one’s thoughts around said music videos.  This then carries over into the rest of my work.

So, it’s very much the same experience of head-clearing that you get while running (sorry, Dave, guys just don’t “jog”).  The key is, I guess, not spending three hours on any single blog post.

Now, as for your questions of the day, since it seems you have posed them in order of reverse difficulty, I will seek to answer them in reverse order.

First off, OMDG!  You don’t know — but probably can guess — how many times I have wanted to post this song to FB!  I had it stuck in my head several times this past week already, including last night.  I think its evocation predates Glee, but it makes sense that Glee would have now exacerbated its tenacity.  All I can say is “Kudos” to you, Dave, for having found the single most extraordinary Youtube video of Break my Stride.  Mustache and unitards alike will be spinning in my head for the foreseeable future.  And, obviously, the answer to your question (4) is “NO, you will never get this song out of your head!” However, I do not think the brain destroying is necessarily Glee-induced…

Actually, I was just asking myself yesterday:  Should I let my mother know about this blog?  She was one of the most loyal readers of my past blogging effort, if not always the most civil of commenters — Unlike you, though, I am not FB friends with my mother, so I would have to go out of my way to tell her about this blog, and I am not quite sure if I am ready to do that.  But, yes, “Your mama!” is indeed reading this blog already (3).  The question is, when will Ty get with the program?!?

So, I told you yesterday, that I was potential going to live the principle of “WTF-ever” by catching some gay performance art.  I was actually kind of looking forward to being appalled by people in tight-fitting clothes making obscure jerky movements that often would involve their hands chopping the air, swirls, and heads tilting to the side in a kind of Lobdellian tour de force.  However, that is not what Dead Boys delivered.

This was (2), in fact, a straight-up (no pun intended ha ha) musical vaguely inspired by the hanging of homosexuals in Iran — although this inspiration only emerged within the last fifteen minutes of something that seemed overlong, although, apparently, it was in keeping with its theme of “awakening.”  Still, I never want to hear another musical number that contains lyrics such as “performing gender”, “post-structural feminism” and “Foucault” I shit-my-pants you not!  What ended up happening was a series of vignettes centered around a gay performance artist and his hippy-medium landlord that culminated with a psychic channeling that led to a stirring denouement where it was revealed that our hero could in fact have political consciousness AND the dishy Asian saxophone player.  Oh, and a couple of BDSM scenes were thrown in to thicken the broth.  If this seems a bit muddled to you, believe me, it was much worse for people who were actually there.

You will probably say, “Russ, that sounds like totally not your thing.  What were you doing there?”  Well, that’s a valid question.  All I can say is that a classmate of mine was performing in the piece, and, you know, I’m the kind of guy that when someone tells me, “I’m doing this musical-thingy, you should come see it” or, “I’m writing this awesome blog, you should read it.”  Well, I DELIVER THE GOODS.  I SHOW MY SUPPORT. I GET WITH THE PROGRAM.  I guess these are rare qualities these days.  (By the way, this does not hold for reading poetry, sorry…)

Still, the major tragedy is that currently, in Berkeley, there is a musical called Dead Boys as well as a rock opera staging of — get the barf bag — Green Day’s American Idiot, but there is NO ROCK OPERA BASED ON THE MUSIC OF THE DEAD BOYS.  I’m thinking I need to find a crew that will help me remedy this problem.

Finally, I don’t know about you, but I only ever consult Cakewrecks when I need a lil’ pick me up.  But, now that they have a book deal, I think (1) we should boycott the site until we get ours.  Further, being a high school poseur, I think that’s a completely valid question.

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling an eerie sense of empathy with Big Nate, right now.