On Tape

Finally! Caught up on bills, rent, and most important, my ISP. So what do I do? Buy, on somebody else's credit, $165 worth of fancy colored tape for making my hoola hooops!!! I will sell them, and some of it is for me, my personal hooops and my performance, but it is just one example of what I was saying in the last post about dancing on the edge of a wine glass.

Dancing on Glass

Pretty much all the broken glass has been swept up. But now I feel like I am dancing on glass, maybe a huge bubble of heated air that floats up which could pop at any moment, or mabe tightrope walking my stunts on the edge of a great wine glass. Or perhaps I am bending towards my own reflection in a dark mirror, leaning so close that I could fall through.
Teaching classes, learning performance, taking lessons and giving them, researching, writing, buying and making and selling, inventing. Everything boasts of potential, but which posssibilities will pay dividends and which will crash through the fragile bubble of my invention? I definitely see the potential for disaster, and certainly my finances have rarely been on less stable footing but really all I asked from life is that it be meaningful and interesting. Clearly all that is necessecary for that to happen is to entertain ten different avocations at any given time and see which ones pan out, and which ones were just interesting experiments. Kids, try this at home, but if the test tube breaks over the bunsen burner, you could get cut OR burned if not both!

Long Time No Fun

Dear friends,
It has been a LONG time since I sent y'all a Fun Alert Bulletin. Hopefully y'all are ready to rock again. Here is the scoop, courtesy of the Nematoads:
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 11 @ BIGSBY'S
505 E. 6thAustin
8:00 The Bad Rackets Austin's answer to the New York Dolls minus the makeup
9:15 The Nematoads Your loveable bastards of surf back in action!10:30 Basin Street Those godless wonders of blues-drenched, Gretsch-fueled, alcohol-stained rock&roll revival
11:45 85 Decibels If Johnny Cash, Iggy Pop, the Beat Farmers, and Johnny Rotten had a kid, they'd call him 85 Decibels.

And on top of that, we're also shooting footage for our music video. We're working with local indie filmmaker Matt Kordelski to produce a wacked out video for our original song Bandera. So if you want to be in a shot or two, come on out to Bigsby's and get a good spot up front. Wear something unusual and stand out. There will also be a troop of huluhoopers in the crowd, so don't be afraid to cut loose.

Heh, heh, thanks, TJ. That "troop of hoola hooopers" would happen to be me and my loopy hoopy friends. All three of us. YEAH! So be sure to come ready to point and laugh, or better yet spin a few for the band! We will be there for all of the Nematoads set and then see what happens.
Bigsby's has changed it arrangement and they went and got a very cool manager, so it really is developing into a great live music venue. High ceilings (so smoke isn't a problem) and plenty of space, and the sound is great. And best of all - NO COVER!
See y'all there,
Hullaba Lula

Spooky Rides Out West

Spooky is a BADASSS Puddycat. Pure snowy white naturally, dirty and smeared with auto grease normally, with no social graces, and a driving territorial aggression, he is forever coming home with his face/leg/chest/flank all messed up from the recent Saturday night brawl. "He just loves a good fight," says LM, shaking his head in admiration.

Well, this time his opponent got him back in kind. Homie noticed that his cheek was all swollen, presumably from a bite, and we knew that it would probably open up, or Spooky would open it up himself, which he did on Friday morning. He had the manners to go and drain it outside, but still his face was a mess. A silver-dollar sized hole of blood, pus, dead cat bits and fur. Tex-Mex anyone?

Having been through this sort of thing before, I plied the usual remedies plus some hardball topical anitbiotic left over from LM's affair with S. aureus. I spent a lot of time with him, sleeping on the sofa with him on my chest. But by yesterday I became worried that he wasn't going to resolve this himself, so I made a vet appointment. The ointment didn't seem to be having the miraculous effect it had on our human patient. Of course, upon having broken down and called the vet, I found a treatment that seemed to be working, a drying powder compound of Myrrh gum powder (vulnerary, antimicrobial) Goldenseal (antibiotic) Echinacea root powder (anti-hyaluronidase action, immune stimulant) and Prickly Ash bark powder (astringent, antimicrobial, topical anaesthetic). It helped dry up the oozing gore and help a crust begin at the edges of the wound, to begin a scab.

I couldn't get a ride to the vet and didn't try too hard, having used up a lot of car karma recently, so here is what you do when you have to transport a LARGE cat with a fucked up face: You tie the danged cat carrier onto your bicycle rack, and walk it over to the vet. Just cross I35 like you are an ordinary pedestrian. Get up and ride the bike? It didn't work, he is 14 pounds of loose weight and I already had nightmares of dropping the carrier and spilling my milky white kitty onto the bridge over the Interstate. (I just now realize why my right arm is so sore in an odd spot - I thought it was hoola hoop strain.) Really, he took it very well, but there is just NO WAY to look cool while you are doing something like this. I should have just muttered, cursed, and pointed like the crazy old bag lady that I am becoming, and nobody would have given a second look.

Has Spooky been vaccinated? -Yeah, most recently when I bailed him out of the pound! Flea treatment, earmites, previous vet records, feline leuk/aids testing? Jeez, I know I would have to walk the Hall of Shame, so I did it with as much poise and grace as I could, and in the end they washed out the wound (which I had also done of course but they have better gear) cleaned out the earmites and gave a scrit for a month's worth! of antibiotics. He had no fever, so I am wondering about the antibiotics.

Then back on the bike and across the interstate with no mishap! This is a new level of bike self-sufficiency, I guess, made much less stressful by the cooperation of the cat. So prayers and candles to Spooky Monster, the baddest cat of my neighborhood and a good friend. Speedy recovery, keep your ears clean, and stay out of trouble.

A Happy Ending

I went to create a Yahoo group for my shop. Our current website was down, and we needed to have an announcement forum. Dang! I found that the name of my shop was already taken in Yahoo groups. Curious, I took a look at the moderator, and he had a link listed, one of which was www.myshop'sname.org! MMMMrrrrrrr! (Marge Simpson disapproval murmur.) When I followed the link, I found it was a local party girl/stripper outfit, that sends exotic dancers to your frat or bachelor party!

So I freaked out. I started asking for advice. The lowdown on free advice was that if my shop's name was not trademarked (it is not, because a carpet-cleaning product holds that right) we were SOL. Pornographers were assholes, they warned, they are not likely to sell you a URL for a reasonable price.

It is not like I disapprove of this sort of thing. Looking over the arrangements for the dancers, it seemed like they were being protected and treated well. What sent me into paranoia was that it soon was discovered that the guy who owned the site and the Yahoo group, was a guy who, upon moving to Austin in September, was directed to my shop on a listserve that I subscribe to! We even had a pleasant exchange, because I complimented him on a piece of writing he did. So he was well aware of my shop and it's name, and our standing in the community. So why did he have to use OUR name in the URL for his titty dancers???? We suspected foul play, that he had some grudge against us. In my paranoia I even thought that the drawing of the girl on the front page looked a lot like me! And the headshot behind her looked like my biz partner. To make matters more dubious, it also was discovered that he DID have his own URL, and that he was using both to point to his website!

A friend and member of the pagan community of some importance approached him, with a much cooler head, on our behalf. And guess what? The guy was unaware of the mixup, it was a mistake caused by him rearranging his web business, he took the stripper site down immediately, apologized to us personally and in a public forum with explanations, and gave us the URL as a goodwill gesture!

As I always say, "When in doubt, freak out!" to which my business partner replies, "Panic now, avoid the rush!"

Crawling Over Broken Glass

When Trailer Park Girl recently wrote about how lately life was like crawling over broken glass, I knew she had a point, or several hundred. Here are some of the shards stuck in my skin, drawing blood:

cat's face all fucked up from getting in another fight

not knowing if housemates intend to pay rent

needing that money to pay rent and fix cat's face at vet

fought and lost a fight with my food co-op. they fired a friend of mine, the alleged offense (pot smoking on the job) was a frame, his grievance committee was overruled, and the BOD upheld managements decision to keep him canned for and offense he did not commit, in spite of employees appeals and the 150+ signatures I got from members

cut in pay

long distance service discontinued at work

not accepted to a county rent-to-own your own home because i am too poor

heater stopped working. raining in the upper 30's. fixed it, tho, cold wet crawl under house, two brown recluse spiders

jury duty (not usually something I complain about, but a lot of people would. a context thing)

someone, who knows of me and of my shop bought the domain name.org and it is now the website for a call girl service for bachelor and frat parties. no legal recourse

You know??? I mean, it's no tsunami, but I definitely feel overwhelmed by adversity. Better go get my voodou god some REAL good rum ASAP!