Big Block Hippies

So last night I'm standing in line at the Aladdin Theater after just purchasing a last minute scalped ticket to see the tenth and final Night of the Murder Ballad...suddenly I hear my name being called, "OOOldie!" I turn, and there's Jeff standing up through a sun roof, stopped at a red light with some co-workers. The light turns green and I run after them, chasing them through the intersection doing some Riverdance kick moves and just basically looking like an asshole. And Jeff doesn't stop, despite the risk of my soul being captured by God as I dodged oncoming traffic...I found out later the guyser was on his way to go ghost-hunting at some cemeteries in Beaverton (Wow, cool...look at that ghost getting a manicure and beating her immigrant workers).
The murder ballads were great, performed by Stumptown notables like Dirty Martini, Heroes & Villains, Lil' Sue, and a bunch of others I'm not hip enough to remember...some great Nick Cage songs ("Where the Wild Roses Grow" among others), some nice originals, a few touching old timey tunes, and some lively covers of pop death dirges like "Jaynie's Got a Gun" along with two from the Blue Oyster Cult and the Violent Femmes that I can't recall the names of. Unfortunately it lasted close to four hours, and I felt myself nodding off despite the chorus of carnage on-state...
To fend off the feeling of getting old, I called up Jeff and we waxed our eyebrows, plucked our backhair, applied Rogaine, pulled on our lime-green Spandex and did some Xtreme BMXing.
Kidding...though I secretly wish I wasn't.
Instead we decided to bump some belligerent Bay Area gangsta rap Jeff bought earlier in the day, and drive by the Hawthorne Theater where some reggae concert was taking place...I screamed "Big Block, bitches!" and screeched off...then parked half a block down the street and we went inside to give a listen. The singer was a black-version of my stepdad with balding dreadlocks. It was a pretty sweet vision. The stink was overwhelming though, and I had a grand mal seizure just reminiscing about Arcata (Jeff and I went to school there, at Humboldt), so we bounced for a gin & tonic at Mulligan's a few blocks away. The bar had no character, but two things saved the experience...the first was a back room with the names of all the counties in Ireland carved into the plaster walls, the second being the three songs that played while we were briefly there were some Outkast, Goodie Mob, and Mos Def. Their old stuff. None too shabby.
Hungry, we stopped off at No Fish, Go Fish but were immediately shooed away by a gang of nekkid folks inside...we didn't want to cause a scene (can you imagine getting into a fight with a bunch of flaccidly floozy forty year olds?...I can't either) so we headed home for some leftover pizza I had from a previous night's trip with Kes to Blind Onion where she and I had filled out our ballots for the upcoming election (Oregon is a mail-in only state...there are no polling booths).
On the way back to the flophouse, I decided to take a detour under the freeway to this massive storage complex I had been eyeballing for over a year as a potential foty (that's 40oz., nugget) spot. It was like a miniature city, and we drove around until hitting a dead end dirt path...I put the car in reverse and looked in the rearview and HOLY FUCKING SHIT. There were goddamn LIBYANS behind us in a VW bus, homeboy standing through the sun roof with a fucking rocket launcher. Then I saw Doc get his chest liquefied with an AK-47, and we went apeshit trying to save him, but man, he was ghost.
So we went home and watched a library rental foreign film about a dad and his son taking a road trip from Paris to Mecca. Jeff fell asleep within 20 minutes, as always.
I cursed the terrorists, and wept for Doc.
Like my man Guru says, "Word is born, he was a good man."