THE WYMAN WEEKLY

Underemployed. Unattached. Unimpressed.

Issue 24 September 26,1996

 

 

 

I spent time on Tuesday night waiting for the damn lunar eclipse. “I’m gonna check out that lunar eclipse.” I told friends. Neighbors walked by me out on the sidewalk. “Lunar eclipse.” I would say and they would nod. One older guy stopped to bullshit for awhile. He works at a hardware store and the calendar on his counter said lunar eclipse and maybe he would go to his back yard and check it out. But a weird thing happened on my way to astronomical enjoyment - the damn eclipse never came. “Sorry,” said God, “this one’s canceled due to poor attendance.” Or maybe our earth (Love Your Mother says the hippie bumper sticker that will biodegrade in like 156,000 years) decided to take a different orbit this time. Turns out the eclipse was to be on Thursday and I just happened to skip that word when reading the article in the paper. Wyman, Lord of the Idiots.

 

FOSSILITIS

 

Last week I had an extremely sore back and was I worried - the thinning hair, my right eye is useless, I just don’t get Nine Inch Nails sometimes... all the creeping signs of impending old age. Thank goodness I woke up one morning with a nasty chill so the whole thing turned out to be the flu. I called in to work sick and then started doing a Homer Simpson while dancing around in my apartment: Woo hoo! I’ve got the flu! In your face Old Age! The back pain persisted though, and I almost went to the doctor, but then I remembered that he would say what he always does: drink lots of water and take some ibuprofen. He told me this when my throat hurt so bad I could barely swallow; he told me this when my temperature was 100+ degrees with bronchitis. Don’t it seem strange that the same remedy for a hangover is the same one for strep throat and bronchitis? So instead of seeing the doc, I drank lots of water and took lots of ibuprofen and took two days off of work and still managed to put out the last issue.

 

SEATTLE, MAN

 

Here in Wymanworld I’ve been listening to my Mother Love Bone disc quite a bit lately. The Trouser Press Record Guide said something to the effect that MLB was like Guns ‘n’ Roses with better songwriting but worse guitar playing. Or maybe they had better guitar playing but worse songwriting. Whatever - and why am I referring to Trouser Press anyway? It’s British and what the hell do they know (excluding Polly Jean Harvey) about songwriting or guitar playing? And only the British would name a music magazine after an article of clothing. Anyway, if you love Pearl Jam, you’ll probably love MLB, which had PJ’s Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament and was (as speculation has it, then again speculation has it that JFK woulda stopped the war but then his brother and main confidant RFK supported it for, oh, four more years) about to hit it big before their lead singer died of - you guessed it - a smack overdose. The MLB disc has the anthemic feel of early PJ, with songs like “Stardog Champion” and “Bone China” (with it’s cool line of “let the summer come again” which I think of every time my dad’s dock is pulled out of the water on Labor Day Sunday.) If you dislike PJ, MLB is still important because you can buy it and say you liked PJ back before they were even PJ, because one reason alternative snobs dislike PJ is that they hit it big right away so no one got the chance to sniff “I liked ‘em back in the early days” which is a crucial thing to say when trying to be one up on the rest of the scenesters you’re always trying to one up. If you hate PJ, MLB is essential to not buy because the pre-grunge, pre-Seattle Is The Thing band Green River split up so that its purists could form Mudhoney and its capitalists could form MLB. One of these days I’ll buy one of Mudhoney’s albums.

 

 

 

 

MORE SEATTLE, MAN (AND CORPORATE BOOKS STILL SUCK)

 

I’ve been getting my yuks at lunch when I go to the Baxter’s Books downtown and look at this alternative record guide put out recently by Spin magazine. And I was going to rip it here, but then earlier today I was down the street at the used book store (where one night last spring I bought The Grapes of Wrath and the clerk asked if Springsteen influenced me to buy the book and I nodded yes and then today a different clerk was singing along with “Prove It All Night” on the radio and Bruce basically wrote “Because the Night” but Patti Smith made it famous and she’s a poet and Springsteen also influenced me to buy Woody Guthrie: A Life a few years ago but I gave it to a gal I used to work with whose name wasn’t Patti but I used to work with a Patti and she was always interested in what books I was reading) and bought a book called Screaming Life, which is about the Seattle scene and has a ton of photos from the mid-eighties up to the recent past. So get this book (used if you can, otherwise it’s $35) if you want to see cool black-and-white photos of stage divers, guys and gals with long hair, guitars, ripped jeans, Chuck Taylors, flannel shirts, etc. I just hope possession of this book doesn’t ostracize me here in this city that’s the other home of rock ‘n’ roll.

 

$1.50 COVER, NO DRINK MINIMUM

 

You know how on the bus there’s those seats in the back that face sideways with the poles attached for the poor suckers who have to stand up and hold on to something for balance? Well, the other day I was sitting in one of those seats during my morning commute and then at the Franklin Avenue stop this petite, blonde, and artsy (Dylan: she’s an artist she don’t look back) girl with a post-New Wave, pre-long and natural, pre-Rachel haircut wearing tan slacks, white blouse and black blazer gets on the bus and ends up standing in front of yours truly. Except instead of grabbing a pole with one hand and looking forward - which is the desired state in bus riding because it feels natural and plus you get to be part of that Replacements song - she faced towards me and with each hand held onto a pole on each side of me. I was cracking up and wouldn’t look at her but it would have been worth a slap in the face to ask if the entertainment was free. Oh well, I was out of tens anyway. I hadn’t had such a thrillingly uncomfortable bus ride since way back in eleventh grade when my year-younger soon-to-be-bombshell neighbor Wendy got on the bus wearing a classic early-eighties getup of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans tucked into cowboy boots, turtleneck sweater, and a fur coat. The eight-year old (!) wiseacre sitting next to me whispered “imagine her wearing nothing but that fur coat.”

 

LINGUISTICS 101

 

One of the team leaders at Big Finance will walk by my cube and say “We’re rockin’ now!” when she’s excited about number crunching. I won’t get into what my definition of what “rock” is, mostly because I don’t have one. All I know is that when somebody uses “rock” as a verb, said thing DOES NOT ROCK. Think back to high school. Remember the rocker wannabe in the back of algebra class? If he declared that something “rocked”, you certainly knew that it did not rock. Did he not declare that the new Rick Springfield song “rocked”? And the song wasn’t even “Jessie’s Girl”, was it? When used as a verb, the word has gone on to become it’s opposite! So I pray and pray that this weekly does not rock.