The RhodesTer Chronicles | sweet, succulent satire

Gaga, Obama and a Pathetic Piece of Pot-Metal

by RhodesTer on January 29, 2010

HAPPY NATIONAL LADY GAGA DAY!

Gaga reminds me of the president’s state of the union address last Wednesday, because I guarded the America’s Cup when I was a mere lad.

It all ties in.. just wait and see.

I used to do security guarding to make ends meet. They never did, but I still managed to get by somehow. This was a long time ago when I was young and sprightly, and living in San Diego. I worked for a “contract security company,” which meant that I got sent all over the place to guard all kinds of things.

In 1987 a yacht skipper named Dennis Connor raced his yacht against other yachts and won a huge trophy called the America’s Cup, which they put on display at the San Diego Yacht Club. Then they hired the company I worked for to guard it and the company sent me.

This was a big friggin’ deal in San Diego at the time, but it was so long ago it’s all kind of lost in a swirling haze of pretentious rich assholes. But I remember a few things that stand out, like the good looking Brad Pitt kind of guy who came in with the gorgeous babe on his arm. She was wearing a skirt so short her legs reached all the way to the ground, and I think I might have drooled a little on my tin badge without meaning too. They didn’t notice because they were too busy fawning over “that magnificent trophy!”

They both went “oooh!” and “ahhh!” as they held hands and scanned over the shining edifice to the world’s most ludicrously indulgent sport. They asked me questions about it that I couldn’t answer and they stood there long enough to read every inscription, which was awesome because there are a lot of inscriptions due to it being a really old perpetual trophy, and she had a fine little butt for me to admire while they stared at the towering silver edifice.

Yes, this is how security guards entertain themselves. You knew that.

After they left, an older gent came hobbling in using a cane. He greeted me with a sly little wink and then approached the trophy, which he studied in detail for about three minutes. Then he shook his head and muttered, “What a pathetic piece of pot-metal.”

He didn’t like it at all.

He somehow took my silent grin as a prompt to go on and complain about what a waste the whole thing was, so he did, for about twenty minutes.

I remembered all this on Wednesday while reading Twitter and Facebook comments about President Obama’s speech. I thought how funny it is that some people liked what he said while others thought it was a steaming pile of festering donkey shit.

I realized way back when, while standing in front of the America’s Cup, that the hot couple had their reasons for liking it while the older gent had his reasons for not liking it, and it all had something to do with the context of their lives. Maybe the young babe had a brother who helped crew Connor’s yacht. Maybe the couple bought into all the hype on the radio at the time and just had to come down and see it for themselves. Maybe they both just liked tall, shiny things with names on them.

The old man hated it, but perhaps he’d been a yacht skipper who’d lost the cup years before to the Australians and was still bitter about it. Or perhaps he didn’t like tall, ridiculously expensive things with a cold, hard veneer because they reminded him of his first wife.

Whatever their reasons, they had them, and it affected how they saw the America’s cup.

Just like all the comments I was reading on Twitter and Facebook the other day that were streaming down the line during the president’s state of the union address.

I tend to only follow like-minded people to myself, as most of us do, but a few of my online pals likened the president to a retarded monkey flinging feces at the poor, beleaguered republicans.

Others thought he gave an excellent speech and they’re all “empowered” now. I’m wondering if they all heard the same speech. How can one group be so adamant that it’s all a load of crap while another wildly cheers him on? And of course, members of each group think members of the other group are “ill-informed” at best and brainless slug farts at worst.

To me, it’s all in the context again. Everyone has a bulging sack of reasons for thinking as they do, and sometimes those reasons are good while at other times, maybe not so much. Sometimes these reasons change; by an event, by what someone says or because an individual decided to just sit down and think about it.

That’s what I did with my opinion of Lady Gaga. For a while I was calling her “Lady GAG-ya” because I thought she was all ludicrous and showy. She is, but I didn’t like her very much then and now I do. Why? Because someone who likes what she does explained to me why they like what she does and what they felt she was trying to achieve.

Before you go thinking that I’ll just buy into anything that has a few pretty words behind it, let me assure you that I thought over the Gaga thing and came to the realization, with the help of my friend, that she’s just putting on a show. Always. She can’t just sit down at a piano and sing a song, she has to have the piano float while she wears wings and spouts blood out of her ears. It’s all symbolic of something, and trying to figure out what the symbolism is, is what makes her so intriguing.

She’s the Salvador Dali of pop music.

I still don’t fully understand Gaga (does anyone?) but I like a few of her songs and videos that I didn’t before. I’m kind of seeing them in a new light since thinking it over. I used to work in theater, so I had to apply all of my theater experience to understanding her. I get it now. I really do!

I fully realize that Lady Gaga and yacht racing trophies don’t carry the same significance as national politics, but they’re all the same when it comes to our reasons for agreeing, disagreeing, liking and not liking, loving and hating. We bring our lives to the table and apply them to what’s being served, which sometimes makes for a tasty dish but other times not, while all along we’re all eating the same food.

It may be an over-used saying, but we really are the sum of our experience.

By the way, I seem to have a kind of history with huge, perpetual trophies. I once had lunch with the Stanley Cup but that’s another story.

tell the WORLD..

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I Think We Have Ghosts

by RhodesTer on January 27, 2010

Coffeesister and I have been living in this old house for a few months, and we think it’s rather ghostly.

It was built in 1963 for the hospital supervisor of the area but we don’t know anything beyond that. We don’t know its history or if there were any traumatic events like murders, births, shootings, wild parties, frat initiations, explosions, poisonings, stabbings, exorcisms or seances.

It’s a rental that belongs to a property management firm, so there are no creepy old caretakers full of stories or dusty books laying around with accounts of evil deeds that have been done within these hallowed walls.

Nothing like that.

Of course, a house this old is bound to have had some interesting activity at one time or another, and it’s likely that a few of the former occupants are now deceased. Whoever they were, they lived here, which means they’ve laughed here, screamed here, cried here and maybe even died here.

I hate not knowing.

Cousin Jo rents the whole house and in turn rents out rooms to a handful of housemates, including us. She has a few slightly-more-than-riveting stories, one of which is that screams have been heard emanating from the living room area on two occasions. She swears this is true, because she heard it along with several other housemates.

She said it was a lady screaming – both times were in the afternoon – and nobody was in the living room when it occurred. The others who heard it corroborate her story, saying it sounded like a woman being murdered right there next to the fireplace. It was as loud as if she were actually standing in there screaming, with no ghostly, ethereal aura about it at all, as if it were really happening at the moment. On both occasions they rushed into the living room thinking something dreadful had happened, only to find.. nothing.

Nobody.

Thanks for telling me this, Jo. I have to live here for a bit longer.

This place is creepy, and stories like that don’t help. Jo tells of other things that make her feel like there are more residents in this house than just us. Little glimpses of shadowy figures who turn out not to be there and, on rare occasion, the feeling of being touched or having someone standing next to you when you’re alone.

I know what she means.

Last week I was headed to the kitchen. It’s at the end of a long hall and the room we’re renting is down on the other end. I left our room and as I approached the kitchen I saw that the door was open. This isn’t unusual, and neither was seeing someone cross from right to left just inside the door. But stepping into the kitchen a few moments later and finding that nobody was in there after I’d just seen someone cross the door moments earlier, well.. that was unusual.

I looked to the left and there was nowhere anyone could have gone. I even looked under the table, thinking someone was messing with me. That’s how sure I was I’d just seen someone cross. They couldn’t have crossed back to the right and exited without me seeing them. I was sure I’d seen someone – wearing blue – but it was such a quick glimpse, I couldn’t tell if it was male of female. Literally one second before stepping into the kitchen I fully expected to see cousin Jo or one of the four other housemates taking a seat at the table.

But nobody was there.

I turned around and went back through the door into the hall, then stepped through the front door out onto the porch. Amanda, one of the four housemates, was standing there smoking a cig.

“Were you just in the kitchen?

“No, why?”

A glimpse at her cigarette showed she’d been there for at least a few minutes – it was burned down to the halfway point. And realistically, there’s no way she could have gotten from that kitchen table to the front porch without going past me. Also, she wasn’t wearing blue.

“No reason, sorry. Thought I just saw someone when I walked in there, but no one’s there.”

She took a nonchalant drag from her cig and exhaled matter-of-factly.

“Probably just one of the ghosts.”

Thanks Amanda. Damn.

She’s been here for a few years and was one of the witnesses to cousin Jo’s story of the screaming woman. Amanda was in her own room while Jo was in hers during one of those occurrences and she converged on the living room with Jo and several others to find nobody getting murdered.

Which is a good thing, I guess, except maybe a woman did get murdered in 1972 or something, and it keeps replaying over and over.

Maybe she was wearing blue.

It’d be more understandable if this place were like the Addams family mansion, but it’s not. It’s just a large, sprawling five-bedroom ranch style house in the middle of suburbia.

It’s totally normal looking.

Just like the house in Amityville.