BLOGSERVATIONS

This year my girlfriend and I decided to do a little tribute to Rob Zombie for Halloween, me donning dreads and makeup for my custom, homemade Rob Zombie costume, and Cindy dressing as my “Living Dead Girl.”

What does it take to be a zombie? Well, if you’re going for the average zombie, you’d just ghoul yourself up and walk around with a dead gaze yowling “Brains!” But if you’re talking Rob Zombie you need something a little different. I decided to tribute the look Rob put on during promotion and touring for his first Hellbilly Deluxe release. I figured long ass narly dreads, a dark, mottled trench coat, some black boots and the proper makeup job, featuring a bloody X between the eyes, would do the trick.

A beard helps, and luckily I have a real one so that would help the costume look a little more authentic.

Here’s the rundown on the costume pieces and prices. Black Brahma work boots: $30, Walmart. Black trench coat (a London Fog complete with warm fur lining): $20, Goodwill. Dreads: $16* Walmart. Makeup: Ben Nye grease makeup, about $15 (it’s the good stuff). Art on back of coat: Priceless!

I thought I would add some original art inspired by the twisted, Rat Fink style monster art and hot naked chicks that adorn some of the Rob Zombie and White Zombie albums. Gotta have the naked chicks. Well, in this case I decided to tame it down and put a bikini on her. In my original sketch she was bikini-less. I also made her a brunette since Cindy has dark hair.

The coat is finished with an all-over sponge paint effect (black, white and some lavender mixed in) to give it a nice irregular, mottled look. That always makes for a creepy appearance.

* Now to explain the dread locks. I bought a “dread lock” wig at Walmart for $8, and unpacked it to discover that it was made up of braids, not dreads, and was also rather thin in the back. Not acceptible at all. I went back to the store and bought another, bringing my wig total to $16. Then I cut off a row of hair from the new wig and sewed it into a blank area, between rows on the back of the original wig, then unravelled all of the braids.

I made a wig stand to work on, and proceeded to twist the dreads. I blended brown, black and white acrylic paint in varying combinations to create a more natural look to the wig hair. I would select segments of hair, some as small as 1/8 inch, all the way up to about 1 inch, pull them out straight from the wig, apply some paint along the whole length, twist the hair and apply more paint as I twisted.

Tighter on the smaller dreads would create a natural twirl to those lengths of hair, looser twists on the thicker ones created a straighter, more natty dread look. I continued this all the way around the wig, alternating low and high, in and out (meaning surface area hair and then pulling some hair from deeper int he wig). Each dread was blown dry with a hair dryer on hot setting, as I held the length of hair out. I had to make sure each length was completely dry before letting it lay back down on the wig. It could get tangled up in the other hair and lose the natural look.

Once that was all done I trimmed about 4 inches off the total length of the wig and shaped it some to give it a more realistic look.

The X on the head was built up with latex and bits of cotton. I was able to remove it the first night and reuse it again for round two, so that was convenient. A little stippling of latex to create a wrinkly, cracking look here and there, a nice coating of grease makeup, with darkened eyes, and that’s how I created the Zombie costume. I think I’ll need to wear this at the next Zombie concert we go to. Should be fun.

For my Living Dead Girl companion (inspired by the Rob Zombie song of the same name, featuring the line “Blood on her skin, dripping with sin, do it again, Living Dead Girl…”) we decided to go with the “blood on her skin” vibe.

Cindy’s costume was a little easier. We picked up a Carrie dress, made to replicate the scene from that Stephen King tale when Carrie is drenched with pig’s blood at the Prom. After unpacking the dress we found that the $30 costume was only painted bloody in the front, so I hung it up and added a healthy dose of blood red paint to the back side of the dress to complete the look. Then we found some cheap canvas shoes at K-Mart and painted a blood bath on them to pull it all together. Some Vampire Blood on her face, neck and arms, and she was the sexiest living dead girl I’d ever seen. This is my kinda gal.

We put our costumes on for a party on Saturday night, then did the whole thing again on Halloween to scare the trick or treaters. Afterwards we took a little stroll into town for dinner, in our gruesome glory. One time each year when we can get our freak on. And it’s funny, you think it would be expected, but man, the looks you get. Some people just don’t get it. Hey, it’s Halloween people! Lighten up. In my opinion the only real freaks are the people who think they are “normal.”

Whatever you do, don’t let anyone stop you from being YOU! Have fun, it’s Halloween after all! Rock on Zombies!

No, I’m not reviewing the book by Jon Kabat-Zinn. But “mindfulness” and relaxing, quiet moments of inner reflection — a sort of spiritual amplification and attenuation of chaotic elements in one’s life — can be beneficial.

I think the phrase was actually first spoken by Confucius, as “No matter where you go, there you are,” or something along those lines.

Have you ever found yourself “in the moment?” I mean, really attuned to something at any one time, for a moment locked into something that seems greater than yourself? “In the moment” has become a phrase generally associated with an attitude toward life, “live in the moment.”

Fun little phrases abound that suggest we cherish every moment. Cutesy little fruity phrases to make us feel happy, bubbly, and… I tire of some, like “Live fully, love deeply, laugh often.” I’ll try not to let my cynicism get in the way, but Christ, just living half the time is enough of a challenge, do we have to put little frilly footnotes on it too?

I do love deeply, I do laugh often and I try to live fully (whatever the hell that means). Are these not things that should come naturally to a human who stares down the barrel of immortality everyday? I don’t know about you, but my life, love, and laughter are precious precisely because they are temporary!

Remind yourself that you’re going to be dead some day, or that you won’t always have the opportunity to look into your significant other’s beautiful eyes, or that fleeting moments are lost to the past and we’re stuck with just memories until we can’t remember anymore, and you won’t need those little phrases to remind you of how to live. Conveniently ignore the obvious and you can blissfully roll in all of the warm and fuzzy triteness you want.

What the hell just happened there? I started light enough, then got a little hot-headed. Where was I…

Ah yes. The feeling that this life is special hits you like a ton of lead. You try to hold on to the feeling but it lasts a precious few moments. Gone. Maybe you were staring out over the Grand Canyon, or sitting in your back yard when a small bird suddenly alighted on a nearby branch, then looked over at you. Maybe your child spoke his or her first words, or climbed a tree, or… Or maybe you were standing beside your husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, gazing out over a vast sea, a breathtaking vista, or swigging a cold beer.

Those moments hit you, but they don’t hit you for what they are, they hit you for what they won’t be: there forever.

But, then, there are those moments we could do without…

Maybe I’m becoming a grumpy old man (at a mere 42), but the sales-”men” in some of the stores I venture into seem to be nothing more than pimply-faced, snot nosed, wise-ass kids. Did I miss something? Whatever happened to dressing nice for work, or acting like you actually give a sh*t about your job? Hey, how about actually giving a sh*t about the customers, or thinking for two seconds before your knee-jerk reaction to a customers inquiry?

Granted the employee who was standing by the Apple Display at the local Best Buy (somewhere near Downingtown, PA) was dressed impressively, and was clean cut, but I didn’t really appreciate the smirk or chuckle when I asked if they stocked any USB ZIP drives.

Now, I know a thing or two about technology — I’ve been programming on computers, tinkering with assorted AV devices, computer peripherals and other techie nonsense for the past 30 years or so — so I understand that ZIP drives are a relative thing of the past when it comes to external, removable, portable storage devices. However, they are still necessary in some situations, and are still available online. Even the new ones are being sold at the retardedly high prices they were originally sold at in their hey-day.

If people ever stored something on a ZIP drive, isn’t it possible that there may still be some small demand for them, even now? The situation I find myself in is owning a box of ZIP disks that contain some important data for me, that I would like to transfer to a newer medium, say, my 1TB NAS drive, or maybe even burn the data to CD for long term storage. CD? HAHAHAHA!

I don’t think I needed to be met with a snide grin. Yeah, it could be I misread his reaction, and I know the ancient technology is pretty “old school” to younger people who were born into a world of USB flash drives, but that old technology created a zillion ZIP disks containing data that outlived the drives that wrote it. So I need a ZIP Drive to transfer all of my old data to a newer storage technology.

Part of me wishes the kid would have suggested an 8 gig flash drive so I could have brought him up to speed on why someone might be in the market for outdated ZIP technology. Instead I thanked him, because after the smirk he was polite enough, and I moved on down the aisle past the doofus sales-”man” with the hair hanging over his eyes, baggy pants and untucked shirt. It looked like he had just rolled out of bed, but it was 2 PM.

Shame on me. I was a young kid myself once, I shouldn’t expect so much from the younger guys these days, they’ll find their way and do their thing just like everyone else. One day these kids will be looking for a USB adapter to transfer all of their backed up music, movies, and gaming data onto Holographic Storage, or a Molecular Memory Device or something. And so will I.

Upon hearing the news this morning a co-worker quiped, “didn’t see that coming.”

I sure didn’t.

The, then young, star of The Lost Boys (great movie) had kept somewhat busy in the movie business. According to IMDB he had been involved with 5 recent projects that were still in pre-production.

It’s always a sad thing to see celebrities die due to drugs. Well, anyone for that matter. Well, it sucks to see anyone die for any reason, but when it happens to celebs it seems so tragic because they’ve done something pretty cool with their lives and we may have fond memories of their films we saw when we were younger, or maybe they impacted our lives in some way.

Too often it seems that the younger actors who make it to stardom early on in their lives suffer the most with addictions. Sucks to see those icons pass away that we enjoyed watching as we grew up, especially so young. Corey Haim was only 38.

Here’s a full news article…

Actor Corey Haim dead at 38, overdose suspected: reports.

Don’t know why I’m thinking of this. Yes I do, some of the guys at work were talking about childhood injuries, including losing teeth after an unfortunate face plant into the floor, or during those wonderful tooth pulling sessions we all went through.

One co-worker mentioned that when he was losing his first set of teeth his father would count to three before pulling a tooth out. He said it was murder waiting for the countdown to end, anticipating what was about to happen.

My father had a different approach. Just like my co-worker’s dad he would begin counting to three, but he’d yank the tooth at one and a half. GWAH! Talk about timing. He may have paused just a beat longer but, whatever the rhythm, it worked every time. I never knew when to expect it.

Oh it still hurt like hell, but somehow I saw the logic through my watery eyes. It seemed that I recovered quicker from the brief, painful shock than I would have from the traumatic experience following a three-count anticipation of the pain. Plus, the unexpected surprise, and the smirk on my dad’s face afterward always made me laugh about it.

Ah, here’s to childhood teeth pulling and other assorted childhood injuries. Fond memories indeed. I guess this is as good a time as any to go ahead and reminisce about a few others…

Raise a toast with me, if you dare to recall your own misadventures and misfortunes of childhood trauma. We’ll leave the worst cases alone, and just laugh, or cringe, about the ones we fully recovered from.

I never lost any teeth in a fall, but…

Have Wheels Will Fly!

It was a beautiful summer afternoon. I was about 14 years old, riding my circa 1981 Mongoose BMX bike, complete with a handlebar pad my father made out of pipe insulation. I was zipping along the street, racing out of the little lake community where I was raised, bound for “Rich’s Deli” out on the main highway.

Yep, Rich’s Deli. That’s where my friends and I would gather to pick up Suzi-Qs, Honey Buns and Mountain Dew. Perfect fuel since we spent most of our weekends and summer days pedaling for miles around the streets and woods near our homes.

Keep in mind this is the first time I had ever flown, so it was really quite terrifying.

The knobby tires on my bike grabbed at the earth, pulling me up the grassy bank along the side of the road. They gripped the dirt as I tracked along a well worn bike path, weaving along the crest of the bank, between trees on the left and hedge rows on the right.

Some exposed tree roots provided excellent obstacles, each an opportunity to catch air with some well planned hops. Unfortunately I didn’t clear them all. Poor planning prompted me to become a quick study in the art of the “nose wheelie,” but the bike stayed put, and I assumed the swan dive pose as my body soared unhindered over the handlebars.

At the time — and strangely even now as I recollect — it seemed like I spent an incredibly long hang-time in the air. Even long enough to appreciate my surroundings on some level, but soon I became increasingly aware of the approaching ground. The event provided an excellent example of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, at least to me.

With a massive WHOMP, which forced every bit of air out of my lungs, I impacted the dirt bike trail and continued on my original trajectory, sans wheels. Now it was my nipples chafing against the inside of my T-shirt. My lungs must have still been draining because I managed to avoid sucking in the plume of dirt which stirred before me.

More on relativity… following my touchdown I felt like I slid 10 feet, after soaring through the air for what seemed like 15 feet, but in all likelihood I probably didn’t end up more than eight feet from my bicycle.

I can’t recall if I made it to the deli, or if I turned around and headed back home, but I do remember the incredible soreness in my chest, and the telltale dirt patch down the front of my T-shirt. Luckily kids at that young age are made out of rubber.

Well, that’s enough for now. I’ll dig back into my memory banks and see what other childhood mishaps I can bring forth. There is that time I jumped down the cellar stairs and broke my foot, or the time I landed square on my head on the concrete steps, after tripping over my cat and tumbling from the porch through the open bilco doors which led to the basement. Maybe that’s why I turned out like I did… Ah, memories.

It’s a good thing my grandmother was doctor, she was always on-call with me around.