a bit of rambling half assedly

There was a troubling moment early yesterday when I noticed that half my ass had fallen asleep. If the few times I’ve impersonated a doctor have taught me anything it’s that I know very little about medicine and health and whatnot, but finding myself in a literally half-assed condition didn’t seem to be normal. So it was that I stood and felt about my backside. The ass—what there is of it—was indeed still there, yet the coupling of my ever-fattening wallet and an unforgivingly unpadded desk chair had worked to slowly choke the life out of said buttcheek. It was not money that fattened the wallet, unfortunately. People seem to want to give me their business cards as if I were the sort of person who transacted business or called people or didn’t dive into the closet with a blunt object at the ready every time somebody rings the doorbell. I politely take the business cards and file them away until they become painful, and yesterday seems to have been that point.

However, a recollection of my early years then popped into my head as unburdened the wallet and switched it to a front pocket.

Some friends and I began driving to Nashville from our little Alabamian around the age of seventeen. We’d come up for a night here and there to catch shows at 328 or the Exit/In or just to walk around west end or downtown. Nashville was the “big city”, as it were, and we treated these weekends like shore leave. We smoked out in the open without fear of being caught by our parents or their friends and would sneak bottles of vodka or PGA in to augment our drinks as we walked around at Summer Lights or just up and down Broadway.

“Big cities” can be scary places, but that’s part of the allure. We—or I, at least—always half expected to be mugged or stabbed or kidnapped and then sold into white slavery when walking around downtown or from Elliston Place down to Lucy’s Record Shop. Sadly, this never happened.

But the tidbit that had escaped me until the wallet constricted my hind quarters half to death yesterday was the fact that the very first thing we always did when arriving in Nashville was to switch our wallets to our front pockets. This was obviously done to avoid pickpocketing and probably would have bit a useless defense against the kidnapped for slavery thing, but the defensive measure was so engrained on a Pavlovian level that for the longest time I would immediately check my front pocket when I thought of Nashville.

Anyway, I hadn’t thought about that for a while.

Also, this has for some reason reminded me of the short-lived rap duo of Kris Kross (comprised, if you will recall, of the Mac Daddy and Daddy Mac) and their gimmick of wearing their clothes backward. Trends often elude and even trouble me, but there was something about their particular attempt at trend setting that I found especially disturbing. I don’t know why.

I didn’t much care for Christopher Cross either, but at least the man knew how to put on a pair of pants.