There was this group of guys I used to hang out with from '98 up until like 2 years ago. They all lived at a house in Tempe together, which was nicknamed 1810 Funhouse. (Their address was 1810 Randall, but they had bands play there all the time and had punk shows, so it was a Funhouse.) Many guy moved in and out of the house over the years, but when I first started hanging out there, there were the original four.
There was Jeff, who has been and will always be one of my best friends in the world. He went to my college (Al Collins Graphic Design School) and the day I met him he was sitting behind me in class, quietly saying things to himself like, "Are you fucking kidding me?", and "What the fuck is this guy talking about??" about our teacher who was trying to lecture. I turned around and gave him the finger, and we've been friends ever since. Jeff loved video games more than anyone I know. When a new Final Fantasy would come out, Jeff would lock himself in his room with a keg of beer and play until he finished the game. He once bought himself a set of throwing knives and he got really good at it. I introduced him to "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and he got hooked on all things Buffy. When the musical episode came out, Jeff, our friend Corbin and I once spent an entire night in Jeff's room singing all the songs. There was a show going on that night too, with about 100 people squeezed into the house, and we were just trying to sing over the bands playing. One time Jeff got all the Harry Potter books on tape (which was about 60 tapes), and he had this great idea that we should just sit and listen to the tapes straight through, and drink tons of beer. We only got through the first half of tape 1 before we gave up. We couldn't stop making fun of the british guy who was reading the book, then we decided to make up porno names for all the characters. Then we passed out.
Then there was Bob, who also went to my school. Bob liked to smoke a lot of cigarettes and draw devil girls on everything and go off on tangents about how our school sucks or how his job sucked. Bob was a lot of fun just to go up to and say something about anything, and watch him go for like an hour about why Rolling Rock was the only beer anyone should ever drink.
After that was John, who was the house's "funny guy", who lived in the basement and often had blue hair and fell down drunk a lot. I dated him for like a week or two, but that ended when I literally caught him with some girl's pants down. It was cool though because a few days later Jeff got drunk and went down to John's room and peed on his sheets for me. Jeff rocks.
Lastly there was Mikey, who was a cool little punk guy who also was just the nicest person you'll ever meet. He wore glasses and lots of argyle sweaters, and had the greatest music collection I've ever seen. He had this one album from the 70's with this black guy in a leisure suit with a big afro and a hat with a feather (I hesitate to say he was a pimp, because I really don't know if this man had himself some prostitutes. Don't judge by appearance, motherfucker.) on the cover, and the album title was called "Yer Momma". I wish I could remember the guy's name, but the song was a very fast tempo reggae beat, with someone yelling "Yer MOMMA!" every 20 seconds or so. We all used to crowd into Mikey's room and dance around to it when the mood hit us right. One time he and I went to a "Poison" concert with our friend Dan. It was awesome to see all the old mullets come out for a wild night. Mikey also loved Huey Lewis and the News. At first I thought, "Yeah, he just likes Huey because it's a cool thing to say." Is that cool? Probably not, my idea of cool is warped by your standards probably. Anyway, Mikey really did LOVE Huey Lewis. He went to every Huey Lewis concert that went down (and surprisingly there were a lot more in Tempe than you'd expect!) and drove to every thrift shop and obscure music store looking for original Huey Lewis LP's. He had tons of 'em. I always loved doing shots with Mikey in between singing "Power of Love".
Most of the guys have moved out, or I just fell out of touch with them. Jeff just moved to North Carolina this year with his girlfriend and their 6 month old son Xander.
Anyway, the whole point of this is, this morning I woke up with that horrible song "Cruisin'" in my head. The one sung by Gwyneth Paltrow and Huey Lewis, for the soundtrack of that weird Karaoke movie. I didn't see it, because I hate movies about karaoke, but I hate that song even more. So anyway, "Cruisin'", Huey Lewis, Mikey, it all made sense this morning.
There you go, there's a blog.