Tag Archives: lawbi

LAWBI #58: Woke Up In Ybor City …

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Singer-songwriter Craig Finn said once that he never really woke up in Ybor City before he nurtured that memorable lyric from the richly imagined soil of The Hold Steady’s youthful-loser landscape.

Well, I sure have.

In my Jeep, in the HCC parking garage. On the sofa in the old Creative Loafing offices above Cafe Creole. In a “loft” on the other side of the railroad tracks that was more of a hostel-slash-squat, spooning a pretty girl I sort of knew on top of somebody’s loft-in-a-box-in-a-loft and surrounded by people who were still partying.

And other times—the last one at the REAX Magazine office, to the sound of a cop on horseback galloping up onto the porch in pursuit of an assault suspect running from Club Empire. (We found unexploded pellets of pepper spray—the kind they fire from paintball-type guns—all around the place the next morning.)

Read the rest at Creative Loafing …

LAWBI #32

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Felder watched from the doorway as the Senator scribbled. The Montblanc was a blur in the puddle of light from the faux-antique desklamp.

Eventually, Felder cleared his throat.

“Ah, come in, my boy, come in.” The Senator’s pearly caps appeared like scythe in the moonlight, the top half of his face obscured in shadow. “Take a seat. Care for something from the bar?”

“No, sir, thank you, sir.” Felder used about a quarter-inch of the chair’s cushion, took in the landscape atop a plateau of mahogany that probably weighed more than his car.

The Senator rose, shot his cuffs and crossed to the matching sidebar to pour two fingers of bourbon from the leaded-glass decanter. “Late hours, Page, Page …”

“Felder, sir.”

“Yes. Page Felder. Late hours indeed. Sure you won’t have a belt? I find it warms me on a cold night, and tonight is about to get much, much colder.” He chuckled. “Am I right about that, Page Felder?”

“Yes, sir. I just heard from the team at Blue Mountain. The satellites are in position. Operation Indian Winter is a go.”

Read the rest at Creative Loafing …

On the Subject of the Chaz Bono/Dancing with the Stars Controversy

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Often, I think one of the biggest reasons why open-minded and progressive people don’t get more accomplished in the political and cultural environments is simply this: They can’t bring themselves to be as mean-spirited, selfish and judgmental as others.

I can. Fuck you, others. You’re pathetic, frightened morons so terrified of anything you don’t understand the only way you can acknowledge it is to assume that your god considers it an abomination. Um, that’s caveman shit. CAVEMAN SHIT. That’s how quasi-humans that lived among their own waste dealt with thunder.

Gay is the new thunder. I believe I have my album title. (Not that Chaz Bono is gay–“Gay is the new thunder” is just a neater phrase than “Transgendered is the new thunder,” you know?)

But yeah, those of you that believe someone like Chaz Bono is somehow fundamentally different from you, or some sort of aberration, haven’t come very far in the last 65,000 years. Get the fuck out of my way, idiots–I intend to evolve.

LAWBI #27: ChickenGator & The Persistence of Mad Science

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Last weekend, UK newspaper the Daily Mail published an article about evolutionary biologists altering the DNA of chicken embryos so that the embryos developed alligator-like snouts instead of beaks. The scientists suppose chickens are the evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs, and that chickens once had reptilian snouts millions of years in the past.

Obviously, the first question any God-fearing American conservative should ask upon reading about scientists screwing around with DNA in order to put alligator snouts on chickens is, “Why the hell do we need chickens with alligator snouts?” After all, the Bible explicitly forbids fooling around with the magic building blocks of human life-it’s in there with the shit about Jesus being Caucasian and the nobility of amassing personal wealth, if you want it to be hard enough.

The Mail story explains this reverse engineering could lead to “improving” contemporary species so they’ll be better suited to changing climates and environments, as well as the usual claims about such research leading to invaluable advances in medical science. In an opinion column on CNN.com, renowned paleontologist Jack Horner also suggests this and other experiments might be used to educate the general public in evolutionary processes.

Of course, none of those is the real reason why we’re making ChickenGators.

The real reason why we’re making ChickenGators is this: Continue reading →

LAWBI #26: Fashion Loves Found, And Lost

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So, yeah, things have been absolutely batshit at the day gig. But anyway, here’s the last Creative Loafing column. The new one will be up on Thursday.

It’s weird and wonderful how some articles of clothing come to mean so much to us. Not because of what they are, but because of what they represent – because of who gave them to us, because of what happened while we were wearing them, because of the emotions and memories that color them so much more meaningfully and permanently than any stain.

I’ll never be mistaken for someone with anything approaching a passion for fashion. I do like certain things for the way they look, or make me look – mostly jackets and footwear – but beyond comfort and a vague and contradictory set of notions that serves as an underdeveloped sense of “taste,” I don’t think a whole hell of a lot about what I wear. I’m not a guy with style.

I am, however, a human being, and I think everybody out there owns certain clothes or accessories that they love far more than mere comfort or cut can account for. It’s a very human thing to love something more for what it means than for what it is. It goes beyond sentimentality; it’s an association so powerful and personal that it’s woven into our own sets of reality. It’s part – a very big part – of what makes each of us, each of us.

And sometimes we lose them.

Here are five of the items that, when they disappeared from my life, seemed to take a piece of me with them.

Read the rest at Creative Loafing …