Hi :-)

I am a very sweet, open-minded person. Physically I have black hair, tanned skin (I love going to the beach) and black expressive eyes. I have professional education in engineering and a challenging and satisfying job. I exercise frequently because I love keeping myself in shape and because I am very disciplined when I focus in something.

Most people I know think I am a positive, easygoing person. And most of them can tell a funny story about me because sometimes I can be a little silly… What I love the most about myself is that I am very enthusiastic and I am always in a very good mood :-)

My idea of a date is whatever it makes us both to have fun, whether it is having a coffee or dinner with a nice chat, going out to dance all night long or doing outdoors activities like biking, hiking or skiing. Renting movies for a Sunday afternoon or simply holding hands while wandering the city are also well appreciated. Please, no milfseekers.com, if you are a milf seeker read the newspaper.

I can talk about anything. I love listening to others points of view, as it shows me new perspectives. I am not afraid of saying that I don't know something and very open to learn about it (except maybe boxing… sorry, I just do not get it!)

I look for a fun guy who makes me laugh and enjoy what life is worth ! :-)

***Please not smokers.***

 less random, more literary! Hi! I'm Mickie and I'll be your pilot on the craptacular "Secret Rocket 13!" We will be in geosynchronous orbit for the dinner show, which will feature the end of the universe as we know it. Drinks will be served shortly afterward. Audio Sensors: Peawees Visual Scanning: Office Space Text Scanning: Lexicon Devil: The Darby Crash story About Archive Secretions Secretions Blog Weblogs Working Drafts Highindustrial Doghead WockerJabby William Gibson Bluish Orange Crushing Krisis Dr. Mabuse books.film.tv Bruce Campbell Cinema Insomnia FALnet Star Wars View Askew Space Junk Craig's List Onion, The Web Monkey Star Wars Toys! Launched by Blogger Thursday, March 27, 2003 Okay, I'm not bummed out anymore. I got to go to the protest in San Francisco on Saturday March 22nd, and it was quite an adventure! I don't have time to write about it now, but I am preparing a piece on it to post here soon. I will also be writing a piece on our Redding show, which was way too punk rock for real life. For other updates on my life, go to my Livejournal (yes I finally got one! Thanks Ted!) for more timely pieces of my mind. I will be posting there moer frequently, and maybe saving this one for larger, more involved pieces of writing. Now go! carbonite-frozen by Mickie Rat at 10:58 AM Thursday, March 20, 2003 So its here now, Gulf War 2: the long dreaded sequel to the number one feel-bad motion picture of 1991. I was at 924 Gilman last week seeing Rocknroll Adventure Kids and Fleshies when an interesting flyer caught my eye. It was a full color, 3'' by 4'' card. This is what it said:EMERGENCY MASS NONVIOLENT DIRECT ACTION & PROTESTIF WAR STARTS: MORNING OF THE NEXT BUSINESS DAY @ 7:00 AMMEET: MARKET & MAIN EMBARCADERO BART, S.F.TRANSFORM OUR CITY DON"T GO TO WORK OR SCHOOLWWW.ACTAGAINSTWAR.ORG415-820-9649It sounded great, but somehow I knew I was going to miss out on all the fun. I have been out of work for a month, due to the crappy economy whittling my hours down at my two jobs to 5 measly hours per week at minimum wage. Oddly enough, suddenly this week my hours jumped to 20, ten hours at each job. I wanted to protest, but the temptation of being able to pay my rent without borrowing money from someone was irresistible. All I could do was pray that the war would not start until Friday, when I could go to SF and participate in all the fun. No dice. I guess I'm just not that idealistic, and it disappoints me somehow. All day I've been feeling sick to my stomach, because I am almost certain that the agenda for this war is totally different than what everyone wants to believe. Part of me wants to watch the news and keep up with what is going on, but my smarter side tells me that the coverage will be superficial and untruthful. This really sucks. carbonite-frozen by Mickie Rat at 2:42 PM Wednesday, March 19, 2003 I can't believe I haven't written about this yet! It's one of the more exciting bits in my life lately and I'm just letting it slip by, undocumented. I got sum new Toons! I used part of my tax return (what else is it good for?) and went to Bonehead Tattoo on the K Street mall here in Downtown Sacramento. I had my friend Jesse Mitchell draw it up for me. I wish I had a picture of it, but I don't, at least not yet anyway, because I'm semi-illiterate when it comes to figuring how to put pictures on this thing. I'll try and get Tom to do it for me, because I'm just lazy like that. I have wanted a chaos symbol tattooed on me somewhere for the longest time. My life seems to resemble Chaos in so many ways, I can't really list them here. I thought it would be most appropriate as a tattoo, especially right now, because my life is more chaotic than ever right now. I got it done right below my Secretions 'Til Death tattoo. Jesse is an awesome artist, so I had him spice it up for me a bit, so it wouldn't be just your regular old boring crazy arrow cluster. He made it look like it was made of stone, while at the same time spinning out of control. It has bits breaking off of it, as if the centrifugal force of the spinning is breaking it apart. It starts with orange in the center, then fades to yellow at the edges. It has a sort of 3-D look to it, and the sides are red. It is definitely my most colorful tattoo so far. It's quite a dynamic design, something that I am not used to. Every day I'm really surprised at how much I like it. To add to this joy, I happened to find another artist named Nick who works at the same place, who just happens to be a hardcore Star Wars fan like myself. People who know me well know that I am obsessed with the Millennium Falcon and have wanted it as a tattoo for the longest time. I am very picky about who I let do my tattoos though, and I was hoping to find someone who was a Star Wars fan as well as a tattoo artist, and one that would do an accurate rendition of my favorite pirate ship. Nick drew up an example of it for me today, and it's perfect. Unfortunately, my tax return is now gone, so I gotta raise some cash, quick! Anybody got a buck I could borrow? carbonite-frozen by Mickie Rat at 12:15 AM Monday, March 17, 2003 Wow, my eyes are sore from staring at this damn computer screen. I have been doing tour booking stuff since 6pm. I spent hours searching the net for booking contacts, and I even made a few cold calls. One was to Skrappy's in Tucson, where the very nice booking lady (hey pretty ladieeee! glaven!) Kathy said she would give us a show! That's two down, and thirteen more to go. Yikes. I am not the best at booking tours, but I try. I emailed a few people in Texas, and I even managed to find a band from Nogales, Mexico that might be able to help us get a show. I called a "haunted hotel" called Monte Vista in Flagstaff, Arizona to try to get a show there. It would be so cool to play at someplace that is haunted! I think I have made some good progress for the day, but somehow I still can't seem to stop. I think I have to though, because my eyes are going all googly. Wish me the best of luck, I need every bit I can get. Oh, and happy Saint Patrick's Day! Oh my god, I just realized that it's St. Paddy's day and I am stone cold sober! That's sacrilegious for an Irishman like myself! Must??.get??..beer!

The Secretions Contrary to what you initially thought, the Secretions are NOT a multi-national conglomerate with its corporate tentacles in every facet of American business. They do NOT offer a fantastic health package for all employees or retirees. They are NOT currently under investigation by the Justice Department for unfair conduct in business practice. The SECRETIONS are a band hailing from Sacramento, California, USA. They play fun, cool punk rock and put on quite an amusing show, which is occasionally mistaken for a political statement. So what the hell is their music like? Well, going to a show might help you figure this out. Some say they sound like the Ramones with Krusty the Clown singing the occasional guest vocal. Got your attention with the pop-culture references? Good. If you would like to book a show with them, please contact Kevin Sur at Workhorse Entertainment. Otherwise, read on to find out everything you never wanted to know about this band! Kevin Stockton Status : Current member Secreted: 1999-Present Plays/Played : Lead guitar Turn-ons: Anna Paquin Turn-offs: All Jerry Bruckheimer Movies Kevin Stockton has been a longtime fan of Secretions. He has been going to shows since 1996. He introduced himself at a show and offered to help the Secretions carry their stuff. He became their part time roadie for the next three years and learned to play guitar. He got really good, and Mickie and Dan asked him if he would like to play second guitar. He said, "No way, fuck off, you smell!" But then they bought him a bag of Gardetto's snack mix, and he changed his mind. The rest is History! Kevin says he will stay in the Secretions forever, or at least until Good Riddance asks him to join up with them. Yes, the Secretions is a band that inspires utter loyalty. Danny Secretion Status : Current member Secreted: 1991-present Plays/Played : Drums Turn-ons: Lucha Libre! Turn-offs: Danelectro Guitars Dan, or Danny Secretion as he likes to be called, took DJ's place as guitarist after DJ passed away. He was the guitarist until the Secretions broke up the first time in 1992. When they got back together in 1994, they couldn't find a decent drummer, so Dan learned to play drums, and has ever since. He has written some of the most memorable Secretions songs and is the funniest guy in the band. Mickie Rat Status : Current member Secreted: 1991-present Plays/Played : Bass, vocals Turn-ons: cute punk rock girls! Turn-offs: Work! Mickie is the first and only bassist for the Secretions. He started the band with Dave Leon and D.J. Willis in 1991. He has since suffered through seven and a half guitarists, and two drummers. He has A.D.D. and O.C.D., but it doesn't really bother him because he keeps forgetting that he has it, plus it makes for a very interesting punk rock stage show. Mickie's continuing quest for exciting adventures is what keeps him going in the band. He will be in the band until he dies, or until an adequate android replacement can be constructed. He also has his own weblog Secret Rocket 13 and more stuff about him there. Tom Working - mentioned here only because he designed the site Status : Former member Secreted: 1994-95 Plays/Played : Lead guitar Turn-ons: Janeane Garofalo Turn-offs: Joblessness! Tom spent most of his time in the Secretions in a drug-addled stupor. And he played guiatar accordingly. He amicably parted ways with the band in 1995 and got on a train and left... er, actually the train got on him, but that's another story. Over the years, he's kept in touch with the Secretions and in 2000, he revised the existing online presence of the band. He is, in fact, responsible for the layout monstronsity you see before you. Tom continues to be on call for the occasional design or artistic needs of the band and plans on doing another redesign of their website. Because he has no job and everyone in the professional world seems to hate him. He also works on the FALnet site (which is currently hosting this weblog) and his own site and weblog, which pull in enough money to not have to sell blood.

That ambivalent, oblique, laconic way of speaking, it's very self-defensive, but it thinks of itself as very up-front.

A really charming guy last night, one of the musicians, said to me 'Hey, man, you got a really interesting voice.' You know, I was very charmed. And he said, 'Yeah, the way you really push it out there--you can hear every beat.' [laughs.]

That's terrific. That's the way I feel it.

These words, taken from an interview with Anne Waldman in Ron Mann's 1982 documentary Poetry in Motion, come from the most laconic of 20th century laconic American poets, Robert Creeley. The film has Creeley appearing before John Cage, who talks about the "sounds of the silence along Sixth Avenue," and after Amiri Baraka, who talks about poetry's success as "having something to do with high speech, the relation of sounds with words."

Creeley's placement to me seems appropriate--his sound-driven poetry is in a sense halfway between Cage's silence and Baraka's fire. As a 20-year-old wanna-be poet commuting to Rutgers University's Camden satellite campus, I first saw the film at a Philadelphia documentary festival -- the documentary was 4-5 years old by then -- and then rented it on countless occasions--accumulating some serious late fees--from a video store in Philly. Sometimes, I took the train across the Delaware River for the sole reason of hearing John Giorno (see a couple days ago's post) yelp his poems an octave higher over a prerecorded track, or to hear saxophonist Dave Murray and Baraka again, or Jayne Sanchez duel with Jamaaleen Tacuma's bass.

The documentary's angle or thesis was that poetry, as a heard form, can be freed from the academy's grip, which according to several of the featured poets, is "so hard to understand." As someone forced to read Pound and Eliot at a premature point of my writing life, I agreed with these assertions wholeheartedly. Watching the film again, I also recall feeling that I was somehow more hip than the academics.

Creeley, a poet in academia almost all of his writing life, then, at first seemed staid and laid-back to me, certainly not as viscerally satisfying as the poets reading with the bells and whistles, like Ed Sanders of the Fugs, for instance, with his "musical tie."

Creeley's comments that immediately follow his reading of "Self-Portrait," however, have always helped me appreciate the poem. On the surface, the speaker does seem rather coy, "laconic," and "oblique" in his meaning and intention. Over the years, I grew to like the poem more and more as my ear changed; Creeley's pauses in his performance and line, after tens of listenings, I learned, provided a perfect form for the sound and meaning contents of the poem. It indicated deeper ambiguities. Here's the poem:

Self-Portrait

He wants to be
a brutal old man
an aggressive old man,
as dull, as brutal
as the emptiness around him,

He doesn't want compromise,
nor to be ever nice
to anyone. Just mean,
and final in his brutal,
his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,
the gentle, the "oh
let's hold hands together"
and it was awful,
dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he'll stand on
his own two dwindling legs.
His arms, his skin,
shrink daily. And
he loves, but hates equally.

The structure and sounds the poem sets up is just like the jazz I've learned to love--simple, repetitive, supporting the thesis, tearing it apart, then rebuilding it again. "Self-Portrait" does all that in four stanzas. It is, in fact, pushing it out there--stanza 2 parodies stanza 1, stanza 3 parodies the first two stanza's sounds, and stanza 4's simplified resolution is an almost identical syllabic twin of stanza 1.

My definition of parody here is an imitation meant to recall the original, but either through variation, simplification, or a certain hollowed-outedness, becomes its own form, something else completely on its own. The speaker's voice, its third-person, coy nihilism, I think, is also a parody of the sort of poetry that through its first-person authoritative voice establishes the subjunctive or overbearing kind of mood, a testifying gushy upliftment that doesn't seem appropriate for the implied "I" of Creeley's poem.

II.
I've always liked that there has been two versions of "Self-Portrait" in my possession, kind of like the way I am proud of having two versions of songs or rare vinyl that hasn't made it, at least to the satisfaction of audiophiles, onto compact disc.

In the Creeley, the only real discrepancy is in the line, "his own two dwindling legs" [italics mine]. In the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, the line does not include "two" and is dated as written in 1983. In Poetry in Motion, produced in 1982, the line includes "two." I've quoted that word here in my little autographed scan of the poem, and had always thought that was the definitive version of the poem, Norton Anthology be damned.

Then I had the chance for a moment of closure, the kind of instance afforded by privilege, place, and a sheer sense of curiosity--otherwise known as going to graduate school. Armed with a print-out of the poem, I approached Robert Creeley for an autograph, for him to sign this sheet that I had carried along with me on the subway like a talisman. Showing him the crumpled-up piece of paper, he sort of laughed to himself and to another bearded man with whom he was speaking, presumably also from Buffalo, since every man I've ever met from Buffalo has a full beard. Feeling more self-conscious, I asked him which version did her prefer--the "own dwindling legs" or the "own two dwindling legs"? Creeley preferred the deletion of "two." "It sounds and scans better," he said to me, capping my pen.

I withdrew, hearing what I had not wanted to hear--I preferred the version on the video, the one that by its long-vowel sound and almost absurd tautology made it more talkative and accessible. So, against the author's wishes, I include a hybridized version of the poem, from video to print. Not a good start, I thought--but to deal with the original version, the first one, stays loyal to the emotion, the staccato propriety, like James Brown--in Creeley's words, that's the way I feel it.

Girl Next Door

 You know the kind…. the bouncy blonde, blue-eyed cheerleader from high school…. the sweet little brunette who lived across the street when you were a kid… the quiet shy schoolgirl with the killer body who sat in front of you in class. Maybe you yourself are that living dream girl. Maybe you're friends with one, dating one, or are even related to one (Alabaman residents only). But for one reason or another, there is always something indefinably sexy about them. They're a fantasy that's within reach. 

 

I can't remember when I first saw her.
We went to the same school and were only a few lockers apart, but it was a while before I realized how beautiful she was. She was just another familiar face in two of my classes. We saw each other every morning, but neither of us talked to the other.

Then one day it hit me.

It happened one afternoon on the way to the bus stop ... she was there too. I kept looking at her thinking about how we see each other every morning but never speak.

Then, as I stared at her, it hit me: she was beautiful!

I never took the time to realize this. I never took the time to think, to appreciate her beauty. I knew she was cute before, but that day I also knew that I was in love.

She had the most beautiful voice. Whenever she was called upon in class, I blocked out everything just to listen to her speak. Everyone made fun of her soft-spoken words except me.

The hue in her hair could explain why I have a fascination with redheads today. And her eyes had a way of changing color in the sunlight.

We exchanged a couple of letters. Small talk only. Then I transferred to a new school. I could not stop thinking about her, even five years later. I asked as many people I could if they knew her contact info ... to no avail.

Anyway, the few moments of precious time that I got to glance at her were all I ever had of her. I would stare and try to memorize her every feature so that I would have a mental picture when I felt alone.

Her image has now faded in my brain as, slowly, I forget about her. I still kick myself for not telling her how I felt.

I can't imagine why she was different from the other girls I've met.

She just was.

 

First we waited for the N train and sat on a bench.
We had to transfer at Atlantic Avenue.
It's so confusing trying to choose which train to go on at Atlantic-Pacific station. Barney said take the 2/3. I agreed.
Then we had to transfer again to the local 1/9 at Chambers Street. It was getting complicated, even before we listened to the poetry!
But Barney was so excited when the train came. And so was I.
The sun was blinding when we turned the corner off of Hudson onto Spring.
We met the new intern for Karaoke + Poetry = Fun, supernice Jen Hyde, who was surpised to be holding Barney, moments after meeting him.
We wished Marion Wrenn, the editor of Painted Bride Quarterly, a happy birthday, and Barney leapt into her arms and onto her ample decolletage.
Which pleased Marion very much.
Going back outside, I thought it was a prime moment for Barney and I to pose for a photograph. Jen, an art and writing student at the Pratt Institute, opted for a vertical photo orientation.
Barney behaved himself during the reading, although he did call Shafer mean names. He had been hitting the Stella Artois pretty hard.
Barney was out of his element. "What am I doing on a birthday bar crawl with poets," Barney asked himself, "And at a lesbian bar, no less?"
That's when his senses started to get fuzzy.
Borrowing a straw hat from Reen, Barney fit right in with the girls in comfortable shoes at Henrietta Hudson.
"Cheers to all of you poets and lesbians," Barney said, "even the lesbians who don't look like they're on Showtime's The L Word, and even the poets who only write about paintings, animals, and mythology, as well as the ones who went to Iowa and worship Jorie Graham!"
A recent doctorate recipient of performance studies at NYU offered her right breast to Barney. Barney happily accepted.
"Look," Barney said, turning around. "There's your supercute wife, Maze!" Barney leapt into her arms and perky decolletage, and we were so happy!
But then things got scary for Barney. Supermean Shawn took him out to the sidewalk for smoking and public ridicule.
Barney was scared. And gagged with a napkin. "Will I be placed upon a cardboard box with wires in each hand and forced to read Don DeLillo for the rest of my life?" Barney asked Supermean Shawn.
"No," Shanna said, rubbing his feet against her own perky decolletage. "We want to set you free in the West Village, right in front of Joe's pizza, so you can read gestural, relevant poetry while you enjoy the best pizza in the world forever!"
"But what will I read out here?" Barney asked. "After today, I loved poetry so very much, and these European tourists can only offer me subway maps."
"Here," Shanna said, "Give me six bucks, and you can have my new collaborative chapbook, Big Confetti, written by myself and Shafer Hall."
And Barney lived happily ever after.

THE END