I found out it was World Goth Day about 30 minutes ago and wanted to share that news, just because. No mention of anything goth-related can go without including this magnificent video. So first off, enjoy this:
When I was in college, I spent summers as a waiter at a very ordinary New Jersey diner. I came across all sorts of characters. Line cooks who couldn't read, illegal aliens working under false identification, fellow college kids who wondered why they didn't instead work at a bar/pub, women with many babies and no husbands, drug dealers, alcoholics and the like. It was a fascinating time in the underbelly of the very lowest end of the service industry.
I had a crush one summer on another waitress. Her name was Sheila and she was a college student who was a year or two older and much more NYC-savvy than me, which exacerbated that age difference, at least to my fragile 19 y/o self-esteem.
Sheila was a goth. Not a full-on character like the folks above, but the kind who shaved the lower half of her hair under her pony tail, wore dark-rimmed glasses before they were "cool," wore bright red lipstick, and spent a couple nights a week in NYC clubs like the Limelight.
Sheila was smart and cool and funny and we would have music debates all the time. She listened to my pleas that she dive into Phish and Widespread Panic, and politely dismissed them. She tried to explain to me the appeal of her goth scene. She invited me up to NYC to go to a club, but after an uneventful rave experience w/ Zman, Shem, Kyle and future dropout Garrett P in VA Beach in '92 (you read that right), I was hesitant.
In the middle of that summer ('94, I think), Sheila came up to me one day at work and told me she made a mix tape for me. This threw me off. Did she like me? It was the kind of thing a girl did when she liked a boy, right? The tape was littered with Christian Death songs. I gave it a shot. It didn't take, but it made my interactions with her all the more awkward, b/c it now seemed like she liked me. And I knew I liked her. And I knew I was driving a beat-up Dodge Caravan and was broke and was not anywhere close to holding my own in the goth/club scene. Conundrum.
At the end of the day (or end of the summer to be precise), nothing happened. I was just an emerging, underage party animal desperately trying to grow out my ROTC-mandated short hair in my 3.5 months home from college. The idea of hanging with her at Limelight to have a crack at a hookup/date was way too far out of my wheelhouse. It's just one of the dozens of "I wonder what would've happened..." memories* I have as I look back on my days as a young buck at the Jersey Shore. I miss you Sheila.
*Paul Simon captured this sentiment pretty well a long time ago:
If you took all the girls I knew when I was single
And brought them all together for one night
I know they'd never match my sweet imagination
Everything looks worse in black and white
Wednesday, May 23, 2018
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26 comments:
Pushing Phish on a Goth girl will not work. Of course, most of my summer break stories are thematically the same as this one so what do I know.
We need the story of that rave, just based on that group of people.
RIP Philip Roth.
First Wolfe then Roth. Who's next?
As a kid who cut his drug using teeth in the relatively early days of the Florida rave scene (there are advantages to Florida being largely lawless), I’m pretty mad at you for not going to Limelight.
i love this. a ‘wonder what might’ve been’ series would be fun. never happen because lazy, but still.
Z - when is Deblasfest?
i don’t eat red meat, as a matter of course, and haven’t done so since i had my gall bladder removed 10 years ago. still love the taste, but i have semi-unpleasant gastrointestinal issues when i savor the cow. ordered a turkey burger at an airport bar this evening and wasn’t really paying attention when it arrived. thought to myself about 1/2 way through, ‘man, this is really flavorful’. looked at the burger and realized it was beef. figured, ‘fuck it, this is delicious’. i don’t envy my seatmates on the flight back to dulles.
if you see a pasty, dumpy white dude with a harley davidson bangkok, thailand t-shirt, the appropriate first thought is ‘sex tourist’, right?
That’s the fucker that needs extreme vetting.
Yes. And the appropriate second thought is “Marls?”
Pasty...check
Dumpy...somewhat
White...check
Harley Davidson T Shirt? NFW
I hear that. I’m more of a Kawasaki Ninja guy as well.
Caps will need a real epic fail to not advance. I’m watching with baited breath.
They definitely have that in them...
At least those Lightning fans gave a shit ton of strip clubs to hit up tonight, right. Mark?
I see the Tampa fans being “furious” for about ten minutes, and then realizing the weather is perfect all the time and they are in Tampa. It’s a bit different in Ottawa and Edmonton.
Caps!
Check out the sportsmanship on the lightning fans though. Not a lot of empty seats even when the empty netter went in. Hung around and saluted their team after the horn. Really cool. Would never happen here.
Weird. I would have thought that Dodge Caravan would be a big hit with the goth set.
I spent some angsty, lysergically influenced hours in that sweet ride in the University Hall parking lot during a Phish show, mere hours before it met the deer that led to it's untimely demise.
Yes you did. And you (or somebody else) left a bag of greens in my passenger seat, which I noticed as the female state trooper and I arrived at the car. This was after I walked a half mile on a dark highway to an exit and a convenience store. And after the trooper laid down a tarp in the back of her squad car b/c a drunk had just urinated all over the vehicle. Good times.
Yeah, sorry about that. The greens weren't mine, but belonged to a Charlottesville townie. And not all that green as I recall.
Morgan Freeman - nooooooooo!!!!!!
Deblasfest is the Saturday of Fourth of July weekend, been that way for 27 or 28 years now. Moose out front should've told you.
Marls rides a Ducati. Probably a Panigale Speciale.
I'm not the guy you bring to the Phish show in the Caravan, I'm the guy you call at 7 am when you hit a deer with the Caravan.
I think there was once an idea in the comments section for recurring posts about failed hookup attempts, which could've been alternatively titled "zman's romantic history." This sounds a lot like the proposed "what could've been" theme floated here.
Missed out on a lively night here last night. Went to bed at the end of the 3rd Q of Cavs-Celtics.
The Lightning have a surprisingly passionate fan base. Definitely not your typical sun belt hockey fans.
Since the Goth post is still up I thought I’d mention I acquired tickets today to see Nine Inch Nails at the Fox Theatre in atlanta in September.
Nice, Mark. I hope Trent brings his A (as in aggro) game for you.
new filler up
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