GRIFT

9. Another Life by The Rollins Band or Hurray! Grifter's Roommate got us Evicted!

Some of you might have noticed a lag in this thread getting updated these last few days. Well, let me let you into my Labor Day weekend. Things started pretty well. I was able to pull off a huge event with BrokeFix my protest art group you might remember getting a huge shout out from Rachel Maddow when our first video went viral. Our most recent work was based around the people's veto that is trying to repeal the elimination of same day registration in the state of Maine. We took about 20 portraits of young people whose votes wouldn't have counted in the last election if this rule had been on the books in 2010 (which was pretty easy considering there were close to 50,000 same day registrations that year), put them into our BrokeFix monochrome style, and either covered their mouth with duct tape, a bandana, or what not to simulate being gagged, and labeled what was holding back their voice with the bill number.

There are a ton more images from this project and the big videos we did prior to this

That being said, he has a knack for fucking up his life. He has pill problems. He has drug issues. He isn't a graceful drunk. I let him move into my apartment a few months ago because he thought he had gotten a girl pregnant (he may have, someone else opted into raising taking care of it so they never did any DNA testing) and I hired him to work in one of the offices I oversaw to try and help him straighten out and for the most part that is what happened. We hit the gym everyday before work, we had a summer where every weekend meant hiking or hitting the water, and our partying was reigned in considerably.

But after he got back from this wedding he and his girlfriend got into some sort of fight and while my other roommate and I were asleep, he marched through our house punching holes in the walls until he reached a point of exhaustion and decided to take a shower. When he hopped into the shower, he either fell and hit his head or just straight up passed out, because he ended up unconscious over the drain for 2 hours-- sucucessfully flooding our bathroom, hallway, kitchen, and doing water damage that leaked into the second and first floor apartments from our third floor flat.

When our landlord noticed the water dripping in at 6am, he stormed into the apartment, saw the damage, worked his way to our bathroom where he found a vacant eyed Randy standing naked in front of the mirror.

He let himself into my room, scarring the girl I was with half to death, and told me to call him first thing in the morning. Quite reasonably, he asked us to be out by the end of the month when I called him. He told me he'd give me a great reference and that he has no bones with me, but that he simply couldn't have us in the apartment.

After talking to the landlord I let myself into my roommate's room, despite it being our day off he thought I was there to wake him for work. I calmly but sternly told him, "You really fucked up. You got us evicted last night." Then I walked out, trying to take this all as calmly as I could-- trying to tackle the logistics of getting us out of the apartment rather than freaking out about how or why we had to go. When he approached me to apologize I told him that I didn't want to hear it, and that we'd get through the other side of it and then we'd hash things out. He and I have a paid commitment we've been commissioned for n VT in a few days that I knew I had to get through that before I really dug into him about his colossal fuck up.

So for the last 5 days since this happened I've been cleaning out my apartment and patching holes in the walls while playing songs like this over and over again. Bottling up my anger, planning my "Grow the fuck up. You are almost 30. Accountability." speech, and looking up armbars that I think will fuck up his bum shoulder the most for when we get back.

8. The Champ is Here by Jadakiss or Grifter Raises Over $500 with His Liver

Photos of the event popped up in the picture place shortly after it took place, but sadly, it seems that the Facebook originals have been deleted. In the winter of 2009 a friend had taken ill, and needed help paying for his medical expenses. Our friends who were musicians played benefits. Our friends who were artists sold art. But for a drinker like me, there was only one way to contribute: Drink. So during my best friend's birthday party, he and I competed in a Case Race. The goal of which was to drink 24 beers (a case) before your opponent could finish his. These events were relatively common place in college, but usually there would be two teams of 3 or 4 people. For this event it was mano y mano. One high caliber drunk vs another.

We did our best to make the thing a spectacle and we invited everyone we knew in the area. With a packed house (literally, a house) we were decked out in T-Shirts with "sponsers" printed on them, like Steel Reserve and Milwaukee's Best Ice. We had corner men wearing our colors and running our empties. We each had a referee in stolen Reebok uniforms who checked our empty beers before deferring to our score card "girl", a friend who had lost a bet previously that required him to dress in drag at the event of the winner's choosing. The spectacle of such debauchery coupled with a keg in the kitchen had people more than willing to pay $10 at the door, and by the end of the night we had turned a sizable profit for our friend.

But best of all, we had Boxing/Wrestling styled intros and as the heavy favorite going into the match up I picked this Green Lantern produced classic before channeling my inner Samoa Joe to squash Gordy 24 beers to 8.

7. Freaking at The Freaker's Ball by Dr. Hook or Grift Gets Peed On

6. Next Time Around by Little Joy or Grift's Perfect Morning

After the 2008 election cycle was over, work had me hot shot all over the country trying to rebuild our field offices that had a lot of their talent pulled into our presidential efforts. For the most part, this meant spending two weeks in a city, firing the people who weren't cutting it and then restaffing. I was sort of like a whiskey drenched George Clooney from that movie Up in the Air. Well, while working in Boston that winter I met a Brazilian student who was living in the states for her 'summer' vacation named Flavia. She was quite adorable and had the type of accent that was flawed only in the most endearing ways. Unfortunately, after a week of working in that office she was one of the people I was going to have to let go. When I did, she took it very well and surprisingly enough gave me her phone number. A week later it was onto Baltimore, DC, and then New Jersey and I never got to give her that call.

Then just after Christmas, a reason presented itself for me to go home to Maine for a few days and I took one of the cheap buses out of China Town in NYC to South Station in Boston. This dropped me pretty close to where our Boston office was off the commons and with a few hours before the next bus north, I called a couple of friends and went to the nearby Bean Town Pub. Just as I was about to leave the bar, I saw Flavia at the door having a bit of trouble getting into the bar with her passport. I got to play hero and told the bartender she was a friend, and he let her in on my good word. I had a really lovely time catching up with her, and decided to take a later bus back so I could drink a bit more and flirt. I taught her to play pool, poorly demonstrated my knowledge of Biggie Smalls lyrics, and had a really nice time before eventually she agreed to walk with me to the bus station.

We ended up taking a sort of long way about it, and ended up way off track as a bit of snow kicked up. I ended up giving her an impromptu tour of Boston, pointing out statues and landmarks with made up stories to go along with them-- 'That is where Paul Revere put lanterns to warn us the Space-lords were coming. One if by teleportation, two if by dreadship.' That sort of thing. We made her first snow angels and snowmen, and slow danced to nothing but the hum of the Charlie. Eventually I had missed the last bus home to Maine and ended up going home with her.

The next morning I woke up in her one bedroom apartment that she shared with her sister, their cousin, and her cousin's 3 year old boy. When I walked into the kitchen this song was playing softly from a small cd player at the dining room table. It would be the first song on the album which would play on repeat all morning. The 3 girls moved around me, speaking Portuguese and making a simple breakfast while I practice the ABC's in English with the little boy. It was one of those moments I wish I could live in forever. Repeating the letters in call and response with the clever little boy who would purposely mess some up to get a laugh out of me. Being fed apple slices with a sharp cheese. And occasionally being softly kissed on the lips by Flavia. The snow melting in the sunlight. I get taken back to each golden memory everytime I hear this song.

I write Flavia now that she is back in Brazil. I don't think she really has a sense for how well remembered that morning is for me, but it really was just about one of the happiest of my life.

5. You Fucked Up by Ween or Grifter and the Nastiest Break Up

I think it was in late 2007, that I was getting out of a pretty nasty relationship with a girl named Beth. Beth was by and large a pretty sweet girl, but we ended up seeing each other for significantly longer than we should have. I knew it, and I think deep down she did too. At the tail end of things, she started going through my things and became convinced that I was going to cheat on her. I ended up breaking things off with her and aside from some tears, it seemed like it was going to be a pretty clean break. Until Old Port Fest. Once a summer, Portland's bar district totally shuts down it's roads for a party in the streets. It is exactly the type of drunken madness that is perfect for jumping back into the single life with, and me being about a single week removed from my break up, I was eager to enjoy it. I attended the big event with the pretty blonde from my avatar with me. This girl and I have had a sort of no string attached summer fling every year since we graduated high school. I write her once a month, and as such Beth was always very threatened by her-- even though I've never cheated on someone in my life.

Well, Beth saw the two of us together drunkenly stumbling though the streets of Portland and having the time of our lives and it ended up flipping a switch for her and she lost it. She grabbed the nearest guy she could find and took him back to her apartment. She proceeded to fuck this stranger, and call me during the act. I won't lie, the territorial hormones kicked in and I was just as upset as she intended for me to be. Then she started texting me pictures of her sucking his dick.

So naturally, I forwarded them to her parents.

We haven't talked since. She did end up marrying that guy, though.

4. None but the Rain by Townes Van Zandt or We Don't all get Happy Endings, but that Doesn't Mean we Don't all get to be Happy.

Now, I am sure you all know that every song on this list isn't going to end up being tied to a raucous drinking story but still, before jumping into this first somewhat heavier tune I feel an urge to borrow a phrase from a certain Canadian: If I can be serious for a minute...

Because I've been travelling for a good long time, relationships have always been a funny thing. When you don't stay in one place for longer than two months at a time it gets a little tricky trying to make a real genuine effort at falling in love. Heck, falling in like usually takes a backseat to trying to get your rocks off for a while. All that coupled with my own hangups and heartbreaks past, tends to put a tilt towards the skeptical in me so that combination of moving from state to state and my life style in general lead to me having these wild encounter's with a lot of women, but every once in a while, there is a girl I'm real sad to see in the rear view. A lot of 'em are likely to pop up throughout the list. There is even one who I really wish I could fold the map for and drop us back into each other's laps-- but for now here is to the song that makes it a little bit easier to look back on them all, the time we had, and what it meant in the moments they happened across. These relationships weren't conventional, some didn't last longer than a night or a couple of days but I think of them like good books. Just because they're done and back on the shelf doesn't make them less enjoyable to have read.

And like I said in the title, just because we don't all get happy endings, doesn't mean we can't look back on what we did have in a happy light.

We had our day but now it's over

We had our song but now it's sung

We had our stroll through summers clover

But summer's gone now, our walkin's done

3. Beat the Devil's Tattoo by BRMC or About This Weekend...

Animal lovers beware...

So, this entry comes fresh off of this weekend. One of the campaigns I'm currently contracted to is an effort to put marriage for gay and lesbian couples back on the ballot in 2012. I've been helping them shape their messaging, persuasion tactics, and overall strategy since about February of this year and we just recently got our ballot language approved by the Secretary of State to begin petition collection. There were a series of events this weekend that made a lot of sense for us to collect at so my day off this week ended up being Friday night. Knowing that I had to be 50 miles north very early that Saturday morning to launch our collection efforts, I planned to keep low-key. But the best laid plans of mice and men...

I figured, the best way to avoid going out or running myself too ragged was to fill my days with activities that would put me in bed early. Friday started with buying new books (including Supergods by Grant Morrison!), cliff jumping at Salmon Falls, and then some disc golf in Gorham, followed by an especially rigorous work out at the gym and then a nice game of poker with old college friends to close out the evening. Sadly, these tiring activities that were meant to stop me from drinking ended up being the key to my undoing.

Poker ended much earlier than I planned. What is worse, I won.

This left me with money burning a hole in my pocket, and my roommate Dylan, who had lost some those winnings to me goaded me out to buy him, "just one drink." Naturally that spun off into a whole plethora of drinks and in my exhausted state I ended getting to be quite drunk at an alarmingly faster rate than usual. After closing time I ended up laying on the cap of my truck looking at the stars and dozed off until I woke up to a rather pungent aroma. The skunk who had been terrorizing the olfactory senses of my neighborhood, tearing through our garabage, and possibly raping our cats, for the last month or so was weaving in and out from under the cars in my drive way. I, a wakeup-stumbling drunk, gracefully fell off my truck roof and wild eyed tore through the back of my cap in search of my secret weapon. My bow and arrow. Over the next 45 minutes I proceeded to stalk this elusive little bastard through neighbor's yards, over fences, under porches until finally around 3:30am-- after several failed attempts and a very near miss with a neighbors cat, I finally got Pepe le Fuck Head. Now, what I hadn't had the mental foresight to understand going into all of this was that upon death the creature would release all of his backed up stink. Going near the creature alone nearly made my already twisted stomach yak up it's contents. So unfortunately, I couldn't retrieve my arrow and left my slain foe in the backyard of a stranger's house with a bright neon green arrow sticking out of his back.

I managed to stumble back to my apartment and up the treacherous stairway that led to my 3rd floor apartment. When I walked in the door both of my roommates were awake and quite similarly twisted out of their gourds. I am not sure how it came up in discussion, who presented the idea, or why but before long Dylan and I had broken into Randy's charcoal and started drawing an homage to X-Force Sex and Violence on one of our living room walls. While the song in question played on repeat.

To do a lot of the fill in work, we used a cheese grater to get a pile of black powder to hand smudge about... which inevitably lead to me chopping Randy (who tends to come down with a case of the McConaughey's whenever we are home) in the chest. Producing maybe the greatest photograph of all time:

And sparking an all out charcoal wrestling match...

THAT I FUCKING DOMINATED.

This kept us up until 5am, giving us two hours of sleep before having to drive to Lewiston and launch one of our biggest days of the year... hangover or not, we managed to collect close to 1200 petition signatures in 7 hours. The most of any kick off event in the state.

2. Lay Me Low by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds or The SECOND Time Grift got Chased out of California

By the fall of 2010 I was back in California after only being gone a few months, and I was working a prop for upcoming November ballot. I was the lead

Before I headed back to Maine, she wanted to see me one last time so I made a plan to shoot down to Santa Cruz where she lived to spend the first week of November with her. I climbed off the bus with an army bag full of my every possession and shot off to her place. This first night went off without a hitch. We walked on the beach, went to a Dead Kennedy's tribute show, and then crashed out at her apartment. The next morning I woke up, pulled on my jeans and walked to the bathroom. When I came out of the bathroom, naked to the waist, I came face to face-- or rather face to neck-- with a bloke who had a solid foot on me.

"Who the fuck are you," He grumbled from under his beard.

Laura, the punkabilly chick popped out of her bedroom in her underwear and a Descendants tank top that her chest seemed to be fighting to get free of to introduce us, "Oh, hey. This is my boyfriend Colin," she said to me. "And this is someone work sent to help out!" She explained to Colin. The bitch had a boyfriend she had previously chosen to neglect telling me about! Colin shook my hand and hit the bathroom after hastily explaining to us that his band's gig had been cancelled and that he just got back from what was supposed to be a weekend in San Jose. While he was in the bathroom Laura apologized, promised to explain more later, but mostly made the point of telling me I couldn't use my REAL NAME because she had told Colin that she cheated on him with a guy named Rob (Grift's real name.)

Moments later Colin lumbered out of the bathroom and asked my name. I, who was sleeping not fifteen minutes before, quickly fished through my alcohol addled brain to cobble together an alias from my middle name and my mother's maiden. Thus, "Wes McKenna" was born. The rest of the day continued and I-- well WES was forced to hangout with Colin all day while Laura finished some paperwork to close out the campaign. The worse thing is he seemed like a pretty good guy. Now obviously, staying there for a full week wasn't a fucking option so I foundout that the soonest flight out of California back to Maine would be the next day out of San Jose and angled to get tickets. I knew fuck all for people in the area and had spent every dime in my bank account on the last minute tickets out or town, so I needed Laura to give me a lift the 45 minutes North... so that night we ended up getting a hotel in town and though it pained me to do it, I shagged the crazy dame out one more night to keep from being stranded. When she dropped me off at the airport she cried her eyes out like we had been dating for years and I just tried to wrap things up so I could get the fuck away from the whole mess. I felt lower than low and wanted to kill Wes McKenna off ASAP. When I finally got on the plane, I plugged in my computer and hit shuffle and Lay Me Low came in like a brick to the side of the head and I couldn't help but laugh uncomfortably loud at the absurdity of my life to the great concern of the other business class passengers.

RIP WES MCKENNA, RIP.

"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability.

And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."

- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

And then a more cumbersome quote that cracks 600 words... I am bad at rules. Even my own. To be fair though, this is a pretty frenetic read:

" I called her. Right in the middle of the conversation, she said: "What do you feel like doing right now?" I replied, automatically, same tone of voice as one might say "I could go for a tuna sandwich on rye," I said: "I wanna fuck." A second of silence. Then: "Okay," she said, just as casually. "Come on over."

I got there fast. She met me at the door in a frowzy black slip, hair all a mess, no makeup, barefoot, half-asleep, emotionally neutral to the world. I thought she was the sexiest thing I'd ever seen in my life. Especially in that ratty old black slip. I couldn't believe I was about to be holding something as magnificent as this in my arms, such a hunk of woo-man, such a primal Earth Goddess, such a lush juicy creation of the Almighty God in Heaven or Hell I didn't care which and she had a brain besides! I had it made. Life couldn't get any better than this! Like Swamp Dogg once sang: "If I die tomorrow/I've lived tonight!" Damn straight!

Who cared if Western civilization was sinking into entropy or gearing up for Armageddon, I never could decide which? All my philosophy was gibberish, and Western civilization was a bucket of shit in the first place! So who cared! I wanted to fuck this woman in the mud of a ditch while a firestorm of whitehot PLO and Israeli bullets whizzed over our heads! I wanted to take her down to the Everglades and throw her down in the swamp and do dirty things to her till she screamed like a polecat tangled up in an electric fence for "More! More! More! Stop! Stop! Stop! No, don't! Eat me! Kill me! Break me! Fuck me!" And then I'd push her down so deep in the mud and the green slime and rotting tropical overgrowth it almost buried both of us in our faces and hair and mouths and we'd love like reptiles slither down lower than the gutter our screaming bellies pounding together in the muck from which all life sprang before we or the media or New York magazine careers or anything else amounted to shit!

Alligators would come slogging over, take one look at the likes of us and turn right around and hightail it the other way! Water moccasins cowered at the bottom of the river, scared we'd bite 'em and then they'd die! Because we are death as well as life! We are jungle fever, beri-beri, Mau Maus ravenous for each otehr after which we'll go machete and bar-bee-cue us some missionaries! We have become one with the primordial ooze! Beats the Upper East Side for shitsure!

Then I yank her upfrom the slime and jet nonstop to Cambodia. I want to fuck her on top of a pile of bleached bones, mountains of skulls, hundreds of rotting carasses! I want to feel death all around me, that's how alive I feel just looking at her, TO BE INSIDE... yeah I want death from sea to shining sea, moutains of it blotting out the horizon, I want to scream with wild dog joy in the pit of a smoking charnel house! In Makindye Prison, Kampala, Uganda! On top of spilled organs of the dead a foot deep! I want Idi Amin to see us! He's been around a bit, I know, but he's never seen this! Might learn something! I want to fuck death, I want death to know it ain't shit, I can lick it, because what I am holding in my arms right now and am about to carry into the bedroom and to which I will deliver up my body and soul deep in the center of her belly, the center of her, I'm serving notice right now is the final and absolute inarguable rebuttal that shoots death down forever!

-Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Lester Bangs

Edit: Just noticed the typo in the subtitle... haha. Grifterfail.