Just kidding. Though I'm never sure. That Nerf toss to my melon the other day came from somewhere.
I'm a little teed off at this particular moment. Those of you that know me (as always, sorry, those of you that know me) know that I wear my emotions on both sleeves and when I get a little ticked and get them dirty, nothing tidies me up better than a little tantrum.
The good news is the tantrums pass quickly. Generally. I can hold a grudge if you absolutely force my hand, and I do have bad days, just like everyone else.
Today's fits and starts involve traffic lights. I hate 'em. They represent everything that's wrong with this planet and its people. They slow us down, get in our way and stop the rock 'n' roll party in my car whenever I'm cruising to my favorite tunes, which I do a lot.
As blog regulars know (cough, cough), I recently decided it was time to reacquaint myself with my favorite CDs, the ones that I can never get enough of, the ones that collect dust in my "Almost Famous" bin.
(I'm just kidding about the dust. I treasure my discs. Not my apartment, but my discs. Because I'm a dude, which makes me a bit of a slob, and I am crazy. That's why, since you asked.)
If you're trying to figure out why stop lights and my CD collection have anything to do with anything, hang on a second. Don't hurt your brain. Regulars (ahem) will tell you it takes me a few minutes in the on-deck circle before I'm ready to step up to the plate and swing for the upper decks.
The stop light tantrum has passed (and I know the expediency is making you go, "Thank God. Because I was worried.") and we can now focus on why Kelly Clarkson is this week's featured artist in the lyrics department. We can also clue you in on tone. Last week's blog was heavy; this week's is heavy on goofy.
Let's begin.
I love Kelly Clarkson. Anyone who spends any time on these pages knows I will fight for Kelly Clarkson. I used to get a lot of crap from people about my love for her voice and her spunk and her wholesomeness, but I've learned something about Kelly Clarkson.
If you are loud and proud about Kelly Clarkson, people around you will sheepishly admit that they, too, love Kelly Clarkson, but they're afraid to say it because they think they will somehow be uncool if they listen to Kelly's wonderful songs about love and relationships from a girl's (read: young woman's) perspective.
Kelly is an angel and a tremendous talent, but we're not here to talk about Kelly this week. I only mentioned Kelly because this week's blog is one that everyone has been waiting for and asking about ever since I started talking about my relationships past and present.
Someone very dear to me will be the focus of this column. She knows who she is and she knew this was coming. And right now she's a little nervous about what I'm going to say. But I'm not going to say it yet, or reveal who I'm talking about. Not until later.
I know. I'm a huge tease. I'm terrible for leaving you in suspense for the moment, peeps. But don't jump to the bottom of this column. You'll spoil all the fun for yourself and you'll miss the point.
One more thing y'all need to know about Kelly and this week's blog and me: I know my audience. And my audience "knows" my friends. And this week's audience is loaded with friends, so just let the names roll off you, strangers and newbies, OK? (Is anyone listening to me? Is this thing on?)
Back to reality.
I brought up Kelly Clarkson, peeps, because the young lady who I will reveal to you later in this blog once stole my heart. She reminds me a lot of Kelly Clarkson. She's funny. Smart. Fun. A little loopy at times (because we all are), but at the core she is the girl next door that all the boys want to marry.
(And here we go with our first friend name drop this week: I am not announcing an engagement, Shelley. It's not that kind of journey. Nor am I coming out. I know you're excited about where this is all going, but you're just going to have to wait a few more minutes, love.)
Moving on.
As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I really love women. I think they're just the best invention ever. Us dudes cannot live without them for many reasons, but the main reason is that dudes cannot take care of themselves unless their lives are at stake.
What I mean by that is, while guys commit great feats of strength and stupidity in glorious attempts to win battles, win wars, win fights and win affection, they usually risk death. To remain among the living, they need a woman nearby to ask, "Are you sure that's a good idea? Because a rocket sled sounds fun, but let's think this through."
Ladies, you know this: Guys live like wolverines with furniture. If left to our own devices, we will mark our territory all over the living room and we will eventually wind up with an autopsy epitaph that reads: "Drowning by toilet."
It's not that we're not smart. We find amazing ways to persevere. Look at the guys who scale Mount Everest and chew off their own feet to survive. That takes guts.
But it also displays in grand style the undeniable truth about guys and why they need their dolls: Guys' guts have poop for brains, because a.) Stumpy likely climbed the mountain to impress a woman, or b.) now Stumpy's wife is going to have to buy him a wheelchair.
Dudes need women because we love them and need them for reproduction and because they make us happy, but we also need women to save us from ourselves. Right ladies?
A woman's best attribute is her smile, if you ask me.
Smiles. I get a lot of them lately. I've been introducing myself at parties and in restaurants and wherever else I happen to be and it's liberating. I haven't been very outgoing for a number of years, and now I can't get enough of the great outdoors, and I don't mean I'm packing a long rifle these days.
Back in the day when I was in my band, I was really gregarious, mostly by accident. Chicks love the boys in the band so finding a date was like shooting goldfish in a backyard pond with a bazooka. For a while, post-rock band, I got kinda shy. And I got a little heavy. And I started to look away when a woman took a peek at me.
Dumb.
Dumb, because looks matter to some degree, yes, but attitude is everything, and as my close women friends will tell you (apologies to close woman friends like Kris, Doree, Heather, Linsey, Steph, Terri, CC, Laura, Bisi, Vanessa, Kate, Shelley, Beth, Amy, Becky, Brenda and many more), I am loaded for bear with attitude.
Which leads me to a wolf pack of fine young ladies I met a couple weeks ago at a local Buffalo Wild Wings. These ladies would be Jamie, Staci, Kylie and Sarah, and they are wonderful peeps, peeps.
I have a thing about big chain restaurants. I love taking my notebook inside them to scribble over a hearty meal while nursing a beer or two while I work on a.) my rock journalism, and b.) my book. And I love people watching and talking to regular folks.
It's sort of like being a documenter of lives, being a journalist and writer. Journalists write about other people, and many of them wind up writing about themselves and their lives someday. That's how I got where I am.
And that's how we got to the soft, white underbelly of the middle of this column.
So I was in this BW3's one Saturday afternoon, gnawing away on some mozzarella sticks and sucking down a Labatt's Blue and shredding the pages of my notebook and filling them with ink from my trusty pen. And I'm thinking about my relationships and my relationship with the movie "High Fidelity."
As I mentioned a couple weeks back, I'm a big fan of writer Nick Hornby. He understands me without ever having met me. The relationship journey I'm on resembles a sequence from the movie -- and the book said movie is based on -- where John Cusack as Rob Gordon looks up all his old girlfriends after a painful and messy breakup.
Everyone who has been paying attention to me in the last month and a half knows I have endured raging pain and survived due to a failed relationship, and because I endured it, I am stronger than ever. And I'm feeling really happy these days. And being happy draws people to you because you brighten their day a little.
That's what a good wait staff at a restaurant does: They make you feel good, comfortable. They are friendly and attentive and fun. And if you take a minute to talk to them, you can learn really cool things about the restaurant, the wait staff and their lives outside of work.
(However, how the wait staff at BW3's remains so cheerful when the soundtrack playing overhead is '90s rock is beyond me, because playlists that feature back-to-back dead rockers like Kurt Cobain and Shannon Hoon sure ain't very cheerful -- no offense, BW3's.)
Back to our story ...
On one particular visit to my favorite BW3's, Jamie informed me that the owner of the restaurant was a genius, because the business is situated in the same lot as a theater. I never really thought about this before, but Jamie is right. Location is everything.
Jamie stopped to take a few minutes to talk to me and told me she was in school and she found out I was working on a book. She was pleasant and kind and fun and she made sure to stop by my table a couple weeks later when Staci was my server.
Staci, too, found out about the book, and lo and behold a couple minutes later I had four young beauties hanging out for a few minutes because they were curious about the scruffy idiot who was allegedly going to publish a tome about rock and pop culture.
(Getting published remains indefinite, peeps, but I'm pretty confident this won't be an issue -- hi, Steph! And in case you were wondering, the two additional stray women at my table were Sarah and Kylie).
So I'm chatting and writing and having a great time and Kylie tells me she's got a great joke. I will print it here, because I think it's cute, and because I promised I would.
Here goes: "Where does a smart hot dog graduate to?" Kylie asked me.
"Dunno," I said.
"Honor roll," Kylie giggled as she prepared to flee back into the crowded and bustling throng in the restaurant.
I laughed quite a bit, which isn't easy to do when all the big screens are playing the Olympics. I hate the Olympics. And I hate the killer whale story from last week. I don't wish any humans dead, but I'm sorry, the trainer was doomed from the start.
While we're at it, the media frenzy was even worse. A killer whale became both a tragic figure in a holding cell and Public Enemy No. 1, journalists asked dumb questions about why a killer whale would kill, and America essentially stopped to watch an empty balloon again in the days following the accident.
(The whale story will be even funnier in a minute, trust me.)
I plan to visit BW3's a little more often because I want to hang with my favorite wait staff and inform them about my progress on my book, but also because I want to make sure Jamie, Staci, Kylie and Sarah get mentioned in the prologue where I thank everyone.
Here comes the part of the weekly Running of the Mouth where y'all watch history unfold, lucky readers: Jamie and I share the same first (real) name. Nobody calls me Jamie except my mom, dad, brother and a few close friends who knew me years ago. I used to get teased about it, so I went with James as I got older. Part of me likes it when I still hear Jamie, though.
James, back to you ...
The longest relationship I have ever been in was with a woman named Leigh Anne. She never called me Jamie. She didn't like it. Turns out she really didn't like me. Leigh Anne never seemed to like anyone.
Leigh Anne was bad for me. The worst choice ever. She sucked the fun out of me. She put me down. There's no doubt that I did love her early on, but she never truly loved me back. Worse yet, she stifled my creativity, told me my band was never any good, and rarely read any of my work.
The only thing I know for certain she read was my proposal to her after 10 years in the relationship, which I printed in my college newspaper (hello, Becky, John, Sara, Dave, Ron, Ryan, Danielle, Terri, Rebecca, and any fellow South Enders I have forgotten).
The South End was a great place. We had a ball. But my former staff can tell you what kind of life-sucking vacuum cleaner Leigh Anne was. Leigh Anne was never a bad person. We were just the ultimate mismatch. I have fond memories of the good times. We even went to SeaWorld together.
(Told ya the SeaWorld gag would prove funny.)
I'm not that into SeaWorld. I had a good time with Leigh Anne, because it was our last good time, and because I like dolphins.
Leigh Anne and I were destined to fail. All my friends knew it and they never told me. I don't blame them. It wasn't their place. But even on the inside I knew someday Leigh Anne would hand me my heart with a dagger in it, then set it on fire and run it over with her Dodge.
Yet I stayed with her 10 years and got engaged. That's some serious denial, peeps. When she broke off our engagement and she forced me from the home we had only shared for a couple weeks and I had barely managed to get used to, it was cold. My mom still has issues with it, and I suppose I do, too.
I always joke that my mom is mad about a toaster she bought for us that Leigh Anne kept. But I know my mom is mad because this woman tore her son to pieces. And 10 years after Leigh Anne I recently attempted to enter into a new relationship for the first time and it nearly destroyed me.
It nearly destroyed me because I never dealt with Leigh Anne. I never talked to anyone -- professional or otherwise -- and I should have. My pal Dave urged me to get help a long time ago and I finally have and it's like the whole universe makes sense.
The worst breakup of my life wasn't Leigh Anne's fault. It was mine. I forced myself to stay in an unhappy union because I believed that since I had invested so much time into Leigh Anne, I had to make it work. I convinced myself that we had to make it work. And Leigh Anne had already moved on.
As Alice Cooper would say, welcome to my nightmare. But it was for the best, and now for the moment of truth -- the part of this blog that undoubtedly will shock the love monkey who I've been teasing y'all about.
Hello, Tammy.
(For the record, Tammy just fell off her couch, peeps. Here comes the part where I apologize to her. Watch me in action.)
Sorry for the scare, Tam. You can put your heart back in your chest and rest easy, sweetie. I'm not here to skewer you. The story just had to end with you and you know it. And you know that because we talked a couple nights ago, so you know my intentions are pure.
If the light bulb hasn't flashed to life yet for the rest of you, Tammy is my first love. Tammy was also Mrs. Neil Armstrong in a lot of other areas, like first serious kiss and first ahem and first serious dance with eventual searing pain. But this relationship took place in high school, so it was destined to burn itself out. We were teenagers.
Tammy is very special to me, and even to this day we share a special bond because we can hang.
Not everyone can hang with one James Chesna because he stays friendly with his ex-girlfriends. The only exception is Leigh Anne, and I think y'all can see why. She doesn't deserve it.
I tried to patch things up with Leigh Anne years ago but it was too painful for both of us. But Tammy and I -- for whatever reason -- can talk like best buds because we both healed and grew and moved on but never forgot.
Tammy and I were many things, but most of all we were fun. Tammy won't do anything unless it's fun. And we had tons of fun. We were exploring our first true love and we got into all kinds of trouble because ot it.
Our first prom? Yeah, Tammy and I fell asleep in the room I bought at the hotel and I got her back to her momser's place at about 4 a.m. Tammy's momser was not happy with Jamie. Neither was Tammy's dadser when he found out.
I think I scared Tammy's mom at first, because all she could see was a mop of hair that somehow had a body descending from it. She could never see my face. I wore dark glasses that covered my eyes and my hair when it wasn't ratted hung everywhere.
I apparently was pretty scary looking back then. My Seventh Son singer Steve and bassist Dave will tell you that when they worked together at a pizza joint back in the day, a young woman who also worked there started to cry and prepared to hand over the cash register when I came through the door one night.
(Be still, staffers. It's not that funny. OK. Yes, it is. Score one for my staffers.)
Tammy was truly a rock chick and remains one to this day. And we know how I am about rock chicks. Tammy's not quite as wild as she used to be, but she can still pawty with the best of 'em. We have been texting and talking here and there and it's been healing to finally tell each other we're sorry about the breakup and the stuff we did to one another. And it's awesome to catch up on the crazy memories. We laughed and laughed and laughed last week.
I've missed Tammy and I've finally come full circle and it's cool. Turns out she's getting married. I love that. I want her to be happy. It's all I ever wanted. I've never felt better and now I can really move on and be happy. Mission accomplished, James, which brings me full circle with the blog, too, and the real reason why Kelly's "I Do Not Hook Up" was my choice for lyrical inspiration this week.
I love all my ex-girlfriends and current girl friends dearly. You all move me and keep me sane and make me laugh and love purely. And you love me purely. My life would suck without you. Of this I have no doubt. Thanks for being amazing. You all truly rock. Thank you for being in my life. I will love you all forever.
Love, Jamie.(That's it for this week, peeps. Until next time, keep rockin'.)
The ABC12 Listening Room staff: James Chesna, editor-in-chief; Josh Daunt, managing editor, photographer; LeeAlan Weddel, contributing editor, staff writer, photographer; Beth McEnroe, staff writer, photographer; Gwen Mikolajczak, staff writer; Chris Harris, photographer, staff writer; Eric Fletcher, chief photographer; Randy Cox, photographer; Chris Carr, photographer; Norm Fairhurst, photographer; Jessica Reid, contributing photographer.
