"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"

Ok. So yesterday I claimed that I was so excited about the Tom Waits concert that I couldn't even tell you.

I lied.

Here's how and why I'm as excited as I am...

I first was introduced to Tom Waits by my mom in either middle school or early high school when I watched Big Time with her.



My favorite part in Big Time, which I still vividly remember, is where the camera very slowly pans back to reveal that he is standing on a roof singing, holding an umbrella that is on fire.

Back then, we managed to wrangle a copy from the library to watch. Now, it is near impossible to get your hands on a copy.

In high school, Bone Machine was one of my absolute favorite cds. It still is.

For a while, I was trying to get my hands on several watches so that I could wear more than one on my wrist at a time, just like he used to.

I've seen most of his major movies simply because he was in them.

At one point in high school, I had either bought or copied onto blank cassettes every one of his albums for myself.

I brought in the song "Murder in the Red Barn" for my high school english class when we were assigned to bring in a ballad of some sort so we could explore the idea of ballads in poetry. I photocopied the lyrics for all my classmates, and I played the song in class. A fellow student became absolutely enamored with him upon hearing the song, and even once years later in high school remarked upon how he fell in love with Tom Waits when I introduced him to that song.

In college, I ripped off many of his images for some not-so-good earlier poems I wrote, particularly those from the song "9th & Hennepin." Example:


Untitled

All the hearts in this city are breaking,
Catching fire as the
Smoke billows from beneath the
Cement grates
Like the cremation of some
Sad, interwoven nightmare
That mingles at the bottom of a
Cigarette-scarred ashtray.
The streets are a portrait of some
Dead, gray woman who
Smoked too many packs a day and
Cried herself to sleep each night,
Remembering all the men she hadn't loved and
All the good times she never had.
And the girls with the black fingernails
Sits on the corner,
Weeping
And her dead-tulip eyes won't look you in the face.
And Charlie perches on the bench
With a bottle of vodka in a paper bag
And he screams whenever he hits rock bottom.
And the broken-boned umbrellas paint the
City's horizons and when it rains,
Each teardrop melts into the
Wrinkles and cracks of the darkening ashpalt.
And momma used to say,
Ain't no one ever gonna amount to nothing
In this city of rainspouts and
Spare parts.

I have painted many pictures of him and his beautifully craggly face.

I have sketched many pictures of him and his beautifully craggly face.

I used to collect random quotes of his in a notebook.

In grad school, I used the lyrics to "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis" in the freshman comp class I taught to discuss a) how we say things in the spaces between our actual words and sentences and b) how we gear our conversations and arguments towards those to which we are speaking in order to influence them in the way we think most effective. I played a bootlegged version of the song in class that could literally make your heart break.

He is currently (and has been since it started) on my harem list and will continue to be there henceforth and forevermore.

And I have accrued many a bootleg of him, singing live, thinking that I would probably never ever ever get the chance to actually see him myself since he tours so rarely.

And now he's gonna be playing in Akron. And I'm gonna be there.

I'm so excited I think I could puke a little. Tee hee.

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