Meetings with Remarkable People

The listomania bug is upon me again, and when it is, I think of Dre. I once lived with this crazy girl. She was one of the Illinoisians I lived with (and was in a band with) at the time. She was awful; self-absorbed, all facade, a liability. My girl at the time summed it up pretty well when she said, "The drunker she gets, the further out those lips of her's get." Yup: she had a pout that could stop a semi. In any case, as worthless as I thought she was (and how shameful it was that Portland's hip inner circles seemed to give her nothing but respect and leeway to do further bullshit things), she was an artist, of sorts.
They all think they're artists, by the way, and maybe she didn't realize what her true medium was: the making of lists. I found lists written by her that said things ranging from the deeply mundane to the life-direction sort. Items like "Travel, muthafuckah!" would sit alongside items like "James Bond Girl?" and "Fondue?". One of the best items I ever saw simply said, "Make Impossible Lists!" I wish I'd saved a couple.
One time that band and I played a show in someone's basement, where a party was going on. We were the only band there that really wasn't familiar to the partiers. First off, a white rap act, of all things.
I thought to myself: I really don't need this. I don't want to stand here and watch this, trying to prevent myself from making nasty comments, and...Oh. Three songs into the set, the biggest of the three guys had jumped up, cracked his head open on a low beam. "I gotta go to the hospital!" he said, and they left.
The followup was a single hippie male playing exceedingly boring tunes on his acoustic guitar. He was a friend of the house though, and everybody listened intently, and applauded on cue. Then we went on, and everybody went upstairs to smoke pot and listen to hip hop.
Sigh. Whatever. We played to an interested audience of three, and later, when I was trying to hassle a drum kit through a very crowded party ("Here I come! Don't wanna hit you! Gonna hit you! Hitting you! Told ya!"), I noticed that the white hip hop act had returned.
The injured party now had a bloody bandage (or was that someone's shirt?) on his head. He looked pretty happy. This was my friend the Reverend O'Hare, who I would not actually officially meet for another year. The thing I had not understood at the time was that they weren't being serious, which would have changed how I viewed them entirely.
I learned later that he indeed had not gone to the hospital.
I first met Bobby Massage during the brief period that I worked for the Death Star, a large wireless phone company, about to be swallowed by another. The two weeks paid training included learning how to use three seperate computer programs, one of which was entirely obsolete, updated every two weeks, etc.
We had been told to give a Power Point presentation about this system and how to use it. My group did one that was pretty straight forward, boring a subject as it was. But when Bobby's did theirs, it quickly became clear that he had hijacked the entire thing with his wicked sense of humor.
In a deadpan voice, he narrarated the steps for using the system, accompanied by lists projected on the screen. The reason that everybody was either laughing hysterically or making noises of disgust or terror was this: the mundane details were paired with these images culled from the Internet of crying babies, vicious-looking crocodiles, people panicking, fires, etc.
I couldn't stop laughing, and soon afterward remembered that I hate working in offices anyway, and got a job washing dishes. We continue to talk about making a soap opera called "...And Then...", in which I play an independently wealthy playboy named Rich Bachelor.
Any other great meeting stories? Gotta be. Just can't think of any at the moment.
Well, the abovementioned girl I used to date, The Bleach Blonde Intergalactic Amazon, I met her when I was baking bread at a small cafe. I was covered with flour and dough, looking bad. She had wandered on in, looking for espresso.
No one else was helping her, so I volunteered. As I was pulling the shot and making the foam, I was grinding my hips a bit to the tune on the stereo. Then I was pretty much dancing in place. I wasn't paying attention to her, as I figured someone as smokin' goddamn hot as her would have no use for my dough-covered ass at all.
When I turned back around, I noticed she was looking at me that way. "What's your name, blonde boy?", she asked.
That night, we got together, and spent every largely misery-filled night after with each other, for the next four months.
See? Meeting Cute is something the movies tell you is a good sign, but I don't buy it. Seems to me that every time I've Met Cute with someone, it leads to disaster. I met another girl when we first shared a crossword puzzle, and she asked me if I wanted to go gather chestnuts with her. Of course I did, and that didn't change the fact that she was just plain awful. I met Gringa Alta Segunda in a bowling alley when she noticed that I was reciting the Litany Against Fear from "Dune", and cute as that was, she fucked me over worse than any of them.
So-to those of my friends who don't have an amazing story about how we met, don't feel bad about it: it's probably why we're still friends.