its been such a long time...

... thats gonna be on my next year's cd swap :)
so the cd's are in the mail as of last night. damn you shenry - this took sooooo effen long, dude. but i wanted it to be good. ppl who dont know me say i'm a bit of a perfectionist.

it's been so long since my last post. one thing that stands out hazily in my memory that i wanted to blog about, was that i attended a cheech & chong show recently. i told a friend of mine and he didnt know who they were. that was shocking. turns out not everybody in BC smokes pot.
apparently cheech and chong actually met in vancouver back in the day - cheech was on the run from the draft, delivering carpets, trying his hand at comedy. chong was on the run from calgary (just over the hill from here), having been kicked out of the town by the mayor for having an inordinately raukous show with his band, as well as wrestling with the problems of converting his brother's strip joint into a comedy club.
they met, and magic happened. but things went sour between them, and they werent talking for decades at a time. like two and a half. then chong's wife decided to meddle with their affairs and wrote an email or 2 in tommy's name, and got the ball rolling for another tour, which has been in the works about as long as the latest G'n'R album and tour. i thought that the tickets were way too steep, but as the show date neared, and i found the tickets werent actually "that" expensive, i started to wanna go. then actually trying to buy tickets online from goddam ticketmaster proved impossible. but the boss came thru and bought them at a ticketmaster outlet like 2 days before the show. just before the show i found out that the ticket was gonna be a little christmas present for me, so that was cool. he was sure there was gonna be an intermission when ppl are gonna flock onto the balconies and have a quick j, or maybe even smoke during the show, and we both thought ppl would smoke right before. i didnt think anybody would actually smoke during the show. i wondered what they were gonna be like - stupid stoner humour, or were they just gonna be talking about their history together..? i saw 2 blurbs online about the other shows (this was a tour) - one was quite positive, but the other was seriously disappointed and thought it was sad to see those 2 old men telling the same old jokes. well, they surpassed my lowered expectations, thats for sure. first of all - they did mostly skits, so that was cool, and some of them these 2 old guys were doing some funky shit, crawling around on all fours, pretending they were dogs, and then chong's wife crawled in, so then chong-dog started doggie-humping her, and then cheech-dog started humping him, it was funny. but there was some stand-up too - the opener was tommy chong's wife with a forgettable name doing some stand-up, setting the bar waaaay low - she was just embarassing herself. but at least some of it was fact based, so i got some details on how tommy's bust and court case went. overall, i thought the show was good, with some re-hashed greatest hit material, and some awrite new stuff, and they made it entertaining. people did smoke in front of the theater, and then as soon as the show started inside. first i thought they were gonna get told to leave by the ushers, then i feared they'd set off the smoke alarms and that was gonna be the end of the show. but apparently this must have been thought of and the appropriate policy set beforehand, because i didnt see anybody being hassled, and no fire alarm went off. soon the crowd had a smoke cloud emanating from it pretty evenly the whole time. and the boss' brother brought some pre-rolled j's, and started lighting those and passing them to us. but i was a responsible comedy show goer and made sure i didnt get stoned out of my tree, because i didnt wanna miss any of the jokes, etc. i just got nicely roasted :)
and towards the end we had a little sing-along - it was "up in smoke", karaoke style, with the lyrics on the screen and everything. i've sung this song lots of times, so it was such a treat to be able to sing it with the godfathers of stoner culture, and a theatre-full of heads. it was community :) and then a shitload of ppl lit their lighters and held them high, like a cool concert. one thing about a show like this, is there's no shortage of lighters :)

it was funny - when cheech first showed up on stage, doing a skit as he was walking on, he got a standing ovation right away. later, when tommy was walking on, he got a slightly longer standing ovation.
towards the end, people were throwing j's on stage, and cheech and tommy and his wife were dutifully picking them up, and as they were exiting after the last skit, somebody threw a big bag - like a few ounces, it was bigger than some women's purses, i mean, i've seen pillows on planes half that size! cheech took a double take, promptly came back for it, said thank you very much.

i'm really happy about having gone.

ok - playlist maybe next post.