It Usually Begins By Accident: How I Met Clean Boys>Chapter One

It usually begins by accident. Everything I have ever done in the past seven years seems to have been done by accident or found by mistake. Take my fantastic adventure to both Denmark and Germany in 2010 for example; one of the greatest accidents that could have ever happened to me! It all started back in 2004 really, the early summer of 2004, when I became a performance artist by mistake, while performing at a suburban poetry open mic, which instead of poetry for that night, I decided to create a game in honor of that bumbling fool of a president that all Republicans bow and grovel to now, none other than that dead corpse that used to represent life, Ronald Wilson Reagan. His funeral was that day. I was slaving away at my desk, trying to come up with an idea to honor him, but of course I had no poems, so I decided to create a game, entitled, “Pin The Quote In Reagan’s Mouth.” The grand prize was an authentic 1980 Reagan bumper sticker, while the constellation prizes were six Roosevelt dimes-the talk being at the time, that Reagan’s face was going to replace Roosevelt’s. Thankfully, that never happened.

And so when my turn came, we played the game and the audience loved it. The only person who was outraged was Babyshoes, the host of the event. He went outside and must have smoked at least half a pack of cigarettes in a span of five minutes. When the evening ended, he screeched at the top of his lungs and nearly lunged at me. A mutual friend of ours intervened and kept him at arm’s length. I was banned from using props that night. It never felt quite the same after that and I remember, just barreling out of there, grabbing a hoagie and eating outside at the stroke of midnight, scared out of my wits by his madness.

I knew then that I was meant to be a performer and not just a poet. Poetry readings were becoming too boring at that venue anyway-same old humdrum pretentious bullshit June-moon-spoon being read and everyone politely clapping, even if they didn’t understand what the author was saying. I had outgrown this scene. Later, I heard the guy actually came back, looking for me and that frightened me even more; he claims that he didn’t see me go to the greasy spoon that a few of us always go to afterwards and he came to look for me to see if I was alright.

I didn’t buy that. The guy went absolutely apeshit on me and I knew my number was up and I would no longer be accepted in his good graces. And so on that night, I was reborn. And I began performing little experiments here and there,

Right about that same time frame of 2004, I was taking piano and voice lessons from a music instructor I didn’t get along with at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. She was very rough on me, a pathological liar to boot and a backstabber as I discovered shortly thereafter (refer to “Pain Is A Lingering Pill, Taking Its Sweet Time To Dissolve” elsewhere on this blog, for further explanation). As much as I tried to get along with her, meaning going to the lessons and learning what I could under these extreme conditions, it just went south, she soured on me and finally, it came to pass that we just couldn’t work together and she in turn made it difficult for me to be assigned to other instructors, which was mutiny in my eyes. That instructor should have been disciplined for her inappropriate behavior, but finally, the school’s program director intervened and just told me to pick another class. That’s when I chose throat singing, the most difficult, yet challenging music class ever, outside of tap dancing, which I would pursue a few years later. Sadly, that music instructor still works at the school.

Fast forward to late summer, 2006. I had just discovered Youtube and the art of digital photos/films, so I decided to begin filming myself throat singing, just as a way to study my technique. In previous years, I used to tape record myself, so this was just one step up. The first film I made was okay and I had sent it out to everyone on my email list; I was proud of what I had accomplished, even if it seemed kind of weird. So one late hot weekday summer afternoon, I decided to film myself throat singing my own Tuvin throat singing ballad, which at the time was considered more or less an exercise to better my throat singing chops. I named it Mykel Board Weasel Squeezer, after my good friend Mykel Board, more so because his first and last name has a total of four different vowel sounds, which fit the bill perfectly. And Weasel Squeezer? Well, don’t get me started on that!

I can say however, it is not sexual, despite the run-ins I would have a few years later with a certain band leader and his crazy fat-ass wife. It was and remains nonsense. So, about a year later, I received a comment on the video from a certain Pedro Da Palma of Aarhus, Denmark, whom I discovered was actually online himself searching for Mykel Board’s old band Artless, to see if there were any films of his band , posted on YouTube. When he discovered there weren’t, he punched in Mykel’s name and found my throat singing video instead!