Summer Monday Music: It's A Good Thing For Me They Don't Bottle That Stuff

In a perfect world, these three songs would have started to play every time I entered a bar this weekend. 

If you add their ages up, the three of them together are over 100 years old.

Even though every single one of them is, like me, a timeless teenager.

Sing along and think of me.

Devil With A Blue Dress


Nobody But Me


Double Shot (Of My Baby's Love)

How Matthew Spent His Birthday

Things you might not know about Matthew

He thinks this is the most beautiful four and a half minutes of film you will ever see in your life:

Hangover (hăng'ō'vur)

1. Unpleasant physical effects following the heavy use of alcohol. These include headache, intermitten shout-outs to Ralph's Buick, and dry heaves that leave your throat so raw your voice sounds like a cross between Andy Devine and Marge Simpson. ("Oh Homey . . . .")

2. A word that never leaves Matthew's lips (cf. Maynard G. Krebs and the word "work"). Example: "I am so huh-huh-huh-huh-horribly afflicted with an upset stomach this morning."

3. And if he ever does say the word, then it's something Matthew never admits he's having because he has an iron-stomach drink-like-a-fish party-like-a-rock-star reputation to uphold. ("Hangover? Hell no. I'm just using the porcelain cellphone to check my messages!")

A Thousand Words

The flux capacitor, Marty!!!!

Eighteen Things I Said To Myself This Morning

1. OMFG I just slept through my alarm, and I'm an hour late for work!

2. Kill me now.

3. Why are my ankles clicking like a geiger counter?

4. God my head hurts.

5. The great thing about drinking six vodka martinis and two0 Cosmos instead of six pints of Guinness is that, when you wake up after three hours of sleep, only your head hurts.

6. The bad this is you sleep through your alarm clock.

7. A litre of Smart Water and four Advil: the breakfast of champions.

8. The breakfast of champions only stays in your stomach for three subway stops.

9. Why is it the only two times of day I feel energized to write is just before I have to go to work in the morning and just before I have to go to sleep at night?

10. I wonder if you-know-who will call me today?

11. Matthew's Theory of Aging: if you stop keeping count, the universe will follow suit. Sort of the reverse of "as above, so below." It certainly worked for the ten years I never wore a watch. I think I only aged about three months. But then I was also playing a lot of GameBoy, thinking about the future, and writing about five times as much as I am these days--all of which activities are designed to make you lose track of time.

12. Matthew's Second Law of Time: the more you lose track of time, the more Time loses track of you.

13. Matthew's First Law of Time? It always takes longer than you think.

14. This train ride is taking forever. By the time it's over I'll be 60.

15. When my father was 60, I was 33.

16. When my father was 55, I was 28.

17. There was a 28-year-old girl at the bar last night.

18. God my head hurts.

Two Scenes From An Autobiographical Play

TOM WRENCH: About ten years ago I was slaving away in the corporate library of a Wall Street firm which shall remain nameless, but whose initials are Smith Barney; and one day all fifteen of us get together in a conference room and our supervisor says, "We're going to play a game that will help morale in the office." And this cute brunette at the end of the table goes, "Shoot the supervisor?" So like already I'm in love. "Oh no," says the supervisor, who wouldn't know a joke if she hired one. "We're going to find out how well we know each other. We're going to go around the room and we're all going to say three things about ourselves -- two that are true, and one that's a lie. And the rest of us are going to guess what the lie is." And I'm thinking, how about “I’m really looking forward to this?” ‘Cause that would be my lie.

So we go around the room, and the lies people are telling are all pretty obvious, until they get to me. And I say, "Number one -- I didn't go to Viet Nam because I was 4-F. Number two -- I lost my virginity at 21 when my boss bought me a call girl for my birthday. Number three -- I have a bachelor’s degree in theatre."

And the brunette, whose name is Luisa, says, "All right; so who thinks Tom has never had sex period, never mind sex with a hooker?" And seven people raise their hands. "Okay, who thinks Tom can't even spell 4-F, never mind that he was old enough to get his ass drafted in 1972?" Seven more hands go up. "And how many people think that Tom has a bachelor's degree in lying, not theatre?" And Luisa raises her own hand.

So everybody looks at me and I look around the room and I give them all a big smile, and then I look at Luisa and I say, "We are gonna be friends for life; 'cause I never went to college."

Scene 2: Tom and Luisa in a restaurant

LUISA: That's not how I remember it. The way I remember it, nobody raised their hand for the bachelor's degree. I know I didn't. I raised my hand on the hooker.

TOM: Yeah, but it makes a better story this way.

LUISA: I think the truth is a better story.

TOM: The truth is not dramatic.

LUISA: Oh you want drama. [waving for the waiter] Check, please.

If Loneliness Was Cash, I'd Be A Millionaire

When you look up the word “alone” in The Devil's Dictionary, it says: “Alone, adj. In bad company.” I feel like that sometimes; usually when I’m awake. I feel like anybody’s company is better than my own, simply because they’re not me.

That’s one kind of loneliness. It’s common; it's generic -– it’s barcode loneliness. Then there’s the lonesomeness I feel because there’s no one special in my life. Most people have an open passport to that particular country; me? I have dual citizenship.

I’ve been trying to get rid of that loneliness since I was twelve, and fell head over heels for the girl across the street. Didn't work out, but that's my pattern. Girl on one side of the street, me on the other, and whenever I make a move, I get hit by a car.

On those rare occasions when I manage to dodge the car and get the girl, my special person loneliness disappears completely. Problem is, it gets replaced by a third kind of loneliness. I'll go out with this girl–-pretty, sensitive, smart, funny--and it's like that feeling you get when you don’t know what you want, you only know what you don’t want–-when you say to yourself, I don’t want to read this book, I don’t want to see that movie, and I don’t want to be here; but I don’t know what I want to do and I don’t know where I want to go. That feeling you get when you’re not a part of anything–-just apart. Even when you're with someone.

I would get this feeling and thing, "Is it the whole 'wanting is more fun than having' thing that comes complete at no extra charge with the Y chromosome? Is it Groucho Syndrome ('I refuse to be part of any club that'll have me as a member')? Is it just my mutant power?"

I never knew how to describe this kind of loneliness until I read a biography of Doctor John Henry Holliday of Griffin, Georgia--dentist, gunslinger and famous consumptive. Some reporter went up to him in Tombstone and said, “So tell me, Doc –- you ever get lonely?” And Doc shook his head and said, “Only around people.”

Like A Ton Of Bricks Through Greased Air

I am attracted to five kinds of women: sprinters, Pullman trunks, wounded sparrows, lobsters and porcupines.

Sprinters are the ones who like to be chased, because that gives them the power to decide when to slow down and who gets to catch them. And it's never somebody who runs after them. The guys they wind up with never break a sweat. They are the living embodiment of Groucho Syndrome: they refuse to end up with anybody stupid enough to chase after them.

Pullman trunks are those divinely damaged women who walk into your life with enough emotional baggage to fill Grand Central Station, every piece of which they will unload on you before walking off arm in arm with somebody else to Gate 69, where they will gleefully hop on a one-way express train to Intercourse, Pennsylvania.

Wounded sparrows? Ah, those beautiful frails. You cradle their helpless, hurting souls in your caring hands, and you mother them and you father them until they're healthy enough to think of you as a brother.

Lobsters are those confident dames who are so hard-shelled on the outside that you just know it's a front to protect their inner vulnerability. It's a front, all right, but in the same way two security guards with Uzis are a front for a ten-ton vault with a time lock.

And porcupines? Porcupines are the ultimate challenge. They're perfect in every way except that you can't get close to them without bleeding. They're the ones who make you say to yourself, "I can be the one--I can be the one that'll get through to her." And when you get hurt, and you always do, and it's always bad--when you get hurt, you always say it's her fault. But it isn't. It's yours. When you impale yourself on a porcupine, you can't blame the quills.

And why are these five types of women irresistible to me? Because I am all five species at once.