slam poetry, uphills,

The other day as part of an ongoing week of birthday festivities with different friends from different places I went to a show called "Tourette's Without Regrets" at a bar/club/venue thingy in Oakland. The show features a dirty haiku competition, a freestyle mc battle, and a poetry slam. The makeup of the crowd was VERY bay area-like. Lots of pretty thugged out black guys, some rave-looking asian types, thugged out looking mexicans and a mix of nerdy/yuppie looking whites and thugged out ones. I quickly realized I used to work at my camp with the lady who was bartending and this scored me a number of free drinks which was awesome because now that I'm 21 I'm realizing how much cheaper it is to buy 30 keystone light's and sit in your room, however that isn't acceptable at a bar where you have to try to impress everyone else by your "taste" in drinks (so I've upgraded to bud light). Anyways, the show was really tight, the haiku's were silly and funny and the freestyle people had some serious talent, some of them at least, and it was all audience judged and rowdy and sorta reminded me of 8 Mile, minus that really tight song I use to pump myself up when I go on runs. Then to my shock and awe, during the poetry slam, the MC announded "aaron mandel on deck" meaning that somehow I was next to perform. I looked over to my friend Brady and saw him laughing hysterically as he had covertly signed me up to perform. Now normally I don't have much stage fright (except for peeing around people) but a) I had no poem or anything to perform with, and even if i did I suck at that shit b) everyone else who had gone before me had like good rhythm and flow and was talking about police brutality, racism, or welfare. I told Brady this wasn't at all funny but he just told me to tell my baseball story. I'm sure some of you monstroblog readers know this story as it is a performance piece I have developed/embellished over the years about me pissing in my pants while in left field at a baseball game. I know it by heart so it was logical that I could just bust it out if I needed it. So I ran to the bar, chugged a vodka tonic, burped and went onstage, the alcohol having not fulfilled its mission of numbing my nerves. I shakingly grabbed the mic in front of 350 people, looked down at my awkwardly fitting jeans, tugged my fleece over my WSU 100k relay shirt and stammered, "I'm the least cool person here" which made everyone laugh really hard. Then I proceeded to say, "I'm going to share my poem in the form of a short story" and told my story. Unbelievably the crowd loved it and I got good scores and a lady came up to me afterwards and told me I had placed high enough to move on to the Oakland poetry slam finals to which I just cracked up, it was all ridiculous, as much is.

The new star wars is tight, so is cinderella man, please post comments to either agree or disagree.

Good luck to Julian on his bike trek, I might throw five bucks your way.

Dan Baxter, you owe me 10 dollars, please mail it to:

Aaron Mandel
2611 Tulare Avenue
El Cerrito, CA 94530

..or the next knock on your door will mean a broken kneecap.

I went running the other day, which is usually a story in and of itself, although I've been doing a lot more of it lately since I have deluded myself into having illusions about making the cross country team at Whitman in the fall. Anyways, I was running from my house to my friends house in Kensington, which is about 3-4 miles away, but on the route there is an enormous uphill that in high school I used to be able to run up all the way, this time however, I could only make it halfway before I had to stop and walk. My high school was big on writing so we were always told to write about things in our life, things that felt true to us, and while running was a huge part of my high school life, for some reason I could never, never, EVER write about it. As my body failed on the uphill I realized that I could never write about running in high sschool because I was doing it to runaway from things, inadequacies in my life from going through puberty in middle school and sucking at other sports, or at least believing that I did. Now that I am for the most part over them, I don't need to push as hard, don't need to avoid truths, but I still like the run, even if half of it is a walk uphill.