Saturday, April 29, 2006

Happy Birthday, Koko

mp3 of the day: The J.B.'s w/ James Brown - To My Brother

Koko is the other component in this thing of ours we call TOO MUCH BEAUTIFUL WOMAN (I've decided to start typing the title in all caps all the time, no matter how incongruous it may be... Can't be too obnoxious when you're self-promoting, can ya?)

He's been my co-conspirator for a long time, since we were 13 or 14 (Well, since I was 13 or 14, anyway. I've never been completely sure of how old he really is. He claims to be a year older than me, but he had, like, a full beard when I first met him). Back then I was what I guess you would call "one of the popular kids," a rising star of the junior high school social stratosphere - all obsessed with "fitting in," making friends with the right people, supposedly dating the right girls, popping my collar, ironing sharp creases into the front of my school uniform, and wearing loosely-knotted ties and aviator shades (it was the motherfucking 1980s, dag).

Koko was the exact opposite of that. From the vantage point of the desperately conformist, approval-seeking milieu I inhabited, he might as well have come from a completely different planet. He was the first person I ever met who truly did not give a lonely, lavender-scented fuck what anybody thought about him. He was loud and crude, yet had a wit like a rapier. His appearance was generally slovenly and yet he was reputed to have laid more girls than my entire circle of pretty boy friends had even talked to. If anybody taught me to just say damn the torpedoes of conformity and just be myself, regardless of how unpopular that might be... it was him.

So if you think that today I am a weirdo, a contrarian, an oddball.... Blame this man.

But wish him a happy 47th birthday first, willya?

(Hmmm... I should probably post an old photo here or something. I'll dig one out.)

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