I used to write for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. One time I was there to see to my editor. I was a freelance writer for them. When the guy behind the desk let my editor know I was there he said into the loudspeaker, "Mike McGakky to see Tommy." I remember thinking no one has ever mispronounced McGuirk that badly. It was literally the worst pronunciation I'd ever heard. Also, because I was raised Catholic, whenever I mentioned "God" and they didn't capitalize it I would complain. Basically I wrote an article about the new Beck album and mentioned both "God" and "Satan" at different times. One of my friends wrote me an email saying, "Dude, they did not capitalize 'God' but they capitalized 'Satan'?" I was mortified.
I totally mentioned all this to the copy editors at The Guardian. They did not reply and I assumed they thought I was insane. But I had to get them back for doing this to me. There was a band here in SF that I had wanted to write about called Total Shutdown. I wrote about them and mentioned that one of their biggest influences was a band from New Hampshire called Anal Cunt. I assumed the copy editors would hate it but they had to let me loose, swear-wise. I mentioned Anal Cunt 11 times in the article. The thing is, Anal Cunt was actually a really good band, they were from the same New Hampshire scene that produced GG Allin and Lisa Suckdog so mentioning them with the free jazz stylings of Total Shutdown made sense. This article, -- through no knowledge of my own -- came out on the fucking singer's birthday. The last line of it I wrote, "Their album is the best thing made available to the public, ever." You should know the record had 2 grooves. One of the grooves played the album, the other groove played the first Beatles record. Fucking funny. I totally had only heard it once and thought they put out a record of Beatles recordings.
I was at my friend's wedding in a fucking ghost town 4 hours north of SF. It was pretty cool. The church at the wedding looked like the one in Kill Bill. When I had gotten my room I walked around the place to check it out. There was an area with tons of little rocks on the road, like a dirt road and all sorts of trailers. There was a sign on a tree that said, "Welcome to Shogdit Canyon". I thought they had taken the name Shogdit from a Native American tribe that had named the area. I thought it was cool so I walked up the dirt road to the Shogdit canyon. When I got up there there was dog shit everywhere and I realized I had been totally fooled by the sign.
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I remember the article in question. I learned early on to let you fight it out with the copy desk. One of the first articles you turned in was about that singer from Pink and Brown who set himself on fire during a song. I read it and realized I was in over my head. I don't think I ever touched a word after that. What ever happened to Dwyer? Was the fire thing a habit?
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