Thank you, whoever you are

Dear Stoned in San Francisco,

Sorry we didn’t take you seriously before. It must be rather unfortunate to go around with such a name. Your comment on how it was relatively impossible to comment on this blog was ignored like we do to everyone who’s name doesn’t start with Gabe and end with Beaver.

Luckily, later on, Gabey himself attempted to comment on his own blog and found it to be relatively impossible. It turns out (or so our IT guy tells us), that we had put 40204412 instead of 11131626 in a random place in our template and so all of our comments were being misdirected and destroyed. Apologies to anyone that had wished to comment. Surely this will not happen again…

Unless it does.

Love,
Gabe D. Beaver

October 20, 2005 at 7:06 pm | In Gabe the Beaver's solo career | | No Comments

Tao of Gabe: On the Grammatics of Love Addiction

Tao of Gabe

Gabe the Emancipated Beaver here with a recently expired poetic license. So any metaphor I use will be as illegal as your hairstyle should be.

That was a simile. Don’t worry, I’m okay.

Hopefully I’ll manage to renew my license before somebody turns me in to the Grammar Police. There’s nothing more embarrassing than Grammar Police brutality. At least the Fashion Police have the decency to beat you in stylized, matching uniforms.

As long as I stay away from poetic subjects like love, death, unrequited love, and barely requited death, I’m okay.

Speaking of love, remember back in grade school when a single look from the girl/boy/goldfish you liked made your heart melt?

Whatever happened to those days? Where does the time go?

“To the past, usually.”

The problem with love is that it is such an addictive thing that we develop a tolerance (ref. “Addicted to Love” by Robert Palmer). At age 20, if a girl only kisses you on the cheek on the third date, then you’ve likely entered the realm of “friend” who pays for food. (That’s complete with quotation marks around the word friend.)

If, on the other hand, a girl kissed you on the cheek in second grade, your friends might search your backpack for your love potion or Funky Cold Medina.

As years and experience goes up, we get better at knowing who, when, how, and in some cases what to love. This is much in the same way that a cocaine or accent-addict might know his craft better than the casual beaver.

And like black-tar heroine, Mountain Dew: Code Red, and the finest Cuban accent, love increases in cost with each increase in quantity. The only problem is that with love, the increase isn’t in money: it’s in emotional energy and time spent.

Also money.

There doesn’t seem to be a way out of the cycle other than brain damage or changing sexual orientation every year, but I wouldn’t recommend that. After girls and boys, goldfish just don’t cut it.

By the way, sorry I went off on a tangent: today is the third and a half anniversary of the first time my second wife twice removed’s favorite cat Mittens died. If you’ve ever gone through that ordeal, you know what I’m talking about and where I’m coming from.

If you’ve never gone through that ordeal, you’re probably laughing and saying “Gabie, you’re coming from the page, silly.”

However, I stress that while the random drug reference might be funny to most people as a comparison, there is nothing remotely funny about accents. This is especially true of bad accents. For more information, visit your public library and use their high-speed internet to look it up on Wikipedia.

Uh, oh, I’m in trouble. Extended metaphors carry 25 to life.

Love, but it’ll cost you,
Gabe D. Beaver

“Remember Kids: Christian is a weird name. You never hear of anybody called ‘Jew’ or ‘Pagan.’”

October 18, 2005 at 3:13 am | In Gabe the Beaver's solo career | | 1 Comment

Tao of Gabe: On Identity

Gabe the Didactic Beaver here with a tale of mystery, insight, and intrigue that will randomly switch into a “your collective mother” joke without notice.

I’ve been having a problem of identity recently. See, I thought I knew who I was, but it turns out I don’t. I feel like a bad Geena Davis movie (circa 1988-1996).

It all started on Sunday when I decided to leave town on a whim in a move that was rather uncharacteristic of me. It would have been far more characteristic of me to play tennis around my dam in hopes that somebody would yell, “Stop that damn racket!” What? Don’t blame me, my puns are running low on think.

Monday, which at press time is today, I ran into a person I thought was my cousin Dave, but turned out to be my secret twin brother (my family has a lot of secrets, you should ask my uncle-dad about them sometime).

Tuesday, Dave and I ran into a hyper-evolved computer program that thought it was me and wouldn’t answer to anybody, it just kept playing Spider Solitaire with itself and arguing on an Intelligent Design forum of Myspace.

Wednesday, we ran into a future version of myself. We would have thought that he’d come bearing gifts or advice from the future, but no, he was just bored and wanted to hang out with someone who would talk to him. He looked pretty bleak.

Thursday, we ran into a clone of myself who thought it was me. We tried convincing him otherwise, but he made a pretty good case for himself. He did a better job proving he was me than I would have. It was very confusing.

Friday, I woke up in a woman’s body next to a man and a cat. A few hours later—after breakfast in bed—I went to find myself, but I’d come back while I was gone, so I missed me. Hmm. My life sounds somewhat like an annoying t-shirt.

Saturday, we danced the night away. Or so I am told. I forgot all of Saturday because I developed psychosomatic amnesia. All I know is that when I came back on Sunday, a Frenchbeaver I’d served in the front lines of a war with (the war on poverty) had been impersonating me all along. It was like a bad Simpsons episode.

So who is Gabe? Hell if I know. Does anybody know who they are?

Imagine you woke up tomorrow in your mom’s bed, in your mom’s clothes, and in your mom’s body, would you still be yourself? And don’t say that situation could never happen. I mean, I often wake up in your mother’s bed, in your mother’s clothes.

“But not in my mother’s body,” you point out.

Well… it depends on what you mean by ‘in.’

Love, Oedipus style,
Gabe D. Beaver

“Remember Kids: I’m like Batman. I only share my hidden identity with gals whose bones I want to jump.”

October 13, 2005 at 7:15 pm | In Gabe the Beaver's solo career | | No Comments

Tao of Gabe (Lachlan Review): On Conception Day 2005

Gabe the Revolutionary Beaver here at the Lachlan Review (or as I call it, the ‘View) with a review of Conception Day 2005.

It seems that every year Conception Days and first years get smaller. Though this year, our day was particularly fun because we didn’t have to see any new and interesting people. That is, of course, unless those sly devils managed to sneak in with the “SAM Card” that the good people at SAM made us get (it’s very useful for insignificant discounts in all of the many locations convenient located entirely within the SAM building).

In any case, the day started off somewhat slow, and there were at least three DJs that didn’t play to any audience whatsoever, but as soon as everyone woke up (about two, two thirty) the place began to fill like parking spots during final exams.

Now, a typical review of a day would tell you which musicians were danceable and which ones made your ears bleed. Unfortunately, since a musician’s level of suck was directly and inversely proportionate to my distance from them, I can only review the good portions of the day.

That reminds me. Who here can’t get enough Béóncé? I know I can’t. I like her so much, I’ve even looked up how she spells her name and accented it correctly (the other two are smudges, ignore them). I even went back to the indoor DJ stages time and time again and was shocked and aroused by the fact that they kept playing her latest song (the one with the music) over and over again.

And over and over again.

Damn, now I have that blasted song in my head.

But aside from that, rain, and the splendid and terrible music (You would have said ‘terrible and splendid music.’ It’s the curse of the music critic: I like whatever groups you don’t), Conception Day was great. There were even a couple of people in skin-tight outfits, a phunky guy in a cape, and myself: a meter-high walking, talking beaver. You didn’t see me? Oh, that’s fine; we probably overlooked each other.

Love,
Gabe D. Beaver

“Remember Kids! The Lachlan Review, now with humour too (while supplies last, not available with any other offers, limit one per customer per day, for a limited time only, please see dealer for more details).”

October 6, 2005 at 7:32 pm | In Gabe the Beaver's solo career | | No Comments

Tao of Gabe (Round Up): On Media

Gabe the Stupendous Beaver here, to enlighten and snub you. Be glad, I usually save that particular combination for Mother’s Day.

The question of the week is: Gabe, if you bash the media so much, why are you printed in the media?

Simple, kids, just because I poke fun of some media, doesn’t mean I hate each individual medium. I like newspapers if only because:

This is a whole paragraph.

Media is important to any free society (this message brought to you by Geico). But the problem is that media have to be self-sufficient, or else they’ll be as biased as purple dinosaurs in public television (don’t trust Barney, he’s a godless Commie. This message brought to you by ASNMSU). So media take advertising to inform. But since nobody likes information or advertising, the media also add entertainment (if you mention how I’m considered entertainment, I’ll smack you. This is an opinion piece, I’m allowed to do that).

But even the quality of that suffers. I’ll explain:

Have you ever been around a whole bunch of friends and you find yourself laughing at the stupidest things? The reason for that is that, since you can’t discuss deep and insightful topics (project: have a heart-to-heart with more than three people simultaneously), you end up playing to the lowest common denominator.

A general rule of thumb is that the larger the aggregation, the more basic the motivation need be. For instance, the speech needed to inspire your friend to light his underwear on fire must be a thousand times better than the speech needed to get 1000 people to light his underwear on fire for him.

Compare the dialogue between a personal interview with a political candidate:

“I believe that, though the economy is suffering a minor slump, my competitor’s plan will actually be worse for it will tie up transactions at an unparalleled level, leading to a result that is worse for the nation as a whole.”

and the same candidate on a stump speech:

“They want to enslave our free market!!”

Therein lay the problem for the mass media: how to communicate to a bunch of people no smarter than the same amount of grapes? We’re not talking about you, we’re discussing this on the hypothetical level.

Hypothetical means ‘imaginary.’

‘Imaginary’ means ‘not really real.’

So we’re forced to throw in silly things like comics, crosswords, movie times, and even horoscopes (by the way, watch out for Scorpios with birthdays coming up).

It’s that tension then, between what we want to write (Letters to Penthouse), what we have to write (this), what you want to read (Dr. Seuss), and what you have to read (Assistant Professor Seuss) that I make fun of. Of course, since that’d be too complicated to say, I just condense it all to “the media.” It’s a very ‘in’ thing to poke fun at. I know. The media told me so.

Mass Love,
Gabe D. Beaver

“Remember Kids: I love you, but only in a platonic, uncomfortable, but not yet illegal way.”

October 6, 2005 at 6:38 pm | In Gabe the Beaver's solo career | | No Comments