The Tale of the Last Fogelberg Fan...........

About a week ago I was at the HEB on south congress and Oltorf pickin' up some film.......which by the way, is becoming an even more expensive hobby than it already was, since apparantly all those dedicated photographers who made me fall in love with 35mm are fuckin' sellouts now, driving the whole market towards digital faster than Gary Busey towards the big "In Rememberance" screen at next year's Oscars ceremony. Seriously, this shit is a perfect lesson in supply and demand, the B&W film I buy like crack went from $4/roll to $9/roll almost overnight, and the color film I used to buy isn't even being made anymore! It just disappeared from the shelves. I felt like the main character in every cheesy ghost story.........

"Yeah I'll have some Kodak Portra please."

"Kodak Portra? I'm sorry we don't sell that."

"Really? Man that sucks, I just bought some last week."

"Sir, that's impossible...........we haven't sold that film here since 1945. It died in the war."

Dum-dum-duuuuuuuum!!!

Anyway, all recent fuck-ups of capatalism aside, here's the real story. The adventure. The event that changed my life forever, and may very well change yours when you have finished reading the tale. So there I was walking up to the store, minding my own business.........and by that I mean lookin' at all the mexican women at the paleta stand and wondering if maybe the real Montezuma's Revenge is a flat ass........when all the sudden I almost stepped on something on the ground in front of me. A small white object. What could it be? A dead albino squirrel? A flattened bag of cauliflower someone drove over? Bird shit in the shape of an Ipod?

No, an actual Ipod. Cool, right? No, not cool at all, because while it didn't turn out to be literally made of it, I did find some bird shit.........on the inside. When I turned it on, this is just a sample of the playlist that greeted me:

The Eagles
Foo Fighters
Billy Joel
Duran Duran
Coldplay
John Denver
Buena Vista Social Club
Norah Jones
Dan Fogelberg
Tom Petty
Foreigner
John Mayer
Billy Idol
Rod Stewart
Yes

Now, any one of those artists by themselves would have been fine. But all together in the same playlist, this thing could be put in a goddamn museum and studied for future generations as proof of the failure of the human experiment. And yes............you read that last band name right. Yes. YES!! If just seeing the name doesn't disturb you enough, allow me to take you all the way down the rabbit hole now, friends. There was not one, not two, but 3 WHOLE ALBUMS worth of Yes in that folder. Think long and think hard about that little tidbit. That means that not only is there some unabashed Yes fan walking freely the streets of our safe neighborhood, where I let my KIDS play, but this man/woman/evil robot sat down at their computer and spent no less than an hour importing their proud prog rock collection into Itunes, plugged up their Ipod to update with a dumb smile on their face and said "I see nothing wrong with this scenario." Jesus christ, even if you switched that mental picture to a dude sittin' in front of his computer watching child porn while wearing a Mitt Romney halloween mask, it somehow still wouldn't disgust me as much.

So needless to say, finding this Ipod did not give me the warm feeling you would get from, oh, I don't know..........finding a free Ipod that wasn't pre-owned by a sociopath. The pure level of douchebaggery contained within this device made what would usually be a cool discovery into more of a mix of success and shame, kinda like what I assume is felt by any dude who ever woke up with a hangover next to Yeardly Smith in the morning.

So for the last week, I've been obsessed with this guy, the owner of this thing. Who is he? What does he do for a living? How does he dress himself every morning? After a lot of sleepless nights and crumpled notepads full of algebra calculations, this is my best reconstruction of who this man is, based on the evidence on the Ipod and the location where it was found...........

First of all, he is a he. The Norah Jones and Billy Idol had me leaning towards the female box on the checklist but at the end of the day, we all know no woman has ever been satisfied by Dan Fogelberg, musically or otherwise. So this is a dude. His name is Marcus Dzienkowski, he's 49 years old and he works at a store that sells reflective biking gloves and coffee beans. As a kid nobody could pronounce his last name so they just called him "fat head", on account of his head being way too big for his freakishly small body. Which in reality was a sign of malnourishment from living with his senile grandmother who sent him to bed at 6:30pm every night with only a werther's original caramel candy for dinner. One time in the elementary school lunchroom, the cool kids let him sit at their table. "This is it", he said to himself, "I'm finally being accepted". But as he ate his usual lunch of bananas and ketchup, the kids started to laugh. Eager to please and naively thinking they were laughing WITH him, he smeared the ketchup over his face and did the traditional polish dance his grandmother taught him. The kids laughed harder and harder, and finally realizing the situation, he began to cry. "I'll show them. I'll grow up to be somebody special!" And so the day he turned 18, he left his small town and moved to Hollywood. He worked as a waiter and went to the gym constantly, building up his body to make his head look smaller. He eventually became a somewhat successful saxophone player, and can be seen in the movie The Lost Boys playing for a large crowd of people who appear to be enjoying themselves, proof that at one time (or, as we call it, the 80's) his brand of simpishness was acceptable in society. It was during that same year that, while both backstage at a Corey Hart concert, he met his lover and life partner Lorenzo, star of the wildly popular gay porn series "Lorenzo's Oil (in the butt)". In late 1999, Marcus found a job in Austin choreographing chinchillas in tap shoes for a performance art piece, and Lorenzo followed along, deciding to enroll in the University of Texas graduate program working towards his PhD in Plant Biology. They still live in Austin to this day, jogging town lake every morning and handing out Scientology pamphlets in the afternoons. On his way inside HEB to buy a bag of sweet coconut herbal tea, Marcus dropped his Ipod.

The End.........to be continued?

Nah, not really, I just always wanted to do that since I saw it on an episode of ALF. Truth is I gave the Ipod to a friend of mine since I already have one of my own, filled with lots of unbelievably great music but also a couple albums by people like Sufjan Stevens and Danzig that would probably make anyone who found my lost Ipod say "Man, what a huge douchebag."