Redeye - America: Fuck Yeah! July 05 2006

Celebrate freedom

July and cancers — an inseparable pair, I learned the June 30-July 2 weekend. Sure, for a solar-powered love machine like myself, there’s scalp cancer fear during a crabby month of sunny beat-downs, but I’m more thinking Cancers as in the astrological sign.

My expatriate travel partner, Miss Josephine Butterscotch, recently sent word on a tidbit she gleaned while on safari through the Lower East Side. The telegram read, “My dear Tone-Loc Terrapin. STOP. I am having the most fabulous time wrestling the fearsome Wangdoodle. STOP. Miss you. STOP. And did you know, according to astrologist Julie Mars, ‘Cancers take great comfort in familiarity, and new people, places, and things are best introduced slowly.’ FULL STOP.”

It was this disclosure by Josephine, a Cancer herself, that got me thinking — thinking so hard I barely left the house all weekend. Comfort in familiarity, even an über-Virgo like myself is down with that. When I did head out, it was for crisp mojitos at D’jango, or humid hip-hop at MJQ. Yet even within places I feel comfort, I sometimes gots to get things off mah chest. So here’s an open letter:

Dear Breakdancers: I get it. You are an inseparable part of hip-hop culture. Breakdancers are to cardboard what cats are to kitty litter, ‘cause you gots to have a place to do your business. But is it worth nearly decapitating an innocent bystander just to impress a couple other dudes in wife-beaters? When there’s enough room for all that freeze shit, it’s cool. But if it’s cramped and you look like you’re just doing a homoerotic dance in front of the mirror, maybe that risky business needs to stay home. Thank you, T-Dawg.

More fearsome even than breakdancers, however, is the Black Lung. Man, half the people I know have cycled through a wicked cough. Is it the nightlife or the city life catching up with us like a virus, or cancer? Maybe that universal smoking ban isn’t a bad idea.

At a dinner party/wine tasting held by friends on Saturday, stylist-to-the-stars Robot was suffering. But she’s still DFW through and through (that’s Down For Whatever). The rest of us enjoyed rosé and delicately chilled Pinot Noir while leisurely discussing the consumption and Robot’s love for carnies. Now I see why Cancers claim the Fourth of July, bringing together friends and family. So Happy Independence Day, or Indiependance Day, or whatever you celebrate long as it’s Southern-fried, not French-fried. Soon I’ll feel the couch and my TV are a cancer, so we’ll return to surveying the summer daze still to come.

RedEye celebrates going out and going off. Send comments to redeye@creativeloafing.com, but hand-scrawled hate mail is preferred.