Yes. Yes I can.

There was a time in Los Angeles where a goth could find something to do 30 days of every month; now there are just a couple of old stand-by nights left.

I have been unable to locate a goth night in New York City for several years now. You’d think Gotham would have at least one.

Participation in Dallas has fallen to the lowest point I’ve ever seen it, though they do still pack the house for their annual fetish ball.

In Washington DC last November, I located two nights, both on Saturday. One venue was in a basement and reeked of rat piss; the other was very small and the bathrooms were so bad I held it getting back to the hotel. Neither was well-attended.

Las Vegas got themselves a place on the strip a few years ago for a regular Friday spot, but the last time I was there (July 2009), the club was falling into disrepair and the night itself was not well-attended.

A few years ago, Orlando had one night and about 100 people in total. Last October, I couldn’t locate a night at all.

Atlanta doesn’t have a regular night of which I am aware and hasn’t since about 2003.

Chicago had two nights last June, but they were both on Saturdays, in giant spaces, and thereby split the crowd so neither place looked like it had anyone in them.

San Francisco has two nights, but one is on Mondays and the other is just once per month. On a Wednesday.

I just spent two subsequent Saturday nights at London’s largest and longest-running club night and it was pitiful. Oh, the venue is still fantastic - big and meandering with great sound, different choices of music, and bars that serve until the wee hours - but attendance was so low the second weekend they closed an entire section of the place.

If you peruse the goth club listings online, you’ll see just how many of them have gone away. We are not dying, per se; I think the people in other cities who produce, promote, and keep events running are either burning out or otherwise giving up. As a former producer and promoter myself, I can tell you why they would do so: Trauma drama.

I’ve been in Denver for nearly six years now. Here, we get four or five goth or goth-friendly nights per week, plus a lovely daily hangout where we can drink, play pool, and not have to listen to the awful music they play at other bars, and a global streaming goth radio station.

Yet for every successful night or other goth-related endeavor, there are a few whose sole purpose in life, it seems, is to make each others lives a living hell.

Yes, I am talking about the people who talk smack about other people’s club nights or radio or whatever the latest thing is that sparks the jealousy. And yes, I am as tired of it as everyone else.

We have it good here. Really good. There is no cause or valid reason to drag each other through the mud, especially since everyone who is currently doing something by and for the community, at this very moment, seems to be succeeding. Would that we could just step back, realize our fortune, and let each other be.

I’m sure some of our current trauma dramas - ongoing bickering, personal attacks, continued vendettas, petty jealousies, and even lawsuits - were just as present in all the other cities I’ve mentioned. I’m also sure some of their scenes, if not all, paid the ultimate price for it.

How do we save ourselves from the same fate? We start calling each other out on the bullshit. Let me put this in perspective: If someone from outside the scene starting talking smack about goths in general, we’d all jump on the bandwagon to defend ourselves and our community - so why do we allow it from the inside?

The answer is we don’t. To whit:

1. If you hear someone gossiping or talking shit, tell them to stop. You don’t want to hear it, it’s none of your business, you are a drama-free zone. Don’t bluff, either. Rumor-mongers need an audience; don’t give them one.

2. If gossip or drama involves you directly, call the perpetrators out. Specifically, ask them why they think that way or why they would do such a thing in a calm, rational, dignified manner (this is called “taking the high road”). If no good answer is forthcoming, let them know that’s not acceptable behavior and - most importantly - walk away. Drama queens need you to be on their side; you need to be on the side where you’re treated better than a pawn in a personal war.

3. Put your money where your mouth is. Support the local club nights, bars, streaming radio, and other projects that make the Denver scene as great as it is and pull your support from people or projects that don’t live up to a higher standard. We get enough hassle from people on the outside; don’t give anyone the satisfaction of cannibalizing us from within.

As a final note, this post is not directed at anyone in particular. It is intended to help the Denver scene survive and thrive where others have failed. The community here is one of the reasons I remain and I want the very best for it.

Isn’t that what you want, too?

The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, and Oliver Reed.

Here’s the scoop on NPR.

Here’s the Amazon Listing.

It’s worth the koi pond story alone.

Nailed her.

When the lady in the TSA uniform overheard us and asked “Why do you hate this airport?” our reply should have been “100,000 miles of experience.”

Instead, we apologetically placated her and agreed with every point she made about why O’Hare doesn’t suck. Here’s why:

We’d just arrived after 8-1/2 hours on a plane across the Atlantic, walked the Trail of Tears from our gate to U.S. Customs, waited for one of the four windows open for clearing immigration along with the other 500 people in line – that’s the count for four full 767 flights, which all arrived nearly at the same time – retrieved our checked bags, hauled them to the right place and re-checked them, caught the train from Terminal 5 to Terminal 1, and entered security again with just six people in front of us in line when the gent handling the ID check at the particular security gate we’d chosen (specifically for the shortness of its line) decided that all of us would hike down to the other, freshly opened ID check. This instantly created a situation where we had 20 people in front us in line rather than the six with which we’d started.

This prompted the comment, said aloud by both my love and I, “I hate this airport,” which in turn prompted Miss O’Hare Pride to start questioning us and making comments of her own. If she were not in a TSA uniform, you can bet she would not have won an argument over the pros and cons of O’Hare vs. any other airport with two very seasoned travelers. However, it is very important to choose one’s battles carefully. People with no real power tend to use what little power they do possess with impunity and, at times, out of sheer spite; we’d already been through a lot and didn’t care to add a body cavity search to the list.

So we agreed that Midway airport is worse – it’s not, by a long shot. We nodded when she said that we’d chosen the wrong line because we’d followed the crowd instead of looking at all the security lines first – which, as some of you know, simply isn’t an option with my love around. And we smiled like idiots when she explained that the change in the structure of our line was better because there were more x-ray machines open at our end than at the other – even as we could see with our own eyes there were three open where we’d been and only two open where we stood.

I don’t mind a person being proud of their city, their airport, or their job, but I truly dislike any person – uniformed or not – arguing invalid points on topics about which they know absolutely nothing. My battles are chosen, however, with the wisdom of someone who has challenged authority in the past. You can win on principal, but if it’s not worth the effort, what’s the point?

Besides, I don’t have a problem with allowing the truly powerless to maintain their illusions.

Only burst the bubble when it counts.

Some lessons are only learned through a really hard face plant.

He was blond, about 3 years old, and stubborn as hell until he fell.

Adding to my previous list:

Cornish Pasty

Cockfosters

And after last night’s Sausage Feast - yes, that is the actual name of the entree on the menu at the Mitre pub - I may now add Addlestone’s cloudy cider to my list of favorites.

Mmmmm … sausage.

It was supposed to rain in London and Budapest the entire time we were visiting. It hasn’t. In fact, it’s been beautiful most days, if a bit chilly.

While we’ve been gone, Denver had a spring blizzard complete with thunder snow. I joked with friends here and back home about how we stole the sunshine and brought it with us to Europe.

Dearest Denverites: We return home Monday. London is expecting blizzard-like conditions on Tuesday and Wednesday, while your local forecast is a high of 72 on the former of the two days.

You’re welcome.

If there is anything I can say about my life with any certainty whatsoever, it’s that the randomness of it tends to keep things interesting.

For instance, our second night in Budapest, we found ourselves at the Harlem Globetrotters show.

Seriously.

A little background: My old friend in Budapest writes for an ESPN blog about basketball. He needed to go as part of a work assignment and asked if we’d like to accompany him.

I hesitated, of course. Did we really travel all the way to Eastern Europe to see an American sports comedy act – whose relevance has all but disappeared over the years – when we could easily catch the show back home sometime? Did I even care to see them at all, in the States or elsewhere?

More importantly, could we perhaps find something better to do in this city on the Danube?

I also worried that the Globetrotters hadn’t changed their act much from the Saturday afternoon TV specials of the 1970s. Back then, they had a few household names – Meadowlark Lemon and Curly Neal immediately come to mind without an online search – and I recall simply loving their antics. Of course, I was about 10 years old and was very much into the Three Stooges as well. I’ve also learned, sometimes the hard way, that one can’t “go home again” with fond memories of those weekends at home with only five TV channels of programming from which to choose. The only exception I’ve found is for Godzilla movies, which were fun to watch then and still are now.

So after considering the offer for a bit, we opted to go. Our decision was based simply on of the randomness of it all and what a great story it makes. Yet now I find myself simultaneously interested in going over the show in its entirety – what I remembered from my childhood vs. the new gags, the jokes that fell flat because they were built for an American audience (or due to a lack of adequate translation), the relevancy of “Harlem” in their name when the team is actually based in Arizona somewhere – and slightly embarrassed at having attended at all.

Meh. Perhaps I should just be glad my life is this positively random on occasion.

“May you live in interesting times.”

What is it about women with sharp features?

We were upgraded to Business Class on the leg from Chicago to London, but our seats were across the aisle from each other. The woman in the seat next to my love’s insisted on staying there, saying only that she preferred the window. Mind you, it’s not as if the window seat were any more comfortable – no, on that particular Boeing 777, all the Business Class seats weren’t seats at all, they were small cubicles. Each one had little walls to keep the noise from neighbors out and each could lay out completely flat for sleeping.

We shrugged our shoulders and settled in for the eight hour flight. Meanwhile, the lovely gentleman who sat in the cubicle next to mine realized what was happening, confirmed my man and I were indeed traveling together, and switched seats so we wouldn’t have to communicate across the aisle for the duration.

The sharp-faced bird in the window seat? Oh, she fell asleep before the plane left the ground and only woke up for meals. That’s right, not once did she really look out the window at all.

Now I sit on a Swiss Air flight – London to Budapest – next to another sharp-faced woman. We nearly had to climb over her aisle seat to reach our window and middle one, yet she has pretended to be asleep each time either of us has even mentioned stretching our legs. She is thin and seems quite unhealthy, based on the way she just devoured an entire box of English crackers with her one cup of hot tea. I’m going to guess she’s bulimic, because she is losing her hair, asked me to turn off my air vent because she is cold, and as soon as she was done devouring that box of food, she headed for the toilet.

Thanks to my lovely girlfriend, I am reading Prometheus Rising (by Robert Anton Wilson) on this vacation. It is a great treatise on the behavior of humans in general, but I really didn’t think I needed a concrete lesson on these sharp-edged - literally and figuratively - women.

Then again, maybe that is exactly the point.

Where are my own edges?