The Best Revenge

by Duxoop Douglas

As of Thursday, August 31, 2023, it will be exactly 20 years since I made my public singing debut. I've enjoyed telling the story of that night many times, and this seemed like a good time to type it all out for all my friends. Enjoy.

Part 1: Before That Night 

At the time I lost my mom to medical incompetence in March 2002, I had been in a long-distance relationship with someone for 14 years. Ma's abrupt end made me realize that life was too short to keep waiting for said someone's and my combined circumstances to allow us to be together. That summer we mutually decided I should explore other options. But there were plenty of obstacles involved. I was extremely socially anxious/awkward, I didn't drink (I got embarassingly drunk at 15 and didn't want to surrender control to any substance afterwards) and can't breathe cigarette smoke, so bars weren't an option. One of my friends sang karaoke and kept trying to talk me into it because I had singing skills, but I was too scared to sing in public. (Hard to imagine now, right?)

So with seemingly no way to meet new people, and with PTSD from my mom's death, I made the ridiculously stupid decision that my only options were my existing circle of friends. A very small circle. A grand total of 5 friends. All male. And only 1 was bi: the aforementioned karaoke enthusiast. (I later learned there was a 2nd. Moot point.) Due to his passing resemblance to an only twice-appearing Scott Thompson character on the Kids In The Hall, we will henceforth refer to him as "Idiotboy".

To my trauma-addled brain then, this was my only option. I proceeded to pursue him obsessively like a fucking dolt. (I piss myself off just typing it. 😠) Two problems with this: He turned out to be a grifter and led me on to get money from me. To the tune of definitely triple digits and probably quadruple. Ugh. Also, he had a girlfriend. A rather serious one at that. She was very shy around me at first, but eventually warmed up to me, just like one of my sibling's cats shortly before. We'll henceforth refer to her as "Sweetie", which is what I called both her and the cat.

Now, a couple other details about Idiotboy I need to mention before proceeding further...

We hung out a lot at his home and spent many late nights playing games on his computer. He often had anger issues, and I often enjoyed doing weird, annoying things to piss him off because I found it hilarious. He would get this look on his face that made it easy for me to imagine steam coming out of his ears. The best instance of this was not long after I was there with Sweetie while he was running an errand. She showed me some funny pics from a photo album including a few of her as an infant/toddler running around the house naked, which she called her "naked baby pictures". A week or two later he and I were driving somewhere and I said "Sweetie used to be shy around me but she's warming up to me now" "Oh, that's good," he said. "Yeah, she even showed me some nude photos of herself." Cue the ear-steam look. He probably would have pushed me out of the car and backed over me if I hadn't let him off the hook fast enough.

The other detail is very important here: He was a fan of a pioneering band called Pansy Division, one of the first all-openly-gay punk rock bands, formed in the early 90s. Lots of songs about gay life, both funny and serious. Since Idiotboy was also a James Bond fan, the first PD song he played me was one of the funny ones, "James Bondage", which includes the lines "007 inches" and "a goldfinger up my ass". 😂 Say no more, I'm sold on these guys!

[Above: Pansy Division, circa 2003. L-R: Patrock, Luis, Chris, Jon.]

(On a side note: You know how you and your friends play your favourite bands for each other and then you're both fans, but whoever heard the band first, that was considered their band? Same thing with a relationship, and then if you break up with them, you break up with 'their' bands too. Yeah, so let's put a pin in that thought and come back to it in Part 3.)

[Above: Pansy Division - "James Bondage"]

October 2002 is a significant month in this whole story. In the midst of all this drama going on with me and Idiotboy and Sweetie, we learn that Pansy Division is playing a show in Detroit, and Idiotboy and I go (she can't make it). When they get to the encore they ask if anyone has a request. On one of their albums is a cover of a Liz Phair song called "Flower" (I didn't even know it was a cover until a few years later), and their version features a run-on lyric that lasts over a minute. As far as we can tell, band founder Jon's vocal was not recorded in one take; it's a few takes edited together and you never hear him take a breath. So we look at each other and, having the exact same thought (let's see if he can do it live), we both yell "Flower!"

[Above: Pansy Division - "Flower"]

The band obliges, but with a catch: The sound guy plays the song off the album and the band fakes playing it. But not like Milli Vanilli. They're not trying to fool anyone. Instead they resemble the animatrons at Chuck E. Cheese. Jon's 'lip-sync' is more like a marionette, Luis is clearly not hitting the drums, etc. Very funny and a very clever solution!

After the show we get to chatting with the band members. This was Idiotboy's second time seeing them live (my first, of course), and one thing he's very good at and useful to me for is schmoozing. His ease in chatting them up makes it easier for me to do so and to establish a rapport.

BTW I think on the way home from this show, I may have brought up the subject of maybe sharing him with Sweetie. I don't think he was too keen, but let's grab another pin and we'll pick this one up below.

Not long after that night, I was listening to PD in my car and whenever "Flower" came on I found myself trying to see how much of that run-on lyric I could get through in one breath. Eventually I just tried to get through the whole thing smoothly, and after much trial and error, I figured out a good breathing pattern that would get me through it! Once I got to where I could do it consistently, I called Idiotboy, put him on speaker and did it in my car in the garage. We jokingly agreed that next time we saw them, I could say "Hey, I can sing 'Flower' now," and maybe they'll let me join them on stage and do it!

Sure, as if that would ever actually happen. But that didn't stop me from fantasizing about that scenario. I had it all worked out. I'd just hop up and nail it and hit my knees on the last line like a total rock star and the crowd would go wild and I'd become a singer and find someone and sing my way right into their pants etc. etc. No chance. But nice to think about before I go to sleep. Another pin, please! In fact, make it two! (These we'll collect in Parts 2 and 3.)

Halloween night, on my way to my 3rd-shift job, I drop by Idiotboy's place with some candy, and Sweetie is wearing this amazing, sexy goth outfit. Up until then, I was not a chubby chaser like Idiotboy, but the sight of her that night definitely started a change brewing in my mind.

They broke up around Thanksgiving, and then got back together. They broke up again just before the holidays and got back together again in January. This time, they decided they were engaged. (Also by this time I was running out of extra money and not only had stopped forking it over to him but also started seeing through him and coming to my senses.) They wanted to celebrate with me, but on our way to a bar they changed their minds and we went to the store, bought a few bottles of whatever and went to my house and sat at the small bar my mom had built for a friend and inherited back after he died. After plenty of drinks all around, she started dropping me hints which I failed to pick up (speaking of which, let's pick up that second pin). While she excused herself to my facilities, he clued me in and shortly after, some fun, sexy stuff happened. Within a week, a lot of not fun and not sexy stuff happened, such as their third and final breakup.

He tried to get her back but it wasn't happening. Meanwhile, I came to the realization that I enjoyed being with her that night more than I did with him. So I tried to get her back too, at least as a friend. Except that I made the 30-mile trip north to see her on Valentine's Day. Early enough that she had just woken up, too. Derp! Ever the hopeless romantic, I am. And hopelessly misguided. Ultimately, my only chance of getting her back either way was going to have to be through him. And if I had to then steal her away from him, so be it. Screw him. But in the meantime I'd have to pretend to still be friends with him.

After he'd gone through a rebound or two, and while I was waiting to be able to use him to get her back (as well as waiting for him to maybe pay me back some reasonable amount of money), we find out that Pansy Division will be playing in Cleveland Heights at the Grog Shop on August 31st. This is my chance to make my fantasy a reality! I brush up on my breathing pattern, just in case.

But there's a chance at something else, too. We hop in Idiotboy's beater of a car and head to Cleveland as two single dudes, and on the way there, we decide that we are on a mission:

We are each out to fuck a member of the band.

***

Part 2: During That Night 

Okay, so we're going there on a mission, and we each call dibs on 2 of them. I'm after the 2 older members; Jon, the band's founder, is my Plan A, and Chris, the bassist, is my Plan B. Idiotboy's Plan A is Patrick, the lead guitarist, and the drummer, Luis, is his Plan B. And I must admit that even though I've enjoyed telling this story many times, it wasn't until I thought about writing it out like this that I thought to myself "how shitty of us to objectify them and think of them as trophies", so I brought this up with Patrick and his response was "being objectified is part of the territory." Nonetheless I offer my apologies to all 4 of them.

We arrive in Cleveland Heights in the late afternoon, and find our way to the Grog Shop. (BTW upon entering, I remember seeing a promo flyer for an upcoming show there, by an unknown band with a name I found interesting because it was a Simpsons reference. "Check out this band name," I said to Idiotboy. He got a chuckle out of it. "Fall Out Boy. That's a good one.")

When a couple of the Pansies walked in, we went into volunteer roadie mode and helped bring in their gear. After that, the club had arranged a meal for them at a sandwich shop down the block, and all but Chris walked down and we tagged along. We had a good chat as we watched them eat. I don't remember any of it except for Jon talking about coming up with a song title that cracked the band up: "He Whipped My Ass In Tennis (Then I Fucked His Ass In Bed)". Naturally, it ended up as a bluegrass song. Do-si-do!

[Above: Pansy Division - "He Whipped My Ass In Tennis..."]

Later, back at the Grog Shop, I'm hanging out with Jon as he's minding the merch table and one of the opening bands is playing. Two crucial bits of casual chat came up...

A few days earlier I was on the band's website reading their bios, according to which Chris was currently single and the others were in relationships. In the course of trying to hit on him as subtly as possible, I mention this in a tone that asks if it's up-to-date. 

Now, Jon has been on the road with this band for over a decade and it's not his first rodeo. I'm certainly not the first (or last) PD fan who's tried this, so he sees right through me. "Yeah," he says, "but you're not really Chris's type. You're more Patrick's type."

Anyway Plan A is pretty much shot down, gently but definitely. Meanwhile, Pat is apparently a bear hunter. Interesting, we did not know when we were making our picks. But unfortunately Idiotboy has dibs on Pat. Oh well. What can I do? Dibs is sacred!

The other bit I bring up is that "I've been practicing 'Flower' in my car ever since Detroit and I figured out a breathing pattern for it that works really well. I could come up and sing it with you guys if you'd like." Can you believe my audacity?! Jon's response: "Eh, we'll see." Which I can't help but translate as "Yeah, right." Am I nuts? I've met these guys twice and I'm ready to hop on stage and be their frontman! Having never sung in public! But this is part of my script for the scenario and by gum I'm sticking to it!

Anyway, they play their show and it's a blast. During the aforementioned tennis song they don pink cowboy hats and Idiotboy and I do-si-do. We and the band consume plenty of drinks/shots throughout and have a good buzz on by the end. They do "Luv Luv Luv" as an encore, then Jon announces (time to collect that third pin) "We have a friend here tonight who says he can do this song, so we're gonna bring him up here and see if he can." And he motions for me to come up.

I have no time to think. I have no time to panic. I hand Idiotboy the small camera I brought (we didn't have them in our phones back in the old days!) and tell him to get pics. (Or it didn't happen.) Then I just proceed as I'd been planning in my head all this time. No stage fright because it wasn't in the script. As they say, the 5 P's: Proper preparation prevents poor performance.

[Above: Me singing "Flower" with PD, 8/31/2003]

I hop on stage. The band starts and I launch into the song. And I nail it. I'm on key the whole way. My breathing pattern works perfectly. Until the very end when I hit my knees at the front of the stage as planned (couldn't do that nowadays!) and belt out the last line:

"I'll fuck you..." Uh-oh. I may have overshot it. "...'til your dick..." Yep, I overshot it. I'm not gonna make it. I slump myself over one of the monitors to squeeze out just enough air to croak out the last two words. "...is blue!"

Not quite perfect enough for me, but by that moment everyone was cheering too loudly to notice. People are slapping my back as I'm still draped over the monitor. I spring back to my feet and start running around the small stage like a total spaz and hugging the band members, and then I stand at center stage for a moment and take in the moment. The crowd, larger than any karaoke crowd I've seen since (even the Bier Stube at full capacity is maybe half what this was), is still going nuts for me, and I think "Wow. I did it. I nailed it. And they love it. That was easier than I thought it would be.

I need to start going to karaoke."

The rest is history of course, but let's save that for the end of Part 3 and go back to the other objective.

After the show people are milling about, enjoying our collective buzz, chatting with the band members, complimenting me, etc. After awhile I see Chris back on stage unplugging his bass and whatnot. Time for Plan B. I give him another hug and then "I see by your website bio that you're the only single one in the band." Chris is also no rookie at this shit. "Well, technically yes, but I am dating a couple of people semi-seriously."

And Plan B is shot down as gently and definitively as Plan A. Oh well. I wonder how Idiotboy is doing on his plans. Let's see if I can be a wingman and help. Because I can't help but be a good friend, even to a shitty friend who doesn't deserve it.

A few minutes later I see Patrick. We hug again and, in a joking manner, I say "Jon tells me I'm your type, it's too bad you're spoken for! "

Pat laughs. "Yeah, that's true. But..." looking me square in the eyes and not laughing, "...I'm on the road right now."

Whoa. The bear hunter has me in his crosshairs. I laugh a bit nervously. "Oh, you mean what happens in Cleveland stays in Cleveland?"

"Yeah, pretty much," says Pat.

The next thing I know his tongue is halfway down my throat.

I definitely did not rehearse this scenario in my head. Hello Cleveland!

And I'm either too surprised or too drunk to do anything but go with it, and I do, no problem, but wow. Plan A failed, Plan B failed, but Plan C is going just swimmingly, thank you!

Except I didn't even HAVE a Plan C!

And even at this point, I'm STILL trying to be a good friend! Past Me, you knucklehead! I'm telling Pat that Idiotboy is really into him and maybe the three of us could have some fun. (It certainly wouldn't be a first for us!) But Pat is having none of that. He's a bear hunter and I'm a bear, and frankly I don't even know what Idiotboy is but whatever he is he ain't a bear!

Fast forward a few minutes and I dunno if Idiotboy has seen any of this, but I assure him I'm working on including him in whatever Pat has in mind, but it's proving very tough. But even though he's not quite to ear-steam level yet, he ain't happy.

Fast forward to a bit later after Idiotboy and Luis have had a smoke and are back inside, and they're chatting while Luis is taking apart his drum kit and I'm lying on my side on my elbow near the side edge of the stage listening. After awhile Pat comes up and sits on stage behind me and starts rubbing my leg. And it's at this point that I change from being a good friend and team player to laughing in my head because I can tell Idiotboy does not like the sight of his Plan A making himself my Plan C, and what makes it even funnier is that his Plan B is getting no further than Luis platonically saying "Well, if you're ever in San Fran, maybe you can come over for dinner."

Now, here I do have to give credit where it's due: While this is going on, at one point Chris is at the back corner of the stage, facing toward it, changing out of the skin-tight dress he wore during the show. I must explain that Chris sings lead vocals on a PD song called "Dick Of Death" in which he sings about a well-endowed acquaintance. I did not have a good angle to see, but Idiotboy did, and he got off a good line: "Damn Chris, talk about the Dick Of Death!" Seems Chris is a shower, not a grower.

[Above: Pansy Division - "Dick Of Death"]

Fast forward to a few minutes later, Idiotboy and Luis go out for another smoke, Jon wants to have a post-show meeting with Chris and Pat, and Pat invites me along. I follow them through a hallway to the dressing room where we all sit down and chat. (I remember Jon saying he thought the show was a bit sloppy, I say it seemed pretty damn good to me but what do I know, etc.) After about 5 minutes, we all get up one by one, Jon walks out the door, followed by Chris, followed by Pat, but instead of walking out, Pat shuts and locks the door and now it's just me and him in the room.

Now I suppose this is where you might expect this story to get very explicit, but instead let's talk about the dressing room. And this is one instance where we need to time-jump WAY ahead:

It would be 11 years before I finally returned to the Grog Shop, to see Sam Roberts Band in 2014. Before that show I was able to sneak back down that hallway and get a fresh look at the dressing room. It now looked very different: very well-furnished, well-decorated, and intimately-lit. Wow. If it had looked like that 11 years earlier, I might have torn Pat's clothes off and banged him like a screen door in a tornado!

But in 2003, the room was pretty basic and utilitarian, very brightly-lit, and the bright green couch looked very much like the ones you'd see a few years later in a Cricket phone store. Also, one wall of the room was mostly taken up by a huge arched window, and all I could see on the other side of it was blackness. So black I couldn't tell if it was a window at all. There could have been just wall, or it could have been an alley with winos looking in at us as we started making out on the couch.

If anyone was there, I guess I was just drunk enough to not worry about it, and they didn't get much of a show anyway. Pat did manage to unbutton my shirt about halfway down, enough that he could start licking one of my nipples. Now I was never a bear hunter myself, and I find my own body gross, so I can't see why anyone would want to run their tongue around one of my hairy-ass nips, but who am I to yuck anyone's yum? 

Sadly for Pat, not only did I not find the surroundings conducive to getting my schwerve on, but my nerves and more importantly my PTSD caused me to talk his ears off about all the drama going on in my life at the time. Not just losing my mom and all the stuff with Sweetie and Idiotboy, but also with a cute but platonic co-worker with a jealous douchebag of a husband, and some other shit I've luckily forgotten since. Pat eventually cooled off and instead lent his ear and some friendly advice. A decent and caring guy then and now.

I asked if going to wherever he was staying that night was an option. It most likely wasn't, but he'd check. And it's at this point, after I've gone from good friend/team player to having fun pissing off my shitty friend, that I really should have started thinking about not pissing my shitty friend off too much because he's my only way back to Toledo

After about 20 minutes, we left the dressing room and went back out to the bar. At this point, you gotta figure Idiotboy has come back inside from his smoke, looked around and noticed the two of us missing. And I don't know, but maybe he asked Jon and/or Chris if they'd seen us, and I don't know but maybe they told him the last they'd seen us we were in the dressing room. And now he's spent the last 20 minutes getting more and more pissed off and building up ear-steam. And now he's sitting on a barstool leaning against a big ceiling support beam with his arms crossed, and already with the ear-steam look on his face. And here we come from out of the back hallway, and I'm re-buttoning my shirt! And I can only imagine what he's thinking, but at this point I'm just gonna go ahead and let him think it!

Fast forward to a little while later, and we're hanging out in the bar, and he's sobering up for the drive home. Pat reappears and, as expected, going to where he's staying is a no-go. But before the show, he had told us that his other band, Dirty Power, would be playing in a couple weeks in Columbus, so we should come check them out if at all possible. So he reminds us of that, and then grabs a couple scraps of paper from the bartender and jots stuff down on them and hands one to each of us. I look at my scrap of paper, and it's Pat's email address and his phone number. Cool, we will definitely try to make it.

[Above: DP's self-titled album cover, which also looks cool on a shirt]

We help them load their van and say our goodbyes, and then we head for home. We hardly talk for about a half hour, we're just soaking in the evening's events. Eventually we start talking about the possibility of getting to Columbus. Can we each get the night off work? Should we risk another long trip in the beater he's driving or can we get a rental? Stuff like that.

After working out some of this pre-planning, I say something along the lines of "Okay, we'll check on this, and look into that, and work out this detail and that detail, and then we'll call Pat and let him know if we're coming."

"You mean email him," he says.

"Well, call, email, either/or," I say.

Cue the ear-steam.

Turns out, the only thing written on Idiotboy's scrap is the email address.

Me? I got the digits. 

[two snaps up]

[P.S.: Above in my "Hip-O-Festivus" video, you can see that I was wearing my Dirty Power shirt that night. BTW, in an odd coinkydink, my friend Dave, who hosted this party in 2016, has since moved to Denver, where Patrock also lives now.]

***

Part 3: After That Night 

So, you ask, what happened in Columbus? And did it stay there?

Well, I ended up renting a car and going there solo. Dirty Power was great of course, but being a mid-week show, there were only a handful of us there to enjoy it. Patrock was tired and not in the mood after the show, and we haven't seen each other in person since.

[Above: Dirty Power - "LSD"]

Idiotboy eventually joined the Mormons (oh my lack of gods), moved to Texas, and got married. Somehow he got his in-laws to pay his way through radio broadcasting school, shortly after which he divorced her. What a slimeball! He never paid me back any of the money he swindled out of me, but he did give me some things that were very cool and very significant: Having joined an infamously-homophobic cult, he obviously deemed it necessary to give me his meager collection of Pansy Division records, thus making it official that (let's pick up that pin from Part 1) I had pulled off the rare feat of stealing "his" band. That'll happen when you hop on stage and perform with said band and make out with a band member afterwards. That night in Cleveland, PD became MY band.

I finally got tired of his bullshit, cut my losses, and cut him out of my life in 2008.

He also never did anything to help me reconnect with Sweetie. I pined for her for over a decade like a dumb schmuck. I eventually found her myself in 2016 (after she had moved out of Michigan for several years and then back), went to see her, and we had a good talk. Turns out Idiotboy was squeezing money out of her too. Also turns out that he had found her about a year before I did, went to visit her with his 2nd wife in tow and tried to cheat on her! To Sweetie's credit, she would have no part of it.

Sadly, she did not want to resume our friendship, as I was part of a life chapter she wanted to forget. I wish her all the best. At least I got closure.

As for karaoke, it took me a couple months to actually work up the nerve to go find a show. I got "One Thing" by Finger Eleven stuck in my head and to go sing somewhere to get it out. This led me to Mutz, in the Oliver House near downtown, on November 9, my late brother Louie's birthday. The KJ's name was Doug and he sang, so when I filled out my slip, to avoid having a second Doug on the list, I decided to pay tribute to Louie by using the mean nickname he saddled me with as a kid. He changed Doug to Duck, and at some point he tacked Soup on the end. I wrote down Ducksoup, and it stuck. (Years later, while playing that bar trivia game with the blue controller that limited your name to 6 letters, I changed it to the current spelling.) Within a few months, I could walk into a bar I'd never been to and total strangers would know my name. "Ducksoup!" Thanks for the handle, Lou.

Oh, I forgot to mention that just as I got brave enough to get up to go give Doug my slip, he announced he had enough singers to finish the show and wasn't taking any more slips. So my karaoke debut wasn't until the 16th. I saved my slip from the week before, and then saved all my slips and have kept count of all my songs and turns since. As of last weekend, I'm at 2,192 different songs and 13,316 turns at the mic.

In February 2004, I debuted my first karaoke parody, "Man! I Love Karaoke!" In April, I volunteered to sing the male part of a duet with a cute gal (with a build similar to Sweetie) who remembered my parody. Before long, we were dating and it was going very well.

Okay, so you know how I played out the singing with PD scenario in my head so I'd be prepared when it happened but it couldn't possibly happen but then somehow it did? I was lucky to have such a thing happen once. Twice would be impossible, right?

I played out a first-kiss scenario in my head. By May, the tulips Ma planted in the backyard the fall before she died and never got to see bloom would be blooming. I'd sing "Tiptoe Thru The Tulips" at karaoke, then when she dropped me off at home I'd take her to the backyard and do just that, while quoting the lyrics. Then I'd pull her close, look at her with my baby blue bedroom eyes. "And if I kiss you / in the garden / in the moonlight / will you pardon me?" And then boom, cue the fireworks and all that. Perfect plan. Except...how do I get her back there?

So one night I do the song (in a spot-on Tiny Tim falsetto), and afterwards we go have coffee and while we're in the diner, it rains. Shit. Rain is not in the plan. But by the time we leave it stops. On our way to my house she mentions her lawn mower is broken. I still have an old mower that still works that she can use. When we get there I figure I'll go get it out of the shed and bring it out front to her. But instead she turns her car off, gets out and follows me to the backyard! Ho. Lee. Shit!

I turn on the light on the front of the garage and light up the yard. As I open the shed to get the mower, she sees the tulips. I had already told her about Ma never seeing them grow and all that. Acting impulsively (and in this case I mean "Acting! Genius! Thank you!") I take her hand. "Come on, let's tiptoe thru the tulips!" She follows. I keep quoting. "Knee deep in flowers we'll stray / we'll keep the showers away..." And we were!

I start to pull her in. Our eyes lock. She's getting nervous, but comes closer. "And if I kiss you / in the garden..."

The rain had stopped, but it was still cloudy. No moonlight. But not to worry. I had a Plan B:

"...in the...*garage* light..."

I get a little laugh out of her, just enough to break the tension.

"...will you pardon me?" And boom.

The next week, I practice a romantic song with her name in it to seal the deal. As I sang it to her, I was so nervous I could not stop myself from trembling like Kate Hepburn during an earthquake. Never happened before or since. It's a wonder I held on to the mic! Later that night, the deal was sealed.

I'm quite certain that, to this day, Tiny Tim and I are the only two guys in history to sing "Tiptoe Thru The Tulips" to a woman and end up getting in her pants.

(P.S.: The "Tiptoe" weekend came exactly 6 months after my first visit to karaoke, and thus the following weekend was exactly 6 months since my karaoke debut.)

And yes, I screwed up and rushed things because I was still post-traumatic and we broke up and that was a total train wreck into a giant pile of burning dumpsters, but it was more than I would have ever gotten had I not started going to karaoke in the first place. (And it probably would have ended by now anyway since my libido is now long-gone and my equipment no longer works.)

And I have a lot more and better friends now thanks to the last two decades of my hobby. The handful of friends I had before that are all out of my life now. I thought I was choosing quality over quantity. Turns out that by upping my quantity of friends, I also improved the quality.

Most of you who are reading this got to know me through karaoke. For those of you I've met more recently, I took a poll about 4 years ago and asked everyone what name they knew me by. "Duxoop" beat "Doug" by a 2 to 1 margin, and the margin is probably even wider now. Thus I use the name I use.

And it all traces back to that stage, that night in Cleveland Heights. I can never thank Patrick, Jon, Chris and Luis enough for giving me that moment that has changed my life for so much better. Suffice to say I wouldn't know most or any of you without it.

I wanted to thank them much sooner than this in person. Even though we haven't seen each other in all this time, I'm still friends with Pat of course, as well as his partner Channan. As for the others, I kept checking the band's website to see if they were coming back to the area. Over the course of a few years I'd check less frequently. Then I went a bit of stretch without checking. By the time I checked again, in 2009, I saw that they had finally scheduled another tour date at the Grog Shop...

10 days earlier.

I missed them by 10 days! I felt like Hawkeye after Trapper left!

They were in Chicago about a month ago or so but it's too far for me now. I still hope I get a chance to sing with them again. (I still haven't met Joel, who is now their lead guitarist.)

Backing up a bit, after talking to Sweetie, I thought briefly about finding Idiotboy and telling his wife (if he was still with her) about his cheating attempt and what a scumbag she was married to. But why bother? I think I got the last laugh already. After 20 years of singing and making plenty of new, quality friends, I know I'm much happier than I would have been had I not started singing in public.

And to quote my favourite Pansy Division song (the one I'll sing with them if I get the chance), "Happiness is the best revenge."

Check that one out below, it's a banger. Espesh Patrock's guitar work on it. He's got quite a lick.

[Above: Pansy Division - "The Best Revenge"]

***

P.S.: I'd like to give a shout-out here to Patrock's latest band, Maris the Great and the Faggots of Death:

[Above: Maris the Great and the Faggots of Death - "Go Fag!" (written by Pat)]

And his latest persona, Kermit The Fag:

[I am SO envious of that green mohawk ]