These last few months I have been kicking around the idea of starting back on the blogging train. It hasn’t been much of an idea, but nevertheless, it’s been in the air.
Then the other day I got an alert from my friends at Blogger:
Hello,
As you may know, our Community Guidelines (https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we allow-- and don't allow-- on Blogger. Your post titled "Lester Bangs, birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom" was flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at http://hisdorkmaterials.blogspot.com/2012/01/lester-bangs-birthday-party-cheesecake.html. Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.
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Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
Hoo..kay.
Even though that was an eleven year old post, I could remember from the title in the web address what the post was about. It was about the Michael Stipe and Peter Buck from REM having diarrhea. At least that was my recollection.
So backing up to the start of the story, there’s this:
The other night I drifted nice continental drift divide
Mountains sit in a line, Leonard Bernstein
Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs
Birthday party, cheesecake, jellybean, boom
You symbiotic, patriotic, slam but neck, right, right
That’s a chunk of “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” which is one of those songs that my generation’s cohort was required to attempt and mostly fail to memorize (“yabba dab dabba dab, LEONARD BERNSTEIN”). Now, at the time it seemed obvious that “jellybean, boom” was a reference to Ronald Reagan, who enjoyed jellybeans and was going to blow us all up. But no…
The story that I recall coming across was that Stipe and Buck drove all the way from Atlanta to New York without stopping to eat so they could be at a Birthday Party (I think, for Lester Bangs, but at the very least he was there). They arrived ravenous, thinking that there would be a lot of food to eat, but discovered that there was nothing but birthday cheesecake and jelly beans, which wasn’t what their bodies needed.
So…
The blogger algorithm sat on that for over ten years and just now decided to flag it? Over gastrointestinal distress? I spent a few days just sitting on that until I decided to go look at the post, because hey, I’d already been thinking about cracking the bloggy thing.
Now - the post itself was just a quote from the book I was reading at the time, which was a biography of Bangs. I actually left out the part where they got sick (so did I misremember it, or decide to leave it out? I don’t have the book anymore, so this means a trip to the library at least.)
But I did leave in the bit where Bangs calls Peter Buck a terribly unpleasant word. Mystery solved!
So after a bit of consideration, I’m just going to leave that post behind the wall of naughty shame. So if you are interested you have to get past the prompt.
But “lack of trigger” warning: No mention of sick.
++++
And hello everyone!
