Tuesday, June 28, 2011

The World According to Casey


One person very dear to my heart is my ex-husband Casey. Casey lives on the Oregon coast and recently started a coffee roasting company. When I told Jane this, she wrote some exciting new text for his website:

I carefully roast my coffee one bean at a time so that I'll never, ever have nothing to do. I'll bring each coffee bean to your house on my bike, hand delivered each hour on the hour. I don't care where you live.

And that pretty much sums up Casey: if you're doing something the normal, efficient, time-tested way, you're doing it wrong.

Case in point: I was his first wife. We got married when I was 24 and he was 25. A year later, the lawyer who handled our divorce asked us very earnestly whether we were sure we wanted to break the sacred bonds of marriage when we couldn't stop giggling over the task of signing the divorce papers. A year after that, Casey got married again (he doesn't want to talk about it). And then a few years after that he married Renee, whom he no longer lives with, but refers to as his "Best Friend-Wife." Now he's dating a really nice lady named Melissa who seems genuinely unconcerned by the fact that he's been married three times at the tender age of 34. I can imagine that's easy to do with Casey--he's just so charming and stubbornly optimistic and pleased by nearly everything. The other day on the phone, Casey started giving nicknames to his ex-wives, and I asked him which wife I was. "Oh, you're my Most Special Little Guy, Jess!" he said. He was being completely serious.

Anyway, thanks to the wonder and majesty of THE INTERNET, today I accidentally stumbled upon a photo of Casey that I had totally forgotten about:
That's him tenderly nuzzling that riot policeman's bosom. It was taken at the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, and was eventually turned into a Microsoft spoof ad for Adbusters that said, "Where do you want to go today?" (By the way, is Adbusters even a thing anymore? Evidently it is, because I just Googled it and Google says it's still a thing).

So, the story behind this photo goes like this: Casey got arrested protesting globalization and corporate capitalism, which are two things that really chap his hide. And so he got tear-gassed and had to spend four days in the King County jail wearing an extra large pair of dingy underpants that weren't his, eating Beanie Weenies and sharing a cell with a dude named Gravity's Sunbeam or some crap. I didn't know what had happened to him--he just sort of stopped calling--and Jiminy Christmas, was I pissed when he got home in a hot-boxed minibus driven by a homeless person. On the other hand, Casey couldn't have been more delighted with himself.

And that, Little Ones, is the story of Casey. He could make some lucky biographer rich one of these days.



3 comments:

  1. a hero of mine, if not the guy you bring home to momma.

    tell the story about boiling acorns, hunh?

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  2. one of my favorite posts ever. casey is still one of those people i reference when i want to get a point across about how quirky (and passionate) people can be. :)

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  3. So, craziness. . . . . My brother was arrested in the 1999 protests and he stayed in the King County! And it was horrible!

    This is Magdi, by the way.

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