Mad titties, or the varieties of human experience

I haven't mentioned it here yet, but I'm once again gainfully employed and have been since December. I don't know why I haven't let the news slip even in passing on this blog, especially since the tumultuous events of the past several years have become a near-constant topic in this rarely visited corner of the artist formerly known as the information superhighway. Now that I'm no longer praying to a deity I never believed in to strike me dead, I'd like to raise a glass to my first three months of regained sanity and another glass to hopes of continuing trends in no-longer-looney-tunes monkey business. I'm not being that hyperbolic. I was nuts. I wasn't really a person anymore, just a kind of slug-robot-sad-old-country-song hybrid. Because I have an amazing wife, I am still here and I am employed. If she wasn't a part of my life, my last few years would have been an extended, real-life, tragic version of the first three episodes of season two of Eastbound & Down. I would also be dead, a homeless alcoholic, or the accidental cockfighting impresario of Ciudad Juarez.
I am now a case worker for a state Health and Human Resources office, deciding if people qualify for food stamps and/or Medicaid. My new job requires extensive training because I have to learn a lot of state and federal policy and apply that policy to individual situations using a needlessly complicated computer system while talking to needy, hungry people who are sitting in front of me or talking to me on the phone. I also have access to all kinds of private information about these people, which can get me fired if I compromise it in any way. Since I'm a new guy with a limited caseload who's only partially finished with training, I sometimes have to help out in the front lobby. This part of the job is pretty mindless, consisting of finding out why people are visiting the office and giving them a corresponding ticket with a number on it that will eventually be announced over a loudspeaker. I don't mind doing this because I know it's only temporary, and I also don't mind because it's some pretty amazing people-watching. Frighteningly, the lobby is massively overcrowded about two-thirds of the time, thanks to the Bush/Obama never-ending war economy. (A retired Army vet who recently started working there told me that our beautiful government was spending one million dollars a month on Gatorade delivery alone. Halliburton contract employees made $95,000 a year hitting the play button on DVD players in base media rooms. That was the entirety of the job. And that's the small-potatoes, anecdotal shit.)
The shortcut to the point is, I see a wildly varied cross-section of humanity. On Tuesday, a chubby boy with corn rows and glasses, estimated age of nine or ten, walked into the office. I said hello. He stopped, pivoted in my direction, lowered his head and glared directly at me with withering contempt over his glasses, hands on hips, foot slowly tapping. He then walked over to the security guards, gave them the same silent stare of disdain, and strutted over to his mother, whose application was being screened. He stood next to her and began loudly tapping the wall with his open palm. Two or three minutes later, this same boy sits down in the vacant chair next to me at the front desk and makes himself at home. "My dad's a security guard, so whenever I go anywhere, I just start being a security guard," he tells me, by way of explanation. "Shut your mouth," he then yells at the security guard sitting directly across from me. A woman comes up to me with a new application for aid. I direct her to the coworker behind me, who can help her set up an Internet account. "(Name redacted) can help you get started," I tell the woman. "(Name redacted) is gay," the kid tells the woman. He then turns toward me and whispers conspiratorially, "Did you ever notice how gay this day is?" Another woman comes in for help. The boy sighs, leans toward me, and says, "Oh boy. Here comes another crackhead." A woman tells me she's just been accepted for Medicaid and asks me when her benefits take effect. "A year and a half," the kid tells her. Several women come in who speak only Spanish. The kid starts talking to them in Spanish. My high school and college Spanish has slowly been coming back to me at this job. I can understand him. He says hello to each woman, then tells them that he's in love with them and wants to give them a good time. The kid then informs the male security guard that the guard has "mad titties." Finally, the child's mother and both grandmothers tell him he has to go wait in the car. On his way out, he says to me, "Here, have a Taco Bell hot sauce packet." He then takes a Taco Bell hot sauce packet (mild) out of his pocket and places it on the desk in front of me and leaves.

Davy Jones R.I.P.

The excellent work The Monkees did as musicians and songwriters once they wrested control away from their handlers has thankfully provided some balance to their only partially deserved reputation as a pre-fab proto-boy-band manufactured product, though the earlier songs were pretty great, too, thanks to the top songwriters and session musicians who created them. Whether you prefer the pop-tart TV entertainers of the mid-1960s or the pop/psych/country experimentalists of the late '60s, you have to concede that either version of the band is pretty damn likable and it's sad to see one of them go. Here's Davy Jones' big moment from Bob Rafelson's highly recommended Head (1968):

Michael Davis R.I.P.

MC5 bassist Michael Davis died of liver failure on the 17th. I was lucky enough to see him play with the other surviving MC5 members seven or eight years ago. It was a great show, but I wish I could have seen them in their full pomp and glory between 1968 and 1972.

A song for every year of my life #19: 1995

Remember all that jive I was laying down about the fancy new phones of the day destroying society, human interaction, and life as we know it? Boy, is my face red. When I was volunteering for a film festival back in October, the twentysomething manboys and womangirls made fun of my outdated cell phone, which I used only under protest in highly specific circumstances. They told me to get hip. I told them to fuck off. Nevertheless, when a pretty 20-year-old makes fun of your technology, you have two choices: 1) put on some suspenders, check into a nursing home, and watch sitcoms until you die of inertia or 2) get with the now and buy the items that today's metrosexuals, extreme sports stars, reality celebutantes, and screamo bands need to survive in the future of the now. Well, I got one of these Satanic new robot droid smart phones because I was tired of feeling like Andy Rooney, and I take back all the bad things I said about them. Since age 21, when I decided I liked things the way they were, I have violently resisted every technological advance. When it becomes more work to fight than to join, I reluctantly join. I'm always wrong. I need to be more like the Scorpions and embrace the winds of change. I get it now. I like this phone. It makes my life better. I can avoid all kinds of small talk by pointing my face at it in public. I can check the Internet and play games and shit. But you know all this already. You bought one two years ago.
Here's an epic 1995 dinosaur jam from yesteryear, Yo La Tengo's "Blue Line Swinger," loved by me, one of today's oldtimers.



Alternate choice: Pavement's "Half a Canyon," another classic oldie from the sock hop and cave stomp days of the mid-1990s, back when we were all swinging on the flippity flop and macking on lizard butts. I think I finished high school at some point in this song's six-plus minutes. Matt Pinfield is in the trunk of my car.

A song for every year of my life #18: 1994

Like a lot of misfit teenage music-loving loners stuck in small towns in the early 1990s, I was obsessed with Kurt Cobain. I'm embarrassed to admit I was devastated by his 1994 suicide, taking it almost as hard as a death in my own family. Really, I just needed a girlfriend, but any of you who shared my circumstances can probably relate. Now, I think of Kurt Cobain as a selfish, immature celebrity junkie who wasted his talent and cruelly left behind a young daughter, and I think of Nirvana as a really good band who made a few really good records and probably could have made even more instead of as one of my primary reasons for living. Teenagers are some melodramatic, inexperienced fools, and that's why I have affection for them. Still, my pain was real, though misguided, and Nirvana's records got me through my naive period of mourning for the famous man-boy who created those records. Music can get you through some hard shit.
Now that I'm a grown man ("grown-ass man" now needing to be retired in the storage shed of overused white hipster slang alongside forebears like "batshit" and "word up"), I've had to cope with bigger problems than teen angst and celebrity death. My parents' divorce, deaths in the family, unemployment, depression, real adult alienation from the world replacing mannered teen ennui, lack of opportunity, money troubles, periods of strained relationships with both parents, Zooey Deschanel's divorce from Ben Gibbard (gotcha), et al. These problems put my teenage depression into perspective and taught me that life is mostly hard and brutal, though it's spattered with fleeting beautiful moments where the light comes in and the bullshit temporarily disappears.
What happened to an acquaintance less than a week ago, a close friend of several of my close friends, on New Year's Eve has put my difficult last four years in the same kind of perspective those difficult years put on my immature teen angst. A stranger murdered this woman in her own home after she celebrated the new year watching bands play two blocks from where she lived. I didn't know her well, only enough to say hello in the grocery store or a rock club or a friend's party in those hello-friend-of-friend moments of recognition, but many of my good friends in this usually safe city adored her. She was a friend to one of my bandmates, and she saw us play a few times. Like me, she was a drummer and a music freak who had planned to be a teacher. She was a special education assistant in an elementary school and a volunteer at a rock camp for pre-teen and teen girls. She was only 29, and I don't understand it. I've always been fascinated by true crime and real-life murder mysteries, but I hate this one. I hate it.
We lie to ourselves sometimes, but most of us know the deal. We know that death is part of the gamble of getting out of bed and getting on with our lives, day following day. We could drive too fast, step off a curb without looking, fall off a balcony, get some disease from smoking or drinking or sitting on our asses too much or just having lousy genes. Most of us just get too damn old. But each one of us should have the right to take this gamble without some pigfucking cretin fixing the odds just because he can. She deserved to get home safe and didn't because this world is such an unfair place. The news channels are calling this murder a tragedy and it is, but I don't like this juxtaposition of her life and name next to the word "tragedy." She made my friends happy and taught young girls to rock and inspired her students and supported tons of great local bands. That's not a life of tragedy. The tragedy is that her killer's mother didn't have an abortion.
My 1994 song, and my alternate choice, is dedicated to my friends and her. I hope I didn't pick a song she hated.

Sebadoh - "S. Soup" This is a real shit soup of a new year so far.



Alternate choice: The Magnetic Fields - "Swinging London"

Ironic Song Titles #1 and #2

Collect them all!

Ike & Tina Turner - "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"
Loudon Wainwright III - "Rufus Is a Tit Man"

A song for every year of my life #17: 1993

I got my driver's license in 1993. I didn't have a car so I spent a lot of time driving my parents', a brown station wagon that was nobody's idea of any adjective used to describe an automobile worth describing. I drove it alone at night many times, feeling sad and bitter and self-righteous and lonely and superior and inferior, antsy to finish high school and get the fuck out of town. I dubbed a lot of my favorite CDs onto cassette and listened to them as I drove the brown station wagon aimlessly around town and on nearby highways and country roads. Frank Black's first album, Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, and Dinosaur Jr's Where You Been got heavy repeat play. 1993 was also the year I started listening to a lot of female artists. The grunge boys club of my recent private hit parade started making room for PJ Harvey, Liz Phair, and Kim Deal, among many others. Music journalists at the time often wrote about how blunt and scary and intimidating Harvey and Phair and Kathleen Hanna's lyrics were. I never understood all this verbal pantswetting from grown men (if rock critics can ever really be grown men). I felt a kinship to Harvey, Phair, Deal, etc., and idolized them just like I did their male counterparts. I didn't find them or their words scary. On the other hand, high school girls terrified the shit out of me. They were the scary ones. I didn't know where they were coming from, and most of the time I felt like they were brazenly making fun of me in code. Oh, the terror. High school is a bad four years that can go on forever if you let it. On a related note, no one really understands what the fuck happened to Liz Phair.
Hey everybody, it's The Breeders' "Invisible Man."



Alternate choice: "My Curse." One of the most male of bands, The Afghan Whigs, give a woman, Marcy Mays from Scrawl, the floor for five minutes on one of their most male of albums (Gentlemen), and it's probably the greatest five minutes of her career as well as a definite highlight from one of my favorite records of the 1990s.