Can-Smashing Robot

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

2012-01-04T22:03:00.002-06:00

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

2011-12-18T04:01:00.002-06:00

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

2011-12-06T22:23:00.004-06:00

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.

I haven't posted in a while so here are some James Baldwin quotes because he was a much better writer than I'll ever be

2011-11-29T22:03:00.004-06:00

I started reading James Baldwin's collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, yesterday, and I'm finding much to admire. I'm only 45 pages in, but here are a handful of quotes that appeal to my sensibility.

"... Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. ..."

"...the avowed aim of the American protest novel is to bring greater freedom to the oppressed. [Writers of protest novels] are forgiven, on the strength of these good intentions, whatever violence they do to language, whatever excessive demands they make of credibility. It is, indeed, considered the sign of a frivolity so intense as to approach decadence to suggest that these books are both badly written and wildly improbable. One is told to put first things first, the good of society coming before niceties of style or characterization. Even if this were incontestable -- for what exactly is the 'good' of society? -- it argues an insuperable confusion, since literature and sociology are not one and the same; it is impossible to discuss them as if they were. Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a breakdown of meaning. Those categories which were meant to define and control the world for us have boomeranged us into chaos; in which limbo we whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions. ..."

"It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. ..."

"... Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle. ..."

"... Leaving aside the considerable question of what relationship precisely the artist bears to the revolutionary, the reality of man as a social being is not his only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced to deal with human beings solely in social terms; and who has, moreover, as [Richard] Wright had, the necessity thrust on him of being the representative of some thirteen million people. It is a false responsibility (since writers are not congressmen) and impossible, by its nature, of fulfillment. The unlucky shepherd soon finds that, so far from being able to feed the hungry sheep, he has lost the wherewithal for his own nourishment: having not been allowed -- so fearful was his burden, so present his audience! -- to recreate his own experience. ..."

A song for every year of my life #16: 1992

2011-11-07T19:57:00.002-06:00

Guided By Voices' "Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox" is the greatest anthem of Midwest teenage bedroom air guitar stale beer ditch weed unrequited emotion explosion church of rock and roll praise and worship in the history of sound, recorded or otherwise, on this planet or any other, in any time predating, concurrent with, or postdating 1992, forever and ever. I can say, without hyperbole, that this song will destroy an entire metro area if played on more than 20 simultaneous ghettoblasters.

Alternate Choice: Faith No More - "Caffeine"
I don't really understand why Faith No More is such an object of sneering derision for most people I know. I think their music has aged better than a lot of other stuff from the 1989-1996 era, and I also think they were a boundlessly creative band that wrote really good songs and played those songs really well. Too many people lump them in with either the horrible funk-metal or even more horrible nu-metal thing based on their one novelty hit, but these people are categorizing the band inaccurately based on their own limited knowledge and experience of their work. The essence of their sound, to me, was a singular and unexpected combination of the best parts of heavy metal, prog rock, mainstream pop, and late-night cable access TV, and an openness to try anything. This was a band, in the true sense of that term, made up of disparate, contradictory individuals with different musical tastes and interests who somehow managed to collaborate effectively. As Andy Rooney said, moments before passing away: "Faith No More are way better than most of that other shit. I could never say shit on television."

A song for every year of my life #15: 1991

2011-10-28T17:18:00.002-05:00

In 1991, as all of you know, one album by one band came along and changed everything about popular music. This year marks its 20th anniversary, and the articles, reissues, and tributes have been numerous. In one week, the hair metal bands died forever and the boy bands took a six-year hiatus. The pop culture landscape changed overnight, and an underground movement became commodified by the mainstream. This album was hugely important to me, and millions like me. It was my first year of high school. Three years later, the primary architect behind this record was dead by his own hand and the radio and MTV were full of dreary, shitty copycats. Of course, that record I'm talking about is MC Skat Kat's The Adventures of MC Skat Kat and the Stray Mob. I'm not going to play anything from that record because the wounds are still too deep, so fuck it, here's a far more important band: Mudhoney.

Alternate choice: Since I can't find anything from Mindfunk, here's a funk-metal classic from Vic Chesnutt, "Lucinda Williams," instead. If that previous sentence is bullshit, the following one isn't. This man's songs are so beautiful they're painful.

Public service announcement ... with keytars

2011-10-22T00:48:00.004-05:00

Yo suckers,
Thanks for not fucking off. It's been a rough time. Even if you can't get me a job, keep reading my indulgent spew if you're the kind of masochist or connoisseur of sloppy writing or supportive humanitarian that can't help but tolerate my verbal diarrhea (known in West Virginia as "word squirts").

On that note, I've been volunteering this week as a driver for a film festival. It's been a good thing for me. I've earned enough volunteer hours to get a free pass to the festival, and I took advantage of that today by attending some Nicholas Ray-related business. I might get into that later, but I just wanted to relay a few things I heard today on the bus and the downtown streets while I was heading to my shift and/or leaving a film screening.

Guy on cell phone: "If she's not turning tricks already, she will be by tonight." (hangs up phone, then immediately calls someone else) "Hey, this is Rhonda's friend, Glenn, the guy with all the Adderall."

Guy on bus, to other guy: "Me and my old lady are having some problems. When I went to jail, the only instruction I had for my wife was to take care of my car, and she sold it."
Other guy: "Why'd you go to jail?"
Guy: "I took too much Xanax and drove a new car into a mailbox."
Other guy: "Oh yeah?"
Guy: "Yeah, man. I'm usually cool with Xanax but I got some basement Xanax and I was in my attic, fighting off aliens with a baseball bat."
These two guys later had a conversation about how they would gladly cheat on their wives if offered sex by "hot chicks."

I'm starting to feel a little better about myself.

I'm out of ideas

2011-10-16T21:14:00.005-05:00

What I want to write:
"Unemployment is dragging me down. I'm exploding with stress and I feel about as hopeless as I've ever felt. If you read this blog, enjoy it, and are in some kind of position to offer me any kind of employment, please do it. Send me a message, and help my ass out. If you can't help me out, fuck off."

What I will write instead:
"Bluh?"

Another day, another absence of dollars

2011-10-13T21:21:00.003-05:00

Unless I hear otherwise tomorrow, I have most likely failed to wow yet another group of interviewers and will continue to be unemployed for the foreseeable future. I can keep on staring into the gaping maw of uncertainty indefinitely. Stare into that gaping maw! Stare into it! It's really gaping. I've never seen a maw so agape. Thanks, pointless unending wars, every American politician, corporate CEOs, and big banks for bleeding this country dry for the benefit of a baker's handful of bloated, greedy pigs and keeping me and thousands of other Americans like me out of work so you fuckers can buy some more ceremonial yachts where you pray to your god, the Invisible Hand. At least some day we will all be dead. Thank Christ, Superman, Mom, and U2 drummer Larry Mullen, Jr., for that.
At least it's not as goddamn unbearable and parched and on fire outside as it has been for months and months, am I right, fellow Texans? I took a two-hour walk in the neighborhood today because it was beautiful out and my wife emailed me and asked me to get some beer. Normally, I don't cotton to unexpected errands, but she had me at "beer." As I was walking to the convenience store through the neighborhood, I felt a strange sensation. I think it's called "wonder." I've grown used to feeling only angry desperation or that absence of feeling I believe is known as "dead-inside" in certain billiards halls and salmon farms these past few years, so I was momentarily confused. I eventually got hip to what the day was throwing down. The circle of life picked one of the streets in my neighborhood to put on an exhibition. A dead squirrel in the middle of the road had attracted four large turkey vultures, one on the street getting deep into some squirrel eye socket and three in the adjacent trees. I generally only see vultures eating dead stuff in our neighborhood early in the morning and they tend to get lost as soon as they see people or cars, but this was a bright, sunny afternoon with automobiles and people passing by every fifteen or twenty seconds. I stopped and watched their Dark Crystal-looking asses for a long while. A drifter with a rolled-up sleeping bag on his back stood across the street watching them, too. He looked at me and started gesturing, so I took off my headphones and walked over to him. He began to mouth words silently and mimic the vulture eating some expired roadmeat. I nodded and smiled. He kept doing it. I was wondering how long this was going to continue and how to extricate myself politely when a pickup pulled up. The driver began taking photos of the vultures. Then the pickup pulled up even further until they were right beside us. Two older, rough-looking, drunk-smelling men were in the pickup. The homeless man I'd been having the weird non-conversation with started mouthing soundless words and mimicking the vulture again, this time to the passenger in the pickup. To my mild amazement, the old man started doing the same thing back. Then the men began talking in sign language. Apparently, they knew each other and were deaf and dumb. To paraphrase my dad, they were some rough-looking characters, so I resumed my walk to the convenience store, a shiver running through me as I passed the large vulture chewing on some squirrel. I didn't want my eyes pecked out once they realized I was unemployed.
At the convenience store, I bought a six-pack of tallboys and a lottery ticket. I won 2 bucks, exchanged it for another ticket, won 2 bucks again, exchanged it for another ticket, and lost everything. Then I walked to a different convenience store and bought a Gatorade. On my way there, I nearly stepped in a wholly intact, freshly dead raccoon. I wanted to text the vultures, but none of us had our cellphones. They were crowding around a snack when a feast was two blocks away, theirs for the taking, and the poor carcass-eating bastards had no idea. A non-smushed dead raccoon must be worth at least eight partial squirrels.
There is no moral to this story, but if you're the type who likes high school English-style reductive symbolism, the dead squirrel and the three lottery tickets represent the American worker and the Gatorade represents the futility of human endeavor.

Bert Jansch R.I.P.

2011-10-05T11:02:00.004-05:00

Bert Jansch died of cancer this morning. I was fortunate enough to see him open for Neil Young last year. Young and Jansch both played unaccompanied solo sets, and they both killed it. Jansch mixed his originals with some beautiful Karen Dalton and Jackson C. Frank covers. He was already ill with cancer on the Neil Young tour, but it didn't affect his odd but lovely voice and his inventive acoustic guitar playing.

The history of right now

2011-10-02T20:50:00.003-05:00

Home on break from college a handful of days before or after Christmas one late-grunge evening, my mother reading on the couch, I placed my CD (remember those?) copy of Beggars Banquet in my parents' booming stereo system, pressed play, and leaned back on the couch as the percussive intro of "Sympathy for the Devil" recognizably filled the available airspace and hairspace. (That tasty stereo now sits unplayed in storage next to the garage in the home my father shares with a woman who is not my mother in the only open space not occupied by 17 hairless cats or a handful of small dogs, though a caged Malaysian serama mini-chicken is the stereo's roommate, for reasons only a divine creator could understand. My step"mother" likes to accumulate small, hairless, and/or plentiful animals, though she doesn't seem to enjoy them much once she has them.) My dad, coming home from work a few seconds later, entered the room, greeted my mother and me, listened for a few minutes, then asked me, "Who's this?"
"The Rolling Stones," I replied casually, mentally appending a silent "duh" or "no duh," possibly even reaching back six or seven years to junior high's "doy" or "no doy" or the dreaded "uhhh-DOYYY!!"
Maybe he wasn't paying much attention, I thought, but his next question was the real gobsmacker:
"Is this their new album?"
I was struck dumb. This song, bouncing off the walls of his home a few short years after the new jack swing-murphy brown-schindler's list era, originally bounced off the walls of every American and British teenager's home in late 1968, when my father was a junior in high school. A classic rock staple, a massive worldwide hit, a cultural flashpoint, a big rock song by a big rock band, the second most famous rock band in the world then and now, in a time when rock hadn't yet fragmented into a bajillion little pieces and subgenres and scenes and dogmas and traditions and specializations, and my dad couldn't place it. He was impervious and oblivious to its omnipresence (said Don King). The old man and I clearly had different ideas about religion, rock and roll being mine, none of my business being his.
My sister was privy to a recent conversation between my father and his wife about something I no longer remember, but the kicker is my father's defiant response: "None of my kids have ever, ever smoked marijuana in their entire lives!" The naive trust in this response is almost sweet, and my dad's own cultural illiteracy, high and low, fear of the unknown, even an unknown as benign as a joint on a friend's couch in 1970, and his general obliviousness to anything not happening in the same room as him, gives you some idea where he's coming from. In beatnik terms, my old man is a square, an apple, a clyde. He stays close to the pad, and he won't pick up on the action you're laying down. Becker was his favorite TV show, The Bucket List and Rambo high in his cinematic pantheon, Larry the Cable Guy his top comedian. He admired Steve McQueen until he found out from an A&E True Hollywood Story that McQueen loved pot. "Man, that guy was my hee-roe," he told me dejectedly over the phone. His favorite musical group is ZZ Top. Not for their sound. For their giant beards, sunglasses, and souped-up classic cars.
It's really no surprise, then, that my father had no idea I was a teenage midnight toker. He couldn't interpret the signs. My best friend had long hair and drove a van with tinted windows. I didn't play sports. Girls didn't like me. My room's contents included a drum set, a waterbed, metal magazines, posters of junkie rock stars, unread Carlos Castaneda books, well-read copies of Naked Lunch and a history of LSD and Bukowski and Vonnegut and Ginsberg and Tom Robbins and Jim Carroll, a stolen emergency traffic light (still blinking for a few months), and a boatload of cassettes and CDs, including the White Album, Sabbath, Hendrix, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Clash, Sex Pistols, and various other classic rock, metal, punk, indie, and mainstream alternative stuff. (Bonus anecdote: One summer afternoon, I rode my bike from my friend's basement to my backyard with reams of weed-stench rising from me like cartoon stinklines and eyes like dirty fishtanks, and I ran smack into my dad. I had a conversation with him I gigglingly recognized even then as stunningly incoherent. He never caught on.) I was a lonely, sad, pissed off, and curious teenager. What did he think I was doing? Playing Uno? 2011 postscript: I can't even remember the last time I smoked pot, and I played Uno two weeks ago.
Three years ago, he forgot my birthday. The next year, he wished me a happy birthday a month too early. He called me once and wished me a happy Mother's Day. It was Mother's Day, but I can think of at least three things wrong with this gesture. If you held a gun to my father's head and asked him to name ten things about my life, he wouldn't be able to do it.
I bring these anecdotes/criticisms/observations up not to belittle or embarrass my father, but to point out that this guy, despite his obliviousness, cultural illiteracy, ignorance, and distanced half-ass parenting has one huge leg up on me and on most of us rubes in the iPhone/iPad/iPhuck era. He never once, not once, started a Facebook page. My dad's a genius in this regard. Yes, I know he can't type, doesn't even have an email account, hasn't read anything longer than a classified ad since he was in high school, and I have my doubts he read any English assignment even then, and he most likely didn't open a Facebook account out of pure lazy indifference, but intent is irrelevant here. His move was right. His inaction was the best action. Oh, how I regret my entrance into the unhallowed halls of Zuckerbergiana. Facebook, Facebook, Mind-Erase Book. Yowzah, I know too many things about friends and relatives and friendly acquaintances I didn't want to know, never wanted to know, regret knowing now. I feel dumber and sadder every time I visit the place (no-place). "Then why don't you quit going there, you big dummy? Why don't you just cancel your account, you big palookah?" You're right to ask these questions, and I'm as stupid as anyone. These things are indisputable. But, I'm hooked. I'm caught up in this ridiculous age of constant babble-chatter and e-sucking and i-fucking and simu-living and irrele-pooting. I have three blogs, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, two email accounts, and some ghostly floating Friendster pages. (The cyber-wind still robo-whispers the name Adult Condor.) In my own tiny way, I'm a selfish egomaniac who needs to be heard by my single digits of fans and needs some reparations for my high school loserdom and invisibility. I need people to tell me I'm funny and interesting. I also like to stay in touch with some fantastic people I probably won't ever see in meatspace ever again, and I need that Facebook account to keep the connection alive.
Here are some tiny examples of what I hate in the Facebook, Facebook, This Is No Place-book.
Irrelevance in Real Time: "Eating lobster poolside at Fancypantsateria. Here's a photo of this delicious food." 17 Likes! 4 Comments! Comment 1: "That looks delish, guys. Have fun!"
You have an audience, Facebookers. Many of us are looking for jobs. Even if we weren't, even if I was CEO of World's Largest Moneypile and Blowjob Factory, Inc, even if my life was creamy, dreamy perfection, I still would not give a fuck about what you had for lunch. Stop taking pictures of your damn food and eat it. Eat it! It's getting cold!
Cut and Pasters: "Some of you won't have the guts to repost this, but many people you know and love are afflicted with Shaky Dangler Syndrome and a fear of petting zoos. Cut and paste this message and copy it to your status or you are a terrible friend who doesn't care about me." 128 Likes! 72 friends have shared this!
Deranged politics and stupidity: I had the misfortune of growing up with and occasionally being related by blood or marriage to a lot of perfectly enjoyable people with bizarre ultra-right-wing views. The combination of Sept. 11 and the recession and hysterical Fox News drumbeating have turned them from moderates to paranoid freakshow lunatics. I don't want to have the paranoid, stupid, ignorant, emotional, thoughtless parts of them thrust in my face every day. I like these people, believe it or not. (Believe it.) I don't like these parts of them.
My cousin's wife, from one of those cut-and-paste jobs: "Only Jesus Christ and the American serviceman have ever offered to lay down their lives for you." And on and on, every fucking day.
Ugly reactionary posturing and loudmouthism: A recent tragedy near my hometown saw a man kidnap and murder a young girl. This family's grief has turned into a lot of loud, stupid soapboxing. From a former coworker with American flags all over his page: "I say we skip the trial and just shoot the SOB right now." 80 Billion Likes! Yeah, because a cornerstone of the American ideology you want everyone to know you constantly ejaculate over is executing people without a trial, you dumb shit! "I say we cut the bastard's balls off with a rusty knife. Hell, I'll volunteer right now." 90 Likes! (including my uncle's wife, who should know better). Look at this genius. This guy hates the murder of a small child! He hates it more than you other wimps! He's taking a stand! He hates child murder so, so much! What a giant of the scene! What a man! What a hero! What a refreshing, unusual, controversial stand on such a divisive issue!
What a dumb fuck. Even child murderers think child murder is wrong. Put some of that energy into reading a book or buying a Malaysian mini-chicken. Why are you encouraging this stupidity, uncle's wife? You're an educator. Embarrassing.
Am I kidding myself? Is this the same old stupid on new technology, or are things getting worse? On at least ten occasions in the last two years, I have looked up from a table at a bar downtown when the conversation stopped only to see every other person's face balls-deep (Mel Brooks' Faceballs) in their iPhones, and I don't even go out that much anymore since I've been out of work. It's dark comedy and tragedy at once. Remember seeking things out? Remember the thrill of the chase? Remember being somewhere and actually being there? Remember being present? Now you don't have to take the effort or even bother to shape your personality at all. No more happy accidents or bitter disappointments. Everything is bite-size content, all equivalent, all meaningless. We click like on Life instead of living it. Says a guy with three blogs, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, two email addresses, and a deep ass-groove in the chair in front of my computer.
You can't escape mediocrity offline, either. Middlebrow middleminds are the middlemen at every institution on Earth. I've spent many lunch hours in teachers' lounges in the past few years and whoo boy. The main topics of conversation: Dr. House, Glee, Lean Cuisine frozen dinners, weight loss and gain, shit-talking about the teachers who weren't in the room, Oscar winners, which movie stars are purty. These are the educators of our youth. These are the people who believe they have a firm grasp on culture. You know what these people laugh at, pooh-pooh, sneer condescendingly at? High culture and low culture. The former is the province of the poseur and the snob, the latter the dirty rabble beneath, they tell each other over their beloved Lean Cuisine. They just don't want to do the real work. The pleasure of getting your hands and brain dirty in the real upper reaches of human achievement or in the beautiful, thriving sleaze of the gutter. They don't know, can't know, will never understand that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Supervixens or Vigilante or Swinging Cheerleaders has more vitality and invention and urgency and sweet, sweet life than any 100 English Patients or King's Speeches or Slumdog Millionaires or Beautiful Minds or Paul Haggis Crashes or any other visually dead, respectable flatterer of the middle mind. Any good, really good, professional wrestling villain since the 1950s can show you more about life than any high school English syllabus. The sweet, beautiful purity of a pro wrestling villain, a guy who can make an entire building full of people hate his guts, that's art. That's low culture at its best.
Lincoln, Nebraska. 1997. I'm in the crowd for Eddie Guerrero vs. Ric Flair. Guerrero grabs the mic and confidently announces with some of the best manufactured contempt I've ever seen, "It's a real disappointment that I have to wrestle tonight in Lincoln, Nebraska, home of the worst college football team in the world." At the time, as most of you know, Nebraska had one of the best college football teams in the world. Guerrero whipped that crowd into an orgiastic frenzy of hate with one sentence. Most of those suckers knew the show was a choreographed spectacle of preplanned show business, but one sentence and they all forgot. They lost their damn minds. They pelted the ring with full beers, empty beers, cups, programs, food, candy, spit wads, gum. The ring, in just thirty seconds, was covered in shit. They had to stop the match and clear the ring out. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.
Guerrero later died in a hotel room from a life of steroids, speed, booze, road food, lack of sleep, and a job that required him to take hard falls on his back, knees, elbows, and face. These guys are better Christ figures than most literature and film examples you want to throw my way. They live it. They die for our sins, our lazy, fat-assed need for spectacle and entertainment. They're forced to die for our sins by their god, Vince McMahon. I grew up in the middle of a golden age of professional wrestling, a time of quality regional promotions and healthy competition. A time of polytheism. Now, we're back to the corporate status quo of Vince McMahon's monotheistic monopoly, but these guys are still out there, destroying themselves for you. When's the last time Dame Judi Dench put her life on the line to make you lose your damn mind and throw your full beer at a fictional representation of evil? That's art, baby. That's better than any app on your iPhone.
Disclaimer: Everything in this post is ridiculous and not ridiculous.

A song for every year of my life #14: 1990

2011-09-28T22:50:00.003-05:00

1990 really was a time of weeping, metaphorical or otherwise. At the year's start, I was short, cadaver-skinny, mulleted (I thought I had long hair but I didn't know you had to grow out the front part, too), lousy at sports, invisible to girls, easily intimidated, and short-changed by the slow onset of puberty. It was not my favorite year, though most of them have been lousy if we're going to be honest about life and its inherent crumminess, but it taught me a lot about how power is structured and acquired and how weak and puny most people's ethics are when they're insecure about whether or not other people think they're hot stuff. Plop! By year's end, I remained cadaver-skinny, lousy at sports, and invisible to girls, but I was much taller, no longer easily intimidated, funnier, and my haircut was better. I'm still lousy at sports, but now I have a beer-drinker's paunch and some muscle tone. Plus, anyone who cares about sports is as boring as the sex life of a fundamentalist preacher's wife. Weep with me, peers.
Blixa Bargeld and I shared an awful haircut in 1990. He was probably having a better time, though. Paddling around with Nick Cave and singing songs about weeping is higher on my list of possible fun times than listening to a redneck math teacher tell me I looked like a woman and would probably do poorly in his class because I was a shitty athlete. Teachers could still say these things out loud in 1990. It didn't hurt my self-esteem because just look at that guy with his crew-cut and dim, poorly ventilated classroom. Just look at him.

Alternate choice: Motherfuckin' "Painkiller" by Judas Fuckin' Priest, because why the fuck not?

A song for every year of my life #13: 1989

2011-09-25T22:30:00.002-05:00

I'm still trying to find a job and still trying to blast through the degradation, frustration, and monotony of that search, but I thought I'd been managing okay when I got sideswiped a few weeks ago by the return of my depression. It came on gradually. My wife noticed it before I did. Last night, it got so thick I could physically feel this imaginary murky, brown soup surrounding my brain, making my thinking paranoid and incoherent. Unfortunately, I was hanging out with a crowd of people. Bad timing. That's one of my many middle names.
I stumbled onto a trailer for a book (they do those now?) by a doctor dying of cancer. He passed away a few days ago. The book is about his gradual peaceful acceptance of his terminal illness and how he learned to live with it instead of fight with it. It became another part of his life, rather than something from the outside destroying it. This trailer made me feel ashamed of my lack of enthusiasm for my own life. I'm here now. It's not all going to be a good time, but I need to love it more. I need to be a little more present. This is basic stuff, and I'm an idiot to have to keep relearning it all the time, but this fog just comes in and surrounds my brain and I have to work to get rid of it.
You know what's good, though? Music.
"In the mind of Ronald Reagan/Wheels they turn and gears they grind/Buildings collapse in slow motion/And trains collide/Everything is fine/Everything is fine."

Alternate choice: John Zorn w/ Naked City - "I Want To Live"

Ugh

2011-09-24T12:17:00.002-05:00

It's best to just ignore these things because they tend to go away on their own if we do, but I also think GQ needs a public shaming for hiring Natasha Vargas-Cooper as a film columnist. Read this typo-plagued column and see if you agree with me that this woman is the worst writer and stupidest thinker ever to appear in an international publication.
I have a strong personal belief that critics need to understand the history and canonical works of the medium they choose to write about, which is unfortunately unfashionable with a certain breed of loud, twentysomething critics who are surprisingly getting work from a lot of mainstream and prominent alternative publications terrified about the future of print media and scrambling for relevance in all the wrong places. I like long, thoughtful pieces from critics with a lot of knowledge. I guess I'm a dinosaur. If Vargas-Cooper, Karina Longworth, and Nathan Rabin are the future, I'm happy being a dinosaur. Also, hire a fucking copy editor, GQ.
Here are some highlights (lowlights?) from Vargas-Cooper's column if you have better things to do than read the whole thing (and everyone clearly does have better things to do):

"Let the film school prigs, art house snobs, and the better half of film critics publishing today slavishly catalogue the classics and engage in numbing debates over who did it first and who did it better. Whether reverence for movies from a bygone era is rooted in merit, nostalgia, or neurosis about film being an inferior medium to literature, movies keep pace with social mores of a time and deserve to be free of the tastes and prejudices of people who grew up without Quentin Tarantino."

"Let's be untethered from history, ignore the tug of the familiar, and resolve that any movie made before, say, 1986 has received its due respect and move on."

"History does not inform the value of a film; you need never see a stylized Godard flick or Cary Grant comedy to understand the enthralling power of Fargo or Independence Day."

"This column will survey the new movie canon. The rules of the game (Ha! That's the name of a classic movie I have never seen. Eat it ,1939!)"

Boy, I bet 1939 is really stewing over that zinger. She really stuck it to 1939 good. Yeah, she really did say that "any move made before ... 1986" has received its due respect and should no longer be discussed. I can think of at least 500 pre-1986 movies off the top of my head that haven't received their due respect. Finding these films has been one of my life's greatest joys. Isn't the Internet saturated with more writing about post-1986 films anyway? I think you'll find that The Dark Knight has already received its due respect and then some, while Raoul Walsh's The Man I Love (1947) or Wim Wenders' The State of Things (1982), to pick just two random examples that came to me quickly, haven't been written about enough or even released on DVD in this country. When Joe Strummer sang, "No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones in 1977," he was making his case for the present and the future in a way that Vargas-Cooper may think she's doing now. They're similar positions, I guess. The difference is, Strummer knew his history, was a hell of a lot more eloquent, had more at stake, and knew he was being a bit of a liar. (He loved those three artists.) Strummer spent the rest of his musical career incorporating the rich history of the past into the present and the future. Vargas-Cooper brags about her lack of knowledge of film history like it's some kind of intellectual badge of honor. That's a stupid thing to do. Why close yourself off from any part of the past or the present? Why be proud of narrowing your interests? Why gloat about it? I've already given her more of my time than she deserves. Articles like these don't matter much. The proliferation of articles like these, though, matters a lot in the long run. If our culture decides the present is the only thing worth investing in, the past becomes economically unattractive and some of it disappears from availability. Everything is not available on the Internet, despite a sometimes overwhelming belief in this myth. I don't expect most people to care about esoteric 1940s films. We have different hobbies and interests. I don't care much about furniture or baseball. Some people live for those things, though, and I don't want their passions and histories to disappear.

A song for every year of my life #12: 1988

2011-09-13T21:51:00.002-05:00

I heard a few Dinosaur Jr songs when I was 14 and wasn't impressed. 14-year-olds are idiots. I heard some more Dinosaur Jr songs when I was a weary, battle-scarred, streetwise 15-year-old, and it all made sense. J Mascis is my spirit guide. Maybe that's why I'm unemployed, depressed, and kind of a failure, but I wouldn't trade my Dinosaur Jr albums for happiness or a job or even a never-ending supply of tacos and donuts. Get your own Dinosaur Jr albums, I say. "Yeah We Know."

Alternate choice: Womack & Womack - "Teardrops"
Sorry to those of you sobbing because I didn't choose The Beach Boys' "Kokomo" or something from Y Kant Tori Read. The culling is brutal around here. Some of you may find this song cheesy. It does have a slight Velveeta quality to it, but I don't care. I like it. It was a rare late 1980s R&B song that didn't suffer from massive overproduction and soulless gloss. I like the unarguably cheesy video, too. 1980s videos made the studio look like a great place to be. Everyone was having a good time, nodding their heads and twiddling various knobs and dancing around. We should all be twiddling knobs instead of working for the man. Knob twiddle!

Portion of a telephone conversation with my father from a few weeks ago

2011-09-09T00:01:00.003-05:00

My dad: Say, did you watch any of the MTV Video Awards last night?
Me: No. I don't usually watch stuff like that, and I don't have cable.
My dad: We watched about 20 minutes of it, but I don't care for that kind of music.
Me: Yeah.
My dad: I never did like that rap... (long pause) ... or hip-hop is I guess what they call it now.
Me: Yeah.
My dad: Some of those guys are real wild-looking characters.

A song for every year of my life #11: 1987

2011-09-06T02:02:00.002-05:00

Mainstream top 40 radio was at one of its lowest points in 1987. The first half of the 1980s was full of great pop singles, but look at this lackluster collection of overproduced inessentiality. The late 1980s was the first time in my tiny little life that pop radio stopped meaning something to me. I turned off my radio and began listening to a lot of hard rock and metal instead. It would have been a fine choice, except I listened to a lot of shitty metal instead of the good stuff, though I wouldn't figure that out until I became the embittered, prematurely aged curmudgeon of today's future yesterdays of tomorrow today you all know and love/hate/ignore/like/have no opinion about/are planning to kill, cook, and eat. 1987 became an important musical year for me in the mid-1990s, when I discovered a lot of records I missed out on while I was listening to Whitesnake and Faster Pussycat, including the debut albums from Guided By Voices, Eric B. & Rakim, and Public Enemy, Big Black's Songs About Fucking, Negativland's Escape from Noise, Dinosaur Jr's You're Living All Over Me, Prince's Sign O the Times, and Sonic Youth's Sister. And so on.
I did listen to the shit out of one great record in 1987, Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction. "It's So Easy" is a weird song. It doesn't sound like anybody else's stuff, though you can hear the influences, none of which should belong together this cohesively. I don't feel like getting into a debate, internal or otherwise, about the lack of political correctness in the lyrics, because I really don't give a fuck about that shit in art, except when I do. Some of the lines make me wince, but I'm a form and structure guy, not a subject matter guy, and I think it's better to creatively spew your inner dirtbag instead of suppressing it. I just want people to be honest in their work. A lot of hip hop artists are just as sexist but get more of a free pass from cultural critics because of white liberal guilt. It's a lot less complicated for Pitchfork writers, etc., to criticize Axl Rose. I'm off the subject, though. This record is so finely produced compared to the expensive wall of shit, cavernous yet empty sound prevalent in 1987. It's a big rock record, but it's stripped down. The drums sound like drums. The guitars sound like guitars. It hasn't dated like so many records from this time period have dated. These guys had their own thing going. They weren't Poison. I'm still on board. I just don't get tired of this record.

Alternate choice: Butthole Surfers - "Sweat Loaf"
I wish my father would have had this talk with me. I regret too many things I haven't done. For example, I was at the park one day, and I thought maybe I should SATAN SATAN SATAN!

A song for every year of my life #10: 1986

2011-08-24T17:33:00.003-05:00

Aside from my favorite heavy metal album of the decade, Slayer's Reign in Blood, not much happened musically in 1986 that captivated my interest. Wait, I just remembered. Don Johnson released Heartbeat that year. 1986 is the greatest year in music history.

Slayer's "Angel of Death" wasn't the only great song of 1986, despite my lukewarm feelings toward this particular year. "Pink Frost" by the Chills is worth anyone's time. So is this pajama jammy jam by one of my favorite bands in music history, Sonic Youth. "Expressway to Yr Skull" aka "Madonna, Sean, and Me." Ask your great-grandparents about that alternate song title, youth of today.

Alternate choice: The Go-Betweens - "Twin Layers of Lightning"
This is some beautiful, mysterious stuff. An underrated band with two wonderful songwriters who played off each other's strengths and minimized each other's weaknesses.

A song for every year of my life #9: 1985

2011-08-15T10:59:00.001-05:00

Hey, look. Pitchfork stole my idea, though it took 15 of their writers to handle what this guy is doing alone. Even the introduction is slightly similar. I think I'll sue. Two unrelated entities have never been known to have a similar idea that wasn't that original anyway. It's never happened in history.

1985. Cultural changes happen gradually, but I like to think of 1985 as the year a lot of records started sounding shitty. I mean the production value, I don't mean the quality of the music, though plenty of bad music came out in 1985. The sound of most records recorded in the 1920s through the mid-1980s are pleasing to my ears. I'm not an audiophile that can tell you about microphones and speakers and turntables, but I do know what I like. These records, with some exceptions, serve the musicians and songs, have a dynamic range, have spaces between the notes, convey the time period without sounding dated, and have mood, atmosphere, and the indescribable essence that Neil Young calls "the spook." 1985 seemed to mark a turning point. Technology was used just because it existed, even if it damaged the work. The snare drum got too loud and echoey. The music got compressed with that early digital thinness. Albums were mixed too quiet in the early CD days and are now mixed too loud. The dynamic range is missing. The sound is too busy. Space between notes is lost. Atmosphere and mood are gone, replaced by simulations of atmosphere and mood. It's not all bad. There are still records that have come out every year since 1985 that sound great. A lot of indie records aren't overproduced, and a lot of hip-hop and electronic records use the technology in smart ways that fit the sound. Also, to be fair, a lot of mainstream pop and classic rock records in the 1970s were too clean and bloodless and overproduced and over-arranged. But some of the voodoo disappeared in 1985 and never came back. Where did it go? Did Don Henley steal it and lock it in a vault?

The Replacements - "Left of the Dial"
God, I love this band. I grew up in the Midwest, and The Replacements capture some indescribable invisible Midwest ozone aura. Separate from the hardcore scenes on either coast, ignored, landlocked, "flyover-state" (gag), raised on classic rock, turned onto punk rock, never had to abandon classic rock, just folded punk rock into the aesthetic, bored, drunk, bleary-eyed poets, hangover geniuses, juvenile delinquents, four reincarnations of Hank Williams covering the New York Dolls, embarrassed by how great their ballads were, here comes a regular. I'll be a regular at the Replacements discography until I'm dead. These guys are my Beatles and Monkees in one band. I don't even have a favorite record of theirs. Just throw their first six on repeat, over and over.

Alternate choice - The Mekons - "Chivalry"
"I was out late the other night/Fear and whiskey kept me going" is one of my favorite opening lines to a song. The rest of it's pretty damn great, too.

A song for every year of my life #8: 1984

2011-08-07T03:05:00.002-05:00

Minutemen - "Viet Nam"
Nostalgia is bad, right? Let me reminisce. You have to learn to live with your contradictions. That's what makes everybody interesting and irritating. Minutemen are a band close to my heart. Self-taught, outsider dorks, not part of any scene but influential on many, personal, funny, inventive, timeless, minimal, bullshit-free, politically savvy without being preachy or humorless, real working-class humans. I love these guys. They're small-h heroes. There are no big-H heroes, no matter what TV tells us. This album came out in 1984. I first heard it in 1994. It's my second-favorite rock album, next to The Stooges' Fun House. I heard that one for the first time in 1996. I'm supposed to care about this week, why?

Alternate choice: Husker Du -"Pink Turns to Blue"
Another song from a double album on SST in 1984, produced by Spot. This is the prettiest song about heroin death since Bert Jansch's "Needle of Death." Every current indie band needs to listen to Double Nickels on the Dime and Zen Arcade and feel hot, blistering shame. You can be ambitious without being a twat. You can be funny without being a prick. You can use your goddamn snare drum once in a while. You still won't be this good, precious.

A song for every year of my life #7: 1983

2011-07-31T22:29:00.003-05:00

The Fall - "Smile"
About five or six years ago, I saw The Fall play a show. Mark E. Smith's foot was in a cast, and he sat in a chair for the show's duration. He looked like he didn't want to be there, his contempt for everyone in the room (including his bandmates) was palpable, and the band played for less than 45 minutes. It was still one of the best shows I've ever seen. This song makes a lot of other songs sound stupid and tiny.

Alternate choice: The Style Council - "Long Hot Summer"
Not a lot of people think The Style Council were as good as (or better than) Paul Weller's previous band, The Jam, but I do and so does Robert Wyatt, so there. I also think this video is hilarious in its homophobe-baiting and simultaneous parody/embodiment of what would come to be known as the "1980s."

A song for every year of my life #6: 1982

2011-07-29T00:45:00.002-05:00

Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five - "Scorpio"
Webster's Dictionary defines robofunkonomics (n.) as the "one true religion." Show no shame. Shake it, baby. Scorpio.

Alternate choice: Michael Jackson - "Billie Jean"
Though the non-robotic material that comprised the rest of Michael Jackson's body shuffled off this mortal coil two summers ago, this song will live forever.

A song for every year of my life #5: 1981

2011-07-26T23:44:00.003-05:00

Elvis Costello & The Attractions - "Watch Your Step"
Elvis Costello's backing band The Attractions existed for almost twenty years, though to call them a backing band is an insult. Besides having one of the five greatest rhythm sections in the history of popular music (my hyperbole here is only mild), The Attractions were probably just as responsible for Mr. Costello's success as the songs he wrote for them to play. Just listen to the difference between the Attractions-backed "Watching the Detectives" on the U.S. version of Costello's first album, My Aim Is True, and the other songs on the record, recorded with Clover. It's a great record, and Clover was a competent, skilled, and subtle backing group, but "Watching the Detectives" has that indescribable voodoo chemistry that can't be learned or forced. By the time of 1981's Trust, they'd been killing it for almost four years.

Alternate choice: Siouxsie & The Banshees - "Monitor"
This song melts my face off. They never bettered it.

A song for every year of my life #4: 1980

2011-07-24T23:45:00.005-05:00

1980: Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band - "Run Paint Run Run" from the album Doc at the Radar Station
Painter, poet, bandleader, songwriter, singer, musician, charlatan, genius, lightning rod, short man with big ideas, Don Van Vliet, Captain Beefheart.
A song title from each Beefheart album:
Electricity
On Tomorrow
She's Too Much For My Mirror
Lick My Decals Off, Baby
25th Century Quaker
My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains
There Ain't No Santa Claus On The Evenin' Stage
Party Of Special Things To Do
Upon The My-O-My
Tropical Hot Dog Night
Making Love To A Vampire With A Monkey On My Knee
Hey Garland, I Dig Your Tweed Coat

Two paintings, "Whalebone Farmhouse" and "Crepe and Black Lamps" (both 1986):

Alternate choice: X - "The Unheard Music"
One of my missions in life is to hear all the unheard music.

A song for every year of my life #3: 1979

2011-07-20T23:08:00.002-05:00

Wire's "The 15th" in two versions. The first, the studio version from the album 154, is gentler, almost pretty, but its angular metallic riff sits at a distance from the listener. You have to follow it. It won't follow you. Every time I hear it, I visualize a mesh screen covering the sound, creating a grid in which each square is a long, straight tunnel. I don't know how to describe where the tunnel leads.
The live version from a German television program is more aggressive and direct. The grid is gone, the tempo slower. Their control and confidence is almost frightening in its simplicity and ease. It's the kind of ease that comes after much work. They play with purpose and without antecedents. Chuck Berry, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground, even other punk and postpunk bands. They don't have anything to do with this song. Nor does any band that followed.
What I can't understand is how both of these versions sound so close to each other while sounding nothing like each other at all. The basic elements that give me so much pleasure are the same in each, but the places they take me aren't even on the same map.

Alternate choice: Neil Young & Crazy Horse - "Sedan Delivery"
We know that welfare mothers make better lovers, but is it better to burn out or fade away? Is there a third option? This song is spooky. The verses trip over themselves in a punk rock hurry to get to that narcotic drift of a chorus. Then, the guitar lays you down and tucks you in too far from home in an achy, melancholic daze. Like "The 15th," you'll be digging these tunnels the rest of your life without seeing daylight.

Names

2011-07-19T23:41:00.002-05:00

My wife and I went to Houston today with two friends to go to some museums and get the hell out of town for a day. We walked or drove past the following businesses:
Leapin' Leotards
Uncle Funky's Daughter
The Institute of Eyelash Arts and Sciences
Rock and Roll It
Dr. Gleem
Mr. Hoagies
The Funeral Museum

Leapin' Leotards and Uncle Funky's Daughter can be found in the same strip mall. A second location of Uncle Funky's Daughter is also in that strip mall.

On an unrelated note, please listen to Frank Sinatra's spoken introduction to the following song. Leapin' leotards, it's something else.

A song for every year of my life #2: 1978

2011-07-18T23:37:00.004-05:00

In 1978, I'm still a year away from my first memories. I'm a baby, turning into a toddler, a word I've never liked. Toddler. Say it out loud. It makes an unpleasant sound. What was it like to be a baby? I'll never know. I might as well have been a robot, for all I can remember. These are the robots. Kraftwerk's "The Model." I do remember the 1980s prejudice against synthesizers by the rednecks in my hometown. Guitars were for real men, synths were for gay European pussies. Both are electric machines that make sounds pleasing to my ears. I only know a few gay Europeans, but they are good men. Those rednecks in my hometown are silly little people. I am not a robot, but I play one at work.
Also released in 1978:
Nick Lowe "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass"
Johnny Thunders "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory"
Devo "Mongoloid"
Neil Young "Goin' Back"
Wire "Heartbeat"

Alternate choice: Van Halen - "Atomic Punk"
Atomic punk, but not punk rock. The rednecks and I can agree on a few things. Classic Coke is better than New Coke. Gary Cherone = Crystal Pepsi? Try to imagine the Tea Party Jimmy Buffett, Sammy Hagar, singing this song. Nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain. 5150 taught me that. David Lee Roth: "The only people who put water in Jack Daniels is The Clash, baby." "The only reason rock critics like Elvis Costello is because they look like him." Rock the Casbah, Dave. I'm not angry anymore.

A song for every year of my life #1: 1977

2011-07-18T00:53:00.003-05:00

Those of you who know me personally and are friends with me on Facebook know that I've been participating in the daily song challenges going around that site like an infectious but benign disease. I need structure and daily tasks to keep me occupied during the obnoxious, terrifying limbo that is the job search, and these song challenges fit part of that bill. Now that I've finished the challenges, I need something else to do. I turned 34 last week, and this non-milestone birthday sparked an idea for my own personal, expanded version of the Facebook meme. I'm going to pick one song a year for every year I've been alive on this planet and write about it on the blog. Past lives and my time on other planets will be ignored for now. The songs I pick will not necessarily be my favorite songs of those particular years or a fitting representation of prevailing trends of the time period or even songs I listened to that year. These are just songs I love that happened to be released while I was alive.
I was born in a particularly vibrant musical year. 1977 was a great year for punk rock, pop, disco, hard rock, and what would become post-punk and new wave. Lumbering dinosaurs were getting their asses kicked by a new breed of artists that continue to influence my life in all kinds of positive ways. I didn't know any of this at the time. I was just a sleeping, eating, shitting, suckling, squirming, involuntarily moving fat little baby. I wouldn't discover this music that means so much to me until I was in high school, with the exception of the new wavers and ex-punks with mainstream radio hits in the 1980s. 1977 was the year for debut albums by The Sex Pistols, Wire, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, etc. I'm going to bypass those guys, though, and pick some wealthy, coke-addled, enormously popular classic rockers. Classic rock is the music I grew up with, the music I heard first. Fleetwood Mac's Rumours came out in 1977. "Dreams" is a song that stops me cold every time I hear it. If it's playing and I'm talking to you, my mind will wander over to the song and I will no longer be able to hear what you're telling me. Several months ago, two friends of mine played in a Fleetwood Mac cover band that came together for one night only, performed Rumours, and then broke up. They were so good I almost cried. After the show, I ate several donuts. It was a good night.

Alternate Choice: Richard Hell and The Voidoids - "Liars Beware"
This particular performance is from a 1980 film, but its studio incarnation appeared on a 1977 album. Robert Quine is dead now, but his guitar playing isn't, which is the opposite situation of most guitarists.

Operation: Make Brain Good, or R. Stevie Moore More More, How Do You Like It?

2011-07-02T02:50:00.003-05:00

"Baby, you cry too much/I'm tired of the sound/You're such a baby" -- The Afghan Whigs, "Uptown Again"

To signify a shift in subject matter from how depressed I am and how much the world sucks, here is my progress report for the week. I'm still lousy at staying up too late and sleeping in too much, but I've been exercising more, eating less garbage late at night, and drinking less. All these things have me feeling a lot better after just a week. I feel a change coming on. For the first time in my life, I'm tired of certain behaviors I've engaged in for years. I don't enjoy getting drunk anymore. I don't enjoy stuffing my face with garbage at night. I used to love these things until last month, but I stopped getting a buzz from the path to gastronomic and alcoholic excess. I'm bored with myself when I do these things.
Fortunately, I'm still as committed to musical excess as I've ever been, so when two friends sent me two emails each urging me to see R. Stevie Moore, I decided to do a little investigating into the man. I'd read about him and heard a few songs on WFMU, but I was pretty unfamiliar with his work. I knew he was an eccentric guy who had recorded hundreds of albums in his bedroom and distributed and sold them on his own, but that was about it. I listened to several of his songs on YouTube after my friends' emails and knew I had to see the show. I'm a sucker for obstinate and eclectic bedroom geniuses, Neil Young and Prince being perhaps the most famous and successful examples. Robert Pollard, Dan Bejar, Gary Wilson, Captain Beefheart, Daniel Johnston, Roky Erickson, Syd Barrett, Brian Wilson, Todd Rundgren, Judee Sill, Roy Harper, Tim Buckley, Alex Chilton. I'm lumping a lot of disparate talents together, but I think you can see some sort of vague aesthetic forming there. R. Stevie Moore fits this bill. Defiantly independent, Moore has self-released 400+ records of staggering variety, including early Zappa and Beefheart-esque avant-rock, Beach Boys sunshine falsetto pop, dreamy indie rock, Beatles covers, riff-based garage rock, psych, metal, country ballads, disco, and new wave.
Moore has never toured before, but a Kickstarter benefit gave him the financial freedom to tour the U.S. and Europe and record a new album. On the tour, he's backed by Brooklyn indie rock band Tropical Ooze. Though half the band's sartorial choices can only be described as sweaty 1970s head-injured pedophile dressed by drunken pirate gypsy blind mothers aka the last decade of indie-hipster sartorial puke, their musical skills are thankfully much sharper. They opened the show by themselves and were a likable blend of garage/psych/noise/pop with some serious freakout guitar chops. Sweetening the night for me, the next two acts on the bill were another obstinate bedroom genius, Jad Fair (formerly of Half Japanese) accompanied by a full band, and Pong, a band featuring a former coworker and all-around good guy and another friendly acquaintance of mine. I'd seen Jad Fair play a few songs by himself before a Yo La Tengo show, so the opportunity to see him play a full set with his band was welcome. I don't know how to write well about music, so I can only say his set was a magical, beautiful thing. Pong also delivered the fun. I used to see them play a lot when I worked with the aforementioned good guy, but a few years had passed since I last saw them. Some of them had more hair, others had less hair. One of them grew a giant beard. I really enjoyed myself. Finally, R. Stevie Moore played. Things started out a little shaky. The first four songs were good, but the mix was muddy and the band's chemistry was off. The performance was awkward. "Great," I started thinking to myself. "My friends see the amazing shows and I get the off night. That's the patented Dr. Mystery luck, baby." The band soon exited the stage and Moore played two songs by himself. Again, the mix was weird and the songs didn't quite come together. Then, the band came back and everything clicked. The following seven or eight or ten songs became one of the best live experiences of recent or ancient memory. Holy shit, what a show.
But I'm not here to write a mediocre concert review. I want to talk about something I saw there. The usual mix of indie hipsters, record geeks, reclusive weirdos, punks, and freakazoids (an obese guy with a V shaved in the back of his head who kept talking to his wrist, a middle-aged guy with a Captain Hook beard and women's shoes a few sizes too small, which had caused the heels to blow out, etc., a Mexican teenager with the underage XX on his hands who kept making out with a woman old enough to be his grandmother and bragging about his fighting skills, etc.), the crowd also contained a father and his young son and daughter. I kept my eye on them throughout the show. The father was, clearly, a cool dad (lowercase), not a Cool Dad. He had somehow managed to infect his children, caught in an era in which something that happened yesterday afternoon is already old and lame, with Jad Fair mania. He was thin, maybe 5'7", short hair, khaki shorts, nice leather shoes, button-up shirt that was neither rock and roll nor un-rock and roll. I'm guessing the daughter was 12 and the son 10. The boy was taller than his sister, but he had a mouthful of metal and stuck close to dad's side while she kept a few paces back and looked like she was just settling in to the nightmare of puberty. The boy had a naive, dreamy expression and kept gazing wonderingly at the drums and guitars and a pretty woman in a mini-skirt toward the front of the stage. The girl's face had lost the dreamy kid look. She had an openness in her face that junior high hadn't destroyed yet, and she probably still had another year before she'd be too embarrassed to go to a rock show with her dad and little brother, but you could see a little cynicism creeping into her eyes. She'd probably begun to realize that most adults were full of shit, that most of them were still stupid children, and she'd probably had a boy say something mean to her by this point in her life. When Jad Fair started to play, father, son, and daughter all grinned wide and nodded their heads and tapped their feet. It was cute and sweet, and it made me happy and sad. Jad Fair announced that the next song was about "different colors of dresses." The girl grinned wide, giggled, and smiled at her dad and brother. She started tapping out the drum beat on the wall. If I were a 12-year-old boy, I'd have a big crush on her. She's the kind of girl who would've crushed my heart a couple years later by telling me she just wanted to be friends, but we still would've traded mixtapes and probably smoked weed together for the first time in 11th grade. The brother and sister both have smart eyes and are probably readers. They're not rocking out for dad's benefit,either. These kids are genuinely psyched to be at the show. As the night wears on, the kids start to get tired but they don't want to show it. The boy continues to nod his head and tap his feet, but his heart isn't in it anymore. It's tough being a 10-year-old rock lover. You want to stay up late, but your body wants to go to bed at midnight. Dad's oblivious, which made me like him even more. Sometimes, you have to purposely ignore your children's pain to keep them from becoming narcissists. The girl rests her head on the wall. As she grows more tired, she scoots closer and closer to her dad and brother. She looks back at the crowd a few times and her face registers a complex disappointment in her own fatigue (so un-rock and roll) and in her dad for keeping them out so late. As R. Stevie Moore begins playing, Dad, still grinning widely, takes his kids to the bar for a beer and a couple of ice waters. The girl's face is grumpy now, reverting back to the child from the teenager. Some future significant other is going to see that face when the honeymoon period is over. I lose sight of them after that. After a good night's sleep, those kids are going to ignore the latter half of the show and remember the first half in the fond, partially revisionist dream-haze of the music obsessive. They got the fever. These kids are hooked.

P.S. Speaking of the fever, check this shit out. I just had multiple rockgasms. If that sentence turned you on and/or disgusted you, you're welcome.

I really wish...

2011-06-27T00:13:00.002-05:00

... that bus-sized asteroid would hit the earth tomorrow. That would be a Monday for the ages.

Well, yeah, I'm depressed again. That's always fun for everybody. I'm in the worst physical shape of my life, too, so that's great. The tremendous amount of work I put into getting a second degree and looking for a job and degrading myself as a substitute teacher while I looked for work and the application process to nine grad schools when the economy collapsed? That all turned to shit. I did all that work for nothing. Nothing. And it took all my mojo. I've lost my mojo. My enthusiasm is tapped out. I'm in a band. I like the people in the band and I like the songs they write, but I'm having a hard time getting any pleasure out of playing the drums right now. I'm having a hard time getting any pleasure out of this blog or Twitter. I'm having a hard time getting any pleasure out of anything. I get drunk too often, sit on my ass too much, eat too much late-night garbage food. I get too much sleep three or four days a week and not enough sleep the other days. I'm turning my body into a sack of crap. I get out of bed and it feels like I haven't slept and my knees ache and my feet ache and my head hurts and I'm pissed off.
Here's the plan. The job search is going nowhere, so it can go fuck itself to nowhere. I need to get my health back. I'm going to start sleeping right. I'm going to get up early and get some exercise. I'm going to stop getting drunk. I'm going to stop eating garbage food and eating late at night. I'm going to take my ass off the Internet and read more books. I'm going to unplug myself from the current culture that I despise. I'm going to get my shit together. I'm tired of living like a jerkoff.
One exception to this plan: Two of my friends have an annual Fourth of July party. It is my favorite party of the year. The food is fantastic, the company is great, and the fun is about as fun as fun gets. I had to miss this party the last two summers to attend out-of-town weddings. This year, I am getting drunk as a lord, and I'm going to stuff my face like the world's fattest epicurean. But that's the exception. I want to feel better, and I've got to make some lifestyle changes to make this shit happen. Let's see if I can make it work.

Please excuse this self-indulgent drivel. I post this drivel publicly because I tend to stick to my plans when I make them public on this blog. I put this disclaimer at the end of the post instead of the beginning because fuck you that's why.

Come on baby bite my wire

2011-06-22T20:54:00.002-05:00

"We all gotta leave here sometime, and hopefully, it'll be at ninety-five, in our sleep, with a couple of big-booty old ladies feeding us grapes and ice cream." -- Bigg Robb, Roger Troutman's talk box tech

I'm beginning to think my own demise will occur much sooner, possibly next week, slumped over the computer, a mediocre heart implosion smacking me down in the middle of my filling out another pointless job application, surrounded by empty fruit snack wrappers, a half-finished glass of bourbon, three slices of white cheddar, and my own withering, rotting, decomposing self-belief. I'm a minor, mediocre, American failure. I haven't done anything, professionally, and will never do anything, professionally. No one will ever give me another opportunity to prove I can do anything other than take up space until this whole boring, mediocre system collapses and we start eating each other's boring, stupid flesh. Fuck you, and good night.

Gil Scott-Heron R.I.P.

2011-05-28T18:14:00.000-05:00

Losing it

2011-05-27T23:57:00.002-05:00

My last four years have been defined by loss. I know some people who are going through some terrible losses this week. This one's for them.

R.I.P. Uncle Swede

2011-05-24T17:24:00.002-05:00

My 94-year-old great-uncle Swede died in his sleep 3:30 Sunday morning, right around the time I was leaving a friend's birthday party with my brother, who was in town with his wife for the Renegade Craft Fair. Swede's real name was Donald, but nobody ever called him Donald, Donnie, or Don. Swede was a very interesting guy who did a lot of different things with his 94 years. The only relative on either side of my family tree who ever made consistent money, he was an independent guy who spent most of his life working for himself, doing what he wanted to do. At various times in his life he was an avid bowler, golfer, rural farmer, stock market player/wise investor, city dweller, small town guy, movie buff, fisherman, world traveler, teller of slightly off-color jokes and witty one-liners, partier, registered independent, drinker of a daily 5 o'clock martini, and stained-glass maker. For most of his post-farming and a handful of his pre-farming years, he alternated between rural and small-town Nebraska and urban California. He briefly lived in Los Angeles in the 1930s or 1940s, and he and my great-aunt Mildred spent half the year in San Luis Obispo after he retired from farming. He walked across the Golden Gate Bridge the first day it was open in 1937 (they opened it for pedestrians one day before they let cars use it). I have a DVD copy of some old Super-8 films he and my great-aunt made of California, Mexico, and Nebraska in the 1940s and 1950s. Included is a demolition derby, a Rose Bowl parade, a busy Californian motel pool on a summer day, beautiful Mexican scenery, my grandfather and several other farmers on a row of tractors working the fields of a cancer-stricken friend, and a drunken New Year's Eve dance party. He and a group of friends once built a houseboat in the parking lot behind the bowling alley in my hometown. Swede told me they were drunk on whiskey the whole time they built it, but the thing worked for four years until a terrible thunderstorm sunk it. Swede's wife, my great-aunt Mildred, is the last surviving member of the old generation in my family, excepting the handful of relatives I've met only a few times. That's the way it goes.

Angry people got no reason to live

2011-05-18T17:57:00.002-05:00

I just learned from the Facebooks that a friend of mine was accosted and nearly attacked at a bookstore by a nutcase who was angry at him for turning too slowly into the parking lot. The man was yelling that my friend's slow turn into the lot endangered his child's life. Not really sure how that would endanger anyone, but this guy had no problem leaving the child unattended in a hot car in the middle of a city while he tried to punch my friend in the back of the head for no reason.
A similar bizarre incident happened to me Sunday night while I walked to the Alamo Drafthouse theater's downtown location to see a screening of one of my favorite movies, John Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. I was alone, walking down the street, minding my own business. I noticed a man walking five or six feet in front of me. His clothes fit him poorly, he walked in what can only be described as an aggressively apelike manner, and his skin had that particular red-dirt hue found only on young men who do physical outdoor farm work or hop trains and live on the streets. I made a mental note to keep my distance, but he began to turn around between every fourth or fifth step and glare directly at me with an unsettling mixture of hatred and pleasure. I readied myself. Best case scenario: he was going to ask me for money. Oh shit. I don't have any money. Maybe he wanted to give some insane spiel or manifesto. Most likely, he wants to start a fight for no reason. He started walking slower and slower. I passed him on the right. As I pass him, he turns to me and says, "What's your fucking problem?" I say, "I'm just walking," and keep going. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him take a swing at me. I turn back around, and his fist is about 6 inches from my head. A terrible swing, but a swing nevertheless. Then he takes two more airpunches in the direction of my head, but they're both too far away to connect. This guy is super nuts. He's trying to hit me, but also clearly trying not to hit me. What's his deal? Then he starts shouting at me and following me slowly for two blocks, calling me motherfucker, faggot, bitch, pussy, etc. I still don't know what set this guy off or what I would have done if his punches had connected or he had jumped me from behind. I was a foot taller than him, but he was pretty muscular and pretty insane, which is a scary combination.
Last week, a piece of shit punched a woman in the face and stole her purse in front of a bar my friends like to frequent. They caught him a few days ago, thanks to a sharp-eyed bouncer from a different bar.
Austin, what's with you this week? Get it together.

Distracted

2011-05-08T23:49:00.002-05:00

Tom Noonan, an actor/director/screenwriter/playwright I admire, once said the following words in an interview: "I don't think you go to a play to forget, or to a movie to be distracted. I think life generally is a distraction and that going to a movie is a way to get back, not go away." I have this same relationship to creative work, which may partially explain one of my biggest flaws. I have an extraordinarily thin skin when someone expresses verbal dislike for a movie, band, or book that I love. It's hard to hurt my feelings, but this always does the trick. It also fills me with anger, which I quietly stew over for weeks afterward. I remember the tiniest tossed-off comment for years, and I can make myself angry and sad all over again by remembering it. I have so much invested in what I like, it's such a part of who I am and how I spend my time, that a negative comment about the work sounds exactly like a negative comment about me. "That band sucks" gets interpreted as "you suck" or "you're stupid" or "you have no quality control" or "your taste is inferior to mine" or "you're a blowhard" or "you like everything and you have no discernment." Stupid, I know, but I always think those comments are about me and not about the book/movie/band/song/taco. For a long time, I didn't recognize this horrible quality in myself, but I've become more aware of this particular drawback in the last few years. I'm trying to get better at shrugging it off, and I think I am getting better, but I mostly still suck at not taking it personally. Why? Why do I have this perverse personality quirk?
To make things even more perverse, I have no problem with written opinions about art that conflict with mine. I love reading film, music, and literary criticism, and I don't feel angry or upset about negative reviews of work I love unless the writing, logic, or argument sucks. I also have some pretty strong opinions of my own about almost everything, which I frequently spout off here, often with a lack of decorum and grace. The angry rant and the exasperated tirade are part of what I do on this blog.
What's my deal? I wish I knew. Part of it is a heightened sensitivity that's a byproduct of coming out of a months-long depression. As anyone who reads this blog knows, my last five years have been fucking terrible. Part of it is context. I don't know those critics personally. They aren't friends of mine. It can't possibly be about me. Also, a written argument or opinion requires solitude and thought and actual reasons why the opinion is held. When you're sitting around with friends drinking a beer, you usually don't get beyond "That was shit!" or "That was great!" It's not the time and place for a critical discourse about aesthetics. That is not fun weekend material. Still, I sometimes feel like I'm on the receiving end of "that thing you like sucks" way more than any of my other friends, though that's most likely the ultra-sensitivity talking. I tend to think other people merely tolerate me so they can hang out with my wife, who is much better about not being a neurotic, depressive, rage-filled over-indulger than I am. I wasn't always so insecure, but life has really kicked me up the ass lately.
This weekend, I had two experiences of being on the receiving end of lonely opinion land, but one of them wasn't so bad and may have helped me get over this bullshit. In that case, some friends were bagging on a band I happen to love. I could feel my neurosis kicking in, and I made a conscious effort to relax and continue to have fun. After making a few comments back that were meant jokingly but also with some kernels of anger still threatening to come loose and make everything awkward for everybody, I calmed myself down, made fun of myself, mentioned my neurosis, and had a good time. Nobody meant me any ill will. Crisis averted. Weekend enjoyed. Maybe I can make this thing go away for good.
Then came Sunday, and I'm back to that Tom Noonan quote. Here it is again: "I don't think you go to a play to forget, or to a movie to be distracted. I think life generally is a distraction and that going to a movie is a way to get back, not go away." I went to Kelly Reichardt's new movie, Meek's Cutoff. I loved it. It's probably my favorite new movie I've seen this year. I connected so strongly with this movie, and I felt myself plugging back into life as I watched it. It's a movie of landscapes and faces and formal rigor and beauty and simplicity and ideas and history and emotion and structure. So many of my favorite movies give me back my life for a few hours. They strip away the bullshit distractions that get in the way of living and give me back my thoughts and feelings. They slow me down, make me notice details. They're my form of meditation. Meek's Cutoff might be one of those lasting movies for me. I need to see it a few more times, but it might be a contender. When it ended, I looked forward to sitting in the theater for a few seconds, enjoying that silent internal sigh of pleasure at seeing something great before going back out into daylight and traffic and an increasingly pointless job search and more fucking bullshit that never stops. Instead, two-thirds of the audience immediately and loudly started voicing their disapproval of the film. I was so rattled and shocked by this response. I can't even begin to describe how awful it made me feel. I've only seen an audience as vocal two other times, and they were both much happier experiences. After a packed opening weekend screening of Boogie Nights back in 1997, the crowd was so excited and so into the movie you could physically feel it. People were loud and happy when it ended. At a screening of the remake of The Wicker Man, I and the rest of the crowd devolved into hysterical laughter at the film's final twenty minutes of unintentional comedy. Maybe we ruined it for somebody who loved it, but it really seemed like everyone in the theater was spontaneously enjoying the mind-boggling terribleness. Besides, it was an involuntary response. I could not make myself stop laughing at Nicolas Cage in a bear costume punching women in the face and yelling about bees.
The response to Meek's Cutoff was uglier and ruder, and I don't know why. Maybe the problem was a Mother's Day crowd of mostly middle-aged and elderly people who thought they were going to see a straightforward genre western. Other than their ages, though, I can only make assumptions. I don't know why they decided to buy their tickets. All I know is that these people were distracted. They wanted to go away from their lives, not get them back. They wanted a fleeting diversion, and they wanted to discard it and get on with the next diversion. How do I know this? They loudly told me and everyone else in the room. A non-spoiler alert: The movie follows a group of settlers along the Oregon Trail in 1845 who have split off from the main trail to follow a short cut suggested by a guide. They are now lost and suspicious of the guide's motives. They need to find water. The movie ends without telling us whether the settlers found water or not, but this fact is irrelevant given what the film is trying to do visually and narratively. This lack of neat, tidy closure caused the audience more consternation and anger than if the movie had been 90 minutes of a closeup on someone's face yelling about different brands of cola. Immediately, people loudly complained. "Did they find the water?" "Why didn't they tell us if they found the water?" "They must have found the water. There was a tree." "Why would they end it without telling us about the water?" Not a single person mentioned the Indian (Rod Rondeaux) and Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams), two characters far more important to the meaning of the final scene than the plot mechanics of a search for drinking water. At the same time as these loud, dumb, and grindingly unimaginative questions filled the room, some audience members started laughing derisively. Some boos followed. Then some smug jerk decided to speak for all of us and said, loud enough so everyone could hear, "I wonder if we can all go up to the counter and get a refund?" You can go ask, fuckhead, but please speak for yourself. Another man followed up with this gem: "Well, it was a movie. That's all I can say about it." Then more dismissive laughter. Then I lost it. I started talking to myself, swearing and angrily calling people idiots, still in my normal speaking voice. No one heard me except the people directly behind me. I was flooded with anger. I was angry at them, I was angry at myself, I was angry about not being able to find a job, I was angry at how dumb this country can be, I was angry at my beer gut, angry at my depression, angry at how mediocre life is most of the time. I went on a loud, profanity-filled tirade from the theater to the car and most of the way home about how oppressive crowds are and how most Americans are fat and stupid and how much I hated everyone and everything and why do people have to ruin things and why do people have no empathy and consideration and fuck this and fuck that and everything sucks and will always suck, making my wife mad because she'd loved the movie as much as me and I was ruining her time to quietly think about it and ease back into the daylight. I was being a loud jerk because other loud jerks had ruined my moment.
I calmed down, got myself together. I need to just let it go, but I don't understand this need for distraction. There was so much, SO MUCH, in that movie besides whether or not these characters found water, but that seemed to be the only thing those people in the theater cared about. They wanted a distraction. They wanted a manufactured situation that could be introduced, then solved, so they could forget it and move on to the next distraction. I go to movies, music, and books so I can get rid of these distractions and get away from the manufactured bullshit of jobs and bureaucracies and money and stuff and status and numbness and deadness and mediocrity and narcissism and people like them. They want to sit in air conditioning and see a princess get kidnapped so a princess can be rescued 90 minutes later and then they forget all about it and they drive back home and watch Dr. House solve another fucking medical mystery and then they go to their jobs and they look at applications and they send me an email saying thanks for applying but no thanks and then they die and a few people cry and then those people die and everyone that knew them is gone so nobody gives a shit about them anymore, and the same thing happens to me and to you and to everyone we know, but sometimes we hear a good song or eat a good meal or read a good book or see a good movie or scratch a dog's ear or rub a cat's head or swim or go somewhere we haven't gone or kiss somebody and the distractions stop and that moment is great and it's fleeting but those things can happen again and they will happen again and sometimes even those assholes in that theater have a moment like that and they might even help you if you were stranded on the side of the road and they're probably not so bad when they're not being annoying in movie theaters and I have a great wife and it's late and there are no distractions right now and it's okay.

Poly Styrene, 1957-2011

2011-04-26T21:58:00.002-05:00

Half Full

2011-04-23T03:31:00.002-05:00

Here's another story I wrote that nobody wanted. I'm not sure about this one. We're probably all tired of stories about aimless young men. Still, this is the second story I wrote that didn't make me want to vomit for hours. I only throw up in my mouth three or four times when I read this back. There are a few lines that make me laugh. I need to work harder, though. This is only slightly on the other side of lazy. Am I fishing for compliments or discouraging them with this terrible introduction? Here it is.

HALF FULL

My alarm clock was beeping and I couldn’t make my hands do what they needed to do to turn it off. I’d been turning off alarm clocks for years. I was great at turning off alarm clocks, could do it asleep and in the dark. If there were a championship belt for turning off alarm clocks, I’d have cinched it around my beautiful waist on at least three separate occasions, but until that moment I’d never tried to silence the beeping, blinking machine while warm streaks of amber and fire-brick poured out of the top of my head and colored the white walls. I was in this predicament because I had ingested a small square of blotter paper of the type often purchased from that class of people my father refers to as “characters.” It’s very hard to leave their apartments. Some of them have exotic pets and they know a guy who can get you an albino lizard. No one ever takes them up on this offer. The contents of their refrigerators make very little sense. I’m thinking of one in particular that contained only an eight-ounce carton of chocolate milk, a porno magazine, two beers, and a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. Don’t misunderstand me. My vices are mostly legal. I’m a drinker and an obsessive music lover and I smoke four or five cigarettes a year. I own so many books I’ll be dead before I’m halfway through the pile of unread ones. Sometimes, though, when my rut gets so deep I can’t see over it, I take a weekend trip to Hoffman’s lab. It’s just spring cleaning. A brain colonic. The biennial purge. I’m not a regular in downtown alleys or pawn shops. I’m a citizen. I work and vote and never carry much more than a little walking around money. I almost always know how to turn off my alarm clock.

My whole body was crackling and buzzing that morning, and the pillow wasn’t even warm when I tilted my head toward the hooting alarm. I hadn’t slept. A bald friend gave me the drugs at a terrible party. I was only there to drink a few beers, but the conversation was so bad it made the beer taste wrong. People talked about floor tile and law school and gas mileage. I was ready to make any poor decision that precipitated an exit. My bald friend – his name was Jason – gave me the stuff, gave it to me and two other bored acquaintances. We dropped the tabs, left the party before we were rubbery and traveling the spaceways, and drove out to the country. We turned off the highway and parked the car on the side of a dirt road near a wooden fence. Three cows stood in place on the other side, staring at nothing. We got out of the car, leaned against the fence, and looked at the cows while our internal chemistry changed. It was cold outside, but we didn’t notice because the cows looked so stupid and alien and strange and we were on drugs and wearing coats and gloves. The otherness of a cow’s face up close is something to see. There’s no lesson in it. It’s just unusual, looking at a cow’s face that closely in the dark. We share nothing with a cow. Don’t let PETA fool you. A cow is a cow, and we’re us.

I made it home by early morning. I don’t really know how. I was seeing colors and lights and thinking about the human connection to the reptilian essence. Somebody drove the lighted mothership, and we all got home without killing anyone or accidentally getting on a cruise ship or going to jail. I started thinking about my teeth until there weren’t any other thoughts. I ran my tongue over each individual tooth and felt the urge to brush. My teeth felt gritty and old and strange. I didn’t even take off my coat. I took off my gloves, but not my coat. I thought of that space under the refrigerator that never gets cleaned unless you move, and I felt my teeth occupying a similar space in my head. I wanted to brush the everlasting shit out of them, and I did. It was amazing, like coming up for air after the older kids at the pool hold your head underwater. My gums vibrated with pleasure. After several minutes of breathing through my nose, I spit out a gob of toothpaste, and it crawled around the sink in little jerks like a few frames of stop-motion animation. I decided to follow the gob if it somehow made it onto dry land, but the moving ball of fluoride and spit just kept circling the inside of the sink. I left it alone and opened the closet in my bedroom. I threw my coat on the floor because I didn’t think I could deal with a clothes hanger. Every tooth received individual attention, but a clothes hanger was another story. Too overwhelming. I might miss one sleeve and the whole thing, coat and hanger, would fall to the ground. How many times would I have to repeat the physical movements before I correctly placed the coat on the hanger and the hanger on the rack? It would take only two or three failed attempts to bring on the fear, invite the existential dread, turn everything the wrong way. The nightmare loop that sometimes plagues the lysergic traveler. You start thinking that way and you’re stuck there forever, dropping the coat and the hanger on the floor eternally. So much depends on a coat hanger. Yes, the coat must be tossed nonchalantly to the floor. Hang it up tomorrow. That is the right decision. I brought my eyes up from the floor and saw something that made no sense. Who was that woman in a bikini standing in my closet? She looked like Pam Grier in one of her ‘70s movies, with her perfectly symmetrical Afro and dark, creamy skin. Coffy, maybe, or Foxy Brown. She stood perfectly still, and responded to none of my questions, possibly because they were all variations on the same question, which was, “Who are you and what are you doing in my closet?” It was hardly bikini season. How could she maintain her composure in this weather? I mean, she was indoors, but it was a little cool in the house for swimwear. I looked hard at the woman until my eyes reconnected with my brain and realized, with some disappointment, that Pam was just an old beach towel draped across a suit jacket. People who say truth is stranger than fiction have it all wrong. The truth is imagination’s stern parent, the one who says “time for bed” and “you’ve had enough for one day” and “don’t waste the batteries in that flashlight” and “I’m counting to three.” Truth is never strange enough, not even that cow’s face. I sighed as I got into bed and that’s when the alarm started beeping.

I had to pull the alarm clock until the plug came out of the socket because my fingers were under the impression they were in the fifth row at a 1970 Grateful Dead concert in Oahu, third encore. I couldn’t perform any tasks requiring prestidigital precision. I could only slap and pummel and yank. I needed to call in sick, but how could I hit the buttons on the phone when I couldn’t even turn the alarm off? They were so tiny, those phone buttons, and my hands were idiot slabs, a couple of china shops after the bull went home. I was still a low-level throbbing space cadet. I needed to be straight for a couple of minutes so I could call my boss at the record store and make something up. I picked up the phone with my left hand and stared at the buttons. I couldn’t make sense of the thing. When did phones get so complicated? What did I usually do? I leaned in close and stared at the letters and numbers. Then I flipped it shut and continued to stare at it in wonder and consternation. That’s when it vibrated in my hand. I dropped it in creepy-crawly, all-consuming terror and pulled the pillow over my head. My god, it was like an angry little snake. I collected myself enough to remove the pillow, pick up the little beast, and answer it. My boss’s voice greeted me from the other side. Can you believe that luck? Sometimes you catch a break. I tried to say hello, but a random assortment of grunts and alveolar trills came out instead. My boss reacted as if I’d clearly enunciated an articulate greeting.

“Hello, Jim,” he said. “I was just looking at the shift schedule and noticed you were on the clock today. Can you come in a little early and help us unpack and shelve some more of these new releases? Now that the black ice is gone, we finally got the shipment. Three days late, every time we have bad weather. I’m getting sick of this. A ton of shit came out this week, too, God knows why. Not that anyone’s gonna buy it, but you never know. Maybe a busload of people who’ve never heard of the Internet are making their way here as we speak, clamoring for mediocre indie rock.”

I made a few more noises before my words returned. I tried to sound sick, which was pretty easy since I’d been awake for 24 hours and living in a pharmacological nightmare wonderland where Tex Avery was in charge of the laws of physics.

“Hey, Will, I was just about to call you.” That part was true. “I hate to do this to you, but I feel really sick. I’ve been throwing up half the night. I won’t be able to make it in today.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Will said. He was a reasonable man, and was therefore easy to lie to. “Get some rest, drink some fluids. We’ll get by today. Bob’s coming in at nine, and Shawna wants some extra hours, so I bet I can get her to fill your shift. We’ll get this shit on the shelves one way or the other. Take her easy, buddy. Get well.”

“I’ll do that, Will,” I said and hung up. I turned the phone off and crawled back into bed. Visiting hours in my brain were mercifully drawing to a close. I slept until it was almost dark, woke up tired but no longer hallucinating, and ate some cereal that consisted of some kind of flake with some kind of powdery, blueberry-flavored stuff stuck to the flake. I turned my phone back on and checked the messages. I didn’t have any, but the phone rang a few minutes later. It was Scott. He was a close, personal friend of the bald guy who gave me the drugs, but he’d spent that evening reading and was ready to go out.

“Jim,” Scott said. “What’s going on? I’m bored. Lee’s here, too. He’s also bored.”

“Morning, gentlemen,” I said.

“Uh, Jim,” Scott said. “It’s almost 10 p.m.”

“Last night just kept going,” I said. “But I’m refreshed, well-rested, enriched with vitamins and minerals courtesy of a fine bowl of cereal I finished right before you called. I’m up for hanging out tonight. What can we do?”

“Hold on.” I heard Scott and Lee conferring in the background, and then Scott came back on the line. “We could go downtown. Have a couple drinks. If it’s boring, we’ll pick up some beer and go to Lee’s house.”

“Okay,” I said. Though Scott and I had been friends for years, I only knew Lee as an acquaintance. He and Scott had gone to high school together. I liked what little I knew about Lee, but he was a nervous guy with a habit of darting his eyes back and forth when he was listening. He always seemed to be expecting a surprise attack from behind.

Scott and Lee picked me up ten minutes later in the van Scott borrowed from his stepfather after his Kia broke down. We drove to The Green Lizard first, a hangout for college kids and twentysomethings who lacked visible cultural stereotypes. The drinks were cheap and strong, but the jukebox played manufactured pop and earnest singer-songwriters at conversation-destroying decibels. We looked at each other awkwardly, had a round of whiskey and Cokes, and left for Pine Top. The music was better but the drinks weren’t cheap, and the bar was thick with people and a couple of German shepherds belonging to the owner who kept sticking their noses in everyone’s crotches. We wandered out to the patio, but the air was bitingly cold, so we went back inside, slowly sipping our overpriced whiskeys and looking at girls, wet dog noses occasionally probing into our personal areas. We had nothing much to say to each other. Lee’s eyes were darting back and forth like he was watching a tennis match his mortgage was riding on.

“Fuck this,” Lee said. “Let’s just get some beer and go back to my house.”

Scott and I put up no resistance. Lee had purchased a moderately expensive house the previous year with a small inherited windfall from a childless dead uncle. It was an odd purchase. The house was enormous and in a distant, suburban part of the city. His neighbors were almost-rich elderly lawn care zealots and middle-aged couples. Some of them jogged with electronic apparatuses stuck all over them. Lee seemed to have no opinion, pro or con, about his neighborhood, his house, and the decision to buy it. It was just another thing in his line of sight, just something he did. He had no attachment to the place. This was all second-hand information from Scott, however. I’d never been to Lee’s house before. I really didn’t know the guy. We kept staring at each other stupidly, so I decided to force some conversation between Scott and me.

“Your youngest brother just finished school, right?” I asked Scott.

“No,” Scott said. “He’s been done for a couple of years.”

“Wow,” I said. “Time really moves. Sociology, right?”

“Yeah,” Scott said. “You got that part right.”

“So, what’s he doing?”

“Nothing. He worked an office job for a year, then quit and moved back in with my folks. He plays video games, sleeps, reads blogs, smokes weed.”

“Maybe he’ll grow out of it soon. Or maybe he won’t. You know, I have an uncle who quit his job in Arizona and drove to his parents’ house and never left. Never got another job. His car’s still where he parked it, weeds growing over it, flat tires.”

“What job did he quit?

“Car sales. He did it for thirteen years, and then one day, he just pulls up at their house and never leaves.”

“What does he do all day?”

“Helps his folks in and out of chairs. Reads the paper. Watches TV. Sleeps in.”

“Huh,” Scott said, creating his own version of the Arizona uncle in his head. “Not bad.”

“Not bad is right,” I said. “I’ll never be able to play that card, though, if it all turns to shit.”

“Why not?”

“Divorced parents. They remarried. It screwed everything up. The home base is gone. The headquarters imploded. Selfish pigs. Don’t have kids if you can’t stay together.”

Scott looks at me and I don’t know what he’s thinking. He goes back to his brother.

“Your uncle from Arizona and my brother. I know what you’re saying but you can’t compare that, man. Your uncle. That was burnout. This is pre-burnout. People want to be infants forever now. “

“Maybe he’s depressed.”

“He’s 23. What does he know about how bad it’s going to get?”

Lee entered the room and threw each of us a cold can of beer. I didn’t notice him slink away while Scott and I talked. We were still wearing our coats and gloves. Lee’s roommates moved out the previous month, one getting married and the other moving to Portland, and Lee saved utility money by refusing to turn on the heat. I could see my breath. I always ran a little cold, but Lee’s house was frigid.

“You want a tour,” he asks us. We nod. The room we’re sitting in, the living room, is comfortable and inviting, temperature aside. Lee has two easy chairs, a sturdy couch, a nice wooden coffee table, a television, an old lamp with a red shade on a wooden end table, a rug, and a stack of paperbacks and magazines on both the coffee and end tables. An old baby grand piano sits along the wall on the opposite side of the TV. Its wood frame is scuffed, but it’s still a beautiful instrument. Next to the living room is a huge kitchen. Lots of shelves and counter space, and two ovens. “One of them doesn’t work,” Lee says, anticipating our question.

A hallway leads from the kitchen to the bathrooms and bedrooms. Shelves are built into the walls along the hallway and are sparsely stocked with canned goods and two fishing poles. A small bed fills an empty space below the shelves on the right side. It’s an odd place for a bed. “My dad sleeps there when he visits,” Lee says.

Three large bedrooms and two bathrooms comprise the rest of the house. One bedroom is empty, a second contains the remnants of an old weight bench, and a large book collection, mostly fiction, is scattered across the floor of the third. Scott and I start thumbing through the pile. It’s all good stuff. Don DeLillo, Wright Morris, Eudora Welty, Alice Munro, Stanley Elkin.

“You have good taste,” I say to Lee.

He shrugs and says, “I need some bookshelves. I sold mine.”

He looks at us while we rummage through his collection. I can’t tell if he’s embarrassed at the state of his library or anxious to go back in the living room, but he’s noticeably uncomfortable. Scott and I, unrepentant book whores, don’t care and keep looking through the pile.

“You hungry?” Lee asks.

We nod and say that, yes, now that we think about it, we could go for some food.

“I’ve got some frozen pizzas,” Lee says. “I’ll put a couple of them in the oven. The working oven. It’ll warm things up a little.”

“Sure,” Scott says. “Sounds great. Can I borrow this Wright Morris book?”

“Yeah,” Lee says. “Borrow anything you want.”

He heads to the kitchen and I look at Scott. “Why’d he sell his bookshelves?” I ask.

“He’s trying to save money. His mortgage and his property tax are expensive as hell, now that he’s not getting rent from his roommates. They cut back on his hours at the print shop, too. He used to get a lot of overtime. This was his bedroom. He also sold his bed and his stereo. He sleeps on the couch in the living room.”

“Looks like he doesn’t even use this part of the house anymore.”

“No, he doesn’t. Saving on the utilities. I think he’ll probably sell it if he doesn’t get new roommates soon.”

“Why did he even buy it?”

“I don’t know. We’re too young to be homeowners. We should probably go back out there. I need another beer anyway.”

“Me, too.”

Lee is standing next to the working stove, waiting for it to heat up. On the counter, two frozen pepperoni pizzas wait on two pizza pans. Scott and I grab another beer and toss a third to Lee. Scott drifts over to the piano, and I head over to the couch and pull an old issue of Mojo with Joe Strummer on the cover from Lee’s coffee table. Scott starts playing scales. I’ve never heard Scott play the piano before, though we’ve talked about his music degree a few times.

“It needs tuned,” Lee says.

“It’s fine,” Scott says back. “It could use a little tune-up, but it still sounds pretty good.”

Scott starts playing something by Bach. I didn’t pick it up by ear. I had to ask him what he was playing after he finished. I don’t know anything about classical music, though I like to listen to the classical station in the car when I’m driving alone at night. I’m a rock and jazz guy myself. Even through my ignorant ears, Scott’s playing sounds beautiful. I quit reading the magazine and just stare at the pages, listening to his hands on the keys. Occasionally, a note sounds wonky or unintentionally dissonant on the slightly out-of-tune piano, but Scott plays through it. He’s calm, relaxed. So am I. Lee seems content standing by the oven, sipping beer. We don’t talk to each other, but it’s not awkward like in the noisy bar. Here, we’re stretching out our own little pieces of time.

“Pizzas are done,” Lee says.

Scott quits playing the Bach piece and puts his gloves back on. I haven’t taken mine off.

“You have any napkins?” I ask Lee.

“Use your gloves,” he says, grinning. I grin back and wipe the sauce from my face with the back of my gloved right hand. We stand in Lee’s kitchen with the two ovens and eat both pizzas without saying a word. We chug our beers after the pizzas are gone and smile. We’re freezing and happy.

“Let’s go outside,” Scott says. “It’s about the same temperature anyway.”

We go. Lee hands us each another beer and takes a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket. He puts one in his mouth and lights it. He doesn’t offer one to me or Scott, but we only smoke four or five times a year so no one is offended. We stand around, not saying much, watching cars go past in the dark. Lee’s neighbors from across the street, a middle-aged couple that are a little too handsome, pull into their driveway. We pay little attention to them until we hear the sound of breaking glass. A bottle has been thrown to the ground, on purpose, by the husband.

“Goddamn it!” he yells. “What the fuck is your problem?”

“Whoa,” I say. Lee raises his eyebrows and glances at me and Scott. We lean back against the wall and settle in for the show.

“You’re acting like an idiot,” she yells back. “Why did you break that bottle?”

“You know why,” he continues yelling. “I can’t believe you. I can’t fucking believe you!”

The yelling draws Lee’s next-door neighbor out of his home. He’s balding, with a grouchy face and the physique of an ex-ball player. He looks at us like we’re somehow responsible for this disturbance.

“What the hell’s going on over there?”

“I don’t know,” Lee says quietly. “An argument, I guess.”

“How long you guys been lollygagging out here, watching it?”

I began to dislike Lee’s neighbor. I drank my beer and scowled at him, not responding.

“We just came out here,” Lee says.

“Well,” the neighbor says, continuing to stink-eye us, “one thing’s for sure. If he lays hands on that woman, I’m going to go over there and straighten things out. One thing I can’t stand is a man who puts his hands on a woman.”

He says this like he’s separating the kind of man he is from the kind of men we are, like Scott, Lee, and I are in favor of the Ike Turner school of problem solving, or too apathetic to get involved if we see it happen. Who is this guy? What’s his game? The only thing that’s been physically battered so far is the bottle Mr. Husband threw on the ground. I decide I don’t like this man, and that I am going to give him a hint about my feelings. I try to shy away from unnecessary conflict, but it was a nice night of impromptu Bach performances and silent pizza-eating and this loudmouth was destroying the mood.

“So, you’re against a man roughing up a woman?” I ask.

Neighbor looks at me and grins. Even his smile is full of disdain.

“What, and you’re not?” he asks. “It takes a real coward to hit a woman. A guy like that can’t handle a real fight.”

“I admire your stance,” I say. Scott and Lee look at me like I just dropped down from the sky. “It takes real guts to lay it out there like that. That’s a controversial stand, my man. You’re going against the grain when you deliver such an uncompromising and rare opinion. You deserve our admiration. You’re a true American, and a true hero.”

“Excuse me?” the neighbor says, and walks over to me. He puts his face close enough to my face that I can see little imperfections in the skin on his nose. He has forgotten all about the threatened, imperiled woman across the street. I am his current fascination.

“I just wanted to tell you what a hero you are,” I say. “No one has ever come out against spousal abuse before. The time was now for somebody to step up, and you did it. You should be proud of yourself. Not only did you say you were against it, but you loudly said you were against it twice. I admire that.”

I found myself on the cold ground, blood running out of my nose. The world was sideways. The neighbor leaned his face down toward mine.

“That’s what you get for being a smart-ass, you little prick,” he said, and walked back into his house. I stared at the trail of blood coming from my nose, and the shoes of Scott and Lee. Their faces leaned down toward me. Scott handed me a tissue. I pressed it to my nose. It stuck, and I left it there.

“Are you okay?” Scott asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think so. I’ll just lay here a second, catch my breath.”

“Why did you do that?” Lee said. His eyes were pinging back and forth like mad. “I have to live next door to that guy.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

I rolled over onto my left side, away from Lee, facing the street. The couple was still shouting and arguing. They hadn’t even looked this way. I watched them, and I kept watching them. I watched them until I could block out the sounds they made and see them as the shapes of dancers moving across the lawn and the driveway. I put my glove in my mouth and sucked on the dried pizza sauce stuck there. I was cold. I hadn’t slept in two days, and an old man had just punched me in the nose. I pulled the blood-soaked tissue off my face and felt my nose with my gloveless hand. The blood was dry.

“It’s okay,” Lee said. “The guy’s a jerk. He just wanted to punch somebody. He thought he was going to hit that guy who’s fighting with his wife, but you started mouthing off and he didn’t even have to cross the street. See, he’s back inside now, and I bet he’s not even interested in that little domestic squabble anymore.”

“I should have just kept my mouth shut,” I said, still on my side and facing away from Lee. “I’m tired.”

“You should get off the ground,” Lee said. “You can sleep on the spare bed in the hallway if you want.”

“Okay,” I said, still on the ground. I closed my eyes and waited for decisions to be made for me.

“You can crash on the couch, Scott, if you want,” Lee says.

“Where will you sleep?” Scott asks Lee.

“I don’t know, the chair maybe?”

“No, man. It’s your house. I’m not going to take your couch away from you. Just give me a pillow. I’ll sleep in the van.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

I roll the word “yeah” around in my head, imagine it written on a piece of notebook paper and then animated and orange in color, moving across a television screen, as Scott and Lee pick me up by the shoulders and drag me inside the house. I sleep, under a fishing pole and a can of tomato soup, in a hallway connecting the furnished and empty halves of a large, cold house belonging to a man I know a little in a neighborhood I don’t know at all.

Stay tuned for more content

2011-04-18T16:04:00.001-05:00

I'm going to post another story soon. In the meantime, enjoy this archival photo of last year's office party.

Word scramble of delight

2011-04-13T21:44:00.003-05:00

Hey, fan(s)!
My wife told me about a web site today that she thought I would like. She was right! It's called That Can Be My Next Tweet!, and all it does is generate new tweets for your Twitter page by scrambling together a random assortment of words you have already tweeted. To make it work, you have to have a public Twitter page or know of someone's public Twitter page you could hijack. It's hours of fun, I tells ye. Here are some accidental gems of absurdist wordsmithery cobbled together from my idiotic, pornographic, obscene, boring tweets:

I would kill your ass off.
I think about Jack LaLanne's dick on fire?
You can't stand near a partially nude Charles Durning.
Hottest new record is the Dick Cheney of shit.
Petting an epic piece of water.
Just found dead after a random assortment of insanely violent street fight
Black landlords collect the blow-dart mishap based on a hotel in the blues.
Hilarious Google mishap based on a 30-year camping trip with such unparalleled insight that occurs twice!
Take my attempt at the beauty of Jack LaLanne's dick on your brains!
I woke up this year.
This burger is going to buy my pants at 4:20. - Paul Reiser, ca. 1992.
Yeah, I'm skydiving and drank three beers.
Jesus, it's going to smoke some slam poetry that time Patti!
Listen up, cunts! Blackberries are nuts! I think they've been mesmerized by Georgia Satellites.
Congratulations, Wisconsin GOP, you can't laugh at all? slap bass solo?
Remember when I say Tom Brokaw just came up your face, stupid bird!
I'd smoke some cheese dip
I'm flabbergasted at my permission to impregnate every time machine
A break from Texas? I am not ashamed!
I love that Chris Brown beat PEPSI at church Sunday. I'm going to carry on a hotel in Egypt.
This burger is business lingo for an 8-ball
Still laughing about animal rights for years.
England Dan & Bob Marley shared a coat made of local rock
You motherfuckers are my solar plexus!

Earthlings, conclusion

2011-04-01T00:19:00.002-05:00

Frank hung around TL’s Grill for another hour after Gary left, but he couldn’t get a conversation going with the night crew. They were too busy, for one thing, and they were younger, more interested in singing along to the radio and flirting with the young female customers. They were polite, but he could tell he was being gently tolerated. He needed to go home. He settled his tab and walked back to his house around ten. The burger, the shake, the beers, and the chat with Gary had considerably improved his mood. He might even open the blinds tomorrow, maybe even crack the window and let in some air.

He walked past the television like it was something he’d never have any interest in, like it was a Baptist church or a Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Didn’t even acknowledge it. He went right for the stereo, turning on the power and the auxiliary switch for the turntable. He flipped through his vinyl and spent a long time staring at a Tim Curry record he’d never heard and didn’t know he had before grabbing three LPs and leaning them against his stereo. “It’s classics night,” he said to himself. He drank three bottles of Mexican mineral water, putting a splash of vodka in the third, while leaning back on his couch and listening to the three records (The Kinks’ Arthur, Curtis Mayfield’s Back to the World, and Kevin Ayers’ Joy of a Toy) in their entirety. He got up to use the bathroom every time he switched sides. He moved on to gin-and-tonics. He’d paced himself all day and night and was letting loose now, celebrating his return to normalcy. He wasn’t even thinking about her at all. He started playing his boozy records, but this time he dropped the needle onto the vinyl at random, letting it play where it landed. Like Flies on Sherbert, Hootenanny, Propeller, Ooh La La. He started thinking about Exile on Main Street. He almost never played that record all the way through. Tonight would be a good night to do it. I’m going to take this one-man party all the way to the break of dawn and then keep going. I’m going to play records until I drop from exhaustion. He was still playing records when his phone rang at two-thirty in the morning. He was on vacation, so he didn’t think anybody was dead. He answered it without surprise or curiosity. On his turntable, “Glad and Sorry” was stuck, and Ronnie Lane kept singing “thank you kindly” like an accidental mantra.

“Hello?” Frank said.

“Frank,” a female voice said. Frank scrambled to place it for a few seconds, before it smacked into him. Sandy.

“I hope you’re not trying to spoil my party,” Frank said.

“I don’t know what just happened to me,” Sandy said. She felt a surge of embarrassment and decided to come back to the subject later. “I never liked my name, you know. It sounded too seventies, like I should have been one of my mother’s friends instead of her daughter.”

“You said that to me once before,” Frank thought he said. “I don’t like it either. And I don’t like it that I haven’t heard from you since you moved out.”

Frank actually said, “It’s fine. Nothing wrong with Sandy.”

“Something really weird happened tonight,” Sandy said. “But really good.”

Why are you calling me? Frank thought. But he said, “What?”

She told him about driving around restlessly and about going to Roger’s to see if anyone was up talking or drinking or watching movies and she told him about the purple glow and the feeling of well-being and about not knowing how much time had passed and whether it was real or not and how she thought it was real but maybe it wasn’t and either way it was gone and she guessed it probably wouldn’t come back. Then she hung up.

Frank sat in his chair for a long time, listening to “thank you kindly” over and over, baffled and not-quite-sad. He wanted to tell her she was rude to his parents and left without a good explanation and her silence since she moved out was hurtful. He wanted to tell her she was interrupting a really great Faces album, even if his copy was scratched and skipped on a few songs, and that her purple glow metaphor for their relationship was so goddamn stupid and poorly thought out and reminded him of getting dumped at 19 by a girl with black hair who told him the world was a tree and their relationship was a friendship branch. Sandy with her caustic wit and fucked-up Southern gothic past and healthy dose of misanthropy telling him about a purple glow that was over and would never come back. It didn’t make sense. She didn’t make sense. He almost felt sad, but then he thought about that purple glow speech some more, and he felt pretty glad to be rid of a woman who would say something like that.

He played Exile on Main Street from start to finish, drank three more gin-and-tonics, air-drummed on his couch cushions, watched a stray cat play with its tail through his bedroom window, washed his face in the bathroom, went back to TL’s Grill for a breakfast of a Denver omelette, hash browns, and two buttermilk pancakes, walked back home again, turned off his phone, and slept for the rest of the day. He woke up in the early evening. He would feel bad again someday, but not today.

Earthlings, part 3

2011-03-30T16:21:00.002-05:00

Sandy didn’t feel like going home, so she drove slowly, all over the city, past the houses of friends and acquaintances. It was a Thursday night, late, and most of these houses and apartments were dark. She wasn’t in college anymore. She couldn’t just drop in on a friend at one o’clock in the morning. Some of them had real jobs and spouses and children and had forgotten how great a pancake tasted at two in the morning. “All your Facebook pictures are of your kids, you bores!” Sandy shouted at her steering wheel. She toyed with the idea of stopping by Roger’s place, but Frank could be there. He was there a lot, watching everything from Fassbinder to Street Trash and debating the merits of Led Zeppelin’s Presence and Television’s Adventure while smoking a little dope and drinking a lot of bourbon. She hadn’t spoken to Frank since she moved out of his house three months ago. It was hard, but she felt a clean break was the best way for both of them to move forward, whatever the hell forward meant. She grew angry at herself for her own poor choice of words. Forward. As if anyone’s life moved forward. No, it was all just easily distracted hopscotch limps in every direction. She didn’t need to be free of Frank to go anywhere. They were just bringing each other down. That was all. Somebody had to leave. It might as well be her. She decided to drive past Roger’s house anyway. He was the only friend she had left who might be up this late on a weeknight. Except for Frank. No. Roger was it. She couldn’t call Frank a friend anymore, even though she still had a lot of affection for him. He wouldn’t call her a friend, would he? She dumped him and stopped speaking to him. He’d probably spent the last three months sticking pins in her voodoo doll. None of us can talk to each other. Really, we’ll always be strangers to each other. Every one of us.

Frank didn’t agree with her, she knew. He felt a kinship toward his fellow Earthlings that Sandy could appreciate but never share. She felt terrorized by the fascism of crowds and uncomfortable around most people in her regular daily interactions. The differences might be familial, which certainly exacerbated the breakup. Frank’s family was close, both emotionally and geographically, and his parents visited once a month. She couldn’t bear these visits. She needed solitude, quiet, space. Their comfort and ease with each other pricked her insides. Her parents were divorced, remarried to strange people, her siblings scattered all over the country. No one visited. No one wanted visitors. Her family tree read like a Tennessee Williams plot synopsis, overloaded with death and alcoholism and dark secrets and festering, open-wound resentments. Her mother’s side of the family was full of right-wing lunatics crazy with paranoia about the government breaking into their homes and stealing their guns, the underground homosexual cabal, and the coming Mexican majority. Her father’s people were more refined Berkeley-style left-wing fascists who couldn’t enjoy an iota of their free time or money because people were being oppressed somewhere. They were always threatening to leave the country for Paris if so-and-so were elected and never leaving the country for Paris. They believed the words wife and husband were tools of the imperialist oppressors. They were partners, not husbands and wives and don’t ever forget it. They were always outraged about something. They listened to a lot of Pete Seeger. Both sides of the family were miserable drunks. Her parents got together out of spite and hatred for their own histories. Spite gave them three children before they turned their hatred on each other. Family was just another word starting with F, Sandy thought, like flatulence and famine and fornication and failure. And Frank. Poor, sweet Frank. She liked him a lot. He had a lovably weird sense of humor and didn’t carry himself like most of the other chumps and bores you have to tolerate just to buy a gallon of milk. But his parents visited once a month.

Sandy turned onto Roger’s street and noticed Gary’s car. She looked around for Frank’s, didn’t see it, but slowed to a crawl to eyeball the other cars on the street. If Frank wasn’t there, it might be fun to have a few drinks with Roger and Gary, see what weird movie Roger was watching, make fun of any friends who weren’t there. Sandy always liked seeing Gary at TL’s Grill, and at Frank’s house in the college days, and she’d had a good laugh with Gary at TL’s last week about their new lives as single people. Gary’s former in-laws were a major cause of his divorce. They visited as often as Frank’s parents did, but unlike Frank’s parents, they were malicious and controlling people who’d always hated Gary. “From now on,” Gary had said then, grinning at the words in his head, “I’m only going to date women whose parents are dead.”

Sandy didn’t see Frank’s car, so she parked against the curb across the street and grabbed her purse off the passenger seat. She was about to open the car door when she glanced at Roger’s house. It was bright, glowing, neon and purple. Even his grass and sidewalk were purple. She put her purse back on the seat and took her hand from the door handle. She eased back into her seat and watched the giant glowing purpleness of Roger’s house. It felt good to her, this purpleness. It made her happy, made her feel like all her favorite songs were playing at once and she could pick out each individual instrument and melody and riff and beat. She sighed contentedly and stared into the purple for as long as it lasted. She had no urge to enter the house. Out here, in her car, this was just fine. Eventually, or maybe soon, she could no longer accurately gauge the passing of time, the purple glow disappeared and the feeling went away. She sat up, startled, awake, the pleasure gone, the house back to its old, non-glowing color. What just happened? And did it just happen? Sandy felt the sudden urge to tell someone what she’d just experienced, or imagined. Hallucinated? If she told someone right now, that ecstatic feeling might not be lost forever. She had to try to make it tangible again. Who could she call? What time was it? She looked at her wrist, but she’d left her watch at home. She dug her cell phone out of her purse and checked the time. It was two-thirty in the morning. She couldn’t go into the house now that it wasn’t purple, couldn’t ask Roger and Gary what the hell just happened. Sandy didn’t want an explanation, or, worse, proof that she’d somehow conjured up the whole thing from her disturbed brain. She didn’t want to know why. She just wanted to experience it again. And she needed to tell someone. She would call Frank, she quickly decided. Time to break the embargo; end her one-way pact of non-communication. Frank would understand this call. Frank would still be awake at 2:30.

Earthlings, part 2

2011-03-29T11:50:00.001-05:00

Gary was tired and ready to leave, but something indefinably pleasant in the physical space of the restaurant held him to his stool. It was a palpable convergence of good feeling and soon it would end. Gary needed to bask in it a little more before going home. Or avoiding home. He sighed happily and slowly finished his beer. Eventually, he remembered it was Thursday and not Friday and worked on getting up and going to his car. He said goodbye to the night crew and to Frank, who was still there all those hours later with no apparent designs to leave, and exited the glass door with a light push from his left fist. He started his ’02 Civic, and put a compilation CD he’d made several years earlier into the player. Gary had been spending most of his free time listening to the crates full of old mix tapes and piles of mix CDs in the spare bedroom, his ex-wife Linda’s former office. Gary had not been crass or shameless enough to woo Linda with compilations when he first met her, but he’d made plenty of tapes and CDs for her after they’d married. She’d taken these with her as keepsakes of a relationship that worked in fits and starts before it became all fits, leaving behind the small mountain of mixes he hadn’t made for her. Gary worried that his current obsession with the homemade anthologies of his twenties was a pathetic retreat into nostalgia, but mostly he considered his recent listening habits biographical research into his own psychological, emotional, and cultural history. It was a way of understanding his life now, or a thoughtful fumble toward a partial understanding. Anyway, he still listened to this music. It wasn’t a nostalgia trip. Songs from his past didn’t conjure up the past as much as they continued to change and resonate with the present of each fresh listen. Music to Gary was the organization of sound into an abstract yet visceral state of being that combined the brain, the heart, and the groin into a large invisible bubble that blocked out distraction and deliberation. It changed the air. It turned everything different shades of color and made his blood bright, made his hair follicles pop. It was not a memory trigger to a teenage crush or a seventh birthday party or a grandmother’s sigh or a first year of marriage. It was a right-now living thing and was not nostalgia. Despite this truth, the physical ephemera of the cassettes – his handwriting, the titles he chose for the compilations, the song choices and sequencing – were artifacts from his past, and they took him back there, for good and ill.

Gary drove south even though his house was north. With Linda gone, it seemed too large and empty sometimes, especially weeknights. Unlike his other divorced or dumped friends, he liked the solitude on weekends, especially with a few beers and the music as loud as he wanted (Linda was a morning person), but the place was haunted by absence after a long day of work. Sometimes his friends came over on the weekends, but he had to keep that to a minimum. Newly divorced men drank like W.C. Fields on payday. It wasn’t a habit Gary wanted to cultivate. He sang along to Todd Rundgren’s “Long Flowing Robe” and Sparks’ “Barbecutie” as he drove past strip malls, restaurants, movie theaters, and pawn shops. He felt lonely in general and glad to be alone in the current floating moment of early dark. He liked his job managing his uncle’s diner. Some of his old friends became doctors, professors, and lawyers. Class bias rose from them like steam from a corn muffin. A ridiculous yet accurate analogy, Gary thought. Giant walking muffins with muffin-top heads and slit-open muffin mouths, steam rising out of the slits, flapping muffin mouthholes waiting to be buttered. I guess I hate my friends, Gary thought, and laughed to himself as the Beach Boys’ “Little Pad” segued into the Kinks’ “Berkeley Mews.”

Gary was about to turn around and go home when he saw a light on at Roger’s house. Roger was Gary’s roommate during the year of college both men attended before dropping out. Quitting worked out well for both of them. Roger owned three coffeehouses that did reasonably well in a city full of Starbucks and bakeries and diners. After three or four years of working 80-hour weeks, Roger created a viable business that mostly ran itself, with limited turnover and managers he could trust. He pulled a couple of long days a week now, but mostly stayed at home and had fun. Gary was mildly jealous of Roger’s good fortune, and the bizarre yet benign events that often occurred in his presence. A few years ago a tiny bit of space junk fell out of the sky and into Roger’s spare bedroom. The tiny meteorite fireball did some major damage to Roger’s roof, but he had enough to cover it and no one was injured. He kept the space rock in a glass case in the bedroom it had damaged. At first, some of his friends urged him to donate it to a museum or university, but they quickly tired of butting up against Roger’s stubbornness. “Let them get their own damn space rock,” Roger said. “This one came through my roof. I’m keeping it.” After his schedule lightened, Roger reacquainted himself with his old habit of staying up most of the night listening to records or watching obscure exploitation films, and he welcomed drop-in visitors at all hours as long as his porch light was on. Roger was a confirmed bachelor who had decided to live like a 22-year-old forever. Gary was glad he wasn’t Roger, though he envied his work schedule, but it was good to know someone like Roger when you couldn’t go home, when the chalk outline of a failed marriage was all over the walls of your house.

Almost as soon as Gary took his keys out of the ignition and opened his car door, Roger was running toward him, actually running, with an uncharacteristically urgent expression.

“Gary, hold on,” Roger said. He was mildly short of breath and red-faced. “If I let you in and show you what’s going on in my house right now, you’ve got to promise not to freak out. I mean it. Don’t lose it.” Roger looked intensely at Gary as he spoke, which Gary found unnerving.

“Huh?” It was all Gary could get out. He’d never seen Roger act this way, and he was curious and alarmed.

“I can’t tell you out here, because you’re not going to believe me until you see it. So you can either follow me in or head back home.”

Gary tried to respond, but he couldn’t. His brain had nothing to tell his voice in response to Roger’s bizarre behavior, so his brain and voice just hung on and waited for the proper stimuli and instruction. What could be in there? Gary quickly and silently ran through a hypothetical list. Did he kill someone? Were his coffee shops just a front for drug smuggling? He had no girlfriend or wife to betray, so he probably wasn’t hiding a woman. Was it a prank? Had he gone crazy? Gary thought he should probably get back in his car and drive away, but questions don’t find answers that way. Gary followed a few paces behind until they were inside the house. Everything looked the same, except for the giant thing watching television on the couch.

“What the hell is that?” Gary whispered to Roger. Roger drew up his shoulders into a tiny shrug.

“An alien, I guess,” he whispered back.

The thing was about seven feet tall and wrinkly. Wrinkly all over. Its skin was grayish pink and its fingers were very long and very wide. Its head was wide and round, with large black eyes that took up most of its face. It had no ears that Gary could see. It was wearing sweatpants. (“Those are my sweatpants,” Roger told Gary later that night, after several glasses of bourbon and a trip to the garage to see the spaceship, which looked like the developmentally challenged offspring of a pinball machine and a Hum-Vee. Somehow, the ridiculous machine had made it all the way from another planet to Roger’s house so was worthy of reverence and awe, even though it was the stupidest, ugliest thing Gary had ever seen. “I had to cover him up down there. You should see his genitals. At least, I think they’re genitals. They look like ours, mostly, but they’re enormous. I couldn’t have this thing in my home, looking at me, communicating with me, with his oversized pecker just hanging there, unwittingly taunting my own manhood. The elastic waistband is a useful invention. There’s no way he’d fit into any of my jeans.”)

The men stared at the creature for several minutes. It ignored them, instead focusing all its attention on the large, plasma-screen television, which was playing Roger’s DVD of Russ Meyer’s Supervixens. After Gary’s shock lessened enough to allow him to communicate coherently, Roger asked him into the kitchen for a private conversation.

“Okay,” Roger said quietly. “All I know is that he landed in my backyard two days ago in a spacecraft of some kind, which is in my locked garage. As far as I know, nobody else knows about him. My neighbors were at work, but you’d think some air traffic controllers somewhere would have picked up on his unidentified flying ass. Maybe he has something to block the signals. I’m not going to tell the government about it unless he decides he’s going to stick around. I don’t need a roommate right now.”

“What does he want?” Gary asked. “Can he communicate with you? This is amazing.”

“He seems to understand me pretty well, but he just points at what he wants, which so far has just been my movie collection. He sometimes makes noises, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t speak English. I don’t know if he understands it, or if he’s been here before. He’s pretty easy to get along with. He just sits on the couch and watches my DVDs. He’s been burning through my Russ Meyer collection. We started with The Immoral Mr. Teas and we’ve been working our way through chronologically. Honestly, it’s kind of like having a cat, but a cat with a sincere appreciation for the Russ Meyer oeuvre. He’s pretty low maintenance so far.”

“How can you be so casual about this?” Gary asked. “You’ve got an alien here, man. This is serious shit.”

“I’ve had a couple days to get used to it,” Roger said. “This sounds arrogant, but nothing surprises me. If I can wake up every day on this insane planet, in this insane country, then surely I can take the present curious circumstance in stride.”

“Maybe he came here to get your space rock. Maybe he dropped it,” Gary said.

“Hm,” Roger said. “Maybe so. He’s not in any hurry if that’s why he’s here.”

He smiled, sighed, and offered Gary a beer, which Gary accepted.

“Oh, hey,” Roger said suddenly. “Let me show you what he can do.”

The two men walked back into the living room, and Roger tapped the thing on what resembled a shoulder. The creature looked at Roger, and Roger pointed at the wall. The alien stuck out his large hand and touched the wall with the first of his four digits and began to hum loudly. The entire house and everything in it, including Roger and Gary, turned a bright, glowing neon shade of purple. Gary was not frightened, or worried about staying purple forever. Instead, he felt like he’d been dosed with every drug on earth and somehow been given the indestructible constitution to handle it all, and not just handle it but enjoy it without any of the negative side effects, paranoia, or harsh comedowns. He glanced at Roger, who seemed to misunderstand the look of pleasure on his face.

“Don’t worry,” Roger said, his clown face beaming ecstatically. “Don’t worry about a thing.”

Earthlings, part 1

2011-03-28T03:04:00.002-05:00

I've been writing short stories for a while now, but this is the first one I wrote that didn't make me vomit. I'm a little embarrassed by it, but I'm going to risk even more embarrassment by posting it on the blog this week. It's 17 pages, so I'm going to break it into chunks. Here's the first part.

Frank Hudson was almost done feeling bad. He knew the badness was almost over when he woke up on the couch, television still on and tuned to celebrity worship, half-finished beer warm and flat three inches from his dangling hand, and no longer felt an affinity for his own mini-ecosystem. He might as well have been half-watching a terrible movie of his life on Sunday afternoon rabbit-ear TV while eating leftover chili, nursing a hangover, and flipping through his ex-girlfriend’s catalogs for women’s dress pants. The real Frank Hudson never watched “Access Hollywood” and never let his beer get warm and flat and unfinished. He looked at his torso and his legs and the slept-in clothes arranged on them and his unfinished beer and the celebrity gossip program on his television like they were Polaroids stuck to the cheap plastic in old photo albums. He looked at these things again, this time staring hard at them, and felt a gentle, forgiving disgust, the kind strong enough to push him off the couch but weak enough to keep him from retreating right back into the cushions, the warm outline of his body lightly imprinted there. Frank stood up, grabbed the beer can, poured out the remaindered warm flatness in the sink, threw the can in the recycling bin, and walked to the bathroom. He washed his face, burrowed out of his sweaty clothes like a naked mole rat, and took a shower that was epic in length and temperature. He shaved the two-day stubble from his face and looked at the clock radio next to his bed. It was 2:16 on a Thursday afternoon. He still had a week, one-and-a-half days, and two weekends before he had to go back to work.

Frank’s stomach growled, the noise startling him. He’d eaten just enough to live during his wallow in numbness, and the rumblings from his gut surprised him into action. Frank decided a cheeseburger from TL’s Grill was the only way to begin his reengagement with life. His good cholesterol was high, but so was all the bad stuff, and Frank’s doctor wouldn’t leave him alone about it. Frank made a silent but firm decision last year to ignore the man. He would stop eating the foods that made him happy when he was dead. Until then, deliciousness reigned. Frank decided he’d rather have his heart crap out in the early days of old age than live long enough to waste away in a purgatorial dormitory. He thought of that Redd Foxx joke about health nuts feeling stupid dying from nothing and smiled.

Frank stepped outside his door and watched a grackle fly overhead with a tiny string of thin-bulbed Christmas lights wrapped around its neck. The bulbs on the ends of the string bounced in the thick, summer air as the bird flew toward a tree. Frank stared at the grackle and then started walking, laughing quietly to himself as he imagined the ugly bird stringing the lights up in a nest littered with miniature beer bottles and tiny bongs, a tiny television with the Cartoon Network on mute emitting a mini-cathode glow as the world’s tiniest pressing of Pink Floyd’s Meddle played on a little record player, “Echoes” coming from wee speakers.

TL’s Grill was a neighborhood institution and had changed very little in the 35 years since T.L. (no one knew what the initials stood for) Moore bought the place with money saved from working construction during the day and cooking in restaurants at night. The place looked just like it used to when Frank was in college and lived in a dilapidated shithole a block from the restaurant with three other crazy, brilliant idiots. The video stores and record stores he frequented were disappearing fast, but cheeseburgers, like diamonds, were forever. Frank took a seat in a red chrome diner chair with a diamond button pattern on the back at the U-shaped counter. T.L.’s nephew, Gary, was working the slow afternoon shift. Gary used to hang out at Frank’s dilapidated manse for young adults, and while the men were not close friends, they’d remained friendly. Frank watched Gary pound a hunk of raw beef with a spatula and pour a little melted butter and sprinkle some spices into the meat. On a stereo near the counter, Big Bill Broonzy sang to his woman that he was tired of eating her cornbread and beans. Gary was in a blues mood this week. He had eclectic musical taste, like Frank, and Frank never knew what he was going to hear when Gary was working. Tuvan throat singing, British post-punk, Appalachian field recordings. Gary liked it all.

“Gary,” Frank said. “How you been?”

Gary turned around briefly and waved, then turned his head back to the burger he was cooking.

“Good, good. I’ll get you in just a second, Frank.”

Frank hummed along quietly to the Broonzy song and watched the afternoon sunlight shine through the windows. He was starting to feel good again. Gary took his order a few minutes later, and ten minutes after that Frank happily ate a large medium-well burger with sautéed mushrooms, two slices of Swiss cheese, lettuce, and fresh tomatoes, sliced thin. He silently called his doctor vulgar names before each bite and thanked both the cow that made the cheese and the one that became the beef. He wondered if the two cows had ever met each other, and if the cows that got milked were the house Negros of the bovine world. Then he wondered if that was a racist thing to think. In the long minutes between the handful of afternoon customers, Gary and Frank talked about music and women and politics and movies and childhood and music again. Frank had a milkshake about an hour after the burger, and then he switched to beer. He drank the beer slowly and watched the crowd change over from retirees and the unemployed to college kids and high school students on summer vacation, families, and the after-work crowd as afternoon became evening. Frank was still there when Gary’s shift ended and the evening crew arrived. Frank watched them put on their white aprons and switch the radio to a hip-hop station. They rapped along with Jay-Z and Lil’ Wayne and Big Boi while they grilled burgers, ham steaks, pork chops, and chicken breasts and dropped French fries into baskets they lowered into bubbling, hot grease. Gary sat next to Frank on a stool and joined him in a beer. They drank quietly and watched the other people in the restaurant. A short man in the early stages of mid-life with stylish, expensive eyeglasses and blonde hair just beginning to gray held the door open for a small blonde girl. The man was wearing doctor scrubs, the girl a Miley Cyrus t-shirt and pink shoes that lit up when she stepped down. The doctor said hello to Gary and took a seat on a nearby stool. He hoisted the girl up by her waist and sat her in the adjacent stool. “Hey, doc,” Gary said in response. The little girl was pretty, with a pair of grown woman’s eyes that looked out of place next to her childish nose and mouth. Those eyes were remarkably blue, the blue of swimming pools in Technicolor movies. Casey, one of the evening shift workers, walked from the grill to the counter to take their order. Casey was a large man with a permanently sweaty forehead and one of history’s great smiles. The beads of sweat on his forehead were affixed there like a crucifix in a Catholic home and never ran down his face. He pointed his infectious smile at Frank and Gary, who smiled back, and then at the doctor and his daughter. They smiled, too. Casey said hello to the doctor and turned his attention to the little girl. “Hey, pretty-pretty,” he said and pointed his fist toward her. For a brief moment, her smile disappeared, and she made a fist and bumped it into Casey’s fist with intense concentration, her brow furrowing and her bottom lip disappearing under her top lip. After their fists met, her face relaxed and her grin returned. It was one of those early evenings full of fleeting contentment that Frank wished he could freeze in time and extend for a week or two. That it was happening on a Thursday and not a Friday was even more reason to capture it and magically lock it into place.

Middleage Fanclub - Unemployedesque

2011-03-22T22:14:00.002-05:00

I feel like I've competed in some kind of marathon that took the last five years and is finally over, which is funny. Not funny jokelaughs, but funny odd. Things aren't going well professionally. I'm in very bad shape there, and it's getting worse by the minute. There is no place for me in this world. I've finally stopped expecting to have any kind of success. I'm a failure in that aspect of my life. It's time to accept that and figure out what to do next. I will never have a good job, make any money, do something for a living that fulfills me in any way. I have hit a wall that cannot be moved. I don't fit in this world. I think I was born too late. I should have been alive when you could get a job at a newspaper or a movie studio as a mischievous teenage imp and work your way up through the haze of cigar smoke and bourbon fumes and do something real without having to piss around in academia listening to some sandaled bore talk about the symbolism of his eating disorder. Of course, those days were not kind to women, gays, or people lacking a pallor reminiscent of peach and chalk, but some kind of shit is always fucked up in every era. I may be an idiot, but I think we're going to see the collapse of industrialized, capitalist society in my lifetime, and I'm probably going to die of starvation and/or murder at the hands of a marauding gang of post-apocalyptic hooligans because instead of honing my survival skills, I went to college like a fucking tool. I don't like the options life gives you. For the most part, I don't like life. It's so mediocre and repetitive and dull. I don't believe you make your own luck, because I've been alive longer than five minutes. This place is a shithole, for the most part, and we're all idiots, for the most part. All you can ever be is just a lousy janitor, unless your uncle owns the store, to quote a song by a guy with an exciting mustache who died of cancer.
Here's the funny odd part. I'm not depressed anymore. I don't know why. I should be. The job situation is bleak and getting bleaker. I have been rejected by seven of the nine MFA programs I applied to, and I fully expect to be rejected by the other two. My resume is confusing and unpromising. I don't know what I want to do for a living or how to make something besides mediocre office jobs happen for me in perpetuity. I'm stuck, which pays about as well as you'd expect. Sometimes worse.
Why am I not depressed about all this? Why am I approaching near-happiness for the first time in at least five years? I have no fucking idea, but I do know that professional failure isn't as big a deal as personal failure. Until recently, I romanticized the latter and made myself sick with depression, anger, and worry about the former. I didn't want to be a nobody. I wanted to do something important, etc. I put all my energy into negativity and it poisoned all the good things in my life. It's time to stop doing that.
In forty or fifty years, when we're old and out of oil and all the major economies have collapsed and our cities have been bombed by terrorists and natural and environmental disasters have made huge swaths of area unlivable and the roving gangs of Mad Max S&M punk rock gearhead cannibalistic CHUDs are eating our brains, I don't want my final thoughts to be, "Hey, stop eating my brains. I was a big man once, who did important things and changed the culture and made the money and spent a lot of time at work and schmoozed with the best of them and impressed people." I want my final thoughts to be, "I'd prefer you stopped eating my brains, but if you insist on continuing, who gives a shit? I had a great wife, and great friends, and I played lots of music, and ate tasty food, and did some traveling, and wrote a lot of stuff that nobody cared about but I had fun doing all of that, and I love music, and film, and literature, and jokes and gags, and Friday nights, and drinking beer, and I wasn't a total square. I got chased by the cops a few times, and I did some fun drugs, and I met some great people, and I tried not to take things from other people, and I tried to share, and I tried to get to know myself a little, and I didn't worship money, and I did some terrible things but I was sorry about it, and I didn't let life turn me into a robot or an animal, not like you, brain-eater. You're the animal. Come on, baby. That's what life is, brother! In the words of Ric 'Nature Boy' Flair: Whooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!"
I have an awesome wife, and great friends, and I like the band I'm playing in, and I fill my free time with all the things that give me pleasure. That should be enough. If I never find a job that makes me happy, I need to live with that. I'm working through my parents' divorce, and the onslaught of deaths in the family, and my own predilection toward despair and rage, and my many failures, and my almost comical bad luck, and my tendency to get irritated by the slightest, tiniest thing. I'm trying not to poison and sabotage my whole life because a few aspects of it are terrible. But, yeah, I really think I'm screwed in the job and grad school departments for the remainder of my life.
I will give a variation on this motivational speech to Rotary clubs, high schools, business seminars, rehabilitation centers, community theatres, mud wrestling emporiums, adult bijous, chautauqua exhibitions, World's Fairs, taco carts, tent revivals, hospices, pie-eating contests, Scientology centers, your grandma's basement, lingerie modeling centers, Tommy Lee's house, and skeet-shooting contests for a handsome fee. No state fairs, please.
To conclude, here are three live performances of my favorite Teenage Fanclub song by the Fanclub itself, the Afghan Whigs, and J Mascis & The Fog, featuring Mike Watt on the thunderbroom. The latter also includes a bit of "Range Life" and "In a Rut."

P.S. Since grad schools, magazines, and journals want nothing to do with my writing, I am going to start posting a few of my short stories here for free. I'm kind of embarrassed by them, but if life has taught me nothing else, it is that every person on earth should feel constant embarrassment because of the way we live our puny lives. Vitriol and hurtful criticism will be welcomed. It beats the onslaught of indifferent rejection I am used to my work receiving.

Quote

2011-03-09T01:10:00.004-06:00

"All his clothes were fresh from the tailor's and were all right, except for being too new and too distinctly appropriate. Even the stylish new round hat had the same significance. Pyotr Petrovitch treated it too respectfully and held it too carefully in his hands. The exquisite pair of lavender gloves, real Louvain, told the same tale, if only from the fact of his not wearing them, but carrying them in his hand for show. Light and youthful colours predominated at Pyotr Petrovitch's attire. He wore a charming summer jacket of a fawn shade, light thin trousers, a waistcoat of the same, new and fine linen, a cravat of the lightest cambric with pink stripes on it, and the best of it was, this all suited Pyotr Petrovitch. His very fresh and even handsome face looked younger than his forty-five years at all times. His dark, mutton-chop whiskers made an agreeable setting on both sides, growing thickly upon his shining, clean-shaven chin. Even his hair, touched here and there with grey, though it had been combed and curled at a hairdresser's, did not give him a stupid appearance, as curled hair usually does, by inevitably suggesting a German on his wedding-day."

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Constance Garnett translation

Palate Cleanser 2: Lorenzo Lamas Edition

2011-02-23T16:04:00.000-06:00

Blogdom's biggest asshole

2011-02-22T19:18:00.003-06:00

Goddamn it. I don't know what to do with this blog. The divorce post made my mother feel bad, and my last post made a friend feel bad (though we just cleared that up a few minutes ago), and I'm so tired of the way I write and what I've been writing about that I'm starting to feel like shutting this thing down or changing it into something else. My last post does look like I'm shitting on my friends who left comments, doesn't it? That wasn't at all my intention. I didn't even think of that until I was almost done writing it. That last post was about me and how tired I am of my stupid problems and my writing style and my present life and my strange need to share my personal problems with anyone who has an Internet connection.
So, in conclusion, I hate myself, I hate all of you, I never learn from my mistakes, and I love life. Go fuck yourself, everybody. Then give yourselves a hug, a compliment, and a warm cup of your favorite warm beverage. You deserve it.

Love
Dr. Embarrassed

Palate cleanser

2011-02-20T21:12:00.003-06:00

I don't want to turn into a nostalgia merchant because nostalgia is the devil. Remember when I was a kid and life was like this and I did that? Gaaahh! Fuck that stuff. I hate it. I don't want to lick my readers' faces like a little puppy dog. I don't want to write stuff that's relatable. When I go to the past, I want to go there with specifics and tell a story that's unique to my experience. I don't ever want to write things that will make people think I'm talking about the universal brotherhood of man. That's no way to learn anything new. Goddamn stupid generic nostalgia is so boring. Remember when the A-Team was on and we all drank cherry Kool-Aid? Who gives a shit? Wahhh! My parents are divorced! Somebody give me a blankie! God, I hate movies and books and songs that try to make the audience think the story being told is their story, too. Cheap, easy, lazy, self-congratulatory shortcut to contrived emotion. I'm sorry. I'm guilty. Sorry about all the nostalgia and self-pity lately. Let's blow it up with dynamite! Whooo!

For those of you who don't know me, this type of ranting means I'm feeling normal again.

Also, this post is not meant as a cheap shot at the people who left comments sharing their own experiences, which I truly appreciated and enjoyed reading. My post is a cheap shot at my own solicitation for attention.

Napoleon 2: Electric Waterloo

2011-02-14T22:44:00.003-06:00

That title has nothing to do with this post.
In related news, my most recent _____ (bout, battle, some other choice that sounds less stupid) with my old friend depression appears to have ended. It'll come back. Maybe next week, maybe in five years. But it'll come back. I feel like I have some clarity for the first time in seven months, though, and it feels pretty good. Even when I was having a good time this past half-year, I felt like my brain was encased in used plastic wrap that formerly covered an elaborate casserole. I had to accommodate for the layer of wrapping and bits of onion, dried melted cheddar, congealed cream sauce, and black olives dotting my brainscape every time I tried to think about anything. Any damn thing. What to do with my life, how to pick up a glass, what would happen if I died, what's on TV. Every thought was a clouded, foggy obscurity, not even sadness or frustration or anger but a blurry, confused half-realized idea of sadness, frustration, or anger. Then, a few weeks ago, the obscured blur gradually went away, like tired revelers after the keg is tapped out. The depression party is over, baby. You can go somewhere else, but you can't stay here. We're all out of cups and the only things left to drink out of are this cereal bowl and these snowshoes. As ersatz goblets go, these shits are pretty lousy, so you gotta want it, dudes, or out you go.
Okay, so I'm not feeling depressed anymore. I'm not exactly happy. In fact, my problems are even worse. The substitute work has dried up for a variety of economic reasons both national and local (short story: massive teacher layoffs next year, teachers afraid to lose jobs, not taking any days off), which is good in that it means I don't have to do it, but bad in that my money is mostly gone and I'm back to mooching off my wife. My job search for writing and editing and proofreading work is inviting either silence or rejection, and I also received my first rejection from one of the seven or eight grad schools I applied to. Here's the difference between then and now. My thoughts are clear. Three months ago, if I'd dropped a plate of food on the ground or sat in traffic too long on my way to or from an errand, it would have been enough to fill me with despair and I would have been couch-ridden for a week. Now, I'm focusing on the present and doing what I can.
I know this shit's going to come back, though. The brain fog does more reunion tours than Ozzy.

I mentioned several posts ago that watching The Sopranos and listening to Marc Maron's WTF podcast has been a help. A fictional gangster and a non-fictional stand-up comic/radio host are helping me understand my own problems with depression better, among many other things. I want to write about this in more detail, but I probably won't because I tend to get sidetracked and follow some other strand of thought and never get back to what I meant to write about. So? Sew buttons. I bring it up now because I was listening to Maron's interview with Judd Apatow today, and Apatow's handful of comments about his parents' divorce sent me spinning off in thought about my parents' divorce. My situation is an uncommon one, in that my parents split up after about 25 years of marriage when I was in my twenties. I know a few people who share this experience, not many. Most of my friends in the divorced parents club went through the traumatic aspects of divorce early. They were children or adolescents, still living at home. First, they went through the mundane hell of it, then it became normal. My experience is the opposite, though I don't know how many of my fellow later-in-life kids of divorced parents share my experience. I was sad when my parents split, but once the initial shock wore off, I got used to it fairly quickly. As the years go by, the trauma of it seems to increase for me. My sadness, bitterness, and anger about my parents' split seems to grow stronger as time passes. Why?
My daily life didn't change much after my parents split up, but my thought patterns, my whole outlook on how to handle living my life in my own way, that changed a lot. For me, my parents' divorce was the world's slowest erupting volcano. For a while, it makes you feel like the reason you exist is a mistake, if not a lie. Two people who shouldn't have been together made you. That's a hard thing to think about. It makes you doubt everything else in your life. Everything, everything is a slowly crumbling foundation. Then you get past that idea. Every person is full of contradictory, warring ideas, whether their parents are together or not. Some people have divorced parents who remain friends, some people have parents who are still married and hate each other's guts. No generalizations work here. I can only figure out why I feel worse about it every year through my own lonely experience.
I don't want this to get too self-indulgent or maudlin or self-pitying, so I'll start with the petty stuff and then move on to the tactile, physical part of it I meant to write about earlier. Petty and selfish, but worth getting off my chest. When your parents split up, your duties as a son or daughter double. Instead of making one phone call home to catch up, you have to make two. Instead of getting one phone call, you get two. The time you have to set aside for these things doubles. Petty, yes, but annoying. When you visit, you have to become a diplomat. You have to make sure you spend enough time with both parents so one parent doesn't feel bad. Instead of the normal quality time with both parents, you get half the time, and that time feels rushed, truncated, or oddly stretched out. Then they move in with a new person, or let a new person move in with them, and your time gets cut into another wedge. Not that they shouldn't move on with their lives, but, you know, they decided to have some goddamn kids. It wasn't forced upon them by some overlord.
Middle-aged divorced people make bad choices, which you have to watch in agonizing detail. They enter into relationships with people who aren't good for them, they get absent-minded and forgetful, they try to turn you against the other parent (sometimes on purpose, sometimes unconsciously), they alternate between being too needy and ignoring you, they make it harder to spend time with your other relatives because of the ridiculous scheduling you have to do just to see them. These are petty complaints, and I apologize to anyone reading this who has lost a parent. Some of you would gladly trade your non-bullshit for some of this bullshit to be able to speak to both parents again, I'm guessing.
It sucks, though. It just sucks. I don't think divorced parents realize the constant, ever-present, low-level stress their kids get stuck with permanently due to a decision these same kids get no goddamn say in and only get to hear about after the fact. This may be a ridiculous point of view (except for the low-level permanent stress thing, which is very real), but you can't help feeling this way. I can't help it. It makes me sound like a petty, selfish jerk, but I think some people feel the way I do sometimes and want to yell it out their windows once in a while. Maybe I'm wrong.
I wanted to write about this in a more detached way, but I get angry when I start thinking about it. I was very supportive of my mother's decision to leave my dad, and in a lot of ways, I still am. Sometimes, though, I think, "Why couldn't they have tried harder to communicate? For the sake of my brother and sister and me, at least? Why couldn't my mom have really laid it on the line and told my dad exactly how she felt, because he still seems confused?" Was it worth it? Maybe my mom did tell my dad exactly how she felt and the fact that he's still confused about why she left is the perfect proof that she needed to get the hell out. It just makes you feel lost sometimes.
Here's the tactile stuff. The sensory shit. My dad remarried a while ago. It might have been five years ago, and it might as well be 500 years ago. Shortly before his remarriage, he sold the house my siblings and I grew up in and moved in to his new wife's house. A few years ago, two close relatives died a few weeks apart. After I stopped mourning them, something strange happened. I started mourning my house, almost like it was a person. I thought about my house all the time, and I felt these sharp pangs of melancholy and sadness. I didn't know why I was doing this until enough time went by that I stopped doing it. My house was a center of activity for relatives and friends. Now that my mother no longer lives in my hometown, I barely see these relatives and never see these friends. But that's not why I miss the house. Those are normal life changes. I miss the house because I was a kid in that house. Because I was a kid in that house, I had a relationship to that house that was more detailed, more physical, more thorough, and more complete than I could ever have with any other physical space. Though my parents found the house, bought it, decorated it, remodeled parts of it, decided how it should look, their relationship to that house could never come close to the relationship my siblings and I had with the house. How could it? They were adults when they moved into it. It was a house for them. It was a world under a microscope to me, and I'll never be able to experience anything like it again. You have to be a kid to have that kind of experience with a house. (I'm including the yard, the trees, etc.). When you're a kid, you're short and close to the ground. You see parts of the house in ways that teenagers and adults never see it because your face is right up against it and you don't really understand it and you're curious but you want to make up your own story. You don't know how things work, you're at your most unselfconscious, and you're at a stage in life where it's socially okay to pretend, play, roll around on the ground, spazz out, daydream, make stuff up, be lazy, get lost in thought, etc. I know every inch of that house in detail. I know what the grass looks like when you press your face up against it, I know which parts of the floor and carpets made better deserts and oceans and urban street scenes and battlegrounds for Conan and He-Man, I know what the crawlspace under the stairs looks like, I know what it's like to hide in the closets under blankets and behind robes, I know what the ceiling looks like when you sprawl on the ground or the couch upside down and pretend the ceiling is the floor, I know what those weird green bugs in the trees in the front yard look like both before and after getting exploded by firecrackers, I know how my dad's garage smelled when he was working on cars and motorcycles, I know what it felt like to crawl into my Dalmatian's doghouse, I know how it felt to pelt the annoying neighbor kid with crabapples from the crabapple tree, I know how it felt to jump off the porch and onto the lawn, I know what a strange and mysterious place the attic was and how I wasn't allowed to go up there because it didn't have a floor and how the blast of cold air from it hit you in the face when you popped your head in and how much the insulation looked like cotton candy. I know what summer sweat and snow felt like in the backyard. I know what it felt like to get sprayed by the mosquito trucks going down the alley before they decided that method of bug killing was a bad idea in the mid-1980s. When I came back to visit in college, I liked to look out the window at my old high school if I was lucky enough to catch a late-night snowfall. The high school had installed new light posts after I graduated, and I loved the way the falling snowflakes looked on late nights when the lights picked up their outline. I could watch the snow until it stopped. What's my point? That I miss my old house, my childhood, my dead relatives, my parents' marriage? That everything ends someday? That all sounds pretty facile and obvious. I wouldn't want to go back to the past for more than a day or two. I wouldn't want to live a single day between 10 and 19 over again, that's for damn sure. I'm glad so many things are over. I'm glad things change. Someday, your parents will sell your childhood home, and rednecks will buy it and put trampolines and pickups on the lawn. That's life.
I guess I have no point here, except to say that everything ends. Like this post.

John Barry R.I.P.

2011-02-03T12:16:00.002-06:00

A belated R.I.P. for film composer John Barry. Besides writing the music for most of the James Bond films, Midnight Cowboy, Walkabout, Robin and Marian, Body Heat, The Cotton Club, and many others, he was briefly married to Jane Birkin. Here's one of my favorite pieces of music by him:

American Grungefiti: The Shuffle Game

2011-01-26T23:47:00.003-06:00

I'm going to spend thirty or forty minutes free-associating my life with whatever band comes up on shuffle:
Young Marble Giants - Their record, Colossal Youth, was out of print forever. 1998: This girl I briefly liked and pursued in college after we both played terrible pool against each other at a friend's party and seemed to hit it off had a copy of this record. I wanted it and kept bugging her to dub it for me. She lost interest in me after a few weeks and went from friendly to bored to hostile in record time. A friend who knew her since grade school told me, "Don't worry about it. She only likes dumb guys she can boss around." I was flattered I wasn't dumb but also dismayed that she thought I was dumb for a few weeks. In my defense, I was drunk when we met, and I play pool like a kid born with only the parts of his brain that understand Lucky Charms and spitting. She never dubbed this record for me, but I bought an import seven or eight years ago for a chunk of change. Then it was officially reissued and I felt like a sucker.
Lemonheads - There was a period where it was really uncool to like this band. Maybe that period is still happening, but they've sure aged better than a lot of their '90s peers who were supposed to be much cooler. Bettie Serveert, anyone? I think I first got into this band/"band" in my sophomore year of high school.
The Fiery Furnaces - One of my favorite recent bands that everyone seems to hate. I like to think it's because people are too lazy to invest time into complex, difficult music but I can also see how they would annoy you if you didn't share their sensibility. I like slippery bands that evolve and change and try crazy shit and aren't afraid to fail ambitiously and whose live show is not just a copy of the album. I've liked this band a lot since I first heard "Two Fat Feet" in whatever year it was. 2003? Who gives a shit? This decade was just one long year anyway.
Roxy Music - College again. I got Siren first, then got almost everything else over the course of the next 13 years. Ferry, Eno, Manzanera. This band is so ridiculous and overstuffed and bizarre and perfect. This band shouldn't work at all. They sound like a glam rock score to a wealthy European businessman's elegant attempt to describe what would happen if Caligula were in charge of Studio 54. I recommend the cover of Country Life to horny teens everywhere.
Turner Bros. - Unfairly obscure sibling soul group I first heard on WFMU seven or eight or nine years ago while working a shift as a proofreader for the Texas legislature. I quit that job so I could pursue bigger and better things, and I've had nothing but disaster and bad luck since. The message here is give up your hopes and dreams. Settle. Settle for less. You will be able to buy a house and pets and nice things and go on trips and not worry about money all the time if you just settle.
"You Belong To Me," The Honeys, from the compilation Pet Projects: The Brian Wilson Productions - Every version of this song reminds me of Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters doing it up ukulele-style in The Jerk. That sweet little scene always makes me feel okay, if only for those few minutes. Let's conclude with a moment from that film:

Father: Son, now that you're going out into the world, there's
something you should know. You see that?

Navin: Yeah.

Father: That's shit. And this is shinola.

Navin: Shit, shinola.

Father: Son, you're going to be all right.

Charlie Louvin R.I.P.

2011-01-26T16:10:00.001-06:00

American Grungefiti: 1977-1990, Part 1

2011-01-24T22:38:00.005-06:00

Maybe our personalities and interests are branded on our brains from the beginning. We don't change that much. I've always been a loner, obsessed with music and the written word, a lover of absurdity, full of a blinding hatred of sports, always feeling like I haven't been given the complete instructions about how to do anything, dismayed at my own cruel streak, put at ease by a good movie, bad at making good things happen for myself, lazy and ambitious, jealous and empathetic, naive and jaded, able to easily memorize trivia, slow at math, good at making friends but pretty terrible at instigating romantic relationships, too often stuck inside my own head, bored by sports fans, organized religion, and small talk, lover of foods high in saturated fat, easily discouraged by how rigged life can be, fascinated by other people but too hypercritical of their flaws, able to cultivate that sense of entitlement that comes from being the oldest child while despising any other sense of entitlement, a late bloomer who gets what I want but only after a long, long, long wait.
I've always loved music. My mother, a young mother with her first child, quickly learned to strap the headphones on me to calm me down, shut me up, get me to relax and nod off into sleep. My connection to music was intense, still is. I don't know why I connected with it so strongly. My parents weren't particularly avid music fans in the years I lived with them, though my mother was a huge Monkees fan as a young girl and she's had particular favorites throughout her life (Carole King, Bonnie Raitt, Lucinda Williams, Leonard Cohen (though I get the credit of introducing her to the last two)). My dad likes most music when it's playing but has no interest in buying albums, following any musician's career, or seeing live shows. It's something pleasant in the background for him. My mother spent more of her free time reading than listening to music, and my dad always went to the television. I remember my parents having a small collection of records and eight-tracks, though I think I played them more than they did. The only eight-tracks I remember were a Ringo Starr solo album and The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack, which was playing when the eight-track player went kaput, eating the tape and spitting it out onto the living room floor. A disappointing day for me. The vinyl consisted of a small, random assortment of the popular music of the era. I remember Rod Stewart, Roberta Flack, Anne Murray, and some K-Tel country and pop compilations. The three I listened to the most were the Beach Boys' Endless Summer compilation, Billy Joel's 52nd Street, and Chicago's first Greatest Hits album. I would sit on the floor, headphones on, listening to "25 or 6 to 4" over and over again while staring at the cover. I couldn't get enough of that cover (see above). Maybe that cover is a metaphor for my life. I try to make something happen, but it never quite reaches fruition, often being upended in a comedically tragic hijink that has the potential for whatever-the-fuck mirthmaking or a pavement-smushed corpse. I never once made it through Side 2.
My real musical education happened through top 40 radio, TBS's Night Tracks program, my mother's three brothers, my cousin Pat, my friend Clint and his older siblings Jason and Jenny, and my own insatiable curiosity. I sucked up everybody's particular tastes like a sponge, accounting for my (mostly) permanent catholic (little-c) taste (excepting 6th and 7th grades, when I was exclusively into metal). I lost the taste for big-C catholicity pretty early, but that's another story. Well, maybe not. Maybe I never connected with my Catholic upbringing because music was my religion. Once you hear Diamond Dave-era Van Halen, among many rocking others, the Stations of the Cross lacks a certain amount of pizzazz and blistering guitar pyrotechnics. Why confess to a priest about punching your brother when you could confess to killing a man while singing along to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody"?
Speaking of "Bohemian Rhapsody," I once disappointed my entire 8th grade class by ruining an urban legend of a madman living in the abandoned old schoolhouse a mile outside of town. We were told by some high school kids that this madman had molested and murdered two children in the basement and left some demented ramblings on a blackboard. During a friend's birthday party, we climbed in a broken window with some flashlights and looked around. "There it is," someone shrieked. "There's the weird message on the blackboard." We read it, people's minds were blown, and then I ruined everything by pointing out the message's origins. "Dudes," I said, "Those are just the lyrics to a song by Queen. 'Bohemian Rhapsody'? Ever heard of it?" This was pre-Wayne's World. The few holdouts finally admitted defeat when the movie came out and made the song a hit again. Deep down, we all knew the story was bullshit anyway. If we truly believed some guy wanted to rape and murder us and was actually there in that abandoned schoolhouse, only, say, three of us would have climbed in that window. You know, those of us who enjoy madman murder/rapes. Later that night, we had to run from the cops, and I jumped a farmer's fence to hide and almost got kicked by a horse. I need a Freddie Mercury anthem about that, something in the vein of "Death on Two Legs" crossed with "Ogre Battle" with just a pinch of "In the Lap of the Gods ... Revisited." Maybe call it "Thunder Stallion (Horse of Pride)." Somebody exhume that man's corpse and clone him. We don't have enough Freddie Mercurys in this Sufjan Stevens age.
I'm running long and need to do other things before I go to bed, so I'll continue this discussion later. I'm going to write about each of those formative music-exposing entities I mentioned earlier and how they affected me as a child and maybe I'll make it to the 1990s, my original goal, in a couple years. Good night and, remember, if it's too loud, you're too fat. Wait, I got that mixed up. It's only rock and roll, but I want to make love to it, kill it, and eat it to make its unholy power live in me forever.

American Grungefiti Pt. 1 Afterword: Can't We All Just Grunge Along?

2011-01-21T14:29:00.002-06:00

Now that we're all done groaning at my horrible puns, I need to address something that's bothered me since this afternoon. Part of what I'm trying to criticize in my A.V. Club-bashing is dismissive, knee-jerk snark and condescending hipster detachment, but I'm guilty of that same thing with the harsh way I criticized the guy I said I wouldn't bring up anymore. You know the guy, the guy who got the city editor job instead of me lo those many years ago during the electroclash era. My arch-nemesis. I wrote this a few days ago: "...fuck it, the guy sucks, he's a rude prick, a hack writer, and his shitty band irritated me by playing music in my general direction while I was waiting for Oneida to play." I say some harsh things about his writing later, and I stand by my opinion. That's the impression I get from his work, and I have a problem with it, just like I have a problem with other writers, musicians, TV show creators, etc., who use the same tone. But saying that he sucks and that he's a rude prick just wasn't very nice, and I'm a rude prick for saying things like that about a guy I don't know very well who shares more than a few of my mutual friends and friendly acquaintances. My impressions of him being a rude prick are six or seven years old and come from observing his condescending rudeness to some customers at the video store where he used to work and an anecdote about him being rude and dismissive to a friend of mine at a party. The rest of it comes from my own biases about indie scenesters and my jealousy of him getting a job that I was close to getting and really wanted. He gets paid to interview interesting people, while I barely get paid to take abuse from teenage assholes. So there you have it. My long-held grudge against him is part of the petty bitterness I tend to cultivate, which tends to smother my good qualities and keeps me from enjoying life and bettering myself. I'm carrying a lot of shit around in my head right now. A lot of it is my fault, a lot of it comes from the grim reaper drive-by shooting the holy living fuck out of my family tree, a lot of it comes from my parents deciding to turn my family into an insanity factory after years of stability when I really needed them not to do that, and a lot of it is the fault of those goddamn fat cats in Washington and their fat cat corporate buddies taking a giant shit on the economic well-being of the lower and middle classes, a giant shit we will never be able to clean up ever. But, yeah, most of it is my own damn fault. My therapist is going to put me on Prozac or Wellbutrin soon, so that I can clear these cobwebs out of my brain and think like a regular person again, but in the meantime, I need to relax and focus on getting out of this brainfog.
It's hard to do, though, when contemporary culture is so goddamn annoying. I feel connected to the art and culture of, say, the 1700s through the late 1990s, but this last decade, man, what the fuck? I feel so alienated from the present. That's not to say I haven't enjoyed giant steaming piles of this decade's music, movies, etc., but I just don't feel connected to my peers or contemporary culture. (I'm speaking generally here. I'm not talking about my friends.) This is a decade of overloaded content, lack of emotional and intellectual engagement, diffusion, marginalization, and detached, smug, condescending, self-referential to the point of exhaustion, excessive consumption. The fact that Seth McFarlane has three goddamn shows on the same night says a lot about what is happening to us. Whatever happened to real feeling and real thought? Whatever happened to getting your hands dirty instead of standing above it all, smirking like a goon? Why not read one of the classics instead of watching Carnosaur again? Why not watch Carnosaur and enjoy it for the dumb fun it is without spending hours of your life making fun of it in print?
See, it's hard to express any of this stuff without sounding like a goddamn schoolmarm. It's preachy. No one wants to hear "be better." But if you're a bright, clever person alive right now, you can be better. And I can stop feeling sorry for myself and being so damn petty and bitter about everything. I can be better. I am a sanctimonious schoolmarm preacher from soapbox town. Sorry, everybody.
I don't know. I feel like myself in my 3 a.m. music, literature, film, stand-up comedy, delicious food and drink imaginary fortress treehouse party bubble. Whenever I have to leave the bubble, I'm just a blank, unseasoned slab of raw meat. Prop meatboy in the corner. Put down some butcher paper and give him beers until he falls asleep. And wash your hands afterward.

American Grungefiti aka Remembrance of Gruntrucks Past

2011-01-19T22:54:00.002-06:00

When I was younger, I thought of my mom's brothers as kindred spirits of Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider. In these grown-up late nights full of hopelessness and anger, I consider their recent fandom of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, and I sometimes think of them as the guys at the end of the movie, the rednecks in the pickup truck who shoot Fonda and Hopper to death on the side of the road. Memory and nostalgia are a funny thing, and so are the stories you hold onto because you want them to be true. The fact is, my uncles are none of these things, mostly. Is there really much difference between sanctimonious fame whore Sarah Palin playing "Sarah Palin" on TV, and much better human being Peter Fonda playing a sanctimonious hippie in "Easy Rider"? Both are fictional characters whose iconography we use to put a brand on a part of our public identity.
I liked to think of myself in high school as a cynical, rebellious, mysterious, misunderstood outsider who would one day show all those rednecks, jocks, and unrequited loves how special I was. I didn't realize how fundamentally ordinary those feelings were until I had some distance from those years. I was not special, at least not in that way. Lonely teenagers who like rock music are a dime a dozen and were a nickel a baker's dozen in the grunge era (statistic courtesy U.S. News and World Report's "Special Grunge Issue" of February 1992). I believed my story then, and that's fine. It got me through some shitty years that mostly just led to other shitty years, but what can you do? Complain? I started high school in September 1991, the month and year DGC released Nirvana's Nevermind. (Honestly, school started in late August, but sometimes you have to lie to tell the truth.) It set the tone for my next four years.
I've been thinking about 1990s music and my relationship with it after reading a series in the Onion A.V. Club recommended to me by a friend. This series, called "Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation?" and written by Steven Hyden, eerily parallels much of my 1990s relationship to music. I'll get into all that soon, but I probably need to get into something else first.
If you're one of the five people who reads my blogs and/or follows me on Twitter (what a pathetic opening to a sentence), then you probably need an explanation. You? Recommending some articles on the Onion A.V. Club site? But you hate those people. I don't hate those people. I just hate the way they write. It wasn't always that way. I used to read The Onion's website in its entirety every week from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. I was also a fan of the A.V. Club, back when it was one well-researched, in-depth lengthy interview with an interesting person per week and a selection of decent book, film, and music reviews. As time went by and my life got busier, I stopped reading the A.V. Club and just skimmed The Onion. I didn't have a problem with the two sites, I just got out of the habit. In the mid-2000s, stuck in another miserable, dreary, boring job that used none of my skills and regularly stripped me of my dignity and self-respect, I discovered that the A.V. Club's local coverage was expanding to my city. This interesting factoid became a possible life-changer when the A.V. Club advertised a city editor position. I filled out the application and the writing samples and prayed to Satan, Elvis, Jesus, Baby Jesus, and Ted Knight to get me an interview. It worked. I survived the brutal culling and became one of seven people interviewed for the position.
My excitement, hopes, and dreams evaporated about thirty seconds into the interview, which took place in the lobby of a fancy hotel. I was interviewed by A.V. Club editor/writer Josh Modell, who also writes for Spin. He was a nice guy, we had a good email rapport, but the face-to-face interview just did not work. At all. I think I was the fourth or fifth person interviewed, and I felt like the decision had already been made. The interview was brief and perfunctory, I felt awkward trying to make a case for myself in a crowded hotel lobby, and I blew a couple of important questions disguised as small talk when I completely spaced on the last band I'd seen live, good local bands, and a decent restaurant near the hotel. I left feeling bad, though Modell said he'd follow up with a phone interview in a week. He didn't. He did write me a nice email a few weeks later letting me down gently, though, and promising to give my information to the guy who got the job so I could do some freelance work. In a ridiculous bit of irony, the guy who got the city editor job was a guy I pissed off several years ago when I made fun of his "electroclash" band and invited strangers to punch him in the face on this very blog. Was it my belated comeuppance for saying mean things about a stranger in a public forum? Probably, but fuck it, the guy sucks, he's a rude prick, a hack writer, and his shitty band irritated me by playing music in my general direction while I was waiting for Oneida to play.
So here we are. Of course, my history with the A.V. Club makes my criticisms of its product highly suspect. I know this. It could be misconstrued as the sour-grapes face-saving of a sad, bitter, tiny-spirited man. Here's the thing, though. After my extreme disappointment at not getting the job left me, I started reading the A.V. Club again. I had some immediate visceral reactions to its redesign, new focus, and new writing style. These were, in rough order: How do you find anything on this damn site? What's with all the stupid lists? Why are they writing like this? Wow, I really should have checked out the site before applying. I thought it had the same format as it did in 1999. I'm glad I didn't get this job. I'm glad they didn't hire me. I had no business even applying for this job. I didn't do my research and I screwed up the interview. Why is there so much content and yet not much content at all? Why do these people all write like each other?
Here are some specific problems I have with the A.V. Club and its house style. Just to get this out of the way and never bring the guy up again, the aforementioned city editor, recently promoted to the national A.V. Club, who doesn't like me or my comments about his former band very much, is a bad writer. He uses too many cliches and affects a smug tone that suggests he feels superior to his subject matter and his audience. Every sentence is a chance to drip more snark on something, even the stuff he purports to like. There is a failure to truly engage with the subject matter, the audience, and the dirty business of life itself. Everything is fodder for detached, hipster scorn. I know the word hipster gets thrown around so much now it barely has any meaning, but I feel it's appropriate here.
My problems with the rest of A.V. Club, while granting it a certain entertainment value and admitting that it's a fun site to visit when you need to kill ten minutes:
The meaningless Inventory lists. I like lists a lot, but most of these lists are just content for content's sake, so free of meaning and substance they act as little more than a laundry list of pop culture consumption. This has the effect of making everything the same, making everything just product for generating more content which creates a desire for more product to create more content. It has a deadening effect, a numbing of honest response, a junk-food gorge approach to cultural comment and criticism.
The faux-serious debates about shit that does not fucking matter at all. Read this and see if you can find anything worth saving. I couldn't.
The destructive way they write about meaningful art, music, literature, etc. in the exact same tone they write about pop culture trash, junk, and mediocrity. This is a fine line for me to walk. I find lots of artistic beauty and wild, throbbing, beating life in drive-in exploitation pictures, horror movies, pop music, profanity and obscenity, and lowbrow humor. But I make a case for it in my own awkward, personal way. And maybe that's all the A.V. Club is doing, too. I just can't relate, though, to a style that treats Don Quixote, Carl Dreyer, the Now That's What I Call Music series, and Snooki's ghost-written supermarket book as if they're all part of the same continuum and uses such a uniform house style to express it. Everything's disposable/of earth-shattering importance with these writers.
Content, content, content. So much content.
Examples of the house writing style that annoys me so much:
"When I interviewed B.J. Novak a while back I was a little surprised when he said watching Pulp Fiction made him want to be a writer. It was sweet and guileless and not at all hip. The hip response would be a lofty dissertation on how a triple-feature of Preston Sturges or Billy Wilder masterpieces instilled in him a fierce love for the written word. Then I realized that Tarantino made me want to be a writer as well. Pop-culture legend contends that only a few people saw The Sex Pistols play live in their early days or picked up Big Star’s debut when it first came out, but that everyone who did formed a band. But the Sex Pistols and Big Star were cult sensations. Tarantino, in sharp contrast, was a cult filmmaker who conquered the mainstream. He did more than that: He made the mainstream his bitch." -- Nathan Rabin, My Year of Flops Grindhouse review.
I could keep going, but I either made my point or didn't by now, and I can just keep making it or not making it.
Anyway, despite these criticisms, I'm really enjoying Steven Hyden's series about '90s alternative rock. Hyden's writing here comes across as more personal and thoughtful and more connected to actual human experience and emotion than the 12 people writing in one irritating voice style the A.V. Club has been driving into the ditch lately. I want to write about the parallels between Hyden's '90s experiences and mine, and I will do that in future posts. I plan on writing about my relationship with music at different times in my life, not just the '90s, but my reaction to Hyden's series of articles is a good place to start.
To get this thing started, here is every favorite band/artist I ever had:
Age 6: John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band (for their Eddie & the Cruisers soundtrack)
6-7: Michael Jackson
7-11: Van Halen
11-13: Guns N' Roses
13-14: Fishbone
14-18: Nirvana
18-21: Trying out many contenders, including Pavement, Guided By Voices, Neil Young, Dinosaur Jr, The Who, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Elvis Costello & The Attractions, The Afghan Whigs, Minutemen, The Stooges, and so on
21-23: Guided By Voices
24-present: Guided By Voices, Neil Young (tie)
Who will be next? Mantovani? Sufjan Stevens? The Capital Steps? No, I'm good. I think my favorites are locked in for life.

Tales from the ditch

2011-01-17T22:18:00.002-06:00

I tried to start this post three different ways and none of it worked. I feel like shit. That's the only way to say it. I'm not happy. My weeks are falling into a regular routine. I'm unhappy Sunday afternoon through Thursday evening. I'm happy Thursday night through Sunday morning, with brief flashes of anxiety and portents of doom and gloom, but mostly happy. I'm not lazy. It's not about hating work, physical or mental work. I haven't had any work since before Christmas anyway. It's about the days where I own my time versus the days where I don't. Too much of my life is about waiting. I'm sick of waiting. I do things to change my life. I take active steps. I seek outside help. Maybe I should just accept that I may never have a job that means anything to me and figure out some way of keeping it from destroying me. Maybe that's not even why I feel bad so often. I don't know why. I think mediocrity makes me sad. My own. The world's. I get a lot of pleasure from eating a strip of bacon or from that moment one minute and 54 seconds into Big Star's "Daisy Glaze." I get pleasure from things like that. Those things seem more important than the other things that are supposed to be important. We, sorry for using the royal "we" here, have created such a baffling and unnecessary system of emotional bureaucracy in our interactions with each other and most of it destroys real pleasure. There are 7 billion of us, and I'm not even counting the dead ones. That is ridiculous. How many guys on TV analyzing football stats do we want? How are you doing? Fine. How about you? Can't complain. Working hard or hardly working? A little bit of both. I hear it might rain later this week. That's good, we could use the rain. We'll probably get it on the weekend. Seems like it always works out that way. How's your oldest? He's a lawyer. OH MY GOD THERE'S A SHORTAGE OF LAWYERS! OH MY GOD ONE THING WE NEED IS MORE LAWYERS THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH LAWYERS WE ARE EXPERIENCING A TERRIFYING LAWYER SCARCITY LEATHER COUCHES BOATS CABLE FLOORTILE MORTGAGES AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH BLOOD EVERYWHERE BLOOD EVERYWHERE!
Thanks, everybody. I feel a little better now.

R.I.P. Broadcast's Trish Keenan

2011-01-14T11:12:00.000-06:00

I'm not dead

2011-01-06T21:06:00.003-06:00

Feeling a little bit better today. Still have a lot of problems, but I didn't want to leave that last depressing post at the top of the page for very long.
Good things about the Xmas trip:
Long road trip with my wife and a kick-ass music playlist. Only got irritable twice (first one - sleepy, second one - hungry).
Seeing my mom and dad, most of my cousins, aunts, and uncles, and their 12 million babies and small children.
Getting serious love from my mom's cat.
Seeing my brother and sister-in-law. Watching Die Hard 1 and 2 with them and eating lots of stuff.
Playing some drums.
Seeing some good friends and friendly acquaintances I don't get to see much.
Attending a small gathering of friends that somehow turned into a faux-celebrity roast, complete with live microphone. Several of us performed impromptu stand-up routines, some acoustic music was played, stories were told, and then a dance party broke out. I seem to have one great spontaneous friend night every year at the holidays, and that is something to be happy about.

Please enjoy this photo of hot dogs.

Rehearsals for Retirement 3: Depression is the Bandit

2011-01-02T23:43:00.002-06:00

Not too interested in the claims I made in the last installment. Don't want to tell you about my problems. I'm really goddamn tired of being depressed, but the limbo (not the dance/beach activity, the other limbo) I'm stuck in will have to be endured until some volcano or admissions office or bow and arrow accident or latest useless employer decides to roll back the ball I tossed their way years or minutes ago. I'm having severe to moderate anxiety and the odd panic attack these recent weeks, though, so that's something. You'd think sorrow and anger would be enough, but I guess it was time to add a little spice. Eat a bowl of dicks, everybody. Goodnight for now. I'm going to refill my bourbon and move over to the movie blog. It seems the year ended (I learned this because I was in a car for a long time in order to hear a lot of small talk from people I don't see much anymore during some vague pagan/Christian/materialist ceremonial hybrid -- it's not all bad, I learned that someday I may have a leather couch and until that day I am human excrement*), and I may have to write a little wrap-up to keep my hands from stabbing my eyes with forks or shoving too much cheese in my mouthhole. I don't understand anything about anything anymore, except that it is not worth doing. Blah blah blah from every hole that can expel something, and remember, kids don't let kids have kids. Goodnight, jerks (said by me while looking into a mirror that faces another mirror).

*I am consumed by the darkness right now, but there were also good things. They will come back to me when I am feeling better.

R.I.P. Captain Beefheart

2010-12-18T00:16:00.002-06:00

Don Van Vliet 1941-2010
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?

Rehearsals for Retirement 2: Depression Boogaloo

2010-12-13T01:10:00.002-06:00

Hey, everybody. I know you've all been frozen into inaction, awaiting my next installment about my ongoing battle with depression, because there is nothing more exciting than hearing the complaints of sad people. It really draws you in, makes you want to get close. Hey, you're hypothetically saying right now, I want to hang out with that guy who mopes around and sleeps a lot. I bet he really knows how to party.
Yeah, you know the drill. A lot of you have the same problems. It's a little embarrassing. There's something egocentric and self-absorbed and just plain dull about being sad for no good reason. It's also embarrassing that my sometimes manageable, sometimes debilitating problems with self-inflicted doom and gloom have sort of coincided with a friend and former coworker's diagnosis of cancer, which she has handled with humor, positivity, and grace. You can read about it on her blog if you like: http://365making.blogspot.com/
This is someone with a real reason to be depressed, I sometimes think, and she's kicking A's and taking N's (fake teen slang I made up for kicking ass and taking names) and beating the thing in a very pragmatic and focused way while I can't get my shit together because I've never liked any of my adult jobs and I've been dealt a few recent shitty life cards that everyone gets and half of everyone gets, respectively (deaths in the family, divorced parents).
That's one way to think about it. But there's another way, too. I have legitimate psychological and physical reasons for feeling bad. I'm sad, angry, and full of anxiety for a lot of different reasons, and some of you are, too. I've mostly shied away from getting into the nuts and bolts of my personal life on this blog (maybe this isn't as true as I think it is, maybe this blog is nothing but my personal interior life), but a lot of things have been hitting me at the right time, and I'm going to talk about this shit. My friend is doing a lot of people a lot of good by writing honestly about her day-to-day struggles with cancer. She's giving people hope (I mean this in a non-cliched way), letting people who are going through the same things as her know they're not alone (also mean this in a non-cliched way), and getting into the everyday, nuts-and-bolts, pragmatic minutiae about what it's really like to deal with it everyday. I think it's a great thing, and I like reading about it. So, I'm going to try to do the same thing about my depression.
I have very contradictory personal qualities that sometimes make me feel like I'm two separate people. I don't mean this in a split-personality way. I'm not Sybil, or Dean Martin/Nutty Professor, or Jeckyll/Hyde. You're not talking to Dr. Mystery one day and Dr. Solution another day. I just mean that I am extremely shy and reserved and also a loudmouth party animal. I am scared of girls and a lover of the company of women. I hate people and I love people. I find family both a pillar of strength and a ridiculous concept that makes little practical or emotional sense. I love music and see music as a repetitive trap. I love movies and see movies as an expensive decadent distraction. I love literature and see literature as an exhausted dog chasing its own tail until it dies and then some crazed scientist shocks it back into life, at which point it repeats the tail-chase. I love friends and see friends as enablers of bad habits and/or buzzkill police cops. I don't even know if this paragraph is making any fucking sense anymore. I am a modest person who is embarrassed by materialism and self-promotion and an attention-craving egomaniac who would roll around on a bed full of thousand dollar bills and then bellyflop into my living room hot tub while having the most expensive food item in the world delivered to my penthouse suite in fantasy town if that option were available. I am full of empathy, love, and kindness and also full of anger and violence, most of it self-directed. I am intelligent and I am an intellectual fraud who uses pithy one-liners to camouflage my ignorance about anything that could ever benefit any actual living person. I am a good friend and a bad friend. I am a good man and a mediocre man. I feel like two homunculi are punching each other in the dicks over and over again in my chest cavity. Neither one of those little bastards is ever going to punch hard enough to win.
My personal life is mostly a success. If I were a religious wingnut asshole, I would say that I am blessed to have the wife and friends and siblings I have. Instead, I'll just say I am grateful and truly lucky to have these people in my life. I rarely get bored. I have a lot of interests that I am balls-to-the-wall, TNT, highway-to-hell, back-in-black, whole-lotta-rosie, high-voltage excited as shit about. I play drums. I write. People have been complimentary about the way I do both of these things. Not a lot of people, but the right kind of handful of people. I'm trying to be a better person.
My professional life is a goddamn trainwreck. For an adult man with a solid credit history, two college degrees, no criminal record, and no children, I am somehow to money what the football is to Charlie Brown's foot. I am nearing my mid-thirties, and I have a few hundred dollars, no house, no pets, no real job, and no fucking idea what to do next. I am miserably unhappy at every practical, 9-to-5 job I try, and I can't even seem to find those jobs lately. Friends my age are buying houses, buying cats and dogs, and going on wonderful international trips while I curl into a fetal position, listen to Motorhead, watch "King of the Hill" reruns, and sleep. I don't want kids, I don't want an expensive car, I don't want an office job, but I do want a nice, cozy home of my own and I want to get out of the fucking continent just once in my motherfucking goddamn shitty little life and I want, no, fuck "want," I NEED a job that I like. Mediocre people say dumb shit when I express my job woes. I need to stress here that none of these people are my friends. Some of them are family. They say, "You know, no job is perfect. Life is full of ups and downs. Put all your platitudes in a row and look on the bromide side of life. No job is going to solve all your problems. Be happy with what you have." They're under the impression that I've said my life goal is to find a perfect job that will solve all my problems. Listen motherfuckers, I may be crazier than shit, but I'm a fucking realist. I want a good job that will solve my bad job/zero jobs problem. That's it. That's all I ask.
But that's not all I ask, because I'm a human being, and we're all crazy. I also want my relatives to stop dying, I want my parents to remarry and move back into the house I grew up in, I want to write the best book in the world, I want a great director to make a movie of that book, I want every drummer in the world to grovel at my feet, I want every woman in the world to ask me out so I can reject them all and say hey ladies I already have a wife in your face better luck next time this is what you get for rejecting me in high school, and I want to never, ever be sad or angry again. Also, I want scientists to discover that bacon cheeseburgers actually lower cholesterol. And I want every person who's ever mocked me, been rude to me, ignored me, insulted me, etc. to catch fire right now. And I want some nachos.
Also, I don't want any of these things. Not even the nachos.
As always, I am about 380 miles from what I intended to write about, which is a straightforward discussion of what it's like to be depressed, my first-ever experiences with seeing a psychiatrist, the panic attack I had yesterday (uncharacteristic of me and only the second one I've ever experienced) and its part in one of the weirdest days I've had in recent memory, and how "The Sopranos," Achewood, Twitter, and Marc Maron's WTF podcast are helping me live. Thanks in advance for reading this insane, self-indulgent drivel. The next installment will be much better. I hope.

Holy shit, this actually happened

2010-12-05T21:41:00.004-06:00

A former drinking buddy of mine when I was a senior in high school and on breaks from college just punched his estranged wife in the face in public, hid out from the police in Montana, tried to sneak back to town, was spotted by the cops, led them on a high-speed chase at 102 mph, broke one of the rear wheels off the car after hitting a curb and kept going at 102 mph anyway, eventually spun out on a dirt road, and got out of the car and waved a gun at the police before being talked down and arrested.

Peter Christopherson R.I.P.

2010-11-29T22:45:00.002-06:00

Also, R.I.P. Leslie Nielsen.

Rehearsals for retirement

2010-11-14T23:12:00.003-06:00

I'm having a rough time. It's not a closely guarded secret. I'm sure you can tell just by glancing at my face. Unhappiness is leaking out of me. Here's my last five years, professionally: Unemployed. Underemployed. Back in school. Unemployed. Underemployed. Attempting to return to school again. Here's my last five years, family version: Aunt dead. Grandmother dead. Great-uncle dead. Other great-aunt and uncle in nursing home. Other grandmother dead. Grandfather dead. Other distant relatives and family friend dead. Can't get over my parents' divorce. Angry about it all the time. Thinking about family makes me want to start fires with my mind. Philip Larkin knew the score:
"They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself."

I think I'll get that poem tattooed on my face. It couldn't make me any less employable. I'm box office poison.

Here's the story of my last two months, but I have to begin by going back three years. I went back to school then to be a high school English teacher. I wanted summers and holidays off to write and play music and stay up late and drink lots of beer and read and watch movies and go to rock shows and travel. I wanted a job with autonomy and impact and variety and necessity. I didn't know that both the state and federal government had turned public education into a giant, slobbering, idiotic clusterfuck of standardized tests, standardized test preparation, lockstep lesson plans, nochildleftbehindisms, and increasingly bureaucratic requirements. I'd heard people bemoan the extent of standardized preparation, but I thought they were exaggerating. They weren't. I didn't know that a sophomore English teacher at a particular school would be teaching the same book and the same activities on the same day as every other sophomore English teacher in that school, for example. Additionally, a well meaning but insidious Oprahfication was invading from within. Close reading, intensive writing, and group discussion is being tossed aside in favor of silly shit like poster making, dioramas, drawing, making a Facebook page for a character, etc., because some kids don't like to read and write and their "multiple literacies" need to be respected and encouraged. People look at me like I'm a Neanderthal Archie Bunker Sean Hannity when I express my concerns about the latter style of teaching, but I'm seeing kids in most of the schools I work in that can't even read at a sixth grade level. Between the "run schools like a business"/testing/test preparation/accountability bullshit from conservatives and the group hug/everyone is equal/no child should fail/if reading is hard, we should stop teaching so much of it/hippie nonsense bullshit from the dumb faction of liberals, kids are getting screwed. This screwjob is making them dumber, and dumber kids are more immature, and immature kids act like disrespectful cretins. In the early 1990s, which is not a long time ago, I went to high school. We took one standardized test at the end of the year. We read, we wrote, we practiced grammar, we talked, we discussed, we debated. We read. We wrote. My classmates and I can read and write well enough to function in everyday society. My English teachers had the freedom to pick their own books, write their own lesson plans, and create their own assignments. They could collaborate and share with other teachers if they wished, but they weren't forced to teach the same exact package as every other teacher in their discipline. Those days seem to be gone forever. This is not what I signed up for, and I don't want to do it. I no longer have any interest in pursuing this career, which is okay because there aren't any fucking jobs in the place I live anyway. That place is called everywhere on earth right now, 2010, but it's also called Austin, Texas, if you want to get specific.
Since last January, I have been substitute teaching at nearly every high school in the city. I don't why it took me so long to realize that this is an impossible way to live. The psychic damage of having to win over a fresh supply of teenage strangers every single day is possibly killing me. Some of these students are kind, sweet, funny, curious, likable, interesting, thoughtful, and intelligent. The others are hostile, cruel, indifferent, stupid, hateful, dull, angry, entitled, rude, violent, confrontational, lazy, and dishonest. Every day, I hear and see lies, demands, threats, mockery, racism, homophobia, staggering ignorance, apathy. I have to babysit a room full of emotional cripples with a pile of irrelevant busywork. I have to be an authority figure in a system that doesn't work, but I'm also a peon because I'm the daily hired help. I don't make the lessons. I don't see the kids every day. I'm a stranger. I can't build day-to-day relationships. I have no real way to impose order and discipline other than calling the office to remove a disruptive student. I have a lot of interesting conversations with kids. I hear a lot of funny things. I have a good rapport with the kids who aren't jerks, and I've been able to win over some tough classes and defuse some tense situations. But each day is always my first day, and too often I'm treated like a subhuman, like I'm something on the bottom of their shoe, like I work for them. I can't believe some of the things I see. Where do these kids think they are? I've seen a girl thrust her pelvis up and down while she was sprawled across the back of her desk, loudly describing the oral sex she'd received from her boyfriend the night before. When I told her she needed to return to her seat and change the subject of her monologue for something more appropriate, she looked at me like I was asking the most unreasonable question she'd ever heard. "Why?" she said, her lip curling up into a sneer. "It ain't your fucking business." I've seen a boy get a phone call from his mother in the middle of class and tell her in detail about the beating he was going to give to another kid at the school. He then laughed and shouted across the room to his friend that his mother told him to "whoop that little pussy ass bitch." I heard another student tell the class his mother died the previous day, but he wasn't sad because she was "a bitch who left his dad" and he hoped to one day "piss on her grave." One more? A student calmly and happily told the class about how he and his mother stole money and drugs from her ex-boyfriend while he was lying on the ground unconscious after an unsuccessful attempt at committing suicide by drinking Clorox. The schools where I make most of my money are a non-stop parade of misery, a 3D billboard advertising the dehumanizing effects of poverty and marginalization. Most of these kids will stare at their desks for the entire 90 minutes instead of doing any of their work. They leave without permission, they swear and yell and talk about their sex lives and their drug use and who they're going to fight.
I lost my temper last Friday morning while teaching a particularly awful group of kids. They refused to acknowledge my presence. They didn't look at me or stop talking when I gave directions, they were shooting dice and betting on it with real wads of cash, they were coming and going like they were at a strip mall, they were mocking me and calling me names. I called them assholes, told them they would be working at McDonald's if they were lucky, and that other kids their age knew how to act like human beings. That finally shut them up for a few minutes. I had no chance of making that room work after that, though. I lost my temper. When you visibly lose your temper in front of them, they have the upper hand forever. After their shocked silence ended, they realized they'd beaten me and went back to shooting dice. One kid yelled "Fuck this shit," and walked out. I hear you, kid. There are two schools I love, schools where I almost always have a good experience, where even the challenging days are just reacting to normal teenage bullshit. But most of my jobs are just babysitting, busy work, and misery and degradation.
The moment after I called a roomful of kids "assholes," I didn't feel embarrassed or shaky or excited or worried or any other emotion you'd expect. I just felt devoid of anything. This is my life now. I don't feel like I have any control over it, and I don't even feel like I'm participating in it. Here it is. It's this thing, this abstract thing, and I'm just standing over here to the side watching it. A few weeks ago, I started feeling aches in my joints, my back. I'd get home, do some work on grad school applications, sit in a chair or on the couch, and fall asleep. I'd wake up and it would be 5 a.m. I just kept falling asleep in odd places for odd pockets of time. I seem to be past that now. I don't know where this reunion with sadness is heading. It's a weird one. The other ones made more sense. I'm thinking about seeing a therapist for the first time. I'm not really comfortable with the idea, but I'm trying to give my wife a break by not keeping a running director's commentary of The Troubles of Me on continuous loop. I'm in a weird state of acceptance about the way I feel, like it might be permanent so I'll just step aside and let it do its thing while I sleepwalk alongside it. Maybe I'm fetishizing my own misery, keeping it going. If I could just live in that sweet spot between Friday morning and Sunday afternoon. I can keep the past and the future away on those days. I meant to tie this in with rock and roll and The Sopranos. I guess I'll have to write another post tomorrow. Maybe as sloppy and all over the place as this one. I'm afraid to go to bed. It's that job-hating thing. When I have a job I hate, which has been the case for most of my job-having life, I get stuck in this impossible situation at night. I stay up too late because I know that if I go to bed and fall asleep, I'll soon wake up and have to go to do something I don't want to do. If I just stay up a little longer, I can keep it away a little longer. But it's just stupid and crazy because I don't get enough sleep and I still have to go do that thing that's killing my soul, only this time I'm doing that thing with no energy and I'm tired and it's even worse because I'm so goddamn sleepy. Then I look at the clock and it's later and later and I turn into a deer in the headlights and I freeze and the car hits me anyway or it swerves and runs off the road and hits a tree, and the car bursts into flames, and it's not even a car, it's a mini-van, and there's a whole family in there, a mother and father and two little boys and two little girls and a couple of puppies and three kittens and a few hamsters and a bunny and an orphan hitchhiker they picked up on the road whose dream was to one day see California and the van explodes and the mother and father and kids and orphan and puppies and kitties hamsters and the bunny burn to a crisp in the mini-van inferno and all because I didn't go to bed at midnight like a sensible goddamn human being. I'm going to bed. To be continued.

Overheard at work

2010-11-05T17:26:00.003-05:00

I heard these things from students in a "gifted and talented" English class:

"I got Alex to pour water on himself to prove to me he wasn't a robot."

"I'm going to draw a cat on my assignment to add some pizazz."

"Q: How was it after I left?
A: Pretty gay. Not boring gay, just full of homoerotic tension."

R.I.P. Gregory Isaacs

2010-10-25T16:51:00.001-05:00

R.I.P. Ari Up

2010-10-20T23:06:00.001-05:00

Always bad news

2010-10-18T21:23:00.003-05:00

One of my mother's two sweet dogs was bitten by a rattlesnake this past weekend and may not pull through. Everyone in my family has been relentlessly shat upon by life for the last five years, and I'm so goddamn tired of it. Death, divorce, illness, unemployment, depression, no place left in the world for us and our non-marketable skills in the dying days of capitalism, and the other stuff that's always there and annoying. At least leave our fucking pets alone. Maybe we'll catch a break and my mom's dog will start producing some red blood cells by tomorrow. If one more shitty thing happens, I'm going to just get in my car and go on a multi-state crime spree. We bought new tires and got an oil change on Friday, so now would be the time to do it. This world can be such a toilet. I don't know why, but when bad things happen to dogs, it makes me much sadder than when these same things happen to people.

Public Service Announcement

2010-10-12T16:55:00.002-05:00

Disclaimer: The following statement does not apply to all people I know with children, but it does apply to too many people I'm Facebook friends with who have children. Having said all that, it's now time to pick a fight with some breeders! Yippy-ki-yi-yay! (Sounds of six-shooters firing into the air and spurred boots dancing on gravel.)

Many friends, acquaintances, and relatives with newborns and toddlers like to post links on Facebook to smug little articles with titles like, "Dear Friends, This Is Why I Don't Have Any Free Time Anymore," or "Why I Can't Hang Out Anymore," or "Former Friends, Live Your Empty Bacchanalian Selfish Lives of Self-Pleasure While I Perform Selfless Acts of Child-Rearing" or "Hey, Selfish Monster! Look at All the Time I Spend on Others," or "I'm Having a Profound Experience You Know Nothing About that Takes Up All My Time While You Get Drunk on Lone Star and Attend Das Racist Shows, You Empty Cretins." Granted, the last three are just subtext. The first two titles are a bit more accurate. At any rate, here's my public service announcement about these condescending linked articles:
Yeah. We knew you were going to have a lot less free time when you had kids. We understand that. What we didn't know was that you would turn into smug dicks with a martyr complex. You're not doing anything unusual or praiseworthy. Our parents just had some kids and got on with raising them without all the self-satisfaction and the isolation. Oh yeah, and my life is not a hollow, empty shell. I can do what I want, when I want. So there.
Okay, so this message some of you are sending may be unintentional, but it's there, and it's annoying. Let's all just do what we do, and hang out together more often. Kids are cute and funny when they're not crying or whining or shitting themselves, and us childless freaks won't break them or hurt them. You got your thang. I got my thang. None of those thangs are that goddamn special. The end.

Soul Power

2010-10-02T04:42:00.003-05:00

I've already written a post about how fantastic the Chicago-based Numero Group reissue label is, so I'll spare you the fanboy pants-wetting. However, I would like to say a little something about a song by the Majestic Arrows called "I'll Never Cry For Another Boy." Two versions of this song show up on the second Eccentric Soul compilation, called Eccentric Soul: The Bandit Label. The first is the finished, zazzed-out, Philly soul-style studio version, which is pretty good. The second is a rough demo version, which is one of the most beautiful goddamn things that's ever issued forth from a human person's facial cavity. It's a song that will stop you from moving for its entire duration, if you can get off Facebook long enough to pay some fucking attention. Unfortunately, Numero Group is a bit snooty about YouTube posts of their songs, and they're quick to take them down, which is my only beef with these fine people, so I can't post one of the best things I've ever heard. I can post this minute-long clip of two little girls partially covering the demo version, which should make you feel pretty good if you aren't a giant dickhead. One girl has an incredible voice for a little girl or for anybody who's born a bona fide human. The other little girl is still too little to have any kind of singing voice but is pretty adorable and knows when to stay out of the way of the other girl's big moments. So far, this clip only has 187 views, while Seth Green pretending to be the "leave Britney alone" guy has almost 4 million views. What the fuck is up with that? You people are morons. Here's a little bit of magic in our non-magical times:

Rest In Peace, Grandpa Joe

2010-09-29T21:56:00.002-05:00

The last of my grandparents passed away peacefully in his sleep in a western Nebraska nursing home early last evening while I was at the sold-out Pavement show here in Austin. It was an exceedingly strange day. My wife spent three hours on lockdown at her work near the University of Texas campus because a ski-masked 19-year-old math major took an AK-47 to campus, fired several rounds into the air and the ground, and then shot himself in the stairwell of the sixth floor of the Perry-Castaneda Library. I was fortunately unaware of the situation until it was over because I was substitute teaching a Chinese class for some of the worst students I'd ever encountered. Security had to come in and pat down each student and look through each bag because an iPod and charger were stolen during the class. The classroom teacher left me with only enough work to fill fifteen minutes of three 100-minute classes, so I had a horrible combination of out-of-control kids with nothing to do. I had to guard the window so they wouldn't jump out. Fortunately, they liked me better than the other substitutes and school officials who occasionally came in to help me out. They bore the brunt of the abuse. I was very pleased by the Pavement concert, though I was again denied a live take on "Half a Canyon," my favorite Pavement song. (In their defense, the song would be a bitch to pull off.) It was disorienting to see a huge, sold-out show for a band I saw in tiny clubs during their pre-reunion existence, but they deserve it. I came home from the show to discover that my maternal grandfather had died. His death is a big marker of change in our family's history. The old generation is gone. My parents and aunts and uncles are slowly taking its place, while my siblings and cousins and I move slowly toward middle age. My cousins have been procreating like mad, so the youth are well represented, and a handful are turning into adolescents. This is the way things work. It's not a tragedy, but it is sad to see time move past and people go away for good.
I spent the majority of my elementary school Saturday afternoons watching professional wrestling and old movies with my grandfather. I was much closer to his wife, my grandmother, who died two years ago, but Grandpa Joe was a warm guy who loved his grandkids and had a hard time reconciling his personal failings and mistakes and sometimes strained relationships with his children with the guy he was later. He drove across most of the country and parts of Mexico and Canada as a truck driver, and a map of the continent hanging up in the hallway of his trailer was thick with pushpins indicating places he'd worked. When my sister moved to Wisconsin a few years ago, he mentioned driving a shipment of frozen rabbits to a rural Wisconsin mink farm. By the time he'd arrive, some of the rabbits had thawed, and the stench was apparently ungodly. Once the rabbits had been deposited, he picked up cases of Schlitz to deliver to Nebraska liquor stores. My last substantial memory of my grandfather is watching Mr. Smith Goes to Washington with him and my wife two Christmases ago. It was the first Christmas without my grandmother, and I had a hard time sitting on that couch knowing that she wasn't in that physical space anymore and wouldn't be again.
My grandfather's death yesterday was the period on a sentence that began on New Year's Eve, 1995, when my paternal grandfather died. I have some tools now to cope with and understand my parents' eventual deaths, and my own, but I can wait a while, a long while, for these other sentences to start.

Coincidentally, the song that will open and close my grandfather's funeral (which, as usual, I won't be able to attend for financial/educational reasons), has been posted on YouTube by a user named "papajoesvideos."

An apology to tacos

2010-09-23T22:14:00.003-05:00

I was feeling pretty rotten last week, and I said some things I didn't mean. My wife urged me to retract one of my statements. Three days ago, a good friend emailed me and demanded this same retraction. I owe it to them, I owe it to myself, and I owe it to you to make it right. Mostly, I owe it to tacos. That's right. I was in such a pit of despair that I actually said "fuck tacos." This was clearly a mistake. I spoke in haste. I spoke incorrectly. I've never been disappointed by a taco. Even a shitty taco satisfies on a base level. One time, some friends had us over for fried chicken. We got too excited and started frying everything. We fried a day-old, half-eaten breakfast taco, and it was delicious. Just look at that photo up there. Don't you want to just stick your face in your computer screen and eat the hell out of that taco plate? Of course you do. Tacos, please accept my sincere apologies. You have what it takes to make everything a little bit of alright. I love you.

On an unrelated note, my sister-in-law designed a fascinator that was worn on television by Kat Von D. If she hadn't married my brother, I'd never have known what a fascinator is, but I'm glad I now have that knowledge. This is pretty exciting news. Read about it here.

aldshfjajfaofjweohfonbfnb

2010-09-15T23:08:00.003-05:00

Sorry about all the self-pity. I guess I might delete that post sometime, but I'm going to leave it up for now.

Ffffffffffffffpppppppppppppppp

2010-09-15T22:24:00.002-05:00

Things are really getting bad again, like they were when I was 18 and 19 and so sad and lonely that I couldn't bring myself to do anything except sit on the bed and stare at the wall. The problem this time is my professional life and the frightening scarcity of jobs and my disappearing finances and my own waning enthusiasm for everything. I'm tired of sucking. I'm tired of substitute teaching. I'm tired of teenagers. I'm tired of filling out applications for jobs that will never happen. I think I'm just about burned out on everything. I want to move away. Far away. I'm tired and done. Fuck teachers and teaching. Fuck secondary education. Fuck colleges and universities. Fuck George W. Bush. Fuck Barack Obama. Fuck music. Fuck movies. Fuck books. Fuck the outdoors. Fuck tacos. Fuck you. And fuck me, too.
I don't know. I think this city might secretly be evil. I wonder if I would have been even a tiny bit successful if I'd lived somewhere else.