Middleage Fanclub - Unemployedesque

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

"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

Blogdom's biggest asshole

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

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

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.

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

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.

American Grungefiti: 1977-1990, Part 1

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?

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

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

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

I'm not dead

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

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

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

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

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.

Also, R.I.P. Leslie Nielsen.

Rehearsals for retirement

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

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

R.I.P. Ari Up

Always bad news

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

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

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

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

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.

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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

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.

R.I.P. Roundup 2

I'm late on all these people, who have all been dead for at least a month. I'm a lazy blogger.

I already mentioned Kinks bassist Pete Quaife's death, but I embedded a song, "Australia," from the first Kinks album after he quit the band. Oof. Here's a song he actually played on:



R.I.P. steel guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Ben Keith. He played on Patsy Cline's "I Fall to Pieces" and many other fine recordings. His most faithful employer was Neil Young, who worked with him off and on for almost 40 years. He died of a heart attack at Young's house.



R.I.P Phelps "Catfish" Collins, the lesser-known older brother of Bootsy. He was in James Brown's band at a particularly shit-hot time in the Godfather of Soul's career. He was also in Parliament, Funkadelic, and Bootsy's Rubber Band and played with Deee-Lite.



R.I.P. cartoonist John Callahan.

...

...any lie will receive almost instant corroboration and almost instant collaboration if the maintenance of it results in the public enjoyment of someone else's pain, someone else's humiliation.

words by Dennis Potter, from his BBC miniseries The Singing Detective, directed by Jon Amiel

Paradiddling

What's the difference between a toilet seat and a drummer?
A toilet seat only has to deal with one asshole at a time.

Ba-dum bum ching!