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

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?

"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...

... 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

"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.

Losing it

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

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

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

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

Half Full

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

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

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!