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.

aldshfjajfaofjweohfonbfnb

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!

Highlights from the Wrestlemania 13 play-by-play

You don't know anything about music. You think Fleetwood Mac is the newest burger at McDonald's.

That speech was so boring, Christopher Reeve just got up and walked out.

Quit chewing gum on TV, you idiot.

They filmed that movie Gorillas in the Mist in Chyna's shower.

I'm lowering my tie to half-mast for that joke you just told.

When you slammed that door on my head, you slammed the door on our friendship.

More Pekar

Here's Harvey Pekar's last appearance on David Letterman's show, shortly after Letterman moved to CBS. I feel like a part of my sense of humor and enjoyment of absurdity was forged at least minutely by Letterman's show. I've always been a night owl, even when I was tiny, and I saw a lot of influential weirdos for the first time on Letterman's show on nights when I didn't have to be at school the next day. Letterman was pretty adventurous in his choice of guests, at least until he retreated entirely into show biz tropes and let Conan O'Brien and the corporatization of every genuine emotion steal his thunder. However, as much as I enjoyed Letterman's show and his sense of absurdity, I have to admit that he's a true failure of a human being. Watch his paranoid, self-centered, insecure smug condescension leak out of him when he's forced to cede control to anyone who has anything besides Hollywood bullshit to say. He's more than happy to puncture Hollywood bullshit when he's the one in charge, but when he's forced to acknowledge his own complicity by a guest too clever to bully, he turns into a schoolyard jerk. Harvey Pekar was someone who was honest about his own numerous faults, a real human being to admire, a chronicler of human beings. So much of popular culture is about dehumanization, especially every single Hollywood movie (with maybe 12 exceptions)from the last 15 years, which all look like they were directed by the same dim-witted asshole (Christopher Nolan?), and every social interaction is turning into numb desensitization. Some people remind us that we're actually people, and not a bunch of fucking mouth breathers. Harvey Pekar was one of them, and it's too bad he's dead, even though we're all going where he's gone and it's no real tragedy for an old man to die. R.I.P. Harvey Pekar. (This post brought to you by alcohol and maudlin self-pity.)



UPDATE: Letterman always referred to Pekar's comics as "little." Pekar wrote once that Letterman was dumbfounded Pekar had to have a day job. He thought it was an act. He thought that anyone who published something from a major press was a working professional in that field. That says a lot about Letterman's limitations and show-biz blinders. Watch how Pekar grabs his comic away from Letterman after his intro. He's taking back ownership of his work. The show would never have given him that copy back. They probably thought it was some kind of industry freebie, but that prop was a working guy's living.

R.I.P. Andy Hummel

Dear Grim Reaper, please stop killing awesome Southerners.

More blog content

Like I mentioned earlier today, I was out of town for a while. Here are a few things that happened.

Someone stole two outdoor chairs from us the morning we left.

I used a bathroom in northern Oklahoma that was the dirtiest I'd ever seen. There were substantial amounts of human feces in the sink. That's right. Poop that came out of a living human man's butthole was placed in the hand-washing receptacle. If you are that human man and you are reading this post, I want to hear your reasons and anything else you want to share about your overall philosophy of life as it is lived by you, the guy who puts shit in the public sink.

On my way back to the in-laws from Taco John's, a Midwest Mexican fast food chain, an old man hit the back of my car with his car at a red light. Fortunately, it caused no damage. The old man looked confused. The only thing he said was, "My goddamn foot slipped off the pedal." Mexican fast food chains in the Midwest often feature Mexifries on their menus. Mexifries are basically tater tots rubbed in vaguely Mexican spices. You then dip them in cheese sauce or salsa. Sometimes, they are flatter and rounder than your average tater tot, sometimes they aren't. After living in the Southwest for 10 years, I tend to have a much lower opinion of Midwest-style Mexican food than I used to, but Mexifries are the real deal, and I miss them greatly. Get with it, Texas. Join the Mexifry revolution. They are a worthy garbage food, and should be available in all 50 states, even Florida.

The following graffiti was written on the wall in a gas station bathroom in southern Kansas:
"New World Order
Prankster Apocalypse
Topple this Megalopolis
A new level of consciousness"

I think I've been mildly depressed every day of my life since I was about 9. Anybody know a fun way to slowly commit suicide? I'm looking to die around the age of 82, so I hope that gives you some framework for brainstorming ways for me to do this thing. Your margin of error can be two years in either direction.

Blog Content

I just scanned the headlines on Yahoo news, and apparently Brad Pitt just shaved his beard. Can you fucking believe that? Who knew? I mean, wow. Where were you when you first heard that, right? Mark it down. Your grand-nephews are going to be asking about that shit. He shaved it, man. He just went for it, and shaved it, and we're never going to be the same. Ever. Fucking ever, man. This is the dawning of a new day.

R.I.P. Roundup

I was away for a while attending a couple of weddings. Now I'm back. Several fine people died while I was gone and in the past week when I've been back home but too brain-fried to understand how to do any basic things, like talk to people or type.
R.I.P. Harvey Pekar. He was found dead early this morning. His American Splendor comic, jazz articles, and Letterman appearances made a huge impact on me when I was in junior high, and I've kept up with his work ever since. I discovered him about the same time The Simpsons first showed up on TV, when I bought a stack of American Splendors at Halley's Comics while visiting my uncle in Colorado. An important year for cultural influences. Paul Giamatti is no Harvey Pekar, but the movie's pretty good, too.



R.I.P. Garry Shider, singer/guitarist with Parliament/Funkadelic, famed for wearing only a diaper while performing live.



R.I.P. Kinks bassist Pete Quaife.



R.I.P. Rammellzee, graffiti pioneer, visual artist, mask-maker, planet-eater, Vocoder lover, and rapper.



R.I.P. Sugar Minott, reggae and dancehall legend.