Positively Catherine Street

So Long, Joe II

2012-01-22T13:39:00.000-08:00

When I heard that Joe Paterno had been diagnosed with “a treatable form of” lung cancer, on top of a broken hip, I said to a few people, “He’ll be gone inside a year.”

As it turned, out he was gone much sooner, as in today. As I know from harsh personal experience, anyone that age being treated for cancer is rolling the dice, chances are the treatment itself will create conditions (pneumonia, most likely) that will kill the person rather than the cancer itself. And the doctors will shrug and ignore the fact that one of their patients just died. (At least that’s how they treated my father and us.)

Of course, this isn’t just a factory worker with four grown kids who passed on but a college football legend, saddled with a recently-tarnished image we’ve all been bludgeoned with for the past few months. I’ve pretty much said my peace on that subject in two previous posts. His passing changes nothing in that regard.

Hearing the news, I felt terrible. Sensed it was coming, but not that fast. Get ready for the armchair moralists and dogshit sports columnists to gear up their hype machines again, for more sermons on the mount from people you should trust about as far as you could throw. Writing can be a fairly enlightening and heroic profession, at times. But at other times, it presents people who aren’t good at communicating anything real, but are more than glad to infuse the culture with a type of easy, greeting-card mediocrity that so many people mistake as moral turpitude. For all the writers I’ve known, I don’t think there are any I would trust as great moralists, myself included. At least I’ll tell you as much, rather than pretend I’m wielding some magic wand that illuminates all I touch. I’m no more or less human than you are, and just as prone to getting things wrong.

People are going to remember the man however they want to. This man had a profoundly positive influence on me for decades. That sense of stressing intellectual pursuits, whatever else you do in life. In his case, he was giving free college educations to kids who were tremendous athletes. In return, those kids were given the opportunity to be part of a great college football program that brought in millions of dollars to the university. Some of those kids were so talented that they then took their skills, sharpened by him and his staff, and made their fortunes as professional football players. Some fell by the wayside, or never quite clicked with the program. Most did as noted above, got free college educations, which is nothing to scoff at, especially for impoverished kids from small towns and inner cities. And in Penn State’s case, they were openly encouraged to stay the course and graduate with a degree.

May not seem like much, but it is at that level, where those kids are treated like icons, and no doubt were to some degree at Penn State, too. But beneath the bluster, beneath the occasional flame-out and passing controversy, there was that steady line of graduates. This is Joe Paterno’s legacy, after all is said and done.

If you feel the need to tie in this awful Sandusky situation in with it, feel free. I do, too, but I keep it in perspective. Unless otherwise proven over the next few months or years, I’m going to assume that Joe did what he supposed to, report the situation to his immediate authorities, who then did nothing. I’m going to take his word for it that he didn’t really know what Sandusky was doing and had no knowledge of the 1998 investigation. If this is not the case, then now that he’s gone, it should be much easier for someone to come forward, an investigator or participant from either the 1998 case or this 2002 case, and state otherwise. My mind is surely open to that, or any, type of new knowledge and insight being shed on this case.

Even with that take on things, the Board of Regents still held him accountable and claimed the reason he was fired was because he didn’t do more in the situation. And I can surely see their point of view, given that he over-road their authority in the past and was guessing he could do it again, save no one was prepared for the media explosion when this story broke. What most people aren’t realizing is the Board of Regents is a voluntary organization; I’m not even sure if those people get paid. These are people, probably all of them alumni who want to still be part of the university, who have done pretty well for themselves in life, have successful careers in other areas, and joining the Board of Regents for their college alma mater looks good on the resume and the monument they’ve built to themselves.

People seem to think it’s some shadow organization of campus insiders pulling strings. No. It’s highly-visible alumni, and I gather many of them are going to clear out after this whole scenario, as they’re no doubt receiving a ton of grief over what they did from other alumni. I suspect that there will be some type of pardon for Joe issued by the Board over the next year or two over how we was let go. If you’re not part of the Penn State universe and having a hard time seeing that, then maybe you should grasp that there are two worlds here: the outside world, which has been a shitstorm of accusation and shame, and the Penn State world, where Paterno’s legacy over the past five or so decades looms large over so many things on that town, campus and state.

Like so many alumni, I’m part of both worlds. Far away from that Penn State world. I graduated, and aside from spending my summer after graduation there, then revisiting the place once for Arts Festival in the early 90s, I’ve had virtually nothing to do with the campus. They got enough money from me the first time around, so I’m not a donator, especially when I see what they’re charging kids now. I feel no burning need to attach myself to the university, but I do take some sort of pride in associating myself with the college, and am grateful for the time I spent there, as those few years opened me up in innumerable ways that I’m still learning from today.

Paterno and his legacy are tied into that feeling. Not his myth. His legacy … what he did … not what we think he did (or didn’t) do. I’m with a lot of people on this – he should have done more when that incident was reported to him. Everyone should have done more. They didn’t, and this thing turned into a shitstorm of epic proportions that brought down his career and damaged the program he spent a lifetime building. The sting for Joe was being fired after being a coach there since the early 1950s. Since the early 1950s. Imagine working for a place that long, rising so high, achieving so much … and one day, you’re fired over the phone … for doing what you were supposed to do according to school policy? It seems to me that had he contacted, say, the state police on his own back in 2002, doing so could have just as easily led to him being fired for ignoring school policy on handling such situations.

Either way, he wasn’t going to win this one. And if there’s one thing I learned watching Penn State football, you absorb the losses. Some of them stay with you the rest of your days, but you absorb them. You live with them. I still don’t know what happened in this situation, and I suspect Joe’s passing will have little to do with how this scenario plays out. In his last interview, a few days before he passed, he seemed to give a pretty straightforward account about what he did and why he did it. Either you believe him, or you don’t. There will now be plenty of time for anyone who wants to come forward and either prove or disprove what he claimed.

I feel awful today, as does any Penn State football fan. Most people don’t get to choose when they die, and I’m sure Joe would have chosen to live longer and try to clear his name in all this. But I don’t think there’s anything more he could have done, save to reiterate what he said in his last interview and stand by his words. He deserved a better way out, but as I could see with my father, chances are we will all deserve better ways out. My point being, there’s no easy way out of here, and if you think there is, you’ve been reading too many glowing obituaries where it seems the person was lifted to heaven by a gathering of angels, after the deceased muttered famous last words for his loved ones to live by, and they, bearing candles and warm, understanding smiles, watched him float free of all worldly cares to a better place.

No. Shit happened. Did not go according to plan. But it’s done. It’s for the rest of us to pick ourselves up and prepare for whatever life throws at us next. I’ll miss the man immensely, for those things he taught me in my life.

And What of Heaven

2012-01-15T06:29:00.000-08:00

That last post regarding a heavily-sedated four-year-old’s vision of heaven got me thinking. All right, so you can poke fun at this … but have you ever really thought about heaven? Does it exist. If so, what would it be like. And hell. Is there an afterlife. Is there one true religion.

Yes, the stuff of many a college dorm-room party debate, that time in your life when you will spend three hours getting into it with someone you radically disagree with just to see how far both of you are willing to go in terms of semantics. (And realizing that Born Agains will go all night on this shit, and you’re better off not going there at all with them.)

I can’t recall having a single debate like this in my post-college life. For that matter, aside from trying to reason with the girl who went Born Again on me and just got too impossible to be around, I didn’t really bother with this much in college either. I did have one friend who was deeply Christian – still is. But more of a hard-edged, not so typical Christian, who when not engaging in that stuff, has always been a very fun guy to be around. It’s because of people like him that I’m not as down on Christianity as many people suspect I would be. There are plenty of good ones out there, going about their lives, having faith, not being too obnoxious or arrogant. Whether or not I agree with them is another point. The ultimate point is they’re big enough as humans to want good people in their lives regardless of their belief systems.

That’s what irks me most about the Christian ideal of heaven. The concept that only Christians will go there. Honestly, that seems like a shit proposition and not some place I’d ever want to go. Forget about eternity. I’d have a hard time spending five minutes in a stalled elevator with a lot of Christians. Living in New York the past two decades, I’m constantly exposed to different cultures, people from different countries, languages of all sorts flying around, all day, every day, just this extreme mix of every type of person you could imagine. Live long enough in that environment, you sense that there are many things going on in this world to which you are not privy, or geared to understand because of your culture and how you were raised. I mean that in a good way -- it's a humbling thought, because those people from those different cultures should be looking at you and thinking the same thing. We can all learn a lot from each other.

And then to imagine this monochrome world of people of only one religious faith, who are there only because they put their money on the right horse, and very often in life positioned themselves as arrogant power mongers, be it politics, money or exploiting the religion itself to obtain both? As opposed to countless millions of others who had different faiths, but lived good lives, gave freely of themselves, put the needs of others in front of theirs, basically lived as good and pure a life as they possibly could? No. This concept gave me trouble in those heady college days, and it’s a dealbreaker for me now. If faith in Christ is the only door, forget it, that’s a door I won’t even bother to touch, based solely on the miscreants I’ve seen in my life who have exploited their faith for financial and political power, or just made a mockery of their faith with their arrogance and stupidity. Satan can read this back to me at the gates of hell whenever I go – I’ll nod my head and say, yep, that about nails it, oh dark master, please hand me my pitchfork.

Honestly, I’m not even sure if I believe in an afterlife these days. The older I get, the more it seems to me that when you die, that’s it, the end. I mentioned this to a friend once on the phone and he said, “Doesn’t that prospect frighten you? Doesn’t it make you feel like there’s a lot more you need to accomplish?” I thought about it and said, no, doesn’t frighten me because look around, every animal dies, it’s our shared fate, it’s what we’re supposed to do. As for accomplishments, shit, man, I’m not going to be around after I’m gone, so why waste a minute worrying about legacies and however many people carry around your memory? It won’t be doing me any good, whether I’m dead in the ground or on some mystical journey.

I believed in the sense of afterlife as reward or punishment for what we do on earth. In other words, I’ve seen plenty of people thrive on earth in one way or another, who I know are essentially bad people, and plenty of people struggle on earth who I know are essentially good people. So I pictured the afterlife as a settling of the score, one way or the other.

You have to be young and fairly untested by life to see the world that way. You live long enough, you see bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to bad people, good things happen to good people … on endless repeat, in our lives, with no logic to it. If someone you dislike suffers some hideous accident or illness, it surely doesn’t pay to see that as some sort of divine retribution. As if that horrible thing happened just because you don’t like the person. God help you if pray/wish for shit like that to happen. It’s bad luck. The same thing might happen to you next year.

And all those people you picture having questionable morality who are wealthy, or famous, or beautiful … don’t kid yourself. They’re just people. From what I’ve seen, that sort of material success does a number on people, often turns their worlds upside down, and leaves them duty-bound to present this façade of pure happiness, power and fulfillment. It’s high profile insecurity. You should always doubt someone putting forth that image. Because it’s not human to be that way all the time. It’s an illusion, shown to you for a reason, more than likely intimidation, and most people will bite and never question it. Their real power is not that illusion, but presenting it makes them feel better about themselves, it’s part of the game they play.

The most financially successful, driven people I’ve seen in New York, it seems like the one thing they have in common, once you scratch the surface, is being troubled. For one thing, above all else, they love that sense of power money brings them more than anything, or anyone, in their lives. Rest assured, the people in their lives sense this, and there’s anywhere from an uncomfortable gap to outright psychosis flowing from the wake of that divide.

And driven people never have enough. They’re never happy. They’re never satisfied. If they got $10 billion, they’ll convince themselves they need $20 billion. It’s how they see the world, with the insecurity we all feel regarding how other people see us, how we see ourselves, too. It explains billionaires and the 1% concept we hear so much about. That TV show Hoarders? It’s pathetic, focusing on people who have small homes filled with junk. Your average millionaire has an entire life filled with excess and material nothingness that make those hoarding houses look like a sample of feng shui design. Those are the real hoarders in our world, yet we’re trained to quietly ignore this, or even worse, respect it.

But I don’t see any need to hate these people, or feel sorry for them, as if that would matter to them! That’s their thing in life, to be that obsessed with this one narrow, exclusionary sense of power, the same way a Born Again may view his religion as the ultimate show of power, the afterlife.

So I realized that sense of reward or punishment in the afterlife that I placed so much value on when I was younger was counterfeit. We all receive plenty of rewards and punishment in our lives. If you don’t think you’re being rewarded, try life with no legs, or blind, or suffering from a debilitating mental disorder, or living in a tin shack in a third-world slum. There are any number of variables going on in even the most humble life that are rewarding and life-affirming. I’ve learned to value those things, like personal health and sanity, solitude, the ability to sit and think, to have a warm place to go when it rains, people I can talk to when the world gets to be too much, food when I’m hungry, water when I’m thirsty. Little things that you never think about that are huge, paramount, when you don’t have them. And as noted, everyone passes through darkness in some sense, even if it’s something as basic as family members dying, or loneliness, or no sense of purpose, or a sense of purpose you can acknowledge will destroy others. These things are not lost on folks we perceive as “having it all” even if it never shows.

You have it all when you have your health and sanity. Or at least that’s what I believe as I get older, and see people a few decades in front of me lose grips on one or the other, sometimes both due to the ageing process or circumstances beyond their control.

I just have a hard time picturing that sense of making it through this world, experiencing all the good and bad, the successes and failures, and then at the end, bang, tunnel of light, here’s your harp, here’s a set of wings … welcome to heaven. At least I can’t picture that scenario (or the opposite) as a human now, knowing what I know of the world, knowing what I know of myself, that if I immediately became an angel, but was otherwise as human as I am now, all I could think would be, “Man, that angel with the nice ass is giving me such a hard-on … my wings are getting tired … this is heaven, and I can’t even get off a good shit … does anyone ever feel bad around here … would it be all right to tell another angel to go fuck himself?”

There would need to be a transformation of some sort. What I could get my mind around? That concept I mentioned in the last post of our spirits leaving our bodies, and entering a place where only the strength and beauty of our souls mattered. That appeals to me. Not this crazy bullshit with harps, wings, pitchforks, sea of flames, etc. I don’t care if The Bible tells me so … much of the Old Testament and hefty chunks of the New can be traced to previous creation and savior myths that existed long before they were written, so I have a hard time going with all of it as literal truth (although when I do read The Bible, I appreciate its wisdom and poetic vision, particularly the Psalms). Again, if I got this wrong, and all those writings preceding The Bible by millenniums that the book directly emulates is just pure coincidence, Satan, please clip this portion of the post and read it back to me in that hissing baritone of yours while anally impaling me on a red-hot spike. I’ll understand, I’m giving you tacit approval right now. Laugh as I howl in eternal agony, as you have for millions of other smartasses who thought you were a myth.

The soul leaving the body is the only thing I could possibly believe in at this point in my life: it makes sense. And I’m not even sure if it makes enough sense, that when we die, we don’t just drop over dead, and that’s the end for each of us. I’m just as willing to believe that, too. (I’ve never had ghostly visitors from my past fade back over my bed one quiet night and whisper, “You’re wrong about that, Bill, change, now.” Will surely keep you posted if such a scenario transpires.) Our bodies betray us over time, and any pleasures we pursue in the physical world, sooner or later, lose their value. Spiritual enlightenment is the one thing that never seems to grow old, or become something it wasn’t meant to be, or encourage us to be greedy and needful at the expense of others. I can see pursuing that, in any form, religious or otherwise, but again, cannot see the point in limitations and rules that would degrade that freedom. Breaking free from the body, it seems to me, would be the ultimate freedom.

I remember in grade school how the teachers would ask us what we wanted to be when we “grew up.” And it was always the same: football player, fireman, nurse, movie star, etc. Either these jobs tied into the concept of service or celebrity. Because that was what we were taught to respect – still are, I’m sure, if you were to talk to kids. The reality is most of us get these weird jobs that no kid could possibly imagine, that we do only for the money and some small sense of purpose. Senior Vice President of Global Relations? Chief Information Officer? I can rattle off dozens of screwy, self-important titles I’ve seen over the years, some of them longer than this sentence. Things a kid could never imagine and would laugh at (until he saw the six-figure annual salary … at which point he’d stop being a kid). The point being, adulthood is nothing like we thought it would be, even when we were in college. Especially in college … when we all had these perfect visions of ourselves doing exactly what we wanted and being rewarded accordingly.

Well, I’m imaging a teacher asking that same question, and some kid responding, “Let’s cut to the chase. Adulthood is over-rated – I can tell by the look on your face. The right question to ask is, what do you want to be when you die. And I’m thinking, a wave on the ocean, the wind on a summer day, the sun on your face, a drop of rain when the fields are dry, the look in a dying dog’s eyes as his master pets his head for the last time, the sound of our laughing when we’re playing in the schoolyard, a blue star, water flowing, the first cherry blossom in spring, the last leaf to fall in autumn.”

I can only imagine the stunned silence, followed by howls of laughter from the other kids. But the one constant in my life is the next step ends up being nothing like what I thought it would be, for better and worse. Can’t see why the afterlife would be any different, assuming it’s there.

Heaven Is Real(ly Strange)

2012-01-08T06:39:00.000-08:00

I may not talk about this much, but I had an out-of-bodyexperience. In fact, I’ve neverreferred to the incident as such, but have since realized that’s exactly whatit was.

I had my tonsils out some time in the early 1970’s. I can’t recall the exact year – most likely1970-72, as I had them out “early” and had the operation the same time as myslightly older sister. As with mostthings in my childhood, I’m sure the explanation of why we both went intogether was economics: my depression-era parents did everything possible tosave a buck, which also made sense with my factory-working father supportingseven people.

The out-of-body experience occurred just after theoperation. I was high as a kite. I didn’t know this at the time – I wouldlater learn this when I sampled magic mushrooms in college and found theeffects to be quite similar (and wonderful). When I first came out of my slumber, I had the sensation of lying ongrass on a sunny day. The thing was, Iwas on a gurney in an operating room. The weirder thing was, I was convinced I was lying vertically, againstthe wall, relaxed, but somehow suspended vertically on a patch of soft grass …I swear I could even smell the grass. Ileaned my head forward, but didn’t fall off the gurney.

It didn’t end there. A few second later, I became aware of my body rising, slowly, over thehospital room, so I could see my sister on the gurney next to me, a doctormaking notations on a chart, nurses putting away instruments and such on atray. It was at this point that Iremember feeling very scared – this wasn’t right. I was afraid I was going to fall.

Coinciding with that “falling” feeling was the realizationthat the anesthetic was wearing off, and my throat was on fire. I felt immediately slammed down onto thegurney, no longer vertical, no longer on grass, and my throat felt as thoughsomeone had stabbed it with a dagger. Istarted crying, hard. A nurse said,“Look, William, your sister is doing fine. It doesn’t hurt that much.” AndI looked over, and she was surely at peace, probably as high as I had been, butas noted, whatever good shit they had pumped into my system, man, it was nolonger working.

And that’s where it ended. I’m sure I wailed for a good 15 minutes longer, wore myself out with theweeping, as kids do, then dozed off, awakening a few hours later in our sharedhospital room to parents and ice cream.

Do I attribute this to some mystical experience? No. I attribute it to drugs. Reallygood drugs. The kind of drugs thatalter reality and fill you with a sense of peace. I wouldn’t have had that experience without the drugs. Brother M has assured me, as a waywardteenager, he had many out-of-body experiences in less clinicalcircumstances. I remember the fall-outof one, him standing in the living room at two in the morning covered in clodsof dirt, vines and weeds after running his car into the side of a hill,claiming he had just missed hitting a dog. We later learned he thought he was driving an airplane through a cornfield, and the corn cobs were balls of light. He had been driving on a non-descript portion of Route 61 and simplydrove over the rail into the side of a hill. Luckily, there was a hill, otherwise he would have been flying for real.

I use all this as preface to a review of a book a friendrecommended that I just read over the New Year’s weekend: Heaven Is for Real byTodd Burpo and Lynn Vincent. Burpo is apastor from the midwest, and Vincent a professional writer who co-wrote a book withSara Palin, among other conservative-leaning books. The book is written from the point of view of Burpo, so I’mguessing he told much of the story to Vincent, and she edited this into anacceptable book format. At least thebook has that feel of colloquial first-person account with an agenda. Burpo is set up as a working-class everymanwith a heart of gold and “hey bud” writing voice, thus we get the impression asreaders after about 15 pages that if we disagree with him, there must besomething really wrong and bad with us. (Vincent knows her trade well, emotional manipulation that the unsubtleand converted will not sense.)

The gist is Burpo’s four-year-old son, Colton, visits heavenduring a near-death experience he had after his appendix burst, wasmis-diagnosed, and he wasn’t operated on until the situation had grown into alife-or-death proposition. He neverflat-lined at any time in the experience, but claimed to have visited heavennonetheless, where he met God, Jesus, a grandfather he never knew, a fetus hismother miscarried (that he miraculously also knew nothing about) and variousother angels. He even met Satan,apparently, but was too spooked to try to physically describe him. (I’m wondering if anyone’s shown him apicture of Simon Cowell since?)

It was a bad read, to say the least, cost me $5.00 on AmazonKindle, but that’s a fiver I won’t be getting back. Still, mission accomplished. Colton and Vincent sold another copy, have no doubt sold millions ofcopies as this is the exact sort of hokum that’s bound to be a hit with aChristian reading audience who, even if they have their doubts, will feel sometype of warmth in the story of this humble father, who had already livedthrough a year of tribulations (nearly going broke due to various health issuesof his own, while his garage-door installation business fell by the wayside,during his and his son’s physical problems), and then slowly realized his sonhad a mystical experience.

How mystical was it? Put it this way. If I did myweight in magic mushrooms, with The Wizard of Oz in Blu-Ray on repeat, DarkSide of the Moon blasting from the speakers of my stereo, I couldn’t have comeanywhere near this. Little Colton saidhe was in heaven for only three minutes, but he packed a lot of shit into thosethree minutes. Meeting the man incharge, his Son who died for our sins, family members he never knew, and got toexperience the technicolor glory of heaven, where everyone has wings, eitherstays a child or reverts back to how they looked at 25.

Let’s start with Colton meeting “Pop” – his paternalgreat-grandfather who died in a car crash in his early 60s, decades beforeColton was born. The“great-grandfather” – like everyone else in heaven – appeared to be about 25year old as he was given that body again after his car crash. Old people … suck, in heaven. Heaven would be crawling with the elderly ifpeople entered heaven at the age they died. It would be like a senior citizens home. Heaven would smell vaguely of piss and clorox. We can’t have that. It has to be me more like MTV. Everybody’s young. Everybody’s beautiful. Isn’t that heavenly?

This man Colton met in heaven had many identities to manypeople. Why would this man/angel notidentify himself by his real name, then simply state that he was the kid’sgreat grandfather? In the context ofthis man’s after life, he’s more than likely in heaven with his own parents,grandparents, great grandparents and possibly some of his children … why wouldhe identify himself to this kid as “Pop” in this context? He wasn’t “Pop” to Colton. He would probably only say, “Your father ismy grandson.” Which would probably blowthe kid’s mind, as he’s being told this guy who looks younger than his Dad ishis Dad’s grandfather … who died decades before he was born.

Lest we forget “Pop” was now a 25-year-old man in perfect health, with wings … think about thatwhen you try to identify your parents in heaven, assuming you’re all luckyenough to get there. Your mother andfather are going to be 25 years old and in perfect health, just as you shallbe. My Mom was pretty good looking inher time. What if I don’t know it’s herand hit on her? According to Colton,I’ll still have a physical body and will apparently have the same urges, andneed to shit and eat, too, I guess? Themother thing alone would freak me out.

And why would we have any physical attributes in heaven whenit seems like the most logical explanation of heaven would be our spiritsleaving our bodies, which are in the ground rotting (or incinerated) ascountless exhumations have proven, which only served to drag down and cloud ourjudgment in life? It seems like leavingour bodies, in and of itself, would be a pretty apt description of heaven … whyall this dumb, childish shit thrown on top of it to make it seem like a Disneycartoon on acid? Oh, almost forgot …it’s because we’re talking about a four-year-old boy stoned out of his mindpiecing together bits of his sub-conscious the way we all do when we dream orget high.

The book reeks of this sort of “stacking the deck”bullshit. As if Colton “went to heaven”so he could later prove it only to his father, who was the only one who calledhis grandfather “Pop.” I’m not sure ifBurpo and Vincent are smart enough to recognize this. A lot of what went on in heaven seemed to happen only so thatlittle Colton could then relay this information to his father, who wouldimmediately sense the connection to his own life, as if the kid’s recollectionin and of itself, even if he had nothing to tell his father that would make anysense to him, wasn’t good enough. Itwas only valid when his father deemed it so. I take it that if Colton had told his father of things he saw that hisfather could in no way personally verify, Colton would probably still be seeinga therapist year later.

The reason Burpo focused on “Pop” being in heaven was that“Pop” never went to church that much, therefore there was doubt as to whether“Pop” had accepted Jesus as his personal savior. Little Colton, after his trip to heaven, was adamant thateveryone had to accept Christ as his savior, otherwise they wouldn’t get toheaven. I guess he’s lucky they were inthe midwest, because I could only imagine little Colton busting in on a bunchof Jews sitting shiva for a much-loved family matriarch who had just passed on,and slipping into his “must accept Jesus” routine … they’d have drop-kicked themini-savior straight through to Utah.

Of course, we later find, just days before his crash, bychance, “Pop” had attended a Christian gathering and had asked to besaved. Christ, does it matter? The guy’s in heaven, again, no need to stackthe deck with this inconsequential tent-revival bullshit story that magicallycoincides with little Colton’s stipulation on how you get to heaven. It’s just this sort of bizarre deck-stackingthat’s so questionable that anyone with a rational mind can only read somethinglike this, shake his head and think, “How many people reading this book aregoing to willfully or conveniently not even spend a second thinking of moralquestions like this?” And I meanmorality from a writer’s point of view … knowing that you are foisting bullshitof one sort or another on a reading audience. I’ve done it, and have felt terrible afterwards. On a scale like this? I’ve done some pretty screwed-up things inmy time, so help me God, but nothing this shameless.

The most horrifying incident of this comes with themiscarried sister Colton never had. Hemeets her in heaven. She’s a littlegirl now. I gather meeting a bloodyfetus with wings might have been a hard one to pull off, unless Colton hadglimpsed a Nirvana album cover when he was three and somehow worked this intohis vision. So let’s make her a littlegirl. NOT a 25-year-old girl, like allthose millions of elderly people who have died but ka-ching themselves back totheir physical prime. I take it whenyou die as a child, you stay that same age. If you die as a fetus, as countless millions have since the advent oflegalized abortion, then we’ll spin the magic wheel in heaven and make you anattractive little girl. Alwaysattractive. No room in heaven forhomely girls. Every boy and girl whowas aborted has to be a vision of loveliness.

No fat people in heaven either, I’d imagine. If you were 25 and the size of a house, Isuspect the Man Upstairs will place you on that heavenly diet plan that allowsyou to drop 95 lbs. in a nanosecond. Fixes your teeth while He’s at it. Colton also specifically stated no one has glasses in heaven. Not sure why? I guess the concept of angels with wings … and glasses … doesn’twork with Jesus. Or wheelchairs. Or arm or leg braces. And I guess if you lived with some physicaldeformity, poof, magically gone. Wecan’t have The Elephant Man greeting people in heaven. Rita Heyworth and Patrick Swayze, sure. But not some guy who looked like he had agiant testicle on the side of his head … but probably had a heart a thousandtimes more pure than most people on earth.

The concept of aborted fetuses – as opposed to miscarried –is not broached. The assumption beingany woman who has an abortion is most likely going to hell, along with guys whokiss each other, and Jews, you know, all those people who have horns on theirheads (if you look hard enough … I wont’ get into the sideline of the kidmentioned in the book who saw haloes over some people’s heads, but notothers). Unless she accepts Jesus asher personal savior. I can only imaginethat conversation in heaven, when an aborted fetus, now an 8-year-old girl withwings, approaches the mother, who later found Jesus, and asks her, “Mom,remember me? You aborted me when I sixweeks old in your womb. How do you likethem apples?” (As the polka song says, inheaven there is no beer, but this woman will surely crave more than few.)

It never gets dark in heaven, according to Colton. There is no night. I’m assuming it never rains either. It’s like a sunny day in southern California, all the time. So if you love the night, or the smell of arain shower in the summer, or gently falling snow, forget it, those thingsnever happen in heaven. It’s alwayssunny, light breeze, low humidity, 75 degrees. When the angels aren’t flying around, they’re skateboarding down by thepearly gates.

I’m not even going to get into Jesus. The picture with this week’s post is apainting by a girl named Akiane called “Prince of Peace” that appeared to heras the face of Jesus in a vision. (Ifyou go to her website, you’ll find she has a pretty nice enterprise set up forherself, selling prints of her various visions for tidy sums. And good for her – it is amazing thatsomeone at her age has the artistic talent to do the things she’s done. May as well get rich off it.) In the book, a big deal is made of littleColton rejecting every picture of Christ as not being authentic … until he sawAkiane’s painting of Christ on a website. Funny, how both their visions of Christ subscribe to the cosmic surferdude portrayal we’ve had fed to us over the course of centuries by Westernartists to represent a Jew from the Middle East. I would expect Christ to look more like Danny DeVito or GrouchoMarx, but I guess He really must look like Dennis Wilson, Kenny Loggins, or anynumber of guys you’d meet at a Yanni concert. (It can now be told: Jesus is Andrew Gold.)

We also find later in the book that Colton has grown alittle too attached to his vision of heaven. There’s a situation noted in parking lot, with Todd Burpo becomingextremely upset when his son darts out into parking lot near majortraffic. When asked why he keeps doingthings like this, even though he could be killed, like the rabbit run over inthe middle of the road that Todd points out, the son replies, “Oh, good! That means I get to go back to heaven!” Todd says, “You’re missing the point. This time, I get to heaven first. I’m the dad; you’re the kid. Parents go first!”

The chapter ends on that note. But wouldn’t Colton’s no-nonsense, just-the-truth-as-I-see-itreply have been: “Well, I hope you die real soon, Dad. I can’t wait to go back to heaven!”

Colton also gets into the apocalypse, which is coming,according to him, in our lifetime, as he sees his thirtysomething fatherfighting off demons and bad people with a sword, on earth. I’ll leave this one alone, save to say ifyou’re at all familiar with Charles Manson’s views on Helter Skelter, hisvision of the apocalypse, about the only things little Colton was missing wererace wars and hippies in dune buggies, otherwise he and Charlie were on roughlythe same page.

I don’t know where to begin or end with this. I can understand if you’re a Christian, youpick up a book like this, it makes for a great gift, chances are whoever you’regiving it to isn’t going to freak out and throw the book in the trash. They’ll read it, nod sagely, have theirfaith reinforced in some small way, and feel all warm inside in that way thesesmall things are supposed to. That’s agreat marketing plan, and as usual, I tip my cap to Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincentfor grasping the concept somewhere along the way. Burpo claims the book was not written for financial gain, and Ibelieve him. I’ve met more than a fewpastors in my time, and this is how they are, basically humble people goingabout their lives, hardly making any money at day jobs, and tending to theircongregation in all their spare time. It doesn’t bother me that he’ll more than likely use the money to helphis church and community.

I’m more interested in Colton, who appears to be a normalboy now, growing up in the midwest, not having any more visions, just goingabout his life. I can only hope he goesthrough a phase. That Midwest kidphase. Going to Slipknot concerts. Becoming a goth for a few months onesummer. Getting into some shit. Multiple facial piercings. Having issues with parental authorityfigures. Resenting how his visions wereturned into a book, that caught fire and became a bestseller, thus making itall seem cheaper than just a pure vision of heaven a small boy had. I don’t doubt the kid had a mysticalexperience. But we all do at times,thanks to drugs, whether taken recreationally or clinically in alife-threatening situation. Strangeshit happens when you’re high. Bookslike this happen when you come down.

Holding Patterns

2011-12-31T18:01:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me earlier today, drinking bubble tea in the little shop by the laundromat, that more than likely, I’m going to be leaving all this in a few weeks. Not like leaving paradise. Leaving a place I’ve been living temporarily while the place in Astoria undergoes restoration after the fire (which is going full gun right now).

As you could guess, drinking bubble tea, reading a book about The Faces and Rod Stewart on the Kindle, between laundry loads, I’ve learned to relax and make-do with the situation. You live in any place long enough, you get used to it. And it’s not hard to get used to a place people aspire to live in, the suburbs basically. I’ll never get used to the insane commute, or the shitheel driving styles around here (just no need for anyone to drive as selfishly and recklessly as people do around here, ever, for any reason). But people around here know me now. Say hello to the guy down the block walking his bulldog. On first-name bases with the people in the tea shop and diner. Joke around with the Chinese children whose parents run the laundromat, fun kids. Banter with the people waiting for the bus in the morning. Even see the same familiar faces on the way home.

I looked at this whole endeavor as a holding pattern in my life, but have since realized it’s just life, going on as it always does, until it stops. The people who live and work around here will go on doing so, while I go back to my neighborhood and take my rightful place in the apartment I’d been living in for nigh on 12 years. It occurs to me that my life back there isn’t much different from what it is here, save I have more furniture back there, and internet/TV access with my cable!

I don’t know if that’s a troubling or comforting thought – probably a little of both. The reality of living in a city for most people is that they get set in routines, between work and whatever else they have going on, that, believe me, is easy to replicate just by picking it up and moving it five miles in any direction. You feel weird and alien at first. Then you adjust. Then your mind attaches feelings of “home” – however faint or temporary they may be – to the place, and you create a bond to it. There weren’t 10,000 family members and friends I was leaving behind in Astoria. Hell, most people I know in the NYC area, we’re so spread out and busy with our own shit that even if we lived two blocks apart, it would be an ordeal trying to pull something together. I used to think that was some sort of travesty or failing on my part, but have experienced it enough times to know, it’s just how things are here. I try to make myself available as possible, but even I’ll close ranks sometimes and get too zeroed in on my own shit.

What a crazy year. Some years, it’s like being on an amusement park ride, where all you can do is hold on, convinced that what you’re experiencing is not real, but is somehow, because you’ve chosen to get on the ride, and the belts and buckles probably aren’t going to snap, but you’re still being safely whipped around at high velocity in ways that suggest danger, but are fairly controlled. I resigned from my job back in June due to a luke-warm review (after busting my ass for a few months solid leading up to that point) … and am still working there after management turned up a few dead ends on various candidates. Believe me, after the fire in August, I was grateful to have steady work anywhere. But I go on there, knowing that sooner or later, they’ll land someone for that spot, and I’ll move on. At that time, I had visions of taking the summer off, relaxing for a month or two, and then trying to feel my way into something else. I just didn’t want to haul off and get the same job in a different place. Still don’t. Which is why I’ve never been one of these “planning my escape” people. I’d rather cut something off cold, go through a few weeks of laziness, and then come up with something else. Not a formula for latter climbing! But I’m not worried about that.

I’m not worried about much of anything, to be honest. Lived through a fire, rendered temporarily homeless, set up in a temporary apartment, which has been a blessing, as otherwise I’d probably have bounced from one high-priced sublet to another over the course of the past few months. Picked up my usual routines. About all I haven’t done is cook, opting for a steady diet of Hot Pockets, pasta and canned soup, rather than getting into my usual winter rituals of chili and various soups, which would take up a Sunday afternoon in preparation. And I’d rather let that go for now, gives me something to look forward to when I get back to my place and feel more at home.

Some of the changes I’ve gone through in the past few months have been good. I was watching way too much TV with cable, and who knows, maybe I will again when I get it back. But I’ve been reading more, writing a lot, too, listening to much more music, even listening to local college radio, which has been surprisingly good at times. I always appreciated the routines I had back there and will gladly get back into them. I’m left with the realization that you could lose it all in a minute, and when you've lost it all, all you can do is simply gather your resources and start over again. Feel like an asshole for awhile. Feel wounded. Feel like the world owes you something. But sooner or later, you align yourself with the hardness of the world, and jump back into the freezing cold stream of life where, ultimately, the only person who’s going to keep you treading water is you.

Not to say I haven’t appreciated the support over the past few months. Friends have been good, landlord’s family has been very helpful, crucial in terms of getting me set up with a new place to stay, and I suspect most people have either forgotten what happened to me, or quietly filed it away in the “shit that happened to Bill in the near past” file. I don’t dwell on it much now these few months later, so I sure as hell don’t want to make other people dwell on it. Everyone always asks when I’m getting back there, a few minutes of bitching and moaning about how long it’s taking, but rest assured, wheels are turning now, and I can see I will be back there soon.

I don’t picture any huge emotional revelations. I’ve gone back there a few times to gather things, winter clothes, some DVDs I was thinking about, and the place has been forlorn, dirty as the windows were knocked out for so long, the yard a mess with unraked leaves, all my furniture and belongings packed into one part of the floor so plumbers could tear out a small part of the ceiling to get at the pipes, little off-kilter things like that, as we all waited for work to begin.

My landlord, I suspect, will be weeping when she gets back, tears of joy, probably pain, too, over things she lost in the fire, as she lost a lot more than I or the upstairs tenant did. She’s lived there since the early 60s, started a family and made a life there, so I know the emotional attachment she has to the place is much larger than mine. I can only hope she spends the rest of her days there in peace, never going through anything this harrowing again, as it’s a shit experience at any age, much less in your 70s at a point where you think life is going to even out and let you take it all in before darkness falls.

And I can see, one day I’ll have to move on, a proposition that scared the hell out of me before all this. But I’ve seen – living a few months in another neighborhood – it’s not such a bad deal. You move somewhere else, pick up a few new tricks, learn a little more about the world, and go on doing whatever you do. World doesn’t end. I hope to stay in that apartment a few more years, at least, but I’ve seen with my own eyes, there are other neighborhoods I could handle in Queens (Manhattan and Brooklyn, forget it, too expensive, Bronx I’ve done and not going back, Staten Island, another country). I’d hardly call it a sense of freedom, more like being exposed, against my will, to other neighborhoods, and realizing people live there, too, just as I do in mine!

So, it was a strange, unsettling year that, I guess, should have left me rattled and battle-scarred. But in reality I feel a little more weightless, surely a little harder, which is what happens when bad shit like this gets thrown your way. There’s the famous saying, “That which cannot kill you makes you stronger.” But I’ve learned this year, that’s bullshit. You expose yourself routinely to things that have the capacity to kill you, sooner or later, they will sap your strength and take your life. You get these things in small doses, a house fire, once in a lifetime, you can pound your chest and bellow, “I’m stronger for all I’ve been through!”

But, man, if that shit happened to me routinely, I’d be a wreck right now. We can’t pick and choose some of our crises. They pick and choose us. As noted, one at a time, once in a blue moon, you can ruminate on them, take strength in the fact that you lived through them and have found your way back to normalcy of some sort. But if this shit happened every other day, like bombs dropping, it would destroy my life. Yours, too, no matter how old or young, how weak or strong you really are.

Things to think about for the new year! Things to think about as you get older. I hope I’m sitting in my apartment, this day next year, and thinking, “Shit, nothing happened this year.”

Balling on Campus

2011-12-17T07:04:00.000-08:00

A situation occurred a few days ago at my old Penn State branch campus that sounds depressingly familiar to city life, but somewhat new to the locals. Basically, a bunch of students who had played basketball together (one group from New York, the other from Philly) later ended up in an apartment brawl resulting in serious injuries.

It’s really not much of a story, save that if you read the avalanche of comments, the locals are understandably getting fed-up with these kind of incidents, generally revolving around urban students (their home addresses are always NYC or Philly-based) being admitted to that local campus and then committing these type of crimes which always make for front-page news back there, regardless of the perpetrators’ home town. (A follow-up article noted that the campus is second only to University Park as having the highest crime rate of all the university’s campuses.) The locals are also making the mistake of using words like “trash,” “animals” and “you people” when expressing their anger, and that will automatically push buttons with those kids attending the campus who have nothing to do with this sort of violence.

I can understand both sides of this. I agree with locals getting upset over urban nonsense like this spilling into their community – it’s frightening. It’s frightening when it happens in the city, too, save people who live there are conditioned to think horseshit like this is normal, and to be expected and tolerated. That doesn’t hold true for most towns in rural Pennsylvania, which is a good thing. It doesn’t hold true for most small towns anywhere. You get a bunch of kids squaring off and assaulting each other over something as stupid as comments during a basketball game, pulling up just short of murder, and most people in a small town are going to have a profoundly negative reaction.

And the students from out of town commenting on the site are upset because they see themselves being lumped in with these sort of jackasses who indulge in that sort of violence, thus making themselves targets of bigotry to the locals. Or at least I hope that’s the case. I read through the comments, and not once did I see any of those students state anything to that effect (although I read it between the lines in every comment).

I saw them get angry at the locals for making veiled racist comments. I saw them defending themselves against what they perceived as racist smears. But not once did I see any one of them acknowledge that what happened between those two groups of kids was awful and totally unacceptable. Nor did they apologize for this happening. As well they shouldn’t have. But they can’t seem to recognize that their inability to acknowledge that what happened (and apparently is happening routinely) in that situation was a terrible affront to the community, in the minds of the locals, and honestly in my mind, too. And infers that they relate more closely to a bunch of jackasses who would threaten each other’s lives over a basketball game, rather than be upset that felony crimes are being committed in their midst.

And that’s city people! Having now spent roughly half my life in a rural area and the other half in New York City, I know that mindset. If you talk to these people and point out to them this quiet refusal to place blame on the real problem here (kids willing to kill each other over stupid comments), they would be shocked and tell you, obviously, I detest violence, I hate that this sort of thing happens anywhere.

Yet … if that was your true emotion in all of this, if that’s what really upset you, that would be the first thing out of your mouth. And then you’d lay into the locals for making such typically racist comments. To me, that lack of self realization is crucial and telling as some local starting in with “you people” and going downhill from there.

People should obviously think before they write, but they don’t, especially anonymously on internet message boards. The locals can be just as bad, sometimes even worse, but at least I understand the fear underlying the occasionally stupid comments. Nobody wants to live around bullshit like that. And maybe the university should be doing a better job of screening students if things like this are happening to the extent that a relatively small campus has such an unusually high crime rate. Allowing this to go on hurts everyone. It makes the locals distrustful of any person of color, even if he came from, say, Pottsville, just a few miles away, even if the kid was an honors student at his high school. And it makes the kids who go there from various urban areas extremely uncomfortable when they sense the locals are vaguely hostile towards them, despite the fact that many of them are there to do something honorable, get an education and push themselves forward in life.

All I know is that if I had to choose sides here, I wouldn’t. But I relate more to people who are afraid of felony crime being thrust into their community than people who are willing to kill each other over nothing. And people who don’t recognize that as the core issue. It’s not a racial issue. Or a rural/urban issue. It’s a sanity issue. You would have to be insane to want to live in a place where people try to kill each other over emotions aroused during a fucking basketball game.

Would you have to be insane to live around people who hated you for the color of your skin? No … hell, I did it for a decade in the Bronx! Was perfectly sane the whole time. Foolishly wore it like a badge of honor, as if it made me tough to be the only white guy on the block. Was exposed to verbal abuse routinely, but never physical. Reached my breaking point with the whole “spitting” thing that I started noticing in 1997, people spitting as I passed as a sign of disrespect because I was white. Wasn’t the kind of thing I’d see every now and then. I would see this dozens of times over the course of a week, all week, every week, until I hit that "last straw" milestone and decided to leave that spring. “Hundreds” would not be an exaggeration. Got to the point where I could walk down the street and accurately predict who would spit as I passed! (Generally thugs-in-training teenage males and grown male buffoons who were still dressed and carrying on like teenage males.) Still see this now, too, although not nearly as much. Then again, I don’t live in the Bronx anymore.

For the most part, people were either respectful to me (as I was to them), or they left me alone. Some of them hated me? That wasn’t my problem. My attitude was, unless you make this real, unless you physically confront me, to me you’re just like a baby shitting itself. And that should be a lesson these kids at the campus learn now, because I gather from their commentary that they’ve never really been exposed to actual, real people throwing them bad vibes for the color of their skin. They’ve had this concept drilled into their heads all their lives, but had previously lived all their lives in urban areas where they were not minorities.

It sucks to have your belief in humanity tested as mine was, but it will be tested, over and over again. The trick is to not let anyone control your actions. That’s what’s really going on when someone throws racial shit in front of you: they want your attention, a reaction, why, I don’t know. If you’re wise, you’ll walk on and realize most people don’t give a shit about you one way or the other and are too caught up in their own problems. And that’s a good thing once you get over the concept that the world isn’t spinning around you.

I keep coming back to the issue of recognizing other people’s humanity, but that’s all this is, too. I know for me the race issue got a lot less problematic when I moved here and realized everyone had the same problems. One of the big things for me was seeing how many kids in the Bronx were asthmatic because of their lousy building ventilation and locations near major roadways. Barriers got broken down constantly in my first decade in New York. I could see people caring for their elderly parents. Relying on older brothers and sisters. Struggling through shitty, low-paying jobs. Basically, the same things I’d always seen working-class white people do where I grew up. It occurred me these people had a lot more in common than they knew with white people in small towns, who were equally encouraged to look at black people in the city and feel nothing but fear and disdain.

Incidents like this one that just occurred make that sort of understanding much harder to accomplish. Because you have the incident, in an of itself, which is a lousy thing. And then you have the fallout, people saying stupid shit because they feel threatened, be it locals defending their turf in some sense, or visiting students who want to feel simple respect in a situation (moving to a rural area to get an education) that more than likely has them feeling intimidated and insecure, too.

I can remember feeling deeply upset the first few hundred times with the spitting nonsense, as if I was doing something wrong to incite this kind of reaction. It had to be me, as this kept happening to me with random kids on the street. What was I doing wrong? Was it something I was wearing? Was it the way I looked? The way I walked? After awhile, I realized, I wasn’t dealing with geniuses. The exact opposite was true. Cowards, to boot. Who had picked up on some lousy cultural trend that served as a nice litmus test for their souls. I look back now and laugh at how naïve I was, and quietly mourn that state of innocence, when I assumed that all people were essentially good. I also learned that in any given situation, how I saw things was just that … not how other people were seeing things. It took me out of my perspective and forced me to acknowledge other people are going to see the world, and me in particular, differently, in ways that I might find instructive, but just as likely in ways that are radically wrong and offensive. And there was nothing I could do about that, save walk on if they were going to make fools of themselves.

Don’t you think this kind of knowledge, employed in basketball game where the trash talk must have reached epic levels, might have amounted to the realization that it was just that, trash talk, and no reason to escalate things to a level where someone is willing to take another person’s life?

Penn State Follow-Up

2011-11-30T17:30:00.000-08:00

I don’t want to focus too much on the recent Jerry Sandusky/child molestation case as noted in the last post, which finally seems to have quieted down as the “burning issue we all must confront” media blast. But I do want to write about the experience many of us have had as Penn State graduates and football fans over the past few weeks.

Because it has sucked. In so many ways. The obvious way, of course, is feeling yourself associated to any of this because you have a degree from the university, enjoyed yourself while you were there, still feel good about having gone there, spend a few hours every fall Saturday watching the football team on TV, etc. I can’t tell you how many people at work in NYC anointed me the unofficial expert on this news story … just because I went there. As if I had any sort of inside scoop.

As Brother M pointed out to me over Thanksgiving, Penn State is a learning factory. A LOT of people went there. A lot never had anything to do with the football program, directly or indirectly. I’ve been a Penn State football fan all my life and will go on being one. Sorry if anyone finds that offensive, but I’d be lying if I wrote otherwise. As would millions of other fans. Believe me, for a week or two there, even mentioning that you went to Penn State would elicit vague “pitchforks and torches” vibe from some folks, with you as the Frankenstein monster being stalked through the woods by the howling, straw-hatted mob. If you didn’t support a full shut-down of the football program and demand the immediate imprisonment of all involved, you, by extension, were just as guilty as Sandusky in all this.

The sense of “guilt by association” has been overwhelming at times. Especially concerning Joe Paterno, who was fired over his role in all this, even though we have no idea exactly what that was, save to say at a bare minimum, he dropped the ball in terms of living up to his legend. College administrators tend not to be legendary, and in the cold, black-and-white print of the grand jury indictment, that’s all he was in this situation. Which we have to reconcile with his all-encompassing power as someone who controls everything not just within the football program, but on campus, in that town and in that part of the state.

And I really don’t know how much power the guy has or had wielded beyond his football program, now that we’re equipped with this 20/20 hindsight and superior morality. Would he have known that Sandusky was being investigated by the local police in 1998? Sandusky himself apparently didn’t even know. Who from the police department would have quietly told Paterno this off the record? The media didn’t know about this at the time, otherwise we surely would have heard about it. These are the kind of details we need to know. Did Paterno have any inkling that Sandusky was a pedophile? We’re all assuming this was some sort of quiet common knowledge shared not just by all involved, but by everyone involved with Division I-A college football coaching … and I just don’t know if that’s true or not. If it is, I’ll feel like a horse’s ass for cutting Paterno any slack in this situation. But if it isn’t …

In any event, there are multiple investigations going on now, a trial soon to follow, so we will be inundated with the case again, although we got the media full monty, a legendary college coach falling from grace, this time, and the rest will be anti-climactic. The usual suspects will bloviate, we will be sternly prompted to “think first of the children” … when I can assure you, as a fellow writer, those are the last people on the minds of anyone selling papers or ad space. The first thing will be having the name spelled right in the byline, and then on the check.

I saw a full range of emotions from fellow Penn State grads. One totally disowned Paterno and said he was ashamed to have gone there. That was the extreme. I don’t know any “apologists” … whatever that’s supposed to mean. I see what people mean by that, anonymous commenters on websites bending over backwards to preserve Paterno’s god-like status, but I honestly don’t know anyone who was carrying on like that … or those asshole kids on campus who rioted over this nonsense. Everyone I’ve been in contact with had grave doubts, serious questions and was almost as put off and angered by the out-pouring of hatred towards the university and Paterno as I was.

Every alumni I know was profoundly upset. Some had trouble sleeping. Some got physically ill: headaches, upset stomachs, general malaise. It was like learning that a cherished relative had been accused of a grievous crime, and responding accordingly. I spent two weeks googling “Paterno,” “Sandusky” and “McQueary” every morning to see what had transpired overnight, most of it pure editorial junk. I was obsessed with learning everything I possibly could about the matter. After a week, I realized 99% of what I was reading was utter dogshit, tree-stump pontificating from writers and anonymous, self-appointed super-heroes I wouldn’t buy a used car from, and gave up.

Going back to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving helped a lot. I could see the prevailing attitude back there was, “None of the people hyping this thing care about the kids, or Paterno, or Penn State, so let them blow themselves out and move on to their next conquest.” I could see that this will all end, maybe not soon, but it will end. And the people who follow Penn State football will go on following it, without Joe, with whatever stain this leaves on his legacy and the program. We’ll all go on recognizing that Paterno was a legendary coach, whatever horrible revelations this situation may bring. And we’ll all have to absorb that as it comes along, if it comes along, and reconcile it with his much less tarnished past. His legend is now tarnished? That’s how it works with mere mortals, and we’ve all blown a gasket over the numerous women JFK and Martin Luther King had affairs with while married. They’re still cultural icons, with whatever values you personally attach to them. If those values aren’t complicated, you’re not paying attention or just don’t care. Which is no skin off my nose.

As we’ve seen, other people will be caught up in child sex abuse scandals (your turn now, Syracuse), and the hype machine will kick into overdrive on them. Powerless, angry people will vent righteously on the internet. The hype machine will then give them another topic (take your pick: Kardashian divorce, pepper-sprayed Black Friday shoppers, Herman Cain’s love life, etc.), and they’ll spew Twitter-sized bile all over again, over things they feel no personal connection to and don’t really care about. A subtle message I get from all this: one of the reasons people are so angry is because they sense they just don’t care about anything real, and things like this make them feel like they do, or should. The response rate on stories like this is downright Pavlovian. Ring a bell, and substitute raging impotently for salivating. Chances are if you’re machine-gunning off mini-tirades about every current topic you’re a self-appointed expert on, there’s an emptiness in your life that no amount of time spent on the computer will ever fill.

Personally, it all underlines a seismic shift I felt the day Dad passed on a few Christmas seasons ago. Which was realizing I had just one father figure in my life and felt lost without him for a long time afterwards. I wrote a tribute to Joe Paterno about a decade ago for Leisuresuit.net (and the link doesn’t appear to work right now, unfortunately). Re-reading it now, I can strongly sense that my father was still alive, because I had not experienced the above-noted shift and was attaching father-like qualities to someone (Paterno) who was in no way my father … who the one time I had crossed paths with him, acted like a bit of a nut. Some realizations, you get only the hard way, by experiencing unimaginable and unforeseeable pain and loss. The article I wrote back then feels extremely naïve to me now, but I didn’t know any better at the time.

I can’t tell you how many bad stories and posts I came across on the web attacking Penn State fans for being like children the way they looked up to Joe Paterno, this impossibly clean father figure to millions. The day we put my father in the ground, that fantasy stopped. A lot of fantasies stopped. The world turned black and white, and I can assure you, the last thing on my mind was Penn State football. These bad writers used their massively broad brushes to paint all Penn State fans this way, and I’m just one example of someone with his own much larger, quiet, less obvious personal history, who’d get in their faces and put the fear of God into them if they pulled that little bon mot on me in a social situation.

The amount of sanctimonious, preachy, wrong-headed, simplistic writing I’ve read on this topic has been mind-bending. Like crayon scrawl on wallpaper. Forget about the automatic assumptions of guilt and all the personal baggage (most clearly regarding a disdain for sports of any kind and a burning need to position one self as a font of true, brave morality we must all aspire to). As noted in this article, heroes are not the norm in any extreme situation. Yet … the internet was suddenly crawling with caped crusaders, forces of good who had all the right answers to this moral dilemma and knew every hidden detail about the case. Anonymously. On the internet. Right.

Paterno became an all-purpose piñata for anyone who once believed in a hero and later found the hero to be human. That’s everyone, sooner or later. And once we learn they’re human, the only logical thing to do is to make them bleed, just like we do. I’m having a hard time with people who insinuate that if you don’t personally damn Paterno to burning hell, immediately, you, sir, are suspect, too. This is the sort of sickening nonsense one associates with the Salem witch trials, or any other grotesquely puritanical undertaking. Not everyone in my life is pure and unblemished. Hell, no one is, myself included. I know people who’ve been in prison. Who’ve had serious drug and alcohol problems. Who’ve done “bad things” … anything from petty theft to aggravated assault. You shouldn’t picture me hanging out with a bunch of comic-book villains – most people I know are fairly normal, law-abiding citizens – but sometimes shit happens with people you grew up with and know, and life gets weird.

I haven’t dumped any of those troubled people from my life. Why should I? Because they fucked up? We all fuck up on varying levels. If your life doesn’t contain anyone who’s made these kind of radical errors, goody for you, and I can guess that sanctimony hovers around you like a halo of stale flatulence.

Look at our culture. Our TV shows. Our movies. We are constantly fed characters who are morally ambiguous, or flat-out evil, but then guided in a way that suggests we see these characters as human beings, with feelings, and pasts that explain the roots of their evil, and plenty of other things we all have in common. Think Tony Soprano. Any hiphop artist who portrays himself as a badass with a heart of gold. There are countless thousands of characters and images like this in our society that we are instructed to show some type of human respect or sympathy towards.

Yet … when real-life things like this situation with Paterno come along, we are forcefully instructed to burn this man in effigy and forsake any valuable lessons we learned from him, toss away decades of experience and memory? It just doesn’t work that way. At least for me. If it is found that Joe knew all along about Sandusky’s pedophilia, that he protected and shielded him from the authorities, you better believe I’m going to be furious and about as let down as a fan can be with a major sports figure. But at this point, now that everyone is lawyered up (and don’t flatter yourself, you would be, too, if the media hammer that was dropped on Joe came down on your head), I’m really not sure how close we’re going to get to the truth of this situation, unless people quietly come forward and do some genuinely heroic things that shed light on the situation.

I don’t kid myself. Maybe it’s a New York thing? In the past year or two, thanks to youtube and the explosion of street cams, I’ve been made privy to people filming friends beating up innocent bystanders on the subway and in fast-food joints, or laughing hysterically while providing ironic commentary to a drunken man trying to get back into the burning SUV he just crashed, or a homeless man who’s been stabbed and is now dying on the sidewalk while people passing by ignore him, with one person even pausing to take pictures of him with his phone camera.

The wonders of the internet? It’s all part of the stew of our society, things we don’t like to admit, people we don’t like to acknowledge. Forgive me if I recognize this Penn State situation as a subset of personal dislocation that runs like life blood through so much of what I see today, whether on the internet or street, people who are just incapable of recognizing other people’s humanity. In this case, it comes out as extreme moral posturing, putting on that brave face for the world to see. On the surface, that impulse is a positive thing, but when you think about it … the most moral people I’ve known in my life have never once had to tell me they were moral people, or make any kind of impassioned, grandiose testaments to that effect. And what I learned from them is that you’re only as good as your last act of compassion, that you will fail, and make mistakes, mistreat people on occasion, in effect, be human.

And you could argue that the reason Paterno got himself into this situation is because he, too, didn’t recognize other people’s humanity, in this case that poor kid whom Sandusky was “horsing around with.” And so it goes. He’s paid dearly for it. We all have in some sense, if we’ve taken time to ponder all the obvious and less obvious intangibles. But feel free to skip the less obvious ones. Why trouble yourself with complicated moral questions when the easy ones make for better headlines?

So Long, Joe

2011-11-11T06:14:00.000-08:00

This has been an awful week for Penn State alumni and football fans. In brief, former longstanding defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky has been indicted on various charges regarding acts of pedophilia he committed on campus after his coaching career ended (while he still maintained an office there and used the facilities with children from a youth program he had been running for years).

But the lightning rod in all this has been Joe Paterno, who was eventually ousted as head coach, a job he’s held since 1966, due to his inability to take action when a grad student/assistant coach informed him in 2002 that he had seen Sandusky with a boy in a locker room shower on campus. (In the indictment, it's unclear exactly what the assistant told Paterno.) According to the indictment, Paterno simply followed orders as a university employee and informed his supervisors of what he had been told … who in turn did not inform the police of what had happened, i.e., treat the incident as a criminal matter.

But let’s face it. Even if this had gone according to perfect morality – the grad student, seeing what was happening, physically assaulted Sandusky in the shower, incapacitated him, then immediately called the police to get them involved – the results would have been the same in 2002 as they are now. The incident took place not just on university grounds, but in a locker room reserved for football coaches that Sandusky still had access to (and, according to the indictment, felt comfortable enough with to routinely use as a staging area for his pedophilia). This alone would have been enough to blow up the situation the same way it has now and result in Paterno’s removal.

But as it is, Paterno takes his place in line as an ineffective college administrator, another link in the chain of command who did nothing concrete to stop what appears to be a serial pedophile in his tracks, or at the very least have police investigate him to determine if the allegation was true. Not to excuse his lack of action in any way, but anyone who’s ever worked at a university knows how insular, byzantine and often dislocated from reality their procedures are. They are small fiefdoms, with their own set of codes and regulations, and they like to exercise that authority on a completely internal basis as much as possible. I don’t know why this is, but I do know that world exists as I have worked in that sort of unreality. It explains how something like this could be treated as an “internal matter” to be dealt with rather than doing what any normal human being would do: call the cops. It does not explain why they did not recognize this was a matter of criminal nature and not an isolated campus issue.

And in all honesty, nearly every workplace in my adult life has exercised similar patterns of insularity and questionable morality. Nothing this shocking, thankfully. But in just about every place, I’ve seen workers forfeit their basic human rights, the simple rights of self respect, to keep their jobs, far more often than not when they have reached some type of “tenure” in their positions, have weeks of vacation earned over the years and other larger perks that go along with company loyalty. I’ve seen key employees granted so much power in that isolated work environment that they lose sight of their humanity and become monsters in a sense. Go one floor up or one floor down, and they’re nobody. But in that small space, they rule the world. They know it and act accordingly, with dozens, maybe even hundreds or thousands, of willing accomplices to enable this illusion.

It’s not just the places I’ve worked. You’ve worked there, too, no doubt. And have dealt with this “must avert eyes in the presence of the lord” mentality that goes along with encountering top executives. Think of actors or singers who demand that no one on set makes eye contact with them or speaks to them unless spoken to -- there are countless stories of this sort of arrogance that seem more like France before the Bastille was stormed as opposed to most people’s every-day work reality.

This goes on because that counterfeit authoritarianism has become institutionalized, and people have fear. Fear of losing their jobs, of becoming destitute, of having no future. Realistically, losing your job usually results in weeks or months of discomfort and mild depression, not the wasteland of lost hope most people envision when they encounter a situation at work they know is wrong, but do nothing about. The larger fear is this inexplicable power granted to certain authority figures in isolated environments that far supercedes whatever their professional worth truly is. You got me. I don’t understand it at all: never have, never will.

But hopefully I’m explaining the sort of environment that allows a grad student, and earlier a janitor according to the indictment, see this monster sexually assault young boys, report it only to coworkers and immediate supervisors, and then sit back as nothing happens. I’m not leaving anyone off the hook, but that stifling, amoral fear most people feel at one time or another in their workplaces is the kernel of this sort of cowardice displayed in these events.

I’ve been a Penn State football fan all my life. In the early 70s, as a small child, I purposely had Mom sew the number “22” onto the sleeves of my t-shirts and sweatshirts because I worshipped John Cappelletti, the only Penn State running back to win the Heisman Trophy. There were dozens of other Penn State players I worshipped as a kid, and the fandom extended all through my adulthood, the only constant being Joe Paterno, and that no-frills, “education first” winning way he’s espoused that I’ve admired so much.

Now? I don’t know. I’d rather let this whole thing play out before I come to any conclusions. There’s a few hundred miles of dark road to travel down before this thing is over. Best-case scenario is what I noted above: Joe took the information the grad assistant passed on to him, informed his supervisors, who then essentially did nothing. He did what he was supposed to do as a school administrator, and the administrators above him failed to take appropriate action, as did he.

If that’s the case, I can feel reasonably comfortable with Joe Paterno and his legacy. This is an awful way to end things, but honestly, I was hoping he would step down for the past five years. A situation like this at least forces him to leave, as it seemed like he was never going to leave under his own free volition. I gather part of that was going after various win records, first the I-A record that was an ongoing competition with Florida State’s head coach, Bobby Bowden. And this past year, the overall college win record that he just won from Grambling’s Eddie Robinson.

While this “overall win” issue was great entertainment over the years, it now seems like small change compared to what’s happening now. Even if the best-case scenario pans out, Joe leaves with a dark stain on his record, one that will invariably creep into everybody’s mind when talking or thinking about him, even years from now. For me, it would be like having an uncle you love dearly, despite something morally troubling he's done in his life. (And if everyone in your life has never done anything morally troubling, that's a gold star by your name.)

Worst-case scenario, Joe knew what was going on, had protected Sandusky for years from authorities, purposely told the administrators to handle this internally, didn’t recognize the scope of the situation, and quietly enabled a monster to roam free, and damage and taint no doubt dozens of young lives.

I don’t know. Unlike countless anonymous internet prognosticators and genuinely hack sports columnists and editorialists, who seem to envision themselves as wearing capes with their first-name initials emblazoned on their chests, I just don’t know. I don’t know what happened here. Very few people do right now. We need to know. Or at least I do as a lifelong fan and someone who wants to go on believing that someone I’ve always admired, at the very best, just lost the thread in terms of asserting his authority and doing something decisive in a situation that required the sort of moral turpitude he’s espoused daily. If that truly is the case, I’ll feel bad, but nowhere near as bad if something more damning transpires here.

And if it isn’t, then I just have to make a seismic shift in how I deal with the issue of Penn State football in the future. I’ll always be a fan, but would prefer being one with some semblance of respect for the man who built the program over the course of a lifetime. As it is, I’m a grown man. I watched my father pass away a few years ago. Nearly lost my life in a house fire a few months ago. We all go through these genuinely hard situations in our lives, that are about us, and our lives directly … not things we view from afar, like sports. I’ve got my own set of problems and moral issues to deal with, which keep me more than occupied, and my own life to live that goes on whatever happens with this situation. When this blows over, the media and angry rabble will find another piece of meat to gnaw away at. And life will go on, with many more dark days and small victories to come, all of which will be dealt with in their time.

Reunion Mix

2011-10-30T14:41:00.000-07:00

My next class reunion is coming up in July of next year, and the woman organizing it has given me the assignment of coordinating the music. The concept is we’ll save a ton of money by not hiring a professional DJ, and I can pull together a gigantic mix of 70s/80s/beyond favorites that’s bound to be just as if not more accurate than what any paid DJ could come up with. Either her husband or son will man the laptop that night and throw the mix of tunes together, as I don’t want to, simply because it’s my reunion, and I’m there to see people again, not work the board.

We did the same thing for our 20th reunion a decade ago, just as MP3s were ascending into the acceptable media format, and it went a bit rocky at times. The laptop would skip/freeze up occasionally, and one of the issues with someone not "of that era" running it is they have no idea what key songs will register with the crowd. I can still recall the hostess pulling me aside and saying, “No one’s dancing. We need a good slow-dance song to get more guys on the floor.” I suggested “Love Hurts” by Nazareth – a ballad, but heavy metal-leaning, so all those guy who normally wouldn’t dance, would dance to something like this. And sure enough, they did. Most of the night was more modern dance/party music, which wasn't my bag, but plenty of other people surely enjoyed it.

I went all out back then, and I’ve gone all out now, too, and surely have a much larger/more complex collection than last time. It’s been 10 years of digital music since then, and to give you an idea, back then I was worried about filling up a 16 GB MP3 player, and now I’m on the cusp of filling up a 160 GB iPod. That’s why I love these massively hard-drived players and am disappointed as hell that Apple seems bent on never again making a player this large or larger. That extra space encouraged me to branch out and really fill in all my musical blanks, which is an ongoing project for the rest of my days.

They seem to think “the cloud” and “streaming” is the answer … but I’ve used streaming the past few months on my laptop due to my living situation (no cable, using a Virgin Mobile Broadband USB plug), and I can assure you, streaming is not the answer (data caps, too many drop outs and freezes, unusable in areas where reception is choppy). It’s an addendum, and some enterprising/large media company would be doing themselves a favor to come out with larger hard and flash-drived players instead of forcing “the cloud” down our throats. I like the cloud, but it’s no substitute for having your own, hand-picked, cherished tunes at your disposal at all times.

It’s an odd process, because I can’t visualize any one type of person and go with that, as I recall certain kids liked certain kind of music back then, and wouldn’t be caught dead listening to any other kind. What do these people listen to three decades on? I’m assuming hardly anything, for most. But I’m also assuming that when they go to something like a reunion, they’ll want to hear music from that time period, mixed in with newer popular songs that they’ll occasionally grab onto via their kids and such.

The quibbling aspect of all this is I have a very large, detailed collection of digital music, but I’ll often skip the most obvious hits by an artist for more obscure album cuts. Why? Because the originals were played to death and I never had any urge to buy them again digitally. But, given this context, I found it prudent to double back and get these huge tracks. Even more painful is that I’ll have either greatest hits packages or the actual albums/CDs these songs were on … save they’re back in my apartment, still waiting for me to move back in after the fire! It makes sense to do this now as I have more time on my hands, so I’ve simply re-downloaded about two dozen tracks like this. (All told, I’m just under 2,000 tracks for the whole project.)

Two great examples are “Dancing Queen” by ABBA and “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. Rhapsody is one of my all-time favorite songs, and I was shocked that I didn’t have it in my digital collection. Whereas most ABBA has now been done to death over the past two decades. I can still recall not being able to find one ABBA CD, greatest hits or catalog album, back in the early 90s when not everything was making the jump from vinyl to CD. There was rumored to be a 3-disc Italian import floating around, but I never saw it. A year later, ABBA Gold, the first CD compilation came out in the UK, and I scarfed it up, later getting all their back catalog, despite the fact that I’d never owned one ABBA album in my youth. (This was way before the Mamma Mia musical or any of the Australian, ABBA-based movies; ABBA was essentially dead in the early 90s, which was why I was looking for them.)

And then there’s bands I didn’t much care for at the time, but recognize most kids did. I’ve already dealt with this as a fan throughout the 90s and 00s, realizing I had nothing against these bands, save they were constantly in my face as a teenager while I was scouting out more rarified new-wave and indie music, thus feeling obliged to shun this more popular stuff like the plague. Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Def Leppard. I always begrudgingly liked a lot of this stuff, but as time went on, I doubled back and made sure I had at least one solid hits compilation, while digitally cherry-picking album tracks around the web that I remembered from the radio.

Ditto, 80s bands that came into play when I was already into young adulthood and in no way had any interest in these bands. Think hair metal. Bon Jovi, Poison. I absolutely hated this stuff at the time. But can see now it was simply well-structured if extremely surface pop, with an image thrown on top of it to sell to kids. And I’d wager a lot of my classmates unironically liked hair metal and still do today. Nothing wrong with that, and there are a handful of songs for each artist I’ll gladly throw in the mix.

My “80s Pop Rock” folder on the iPod has become a bit of a mess, because that’s where most of these “hated them at the time/have since made space for them” discrepancies are in my collection. There are times when a track comes up for this time period where I’ll just zap right by it. But I got it in there for just such a circumstance as a class reunion mix, knowing some people out there could like it. Think Whitney Houston, or any slick 80s R&B act. Lionel Richie. Stuff it’s not even fair to say I hated at the time … I simply ignored it all together, as much as I could when it was on MTV 10 times a day. Ditto newer stuff like Lady GaGa. Just not my cup of tea. For these, I’ll relegate them to that one hit track everybody knows them for. Period. If a fortysomething classmate approaches me at this reunion and castigates me for not having more Lady GaGa, I’ll have to ask them what they’re doing even listening to music aimed squarely at prepubescent girls.

Country music? Here’s the thing. It was a rare kid who liked country music in high school back in the early 80s. I wasn’t that kid. I fucking hated country music back then, as did most of my classmates. Of course, times change, and I’ve written about the doors slowly opening for me as time went on, as there is so much great country music out there. But in the context of a reunion, would anyone but me really want to sit and listen to half a dozen Hank Sr. or George Jones tracks in a row? I doubt it. But I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of my classmates now like country, especially the women, as so much of what came out in the 90s was geared towards an adult female audience. I relegated a few dozen tracks to country, nearly all of it more poppy material, think 70s Glen Campbell, Kenny Rogers, Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, The Dixie Chicks. And only a song or two for each. That’s my least favorite kind of country, but recognize a song or two does register with me. A vast majority of the off-the-beaten path country I listen to, think The Gourds or any other longstanding alt country band, would be totally lost in a reunion situation.

Jazz? Classical? Man, forget it. NOBODY in my class back then was into either. I’m sure you’ll find a few now. I’ve surely listened to a lot more jazz and classical in the past few years. But that’s not the stuff of reunions. No one’s going to pound beers and high five to Glenn Gould’s interpretation of Bach’s Sinfonia No 9 in F Minor. Or snap their fingers to an old Charlie Parker track.

The 70s? The 60s? The 50s? As kids in the 70s, we were raised in the shadow of the 60s, thus listening to a lot of what was popular then, via the radio or older siblings. And a lot of 70s music is “our music” as our teen years bridged the gap between the 70s and 80s. (When younger folks ask me what it was like to be a teenager in the 70s, I tell them to put on “Rebel Rebel” by Bowie or “Surrender” by Cheap Trick. Although my reality was more like “Telephone Line” by Electric Light Orchestra.) We had “disco dancing” classes in gym class. I still remember the metal kids standing off to the side, muttering, “This is so fucking gay.” It was a painful thing to watch them do half-hearted disco moves with the rest of us. It was even worse than square dancing, which we did every year, too. That’s what “country music” amounted to for most of us back then: square dancing in gym class.

The 60s were almost as second nature as the 70s in terms of music. At least for the most popular stuff, like The Beatles, Stones and Who, all of whom were still cultural icons when we were teenagers. AOR radio served as a sort of rock school for us, playing all the classic 60s and 70s rock, heavy rotation, in big rock blocks of four songs, and King Biscuit Flower Hour concerts, so that we all knew this stuff like biblical passages. 60s soul music, not so much – it just wasn’t passed on to white kids in the same way rock was, although many of us later developed strong appreciations for it.

Even the 50s had a minor presence. Remember that we were raised watching Happy Days, thus feeling nostalgia for an era when we weren’t even alive. Fifties music was all over 70s pop culture, particularly on oldies radio, which I’d love listening to while driving around at night – just as much an education for me. Fifties music for us then was as country probably is to a lot of us now: a music that wasn’t “ours” in any sense but we learned to enjoy on its own terms anyway.

And that’s the big distinction to make for me as a compiler: the difference between music that was intrinsically “ours” at the time, as opposed to music that wasn’t “ours” and we assimilated along the way. It’s about an 80/20 split for something like a reunion, although the reality in my life has those proportions reversed. Most of what I listen to has very little to do with my teen years, and is an ongoing exploration to hear new sounds, figure out what I like, develop some kind of taste for all these different kinds of music, and bring it into my life in some sense. I can lay this out for people my life in terms of gift mixes (like the kind I do for Christmas every year), but a lot of times, I gather I’m giving music to people to have little or no interest in what I’m giving them, which is why I shoot for the best/most appealing music when I do something like that in hopes of opening a door for somebody, or at least entertaining them when they put on the disc.

No opening doors for a reunion mix! I’m sure these people know what they like and know what they want to hear in a situation like this. I’ll surely be “stumped” more than a few times with song requests. And I’ll surely have some people wonder why I don’t have a certain album track from Sammy Hagar or some 80s metal band that even metal fans are vaguely aware of. But that’s part of the deal. If I can have at least one track for an artist that someone requests, mission accomplished.

I realize that what I listened to at the time wouldn’t go over so well: mainly 60s rock and new wave. I do have quite a bit of new-wave in the reunion mix, but am aiming more for the “greatest hits” effect than a catalog exploration. Because most kids didn’t like new wave in my class at the time! That seems to be a shock for following generations to grasp, but new wave just didn’t sell all that well teenagers in the early 80s. When they first hit, these bands would play colleges when they got into the hinterlands, and it would take a few years of heavy MTV exposure and solid albums to break through to that larger teen audience. I knew two other kids who liked Elvis Costello and The Clash, and we were weirdos. And even with The Clash, I don’t have “Rock the Casbah” in this collection, because I never liked that song and never will. Some songs, I just can’t fathom why they were hits, and that’s one of them.

In a way, this project makes me feel like a ghost, floating down the hallways of our old school, noting who was on the fold-out posters on the insides of lockers, over-hearing stoners in the boys room talking about their favorite tracks on The Wall, girls in the cafeteria explaining how they knew the boyfriend fast-forwarding the cassette to “Keep on Loving You” meant he wanted to make out.

And that world is gone. A few weeks ago when I was back in PA, I went out to the high school to pick up some tickets for that weekend’s football game, which was against old rival Mount Carmel, a huge game as both teams were undefeated, thus the ticket pre-sale at the school. It was the first time I had gone back there since the fall of 1982 (then to pick up my yearbook). Looked the same. Walked up to the front door. First one I tried was locked. Next one, too. And the next one. I glanced over to my left. There was a camera looking at me. And a wall plaque stating I had to hit the buzzer at the far left door, announce my name and intention, then be let in.

It was all a bit unnerving. Back in ’82, we’d just walk into and out of the school, unencumbered by prison-style nonsense like this. But I guess with the advent of kids shooting up their schools over the past few decades, this was now reality. When I got in, it looked the same, but some officious type guy, probably not the principal, immediately told me they were sold out of tickets when I asked. I took one look around then got the hell out of there.

I don’t doubt kids are still going through the same things we once did and will one day feel just as sentimental on occasion, and just as snake-bitten for the bad memories. But that sort of cold, 1984ish reception I got set me straight on nostalgia and any urge to “go back” in time to that place, now that it was in lockdown in anticipation of someone going nuts with an automatic weapon. At least there weren’t metal detectors and security guards, which are standard procedure in most city schools.

Still, doesn’t mean we can’t all get together once a decade and see how we’re all doing, which isn’t the chore or negative experience I had expected it would be before I went to the first one two decades ago. If there’s on thing I learned at both previous reunions, it’s that the music was secondary, not the main attraction at all, just something playing in the background while we all chatted amicably, occasionally ran into old friends, and just as often found ourselves laughing and having a good time with people we never though we would have back then. That’s the attitude I’m taking towards the music and like to think I’ve accomplished. Getting re-acquainted with old friends, meeting some new ones, and discovering I like some people I thought I’d never like at all.

Positively Union Turnpike

2011-10-16T17:19:00.000-07:00

Well, by this point, I thought I’d be back in my old apartment. Insurance company did its thing. Architect filed building permits. Contractors came in and took the one/two days to fix my place. But two months later, and I’m still waiting!

I’ve since learned it takes an inordinately long time for building permits to go through in NYC. Weeks, often a month or two. I don’t know when they were filed, but I gather it’s the usual runaround. At first I thought it was insurance company hijinx, but they really stand nothing to gain by letting the process get drawn out. The longer people wait, the more they find wrong/needing to fix. Of course, it’s killing me because I know my place is so minorly damaged and will be ready to go in a matter of days once they start working.

So, in the meantime, as last posted, cooling my heels in suburbia on the far edge of Queens. Doesn’t feel like far edge of Queens. Feels like Long Island. Walk in any direction, save west, and you’re in Long Island. And, man, have I been doing a lot of walking. Just in terms of getting around – essentials like grocery store and laundromat are spread out – but it’s also a good way to burn a few hours on a weekend afternoon, just go for a long walk.

Later today, I plan to head back to the apartment, pick up a travel bag (headed to PA for a few days later this week), a comforter (this place retains cold like a freezer), and a few DVDs (mainly fall-type horror movies). And on the way back, take the bus to Main Street in Kew Gardens, get off, and walk the seven miles back here, as that will constitute my workout for the day. It’s a straight shot up the beautiful Union Turnpike, which I’m learning like the back of my hand as I peer out the bus window on my daily commutes.

It’s a strange feeling seeing the apartment now. The few times I’ve been there since the fire, virtually nothing has been done, and I can’t stand the abandoned feel of the place, the strong whiffs of smoke that are still emanating from the landlord’s apartment. I’m sincerely hoping no one breaks in as we go along here, with all my stuff is still in there, just waiting to be useful again. If this goes on long enough, into early November, I’ll have to get back there on Sundays just to get leaves off the sidewalk; the sanitation department will most likely ticket the house, regardless of the fact that no one’s living there. Not unlike the time they ticketed the landlord because I forgot to peel off the mailing label from a UPS cardboard box set out for recycling.

The one thing I’ve dealt with since then is the usual conversation with someone who has never been through a house fire: they would have put the fire out when they had the chance. In pitch blackness. At 3:00 in the morning. With fire burning in the wall. Even if that was all I had to contend with, I probably could have figured it out somehow. What they’re not getting is the amount of smoke generated in a house fire. Literally could not see more than a foot in front of me, even in the lit hallway leading into the kitchen Movies and television shows do not convey this properly. This is why firemen have enclosed helmets with strong searchlights on the crowns and breathing apparatuses on their backs. When they walk into a fire, it’s a pure wall of black smoke.

This is what I walked into. And got the immediate vibe this would have knocked me out in less than a minute or two without proper protection. (And I would have fallen down, into that bar of clean air beneath the wall of smoke, and presumably been able to crawl out of there, assuming the carbon monoxide effects didn’t kick in too hard.) If I had walked in and seen an open flame, great, let’s run back downstairs, get a bucket, and try to douse it out. But you have to realize, even if the fire wasn’t behind the refrigerator and in that wall, I still would have had to wander around in that smoke until the fire was a foot away to identify it. It’s not like these Hollywood scenes of someone dashing through clear, open air to pick up a passed-out child. Maybe in the first minute or two of the actual fire. But after that, the smoke billows and intensifies … to the point where a fire will not be seen until it’s more than likely too late to put out without the right equipment.

Hindsight being 20/20, first thing I’d do now, upon the landlord yelling down the stairs that there was a fire, would be immediately dial 9-1-1 to report it, THEN run upstairs and see if I could put it out. I probably could have cut off 2-3 minutes from the fire department’s arrival time and isolated the fire completely to the kitchen extension, as opposed to creeping through the hallway and touching into the rest of the house.

The ordeal now is passing time, and how fucking long this thing will take to play itself out. I gather my landlord won’t live in her place for at least a few months. Since her apartment received the most damage and will require serious construction, it’s going to take a considerable amount of time to get things right there. And it would be to her advantage to get her tenants back in and paying rent as soon as possible, which will not be long once the permits come through. Just the whole, obscene process of waiting for these things to come through! You’d figure there’d be a special division just for emergencies like this: fires, floods, situations where a homeowner has been rendered homeless. But it seems like they get thrown in the same bin as some guy who wants to McMansionize his two-story rowhouse … chances are his request could go through faster if he knows someone on the inside. Just tiresome stuff.

About the one thing I’ve grabbed onto in this time is the Union Turnpike, that long stretch of beat-down, strip-malled, auxiliary to major roadways that cuts straight through Queens like so many of those other miles-long boulevards. It’s my lifeline straight back to the subway system, which in turn takes me to Manhattan. I gather people out here don’t care at all about Manhattan. Even in Astoria, you’ll find people who never set foot there, whether out of intimidation or disdain. Hell, I tend not to go in there on weekends unless I have to (which I do for boxing on Sunday mornings).

But it seems to me like the farther you get away from Manhattan around here, the stranger life gets, at least for someone like me who works there every day and has that sense of “New York City” in his head. The suburbs don’t cut it for me: surprise! It just seems like a disjointed way of life I’ll never warm up to. I understand small towns and major cities. There’s an underlying obnoxiousness to a lot of people out here that I just can’t get around. Related to money and status, and the total emptiness that each entails when that’s all people have to distinguish themselves. God knows, you get it in spades in Manhattan. But there, you can always walk around it. Here, it’s everywhere you go, all the time. Which is why I have such disdain for spoiled brats moving into Astoria: they’re bringing that awful sense of the suburbs and entitlement with them, to a neighborhood that was middle to working-class for years. They would have shunned my neighborhood like the plague as little as a decade ago.

I can even sense, waiting for the bus that takes me down the Union Turnpike, the turned-up noses and smirks in the passing cars, you know, the millions of cars packed in the eternal traffic jams around here, filled with miserable, honking bastards having breakdowns as their meaningless urge to do 75 mph down the road to nowhere is impeded. They’d never be caught dead taking the bus! And down the Union Turnpike? Man, just get I-whatever and you’ll be there in no time. (Thing is, when I catch glimpses of the interstates through the trees, they’re usually bumper-to-bumper half the time.)

The bus surely leaves a lot to be desired – it gets unbearably crowded the closer it gets to Kew Gardens. But I’m lucky enough to be on the first stop and always wrangle a window seat, which allows me to listen to music and take in this blemished roadway, the King Yum Chinese restaurant, The Sly Fox Inn, the frat-boy bars down by St. John’s University, the Indian Palaces with $9.99 buffet, the ubiquitous 99-cent stores, the crazy Irish-Peruvian pub down by Springfield Boulevard.

It’s not so much the land that time forgot, as the land that people don’t like to admit is just around the corner and just as much a part of their lives as the perfectly-manicured lawn. That’s what I see as I gaze down the sidestreets along the turnpike. Very much the vibe that you have these ugly, strip-mallish arteries extended all through Queens, but between each, these safe havens of severely over-priced houses, each with lawns of varying sizes, some houses full-blown mansions, others humble bungalows. And I can’t knock that at all. If anything, it’s a relaxing vibe to know that such sedate living environments are so relatively close to Manhattan. The kind of places people go to “raise their kids.” Although I’m not sure I’d want to raise a kid with the kind of monetary values people have drilled into their heads around here … it’s pretty depraved in that sense.

Still, you look at the faces on the bus – mostly Indian and Asian, mostly women – and get the sense that these are the people who are pushing Queens forward, the ones who quietly get on the bus every morning and take that hellishly long ride into Manhattan to earn their daily bread. It’s a whole different vibe from the subway lines, which are rougher in some senses, but as noted recently in Astoria, also filled with too many spoiled white jackasses who bear the vibe of tourists more than neighborhood people. I can see it on the bus, too. The closer you get to Kew Gardens, the more you get that privileged twat vibe from people getting on the bus. I’m just as guilty in a sense – I was totally unaware of what people who lived beyond the end of subway lines did to get to work in New York City – but I’ve been at it a lot longer, have lived in much harder places, than most of these folks, and have the gravitas to back it up. New York City used to be a place where you earned your stripes: now it’s like instant jello.

I can’t help but feel at home on the Union Turnpike. These kind of no-frill roads exist everywhere in America. You can latch on to the Dunkin Donuts, or Subways, or McDonalds, that invariably line these roadways in-between the smaller local businesses, but it’s the road itself. It will take you longer to get where you’re going, stopping at every other red light. But at least for me, it opened the door to another side of Queens I knew existed, but had never experienced. When I think back years from now on these crazy few months following that horrible house fire I survived, I can guarantee you the one crucial piece of real estate that will come to me then, the lay of the land, will be the Union Turnpike and what I saw looking out the bus window every work morning.

Exile on Main Street

2011-09-18T14:36:00.000-07:00

The airport hotel started wearing thin when the local Chinese place forgot to pack a plastic fork with my chicken lo mein, and I had to use two airport-logo pens as chopsticks. The morning I left, last Saturday, instead of the telltale whiffs of cigarette smoke that had been wafting from the grate in the bathroom ceiling, someone had sparked up a joint in his room, leaving the shower smelling vaguely of ganja. It was time to check out.

I had quickly grown used to the set-up. Free cable, free wifi, air-conditioning, no cleaning up, no bed to make. The gist was I was heading to a place where none of these options would be available, albeit the surrounding environment would be a typical suburban neighborhood as opposed to living in a strip mall.

On top of that, I had to take the bus into the old neighborhood, drop off my bags at my apartment, then go to the dentist to get two last crowns put in. All this on top of moving to a strange place I’d never been anywhere near before. The dentist part of it went easy. Since this was my last visit, and the crowns already fitted, all I had to do was go in, get them hammered/glued into my head, get a quick cleaning, drop a grand on the credit card, then leave. The cleaning was brutal, as it was the first time I went there. But I gather that’s how these things are supposed to be. It was good to find a dentist in the neighborhood who seemed to have his head on straight and wasn’t looking at me as a dollar sign.

After that, got out my laundry list of things to take to this new place, mostly kitchen and bathroom stuff and packed. Once again, the place was virtually untouched. I could see that someone had come in and bunched my furniture away from what would be the work area under the torn-away ceiling. The windows had been left open all this time, and that was the only way I could still smell the fire, as all those charred objects were still there upstairs. I smelled my bed and clothes: still nothing, smelled normal. In theory, I could move right in, and everything would be working, the electricity, water, gas, even cable. But I knew I couldn’t do this.

Landlord’s daughter came by, and we loaded up her car with my clothes and sundry items. We lit out for the rest of Long Island, a place I sort of dread. I think Long Island, I think cars. Everyone in cars. All the time. Driving from moderately-sized, profoundly over-priced house to various shopping and pleasure centers. But the thing is to be in your car most of the time. And vaguely angry. And always wound up. At least that’s the vibe I often catch from Long Island people in office work. A mild sort of aggression that’s as much a trademark of their surroundings as a Southern accent would be to someone from Georgia. And that Long Island accent … don’t get me started.

We got out to Glen Oaks. We had originally been told New Hyde Park. But that’s Nassau County … 50 yards across the street. The bus that services the neighborhood calls it Lake Success. I’ve since learned Lake Success is the area directly north of here, named after a lake that seems inaccessible to the public and part of some country club type set up. The name itself reaks of suburban wrongness. Lake Success … as opposed to Lake Failure? Mediocre River?

The house looked fine. Not too big, small yard around it, near a huge hospital. As a result, there was virtually no parking on the street, as visitors coming to the hospital would be endlessly circling the neighborhood looking for spaces. And I saw them on the streets, carrying silver-foiled “Get Well Soon” balloons. Grim-faced families walking to the visitor’s entrance, to do that dance of the sick and dying, visiting someone who at least has experienced misfortune, but could just as likely be on his deathbed.

We met my new temporary landlord on the street, an older Greek woman, smaller, very lively and vibrant, glad to see us. I later learned she works at the Steinway piano factory just down the block from where I live in Astoria. For a day job. And has about three or four other jobs she works at night and on weekends. An extremely busy person. She doesn’t like renting out the basement because she’s been burned by bad tenants in the past, but since my landlord’s daughter is a good friend and this is an emergency, she’s up for it.

The place is fine. No furniture. Just bare floors, but a kitchen, small bathroom, small living room and small bedroom, laid out railroad-flat style. We found the refrigerator was broken, that musty freon smell, warm bottles of Pepsi she had stored there. And we walked in on a plumber running his snake through the main drainage pipe as the toilet wouldn’t flush earlier in the day. At this point, problems like this were getting to be old hat with me, as everything about this process since waking up to a fire a few weeks earlier had built-in problems.

The landlord’s daughter and I loaded out all my stuff, then went out shopping for lawn furniture. I had a (deeply uncomfortable) cot to sleep on, but nothing else. All I found that afternoon was a small fold-out pillow chair at Marshalls, which I’ve since found very comfortable, but doesn’t look like much … and waiting in line was excruciating, behind the mothers with 50-60 items of baby clothes and meaningless junk that you always get at discount places like this.

By the time we got back to the apartment, the plumber was gone, and all was reasonably well. I still felt stressed out, just a twilight zone of a day, but that Friday at work, had found that a branch of my gym was a few miles north of us. So I asked the landlord’s daughter to give me a ride up there, let me work out, and she could get back to Astoria in the mean time and let me settle in. This turned out to be the only normal part of my day. A good workout, followed by a long shower, and then a long walk back to the empty apartment. Turns out the distance is three miles. Yesterday, I walked it both ways and found the workout to be fantastic, despite walking along a typically traffic-crazed, leafy suburban road that very few people seem to walk along despite having a perfectly good walking trail.

The next day, I found a really good, comfortable lawn chair at a Bed Bath & Beyond at a strip mall a few miles down the road. That’s how this area is set up. Patches of suburban homes with strip malls every mile or so to service the people who live there.

When I walked north to that health club, I got into the more swanky, country-club style areas, and this is where I have issues with suburbia. I’ve always pictured suburban people as being halfway in/halfway out of a deeply confused life, as opposed to how they see themselves, as “having the best of both worlds” of rural and urban life. They don’t. The patches of rural greenery are illusory. From what I saw, nearly all those vast expanses of countryside were either owned by schools or country clubs, or otherwise off limits to the public, save for a small portion that was doled out as parks. Everything of value in terms of open space was owned by rich entities or people.

The reality is most people live in their allotted space in their moderately-sized houses and spend a good chunk of time driving like maniacs and feeling frustrated in automobiles … because if you were to do a percentage breakdown on lifestyle, we’re talking 80% urban and 20% rural in terms of how these people live. I’ll give it to them that they can get a nice house and stake a claim on a nice small property. But everything else about how they live is predicated on dealing with cars, driving fast in heavy traffic and invariably dealing with crowds of some sort … just like I do in the city. Bursts of tension followed by calm when they pull up in the driveway and close the door on what they have to do to live there. The quality of life doesn’t strike me as being profoundly better. Or worse, for that matter. It just seems like an awful lot of money being spent to avoid people with less money and whatever lifestyle baggage they bring.

And the McMansions. Most of the houses around here are basic, two-story brick houses, some with siding, all looking modest and reasonable, the kind of places hosting families with two working spouses and kids. Except for the occasional homeowner who has blasted out a 2-3 story monstrosity of tan stucco (always, same color, same finish) with two-story front windows, the borders of the house pushing up to the edge of the property line. Just the most garish, out-of-place, vomitous looking houses. These people seem to picture themselves as lords of the manor, when they have some guy named Gus who’s a retired firefighter living there for decades with his wife on one side, and an Indian family making a go with a Dunkin Donuts franchise on the other.

I’ve been here a week now and have acclimated as much as I can. Find myself more drawn to the older Long Islanders, who clearly have a more relaxed, rural vibe about them, probably remembering this place when it had open farmland and no interstates. The commute to work is awful, and hour and a half, taking a local bus down Union Turnpike, then catching an F Train at Kew Gardens in the middle of Queens into Manhattan. The longish part is the bus, depending on the whims of traffic that day, or simple luck, as there are a few branches of the same bus line servicing the turnpike, and very often, my bus will pull into one stop to find it empty, as another bus had already picked up a long line of passengers, only for my bus to hopscotch that loading bus and find 30 people standing at the next stop, where we’ll be stopped for five minutes as they load in. Do this 20 times, and you can see how a trip that normally takes 25 minutes stretches out to nearly an hour. The F Train has actually been pretty dependable with a half hour shot into midtown, albeit very crowded most days. It’s not a comfortable trip at all, the only good parts of which are my stop being near the beginning/I can get a seat, and I can listen to the iPod that much longer.

Most nights, I don’t get back here until 8:00 or later, so the concept of having no TV or internet isn’t so bad (although I can play DVDs on my laptop, which I’ve been doing nightly). Kudos to old friend JS who showed me how set up my smartphone as an informal wifi hotspot so that I have had web access here, although I suspect I’m nearing my data cap and will probably have to breakdown and buy a small wifi modem, which will set me back over $100 after all is said and done for the actual device and one month’s use. Still … much better than nothing. The prospect of no TV (especially during football season) and no web access had me feeling like I was stepping back into the stone age, but having at least a semblance of these two things has made me feel halfway normal.

I feel a bit like Citizen Kane in reverse, that scene were he’s sitting in the dark in his huge mansion, in front of the enormous fire place, and you get that sense of a wealthy man who has become profoundly isolated in his wealth. I guess it’s because this apartment is empty, has marble floors and echoes, that I can tap into that vibe of being alone in a strange place. A much smaller place. A basement apartment on the far edge of Queens. With pretty much every necessity I could pack into a suitcase and gym bag. And some lawn furniture. Living a temporarily nutty existence due to a house fire that blazed away one night a few weeks ago. Taking away my comfort, but sparing my life, a lesson that’s slowly beginning to resonate and sink into my being.

Surely, I could not have predicted a situation like this occurring some time in the near or far future. But I’ve found when something like this happens, the best thing to do is treat it like a wave and let it carry you along, a sort of half-assed adventure you didn’t ask for, but since you have it, just roll with it. Talked to the landlord’s daughter last night, very little progress with the insurance company and architect last week, but she thinks this week the ball will start rolling. Which means someone coming in and fixing up my ceiling in a day or two, popping in a few new window slats the fireman had knocked out, and then a general cleaning. I’m hoping to be back there by October. If only to watch the Phillies in the playoffs! But also because it will be a month since all this happened, and I’d really like to get back where I belong, where I’ve lived since 1999, and get about the life I was living.

Whatever I thought was doubtful or wrong about that way of life, I can tell you, get it pulled out from under you, and it all doesn’t seem so bad from afar. I had a lot of healthy routine: making good, healthy dinners for myself, working out a few times a week, listening to music constantly, probably had the TV on too much, but oh well. I guess if your way of life is such that you spend zero time in your house or apartment, losing it temporarily wouldn’t be such a big deal. But I think if you’re in that boat, you have to ask yourself why you spend so little time there. We’re meant to live in places, create feelings of home and safety, have some place where we can close the door and feel perfectly all right with whatever world we’ve created there. It’s not something you should ever take too lightly, and something you should acclimate yourself to as you get older, because at the end of the day, we were all meant to create a home in some sense and spend time there.

That first work night in this new neighborhood, I naturally took the wrong bus back. Right number, wrong extension. I learned you have to carefully read the flashing neon directions on the front of the bus, as the one I take goes ALL the way out and the other two lines don’t. But as it was, it left me off 10 blocks from the apartment, really not a bad walk at all. So I walked, falling in behind a young couple pushing a baby carriage.

As we walked, a small dog, seemed like a cross between a terrier and a spaniel, kept running circles around us excitedly. I figured it was the couples’ dog, and they weren’t using a leash. After two blocks, the guy turned to me and said, “Is that your dog?” No, I responded, I thought it was yours. Turns out the dog had escaped, and I mistook his excitement as crazed attachment to his masters. We kept walking, trying to collar the dog as we walked, but he was fast and didn’t want to be touched. After a few blocks, he ran into the backyard of about the only dumpy-looking place I’d seen in the neighborhood, a modified double-wide with long grass and a chain link fence. The dog ran right in there and started sauntering around as if he was home. Maybe he was home, and this was some nightly adventure he partook to keep his life interesting. In any event, I no longer had to worry about him being squashed by a maniac driver on the turnpike. As usual with lost dogs, I admired how he carried himself and made a vow to be more like him.

After the Fire

2011-09-08T17:52:00.000-07:00

Well, last report, I was wandering around in front of the burned house in a bit of a daze, two weeks or so back. I spent those weeks leading up to Labor Day back in Pennsylvania, cooling out as much as I could, getting my bearings, trying to relax.

It’s hard to relax after something like that. You try to relax, which means you can’t. “Relaxing” is not something you try to do … it just happens. And it happened, as much as it will at a time like this. Running six miles along the backroads every morning. Having dinner with old friends every few days. Going to a high-school football game.

Of special note was helping old friend T chop wood on the 100-acre property his family owns, half open fields, half forest. After the hurricane, the gist was drive along the trails on the property and remove/chop down any fallen trees, of which there were a few, and then take that wood back to the hydraulic log splitter by the barn and split it into sellable fire wood. A lot of work! But it was a good antidote after having my nerves badly jangled. Sunset, we could see a dozen deer grazing in the tall grass on the horizon. The kind of thing that brings you back in a good way.

Had a strange encounter with a deer while I was out running one morning. I was coming up on an open field along the back road when I saw a fawn standing by the side of the road. It saw me. Stood there. I kept getting closer. Still stood there. Ran by it, about five feet away, and it started to run after me. I stopped. It came up to me. I extended my hand. Maybe doing that finally spooked it, and it bolted. But I was about a foot away from petting a fawn in the wild. One of those very odd, vaguely cinematic experiences we sometimes have in life. I was waiting for the fawn to say, “Everything’s going to be all right, Bill” … but I’m not on any medication.

Labor Day, I caught the bus back to New York and saw the house for the first time since that day. Not much had changed. Windows had been boarded up to fend off the hurricane. Same trash bags were along the side of the house that I had filled with broken glass and other debris. There were a few small branches down in the backyard from the hurricane. But otherwise, it looked much the same.

Went down into my apartment and more of the ceiling had been taken out, due to water damage, but I could see that whenever construction started on that part of the house, it would be over in a day or two. Electricity was on. Everything smelled fine/no smoky residue or anything awful. All in all, everything was in pretty good condition. The gist was I would pick up a few things there, work clothes and such, and then the landlord’s daughter would take me out to a hotel by the airport to stay the next few days while she lined up a sublet farther out on Long Island. I was hoping for something in the neighborhood so I could have that familiarity, but I gather the insane real estate market there now makes that nigh on impossible, so I better be thankful for anything reasonable she could turn up in the past two weeks.

Hotel living is a strange way of life. It’s taught me a lot about routine, how relatively easy it is to establish this, even in the most troubling circumstances. All you need to do is repeat what you’re doing on a daily basis … and this magically provides your mind with some sense of comfort. I know this, because I’ve felt it the past few days in this hotel. Sheets and pillows smell vaguely of cigarette smoke. Any given night, you could be living next door to someone quiet as a mouse, or like the other night, European tourists attending the U.S. Open with loud, hyperactive kids carrying on at 11:00 at night. The streets around the place have that bummy, transient feel you get around any major transportation hub. Popeye’s Chicken, Dunkin’ Donuts. There’s a nearby Italian Restaurant that’s like something out of Goodfellas. Anyone living in Astoria who wants to escape the yuppies, man, I can guarantee you, no yuppies living in this weird neighborhood out by the airport!

But you know what? Even with all the negatives, I feel pretty comfortable there. Got cable TV, wireless internet access, sense of solitude that isn’t much different from what I have in my apartment. Obviously, I don’t have that sense of home you get in the place you live, but I’ve found that if you’re allowed to do these routine things, life goes on. What worries me about the sublet is that it probably won’t have cable TV or internet access, so I’d have to pop out to sports bar to watch baseball or football, or go to some public place with wireless access to get on the web. May not seem like much, may have you thinking “woe is Bill/eyes rolling” … but, again, any scrap of normalcy comes in handy after a shitty experience like a house fire. I’m sure the sense of living in a house in a normal neighborhood will compensate for a lot, but I’ll have to stock up on DVDs to play on the laptop for nightly entertainment.

I find that the busier I stay, moving around, figuring out how to get to work via bus/train, going to work, these have been good things for the time being. My work situation is such that I may be out of work in a few weeks, based on a decision I made back in early June to leave the spot I’ve been working for the past few years … believe me, for legitimate reasons, a longer post I probably won’t write because there’d be too much bitching, and I’m tired of hearing people bitch about work, me included. I should put an addendum to the earlier notes about routine, that routine becomes bad when you fall into it and stay there simply for financial reasons. I’ve hardly been miserable the past few years, but have put up with a good bit of nonsense for the money. (I know, we all do, but that doesn’t make it right.)

If work does wrap up, I’d probably head back to PA and ride out however long it would take to get back into the apartment. Or if work goes into October, just keep at it. I have money saved up and am not overly concerned about all this. Timing could be better, but I handed in my walking papers for good reason back in June and had no way of knowing something this jarring was going to coincide with the agreed-upon departure time.

Either way, I’m fine with things. It’s hard to explain to people, when you’re standing in front of them and presenting yourself as being totally together, that you nearly lost your life. I’ve explained this to some people at work, and I can tell by their response (lackadaisical), that they just don’t get it. (Or just don’t care?) I guess I’d need to have second and third degree burns or broken limbs to physically show this? I’m not sure if the issue is self absorption, lack of concern, lack of similar personal experience, or all of the above. But I can generally tell when someone “gets” what I’m telling them about this experience and when they’re just phoning it in with the usual clichés. While I’d probably be just as uncomfortable with people falling all over themselves with this, it’s been mildly annoying to grasp just how little some people care.

If my landlord hadn’t woken up that night, for whatever reason, all of us probably would have perished in the fire. I wouldn’t have called 911 two minutes later. She wouldn’t have run out into the street, alerted a neighbor to call 911, too, or pulled down on the fire alarm on the corner (not even sure if that thing worked in this situation). The fire would have quickly and quietly burned its way through the house – we’re talking minutes – to the point where I’d have been trapped in my basement apartment, waking up in the dark to a very bad smoke condition, and rolling the dice to see if I could crawl my way to the door, assuming that and my staircase leading up to the backyard weren’t engulfed in flames, and crawling my way to some type of safety.

Thankfully, she woke up, got me up and none of the above happened. It haunts me that I couldn’t put the damn thing out, but as noted in the previous post, I think I got there a few minutes late. In retrospect, I wish I’d called 911 immediately upon waking up instead of running upstairs and vainly trying to put the fire out. But I had no way of knowing how big or small the fire was at that point. That few minutes could have isolated the damage even less to just the kitchen extension as opposed to burning into the actual house, but I did what I could, and calling when I did surely helped. After the fact, I realized the landlord has a garden hose on the side of the house leading up to the front, where she waters her plants. But I have no idea how I could have used that to put out the fire in the house. She has bars over her windows, and it would have been nigh on impossible to put the fire out with a garden hose in that circumstance.

The period of second guessing has pretty much ended for me, and I’m in the “moving forward” phase. As much as you can move forward when you’re waiting around for your place to be repaired and getting green-lighted to move back in.

Last night, I went to get my hair cut at my usual Russian place. (With the hotel, I take the train back to my neighborhood then catch a bus that goes all the way out by the airport.) Old man wasn’t there, but a younger guy was who was actually very pleasant and gave me a good cut. It was raining the whole time. It’s been raining all week, like the movie Se7en. For whatever reason, I don’t mind, although it’s hard to figure out unfamiliar bus stops by the airport when it’s night-dark with rain pissing down like a cow on a flat rock, which has happened last two evenings. Saturday, I got to go to the neighborhood dentist and get my last crown put in, finishing off a summer of dental work, reclaiming my teeth after years of letting them go. Normal things. It’s good to do them, no matter how boring they are. Boredom has its moments.

Fire

2011-08-26T13:03:00.000-07:00

Monday morning around 3:00, I bolted awake from a deep sleep. I could hear my landlord screaming down the staircase, “Billy! Billy! Fire! Fire!”

We had a false alarm once a few years ago. Some joker on the corner pulled the handle on the firebox out there, and the fire department showed up in the middle of the night. I recall the landlord yelling down the staircase that morning, too. Me, walking up the staircase groggily, explaining that I hadn’t phoned in any fire as I was sleeping. But this was different, I could tell immediately.

I got my glasses on and bolted up the staircase. Understand that I didn’t smell any smoke in my apartment, so I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. But when I got into her place, I could immediately see, towards the back extension of her house where she has her kitchen, there was acrid smoke coming out of there. I walked towards that wall of smoke, which at this point was brownish gray and hovering about two feet off the floor. It was a wall of smoke, with that clearness noted beneath.

I walked towards the kitchen, into the smoke, and couldn’t see anything – it was 3:30 in the morning, the lights were off outside her dining room where I had entered. I couldn’t find a light switch. I waded in a few feet more, at this point in the hallway leading into the kitchen, and still couldn’t see anything, couldn’t see any sign of flames, only darkness. I started choking.

So I ran back out of the smoke towards the dining room. I had to find that fire to see if there was any chance I could put it out. I could hear it – that crackling/popping sound it makes, but could not see it, no matter how hard I tried to locate it. I walked back towards the smoke, noticing that the smoke was rapidly becoming blacker. Again, I walked into this smoke bank and saw nothing, started choking immediately. I got the impression if I stayed in there more than 20 or 30 seconds, I was probably going to lose consciousness. At this point, I gave up and ran out of the smoke. Ran back down the stairs, grabbed my cellphone and my keys, unlocked my door (which is directly below the hallway noted above) and bolted from my apartment. Wearing only shorts. It didn’t occur to me to take anything else, and I can tell you, in a situation like this, your only thought is “get out.” Not “get out with these things …” The concept of taking the time to put a shirt and shoes on, grab my wallet, etc. didn’t occur. I’d need the cellphone to call 911, possibly my keys, and that was it.

When I got into the backyard, I could see some small flames through the kitchen window – mostly shadows, not the huge flames of an inferno. We later learned the fire started with the power cord for the refrigerator, meaning most of the flames started spreading in the wall behind it, which probably explains why I wasn’t seeing anything through the smoke. The smoke was beyond belief – thick, that awful smell of burning plastic and such.

I stood there and dialed 911, got through immediately, explained what was happening, and the dispatcher let me go. I went running towards the front of the house to see the landlord on the sidewalk and a neighbor on his cellphone, too. She had also pulled down on the fire alarm on the corner, which must have worked, as a cop car then pulled up in front of the house. Two cops got out, one approached us and asked if there was anyone else in the house – and there was, the elderly lady upstairs. We hadn’t seen her. The cop encouraged me to pick up stones and try to smash her windows, yelling out her name. Nothing seemed to work – there was no sign of her, and I knew from my experience with the smoke, you weren’t going to last more than a few minutes in those kind of conditions.

The cop ran towards the back of the house where I had just been and was back there for what seemed like an eternity. But it was probably less than two minutes. He came walking out with the lady upstairs in her night clothes. We later learned the other cop had quietly and quickly taken a rope ladder and thrown it up on the other side of the house, away from the smoke, and somehow got her down that – not sure how she came out on the other side of the house, but I was glad to see her alive, as I wasn’t sure that was going to happen.

Moments later, the first fire truck arrived. (Four more would eventually, but only that first one was used.) This all occurred within five minutes of my phone call. I got the feeling in that five minutes, things had grown much worse back there. By this point, neighbors had started to congregate on the sidewalk with us, along with guys wearing badges and photo I.D. necklaces who we thought were there in some official capacity, but as it turned out were crafty independent insurance claim adjusters looking to get our business. It was mind-blowing how fast they got there – some were there before the fire department. And also how well they presented themselves as official personnel just doing their jobs.

In short, the firemen had the fire out in a few minutes – probably less than 10 minutes. In that time, paramedics had shown up and were asking the three of us who lived there if we were all right. I was fine. Rattled as hell, a little groggy from smoke, but otherwise fully functioning. My landlord and the woman upstairs actually seemed to be very in the moment also. But the paramedics thought it best that due to their age, they should be taken to the hospital for tests to make sure. (We later found both were O.K.) While this was going on, the landlord’s daughter, niece and her husband showed up, all distraught. There was probably about two dozen people in front of the neighbors house, watching what was going on.

This whole time, I’m just standing there in my shorts, clutching a cellphone. It hadn’t occurred to me that this might be all I’d be left with depending on how bad things were. A couple who lives down the block saw me like this, and the wife went back to their apartment and came back with a pair of her husband’s sandals, which fit perfectly. The Mexican building super from across the street brought me a t-shirt that also fit very well. I can’t tell you how grateful I was to get these things. Not out of any embarrassment – I wasn’t even thinking about being shirt and shoeless – just that bystanders would look at me and realize I needed some kind of help in this awful moment. I felt like I was part of some biblical parable, although something out of the Book of Job.

It was good that the landlord was taken away, because as the fire was being put out, the next thing we were aware of was smashing glass – nearly every window in the house was smashed by the firemen. I recall at the time thinking this was crazy, but then I put myself in their shoes. They’ve just walked into a strange house in pitch blackness, put out a fire, all of them carrying hoses or crow bars, and a fire being put out generates far more smoke than it does just burning. I’ve gathered fire does the serious damage, but the amount of smoke in any fire is just unbelievable. Billowing, black, choking: it needs to dissipate as much as possible.

It was also in this time that two guys from the Red Cross showed up with care packages. Wonderful guys, too, very calming, giving us water, asking what they could do. I was just wondering if I’d be able to get back into my place to see what happened, and they assured me that after the firemen left, I would. The firemen were there for about another hour. And the odd thing is, there’s no ceremony – they just leave when they’re done. By 4:45 or so, the only people left were a few neighbors, landlord’s daughter, niece and husband, me … and the ever-present crew of independent insurance claim adjusters. I’ll give them credit – they formed a group across the sidewalk and just talked and smoked among themselves. They wouldn’t leave until noon.

It was still dark, but the Red Cross guys took me downstairs. The staircase was littered with broken, charred window frames and other debris, but we could navigate our way down. I had left the door open when I ran. That's when I realized my place wasn't too damaged, at least compared to the upstairs. The rugs were soaked and there were a few puddles on the linoleum, but the fire or smoke hadn't gone down there. They let me know I could stay there if need be. (I thought I was going to do this, but it became clear after a few hours, no electricity, the possibility of still breathing in noxious fumes and carbon monoxide – I couldn’t stay there.) I can't really say what we did until sunrise -- we sort of just stood around talking to the Red Cross guys and a few neighbors. Took a brief tour through the first floor, which was a mess. Front end of the house wasn’t bad, although tons of stuff had been knocked over, but towards the back, we could see smoke damage, and the back kitchen extension looked charred.

But when sunrise came, I got back into my place, got my contact lenses on, got my sweeper and garbage can, went out front, and got to work. The landlord's daughter started crying -- I guess this really touched her, but I told her, "We got to start somewhere." There was shattered glass surrounding the whole house -- took me three hours to sweep it all up. At which time, everyone else got busy contacting relatives, talking on the phone with insurance people, etc. The independent insurance claim adjusters pretty much left us alone. I was too busy cleaning up the glass to do anything but work. Became aware how heavy glass is as I could get very little into a garbage bag before it grew cumbersome.

I sat down around 9:00 and started calling people -- Mom, work, etc. Explained that I'd probably need to get out of there for a few days at a minimum. I haven’t mentioned this before, as it’s pretty untoward, but since the water was running in my apartment, I went back in and took an enormous shit. Honestly, can’t recall the last time I cut loose like that. I literally had the shit scared out of me. And I guess it describes how awful a day this was when taking a shit is, by far, the high point.

The rest of Monday was a haze of stuff -- getting the small bit of debris out of my place (firemen did knock out a bit of ceiling by my door), the carpets, cleaning out the refrigerator, etc. Hours passed like this, the landlord's daughter, coming and going. She was wonderful -- immediately getting into it with the adjusters, knowing she'd need help dealing with the insurance people and such. She kept walking over and telling me, "I don't know what I'm doing," but I reassured her, she was doing fine. Went to see the landlord around noon – she was staying with her sister, a few blocks south, and she was doing all right, coherent, a little shocked, but all things considered, she was doing fine, drinking Greek coffee and bantering with her sister. We were both still in a mild state of shock. Eventually went back to the house, took a shower, then went into Manhattan and got the bus back to Pennsylvania.

That was Monday. Since then, I’ve kept in touch with the landlord’s daughter and learned that clean-up crew was going full-gun by Thursday. Defumigating, discarding debris and charred materials, cleaning what could be cleaned, etc. I also learned that although I thought my place had been totally unaffected, there was water damage in the ceiling – thus I’m sure they’ll have to pull down a few sections of it and re-do it. But my clothes, furniture, everything else – I was lucky that most of it was totally unaffected.

Still, I can’t go back there for at least another week or two. Will have to hash out what’s going on with work, will have to find some type of temporary housing (landlord’s daughter said they’d find some way to put me up for a few weeks if things stretched out that long). I’d love to be back in there by Labor Day, but can’t say I will with any certainty as I’m not on the scene.

As it is, I’m going slightly nuts in Pennsylvania, but at least can stay healthy, relax to some degree, go running in the morning, be around people I’ve known all my life. I’d like to write this all off with a shrug and say “no big deal.” But it’s been a huge deal, and I’ve found myself blanking out all week, getting lost in thought, just sort of fading in and out the way I did through that wall of smoke in the dark. I recall 9/11, how I felt after that, and also when Dad passed on, that hazy, floating sense of reality that inevitably follows any traumatic event. I’ve gotten much better since Monday, but people might be thinking I’m losing my mind or took a head shot. It’s hard to explain those moments – sort of like daydreaming, only without a dream. I have to say that today (Friday), I don’t think I’ve felt that way once, which is good. Now that I have some sort of clarity on the clean-up process starting, and the concept of me getting back there (post hurricane, as if we already didn’t have enough shit to deal with …), I do have a sense of relief I haven’t felt all week.

But one thing has stuck with me. That however bad that thing looked – and it looked positively awful in the cold light of day Monday morning – most of that was going to be fully repaired and reclaimed in a few weeks. To get myself back there, sweeping up the sidewalk on a Saturday, painting over graffiti, pulling pears off the landlord’s tree in front of the house … it might seem like small stuff, but I can tell you, when I can do these things again, I’m going to feel locked-in to something elemental and right in life. Something that was ripped from us Monday night and threw us into this strange floating world of waiting and slow progress.

If the fire had been allowed to burn longer, if my landlord hadn’t woken up when she did … who knows. Forget about property destruction. Easily could have died on Monday morning, a matter of minutes, but as it is now, only have this tale to tell, and an experience I don’t ever want to have again. You don’t either if you already haven’t. All I can take away is the realization that life must go on, preferably with you than without you. And you must go on with it. I’m already starting to feel older and wiser. Which sure as hell beats dead.

Groupon Blues

2011-08-14T19:12:00.000-07:00

When Groupon rolled around, I thought it was the coolest site ever. Coupons to get substantial savings from restaurants, stores, gyms, etc. in your area. I checked in every morning, expectantly, this will be the day they advertise a restaurant I go to regularly, I can feel it …

Months later, I’ve used Groupon twice, to get some really good Korean fried chicken across the street at work, and some used books at a hip Salvation Army store downtown. Most days, I don’t even look at the site.

Why? I guess for a number of reasons, but the truth is it makes me feel vaguely depressed and pressured to read the daily offers on their website. Taken as a whole, they suggest to me an empty lifestyle for people who position themselves as “worldly” but in reality are just annoying twerps afraid or unwilling to sit still and contemplate their lives for even a second. They put forth a myth of the “everything people” – think of the Dos Equis beer commercial of a man so legendary, sharks have a week dedicated to him. I peruse Groupon for a few minutes, and it makes me want to get an egg roll and some greasy chicken lo mein from the local nondescript Chinese hole in the wall that Groupon would scoff at … for $5.00. And then eat it while watching Shark Week on the Discovery Channel ... with no pants on.

I recognize it’s far from the intention of the Groupon folks to depress people with their site. They simply try to come up with as many different, interesting options as they can for their site subscribers to spend money on, and it wouldn’t serve their purpose to present an image that was anything less than cutting-edge hip.

The problem is the site, taken as a whole and read on a daily basis, presents this antiseptic, metrosexual, perfectly-coifed, hairless-bodied, restaurant-eating-every-night, taking-flight-lessons, yoga-practicing, boot-camp-surviving, Lasik-enhanced-vision, organic-burger-eating, Brazilian-waxed, cupcake connoisseur who spends every waking hour seeking out only pleasure and spiritual enhancing activities that normally cost a small fortune, but thanks to Groupon, allow you to be part of the Über-race of Type A self-realizers for a discount.

In other words, it suggests a person who is an empty vessel that must be filled by spending discretionary income on “cool” things: the ultimate consumer. Not just any consumer, but one who only does stuff, that, you know, would provide scenes for a good reality show, if only the person could become famous for some unspecified reason, to justify the discount kayaking lessons on the Hudson, or $20 off the duck tacos with chipotle cherry salsa. Picture yourself victoriously paddling into the sunset (you’ve won, what, I don’t know, but, fuck it, man, you’ve won) while Alicia Keys croons “Empire State of Mind” in the background. (And not just on the soundtrack … just for you, they really found Alicia Keys and paid her to sing the song to you in her own kayak with a film crew a few yards behind you.)

Pencil me out. How did we reach this place where just living, just going about your life, isn’t enough, that you have to jam all this retail shit into it to make your life feel justified and worthwhile? Is this really how people define themselves? With all this stupid, esoteric shit … the cucumber facial treatments, the feng shui interior design, the teeth-whitening sessions?

You ever spend time around people espousing this lifestyle? I know you have. If you live or work around Manhattan, they’re wallpaper in your life. To hear someone like this go on and on and on about their lives … save they never once tell you anything real about themselves. It’s all these pricey leisure-time activities they’ve jammed into it to make themselves feel important and interesting. To compensate? I’d guess that’s true, too, but compensating for what, I don’t have a clue. I can guarantee you, in their minds, they’re not compensating for anything.

For some reason, this all makes me envision my 78-year-old mother para-gliding off a sheer rock face over the ocean. That’s how crazy this all feels to me. I picture my late father, who liked to get a burger and fries at McDonalds, then eat it while out driving around with his favorite dog, having a pretty, nose-ringed, heavily-tattooed waitress explain to him the merits of free-range rattlesnake burgers as opposed to farm-raised.

Is it all to stave off fear of death and personal destruction? The economy has been so nuts over the past few years, I can’t help but think that all this stuff is some odd, massive cultural fiddle we’re all stroking while Rome, our way of life, smolders. Do you sense that air of desperation, too? Not just that we want to do and acquire all this crazy, senseless shit to alleviate how bad things are … but we want to save money while we do so. Because much like your average Trader Joe shopper, we know a bargain when we see one … and we’re far too cool to shop at the Dollar Store.

It costs a lot of money to feel this empty. But saving a few bucks buying crazy shit fills that void. Normal people save money. We’re normal people buying crazy shit. Get it?

As noted Detroit philosopher Bob Seger once said, "You just can’t have it all." Most of us aren’t financially equipped to have anything. We’re either too poor to get by (and buying way too much shit with credit cards that were never meant to be bought on credit), or spending so much money on rents and mortgages that there’s very little left to engage in whatever socio-economic lifestyle people expect of us for such moneyed neighborhoods. Thus Groupon comes along to cut folks in that second boat a slice of the good life and make them feel more complete/qualified to live this way of life they aspire to.

I wish I’d thought of it first, and I suspect part of what you’re reading here is jealousy that I didn’t recognize how savvy it would be to sell coupons to people who see themselves as being far above the type of person who would ever use coupons. Whatever trepidations I may have, I must also tip my cap to the Groupon folks for their ingenuity. The issues noted above are mine, not theirs, but I still can’t help feeling mildly troubled the few times I click on that site every month to see what I’m missing.

Bill Morrissey Is Gone

2011-07-31T17:53:00.000-07:00

So another great musician dies unheralded in a lonely hotel room in Georgia. This time it was Bill Morrissey, at the age of 59, out on the road, playing, doing what he does. Or did. His passing was as quiet as a whisper – didn’t even know it had happened until I stumbled on a website that mentioned it parenthetically. Like Sean Costello, like so many others, he quietly slipped out the back door when no one was looking.

Maybe I’m calling my own shot, but that’s how I want to go one day. Not in a hotel room in Georgia, though. But that way of leaving, almost as an after-thought, you hear about it later, mutter “shit” to yourself, shake your head, and know that there’s just something about some people that ensures they will slip away like the wind, raise the curtains, rustle a few branches, and then they’re gone.

But I might be getting ahead of myself if you’re sitting there asking, “Who in the hell is Bill Morrissey?” A fair enough question, and you should ask it if you don’t know. This was Bill Morrissey at his best. Turn it up. I could barely hear it when I played it on youtube. Listen to the words, how he captures that feeling of something already fading on two people who won’t be able to grasp this for years. Very few songs can move me to the point of tears, but this is one of them. Using fire wood as a metaphor for how a newly-married couple were already worlds apart. That’s just good writing, whether it’s a song, a story, whatever. “She thought of heat/She thought of time/She called it an even trade” – that’s what you call life as most of us know it. You can wish good or ill on other people, but chances are when you peel away the layers, most of us feel this way: uncertain, grasping, making sense of some things, letting others go.

That song is up there with best of Dylan or any other American songwriter. Bill didn’t stop there. He had a knack for quietly nailing so many things about life, in that unassuming, sidelong-glance way of his, the sort of guy who would say something as an aside, and you’d sit there for days afterwards wondering why you couldn’t come up with anything half as insightful with all the time in the world. Some people have a hard time with his voice, but once you get used to it, you can hear how well it suits the material: no frills, gritty, stripped-down stories about people just working, just living, and stumbling their way through life, the way we all do at times. Bill’s not the guy to play when you’ve fucked up your life. He’s the guy you play after you’ve had a grind of a work day, aren’t doing so bad in general, no great crises on the horizon, but you sit there wondering what the hell it’s all about, that maybe you were meant to do better, but you’re really not doing so bad either. So you just sort of shrug, have a beer and watch some baseball on TV. You’re not a winner. You’re not a loser. You’re just as human as anyone else.

That’s what I learned from listening to Bill Morrissey. Some people might mistake that for embracing mediocrity, but that’s far from the truth. Seeing the humanity in yourself and others is about as good as it gets. Of course, doing so will negate things like ambition and greed, but sooner or later, you stop acting like a child, and try to help others get along instead of figuring out ways to cover your ass. Sometimes you fail. And other people fail you. Times goes on, you forgive. You learn by getting things wrong a few times over. You let other people live their lives, but more importantly, you let yourself live yours. You stop bullshitting yourself and try to figure out what matters to you.

This is how I sound in my head at two in the morning when I’m thinking too much to sleep. But that’s where Bill Morrissey thrived, and where his music will live on. The quiet, private place you think is yours alone, but everyone understands. To take that understanding of yourself and dare to see if anyone else feels the same way, and then help them define it for themselves. That’s what Bill did when it was all working right.

Not many people can write a song like “John Haber.” (Sidenote: folks, if you download this track, be careful not to download the lousy video player advertised on the same page. Looks like sendspace got strange in the past few months, and I apologize for any confusion.) Not many people would stop to think about someone like John Haber: a working-class guy living alone in an apartment over a supermarket who dies in a fire one night. Not from the fire – the smoke. Smoking in bed. The narrator recalls a night they spent two weeks earlier drinking, and John comes up with this as they’re about to slink into falling-down drunk territory: “I don’t know how it happened, but it seems what I want has drifted so far from what I now expect.” The smoke was killing him – the lack of clarity in his life, the sense that he was no longer in control of it – not the flame, whatever passion he felt for anything in his life.

Bill Morrissey understood moments and people like this. When I say “people like this” I mean just about everyone. Again, when you stop bullshitting yourself. Feel no need to pump your life full of self glorification and vanity. Nor any need to drag yourself down. Just that sense of moving on through life, getting your ass kicked by work, by things that don’t work, by things you think are working, but you realize a few years down the road, they didn’t. I wouldn’t call Bill’s music downbeat so much as black-and-white, again, referencing that contemplative side we all have, and the ability to see our place in the world clearly, with whatever beauty or ugliness that implies. And it will imply both if you’re seeing things clearly.

Bill could be funny, too. “Live Free or Die” is about a guy in a New Hampshire prison who sees the irony of stamping out license plates every day emblazoned with the state motto: “Live free or die.” I’ve never been to New Hampshire, but I suspect Bill Morrissey was New Hampshire personified. Not quite Massachusetts or Vermont or Connecticut. The place you pass through to get to those places. Looks nice, but the people look a little hard. Whatever factory sits on the edge of town, that’s where everyone works. And, of course, you get a few dozen miles outside of any city in America, past the suburbs, past the college towns, you get to those places that Bill Morrissey grasped intuitively. They’re everywhere, and nowhere. You pass through and wonder how people live there. Listen to Bill Morrissey, and you get an idea. Then again, pass through on a sunny day in June, with fields of growing corn, houses so far away from each other that you admire the solitude and ability not to put up with other people’s bullshit, and it doesn’t seem all that hellish or impossible. I feel that way a lot when I’m driving back in Pennsylvania and see a lonely farmhouse on a hill surrounded by fields. It’s a way of life I haven’t forgotten, that doesn't frighten or repel me, as it somehow seems to do with a lot of people in cities.

I can somehow picture Bill knowing his time was short and imagine the kind of conversation he would have with a friend in a bar:

Bill: I’m going to die on the road down south.
Friend: Don’t say shit like that!
Bill: I don’t mean to upset you. It’s just a feeling I’m getting.
Friend: We’re going to be having crazy talks like this 20 years from now.
Friend: I hope. But do me a favor. If I don’t come back, there’s a stray cat on my back porch every other night that I’m feeding bits of ham and milk. Could you go on doing that for me?
Friend: Sure. But you know I won’t have to. You know this is bullshit.
Bill: Yeah, you’re probably right.
They go back to their beers.
Friend: What if I’m not? Now you got wondering.
Bill: All I’d ask is that you remember me every now and then. I’d do the same for you.

Bill Morrissey will live on in mill towns, burned-out, post industrial cities on the banks of dirty rivers. In the rust belt. And corn fields. Vacant lots where fatherless kids somersault on abandoned mattresses. Towns that pass by like flashes of concrete and glowing fast-food signs through the trees on the interstate. Where people have kids when they’re 17 and have to figure out some way to get through life. Stopping when they’re 40, realizing they’ve somehow done it, yet their lives still feel as fucked up as when they were 17. You’ll feel him in gritty strip malls with slush-covered parking lots, his presence somewhere between the taxidermy shop and the take-out Chinese place with pictures of teenage girls from Peking on the wall calendar. The gas station owned by the crusty old vet in the CAT hat who calls everyone “Chief.” He’ll wave back at the slow kid who goes around town on the riding lawn mower, waving at everyone all day. In the local bar, in that silence after someone’s played “Tuesday’s Gone” on the jukebox at 1:45 in the morning, and everyone just sits there, knowing their lives ain’t right but that moment is somehow good enough for now.

When it snows, you’ll see Bill’s foot prints, faintly in the fresh powder, and then gone as the passing hours cover them. He’ll keep on walking through the winter night, seemingly directionless, going nowhere, but not lost. Train whistle in the distance. Passing snow plough slinging rock salt in a rhythm like crickets. You won’t miss him until he’s gone.

Sitting on the Carnegie Building Steps

2011-07-24T16:25:00.000-07:00

Back in college, I could often be found sitting on the Carnegie Building steps. The accompanying photo seems a lot more officious and imposing than I remember it. You walk through those front doors, veer right down the hall, and you’re in the main room for the campus newspaper, where I struck gold as a weekly columnist my junior and senior years. Well, if not gold, then some mildly precious metal.

As a columnist, I didn’t have a whole lot of need to be back in that news room, save to check my mail, banter with my editors and avoid the “business side” people who worked on advertising for the paper. (I later found that Valerie Plame was working over there in 1985! Makes me wonder if we ever had any exchanges.) That mercenary sort of ambition you’d associate with a future CIA operative was there in spades on the business side, so I didn’t associate much with those people as a rule (although I made great friends with Aileen, who should have been on the creative side but was bound by parental expectations to be more business-minded).

I’ve commented that my writing from those days embarrasses me now, as it’s out there cataloged on the web, albeit apparently not easily linked to, so I’m more than happy to let it sit, locked away save for those who really dig to find it. It’s shit, for the most part. Some very funny stuff – I started out writing straight humor and specializing in one-liners. But around those flashes of comic brilliance, a lot of clunky writing. No depth … and it pains me to look at my awkward attempts at depth back then, just the worst Readers Digest sort of crap which was totally out of character with how I was (or am now). You want depth? You can’t have it. Either you have it or you don’t. And if you don’t, life somehow goes on.

But I had the right idea sitting on the steps in my beat-up, knee-length khaki field jacket purchased from the downtown Army-Navy store. Carnegie Building was centrally located on campus, just across the way from the English Department in the Sparks Building, and a sort of crossroads for all of us in the creative majors. I loved sitting there in the fall and spring with time to kill before or after a class, because I knew the people I hung with at the paper would saunter around, and we’d engage in that tribal right of youth: hanging out.

It wouldn’t be the last time I hung out – this would go on well through my 20s, even into the 30s when you consider going to bars – but so much of college was the art of hanging out. There was that crew of guys down at headquarters, but there was also this more newspaper-related group at the Carnegie Building. And we all felt like we were in on a secret with that building, working on the paper in whatever capacity, getting to know who the pricks were, the saints, the cool people, the workaholics, the people who would leave footprints on your back to succeed, and the people like me who were sort of befuddled by the immediate success and found it just as enlightening to sit and chat with people who knew me as a guy who hung out on the steps.

There was a tree across the way that burned a flaming red then yellow every fall. I remember pointing it out to Aileen one day and saying, “Jesus, that tree looks like it’s plugged in.” That was the sort of banter, the loose association and non-sequitirs of people in their early 20s trying to be off the cuff. Just as often, I’d be sitting there with pal Justin, and he’d say, “You know what? I bet I can kick your ass in a game of pool.” And off we’d go to the pool hall on campus, for an hour or so of indulgence … it all just seems so free to me now, that sense of taking off in the middle of the day and doing something totally relaxing. That’s how college was. If it was noon and you didn’t have another class until 2:00 pm, shit like this would happen all the time. Why not? You could study later. It seemed much more important to feel that free … maybe sensing we wouldn’t be in the near future? Even with a part-time job on campus, I still had plenty of down time like this any given day.

I also recall a fellow columnist named Dion who a lot of my friends didn’t like, but I did. He wasn’t a bad boy or in any way obnoxious. As I recall, he had been in the navy a few years and had come back to school, explicitly to sew his creative oats and spread out a bit. We got along very well. Oddly enough, what I remember most about him was the one time when we were downstairs working on stories, finishing, leaving at the same time, both using the Men’s room, me taking a leak, him dropping a deuce … and I had assumed in doing so, I would have to leave him behind as that normally takes a lot longer. But he somehow did this in the amount of time it took me to use the urinal and was out in the hallway moments later, “Say, man, you can’t leave me hanging when we’re debating Hunter Thompson vs. Tom Wolfe.” All I wanted to know was how he did the deed so fast.

Sometimes the conversations would be along those lines, other times heavy philosophical discussions about the events of the day or where we were going in our lives. The one thing I always liked about creative people was their open sense of life – still do. Nothing written in stone. Roll with it. Throw away the outline. Just live it. That was in direct opposition to some of the people on the paper, and I gather you’d see that now in spades in terms of how we live our lives. It seemed important to me at the time, and now, to keep your radar up, to observe, to feel, to pick up a sense, to understand. That doesn’t happen when you’re guiding yourself like a torpedo through life. You could usually tell the difference in people, even at that age.

I had always pictured college as a sort of Mount Olympus. When I took philosophy classes, I enjoyed reading how the Greek philosophers would sit around all day bouncing concepts off each other. Granted, not on the “can’t believe you just took a shit in 15 seconds” level, but the idea of these enlightened beings gathered to make sense of their world. That was the guiding principle behind seemingly innocuous acts like hanging out on the steps, or late nights in somebody’s apartment, talking music, movies, the comparative worth of our majors, crazy shit we had done, crazy shit we wanted to do, just taking in each other’s beings and enjoying it. Too many kids were either geared to be fanatical zealots programmed into a “successful” way of life, or if not engaged at that level, just drunk all the time and making no sense. Which was great fun, but not all the time. You always knew around creative folks that their minds were not geared into this either/or campus existence. It was all fair game.

I have to believe people’s favorite college memories are those times they just hung out, with that full sense of freedom we had so fleetingly, our lives mostly blank slates (at least compared to two decades on), realizing there were other people in the world who “got” us in some sense, and vice-versa.

When I wrote for the paper, I was constantly getting thrown into situations like that, probably because of the minor fame associated with my column, and my column known for being “wild” in that cheesy college sense (but was not really wild at all). I remember hitting on an Indian girl at one of the newspaper Christmas parties, going back with her to her dorm room, I guess thinking “here we go” … but instead walking in on her roommates, all of whom were fans of my column, and us having a blast that night, singing “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd while one of the girls strummed the chords on her acoustic guitar and hanging out until about three in the morning.

But I also have some pretty pompous memories of that minor-league fame. It does strange things to your head. I can see being a celebrity on any level must wreak havoc on one’s self image, as you’re encouraged to think constantly only of yourself and how great you are. It’s a horrible trap, and I gather the best that you can do is just avoid that shit all together, not encourage people to see you as anything more than yourself, don’t seek out situations that make you seem more than human. But I guess that would negate the concept of celebrity all together, and a lot of people living that way clearly love and crave that level of attention from strangers. I did, for a short while. I recall showing up for a reading at a dorm, for which about 200 people showed up, and I sat there on a couch with no shoes or socks on, acting like a fucking guru while these kids laughed in delight at everything I had to say for the next hour. You get to feel “special” when you’re placed in roles like that.

And I didn’t know how to tell those guys, shit, you just show up at the Carnegie Building tomorrow at around 2:15, we can do this again, save you’ll be sitting next to me on those cement steps, we’ll be totally equal, and we’ll probably find you’re just as if not more interesting than I am. Those steps were important in the sense of talented people, not trying to impress each other, relaxing, being open, killing time because it was there to be killed. That’s the birth place of creativity, where it takes root. I think when we went inside, the roles took over, we all became whoever we were supposed to be in there, from foot soldier on the Classified page, to glorified columnist or editor.

It made more sense to take the side door and hide in the basement of Carnegie Building with the lowly Arts and Sports staffs to work on my stuff, as I always felt on display in that main news room, people pointing at me, that’s him, as if I was typing up that week’s column in a display window at Bloomingdales. Downstairs, they understood you were there to grind it out with no fanfare. Both staffs were given short shrift, although I think Sports was held in higher esteem simply because of Penn State’s legendary football program. To this day, my life is some strange mix of arts and sports, with little to no emphasis placed on politics and such. It just doesn’t interest me, never really has. Leave that to the “important” people.

So, in a sense, that’s where it all began. It all began, of course, when I picked up a pen and started jotting in that spiral-ring notebook back in high school, trying in vain to be Hunter Thompson or Jack Kerouac, slowly realizing who I was (neither of them), getting better at understanding who that was, learning how to transfer that knowledge to printed page. But it seems like the essence of wasting time on those steps at college, like a bum who snuck into a seat among the columns and concrete of Mount Olympus, was where the senses of wonder and belonging came into being. And you need those to pull this off.

Everything happened. Nothing happened. The janitor swept up the leaves, and then the snow, and then the pollen. We graduated. Life went on without us. I can feel those memories as a real part of me now, so there’s no need to go back or long for those days. That’s what I’ve learned over the years, pick it up and take it with you, because there's no going back. Go back and you'll find it's more than likely stayed the same, and you've changed.

Lost Worlds

2011-07-04T19:00:00.000-07:00

Last time I was back in Pennsylvania, I hit a place in the local mall that’s a sprawling flea market. Used to be called Phar-Mor, a cross between a large drug store and small chain, but that went out of business a long time ago. A few years ago, like weeds sprouting between the cracks of downtrodden concrete, that space was taken over by some odd coalition of flea-market folks, the concept being each had their lot (of which there are a few dozen), stocked with whatever second-hand items they have for sale, and there are cash registers on the mall and parking lot entrances, so shoppers can peruse and buy at their leisure.

It’s a strange place, filled with memories, useless gadgets from the 60s and 70s, beer cans for extinct beers, mothbally clothes, albums, cassettes, jewelry, paintings. The same stuff you’d find in Salvation Army stores and lower-end antique shops. The kind of place you can get lost in. Just wandering around it, seeing toys I used to play with, books I’ve read, posters that were once hot stuff at Spencer’s, old army gear of the kind we used to sport as kids playing army – it was an oddly reassuring place to spend a few minutes.

The mall is dying. I remember when it opened back in 1980, a momentous occasion, like a new world was opening, stores everywhere, the place to be. But this was before Walmart took over everything. Malls themselves at the time were usurpers of downtown shopping areas, which went destitute almost immediately afterwards and have stayed that way decades later. You walk through that mall now, half the spaces are empty, and it just feels like the wind has been knocked out of the place.

A perfect environment for second-hand shopping! I saw the usual selection of vinyl and cassettes. It seems like now is the time to hunt down vintage cassettes if so inclined. Every lot in the place that had music-leaning items, there was a box or two of dozens of cassettes, reminding me how hot those things were through most of the 80s.

But the real find for me was eight-track cassettes. Not every place had them. The ones that did, the selection was sparse. Most were selling them for anywhere from $3.00 to $5.00 a piece. Just picking up one, for me, was like touching history, a part of my life that no longer exists, and I can’t find my way back.

I have the music on the eight tracks, on my iPod. Shit, I have the music, I have bootleg copies of demo tapes of the music, I have unreleased live versions of the music, I have songs the band never released because they thought they weren’t good enough. I have a vast knowledge and grasp of that music that I never could have had at the time – who had demo recordings of bands in the 70s, but the bands themselves and maybe guys who worked in studios?

But, I don’t have the eight track! I had eight tracks for some of these bands. I didn’t have a lot of eight tracks. In their prime, maybe two or three dozen, tops. Some guys had way more, carrying those massive suitcase-style storage boxes that they’d flip open on the hood of the ’76 Nova and marvel at their rock expertise (Frampton, Styx, Foghat, Head East, Heart, Steve Miller, Joe Walsh, etc.) before kerplunking one into the Sparkomatic to blow everyone's mind.

Eight tracks sucked. In my opinion, the absolute worst product the recording industry ever put out. Cassettes were a close second – they sounded a little better, and the songs wouldn’t split between tracks. And the timing was such that cassette recorders were much more available in the 80s than eight-track recorders were in the 70s, thus we could make our own mixes. Both eight tracks and cassettes had the same problems: sound bleed-through from other tracks/sides, and the tape would often snarl in the player, thus ruining the recording. Happened to me many times with cassettes and car stereos. So, if you liked the music enough, you’d have to go out and buy another copy.

Something came over me while perusing those eight tracks. Not necessarily nostalgia, but something similar. Touching those things reminded me how far I’ve slipped away from that 70s rural existence, moving to a major city in the 80s and staying there. I felt like I was physically touching a burned-out memory. It just seemed like such a different world then. Before computers. Before the internet. Before MP3 files. Before so many things that are part of my daily routine now.

I didn’t mourn this loss – just became more aware of it. Like how when I’m back there in summer, that feels more like a gateway to that time, the green grass, the heat, mowing the lawn for old times sake. I guess a similar comparison would be an older man in the 1960s in Europe going back to visit his home village that was devastated in World War II, walking around, everything’s different but the same in a sense, and he comes across something that touches him like a direct path to the time before all the shit happened.

Not like a war has occurred here. But I’m trying to recall that world where I would go out and buy an eight track, listen to it religiously on a stereo, dogging the same album for weeks, read about the band in Creem or Rolling Stone, maybe see them on The Midnight Special if I was lucky, but otherwise just going about my teenage life, riding around on bicycles and then in cars, writing it all down in spiral notebooks on my bed, a bed I still sleep on when I go back there.

There was such an intense bond I had to certain bands and artists back then that I don’t have now. Certain albums, I know every moment, sometimes even have skips and glitches memorized from the vinyl albums and tapes I had at the time. Back then, it was like I was married to music, whereas now I have thousands of relationships that overwhelm me sometimes. Quantity over quality. I still hear plenty of quality, it’s just the sheer volume of what I can listen to now is so much more than what it was then. I’ve turned over every stone that was a mystery to me for decades throughout my musical life. But the emotional connection just isn’t the same.

So when I pick up an eight track, it reminds me of that emotional bond, not just to that eight track, but to that way of life, being a kid, living in the country, being fairly happy with it all, not a bad childhood or way of life, parents in their 40s and 50s at the time, so many other kids in the neighborhood, some good friends, others pains in the ass. I guess that sense of everything being in front of me. Whereas now, I’m halfway through life and feeling much more constricted, whether I am or not. The eight track feels like freedom, in a sense, or a doorway to a lost world. Of course, I realize that world and feeling are an impossible way of life to me as an adult, but it doesn’t mean I can’t tap into it every now and then, in a car, driving at night with the windows down, few days off from work, just taking it easy as opposed to resting before the next work day kicks into over-drive.

And that is nostalgia: romanticizing a time that, I know from memory, didn’t feel romantic at all. I don’t think it’s that specific time period that I’m romanticizing so much as time itself, the passing of it, how you can see it move in with you and everyone you know. I’m good with moving for the most part, but shit, over 20 years in the city, living a way of life that can get to be a bit of a grind at times, and it’s easy to lose track and fade out memories and connections that should remain as guide posts, if nothing else.

I find it good to slow things down in my spare time and do this, just write, like I always have, or honestly, don’t do much of anything. People at work are always carrying on about going this place and that, doing this, doing that, social get-togethers like a crowded business schedule, but, man, I just want to take it easy when I’m not working, do some errands around the apartment, help the landlord keep her place clean and in order, hit the gym, listen to music, get take out. I don’t know if that’s insecurity with people that they have to feel like they’re gunning it in their spare time and doing thousands of things, but it seems more important to me at this point in my life to take it easy and relax. Whether or not that impresses anyone else. When I read a good story or see a good movie, it’s that sort of understanding I value more than any flashy plot or visual aspects. I want to know people – I want to know myself. Which takes time, a lot of it, and doesn’t happen when you’re trying to do a thousand things that, I guess, make you think you’re a more interesting person.

In any event, the eight tracks I picked up were Sleepwalker by The Kinks, Dreamboat Annie by Heart and The Slider by T. Rex. All of which I had on eight track at the time. I want to get Heaven Tonight by Cheap Trick and Hermit of Mink Hollow by Todd Rundgren, as those, too, were key eight tracks at the time. I realize how goofy this all sounds. Not just buying eight tracks in this day and age, but buying them not for the purpose of playing them, but more as a form of recent cultural archeology. I found these fossils, and now I’m remembering all these other dinosaurs that used to roam rural Pennsylvania in the 1970s.

The Drill

2011-06-26T18:27:00.000-07:00

I sit here now with the vague taste of blood in my mouth, and a hole that my tongue curiously darts through every few minutes. Went to the dentist yesterday. Wisdom tooth extraction. Actually, going a few times in the coming weeks as I haven’t gone to a dentist since roughly 2000.

Why so long? Well, not having medical insurance for years was a large part of that. I’ve been working freelance/temp gigs, two stretching on for years, like now. From what co-workers tell me, especially those with kids, the insurance where I’m working now, even on group plans, is astronomical. Sure, we’d all be better off with medical insurance, but when I know people in my freelance boat telling me they’re dropping $300/month on this …

Man, forget it. Last time I was to a doctor was in the 1970s when a dog bit me on the ass while I was riding my bike. I had a few sports physicals after that, consisting of a doctor checking my blood pressure, heart rate and the traditional jamming of his rubber-gloved fingers into my balls/coughing hernia check.

I’m not thumbing my nose at the medical profession … I just don’t want these people in my life because I don’t trust them and have rarely needed their services over the past few decades. When Dad passed on, my faith in them plummeted. (Ironically, the only person in the medical profession who had acknowledged Dad’s passing was the family dentist, who sent Mom a nice card.) I have a fairly healthy life style, have never been prone to illness (haven’t taken a sick day in decades), am not accident prone, purposely avoid high-risk nonsense like motorcycle-riding. I don’t live in fear. If a job comes along with insurance, I’ll take it, but not for that reason, and can’t really say I’d end up using many of the covered services.

But I’ve realized it makes sense to keep up with the dentist, because there’s just so much you can do with toothpaste, mouthwash and floss. This guy I’m going to now gave me a deep cleaning on my first visit that was revelatory, like I had a new set of teeth afterwards, the spitting of blood into the rinse basin was worth it. He had some sort of high-pressure water/scraping device that obliterated any substance on or around my teeth, and while I felt like I had been punched in the face afterwards, I couldn’t deny it really was an improvement.

Flashback 30 years, and it’s another story, and probably the real reason I’ve been more than OK with letting the dentist go by the wayside the past decade. Being a kid in rural Pennsylvania in the 70s, I was used to the concept of a no-frills way of life. Everything Mom and Dad bought in the store was cheap and made to be re-used. Pants were hemmed so one kid could pass them on to another. Gallons of soda were bought instead of more expensive fruit juices. The idea was “bang for the buck” more than subscribing to some type of “American Way” of raising kids where everything they had done for them was healthy and undeniably right.

I won’t bust my parents for much, but one thing I surely will was that crazy sugar-pounding diet we had, and their lack of enforcement on sound dental habits. And I mean to the point of watching us brush, gargle and floss ever morning and night. I would have chafed like hell at this, but would have been thankful for that sort of discipline today. You know kids … they hate to do stuff like take baths and brush teeth. But I wish they would have enforced the teeth thing … it would have saved all of us money in the long run, and saved us many mouthfuls of pain, then and now.

Going to the dentist back there at that time, man, I KNOW Novocain existed and was in popular use back in the 70’s … but we never got it! We went to Dr. Morrison, an aged dentist a few towns over. Can’t recall his first name, so we always thought it was Jim. A ride over there would have my brothers chanting, “Mr. Mojo Rising … Mojo Rising … Rising, Rising … Got to keep on rising!” Or crooning, “This is the end … beautiful friend, the end.” Because it was a Doors-like experience of darkness and doubt to make that long station-wagon ride to the dentist’s office, like we were riding to hell to meet Satan.

Just the door on that office, with the pebbled glass and wire-crossed window, scared the shit out of me. It was like an office out of a 1940’s private detective movie: dark, foreboding, always twilight, shadows everywhere. I expected to open the door and see Humphrey Bogart sitting there with his fedora and cigarette. Instead, I found copies of Highlights magazine for kids, the sight of which still scares the shit out of me. And the tense sound of drills whining in the background.

I can’t even recall if Dr. Morrison was a nice guy or not. I suspect he was a crotchety old man, as I seem to recall him being in his 60s or 70s at the time. I can’t even remember what he looked like, save for the white smock and ever-present surgeon’s light he wore in a headband.

What I do remember, to this day, is getting drilled repeatedly without the benefit of Novocain or any other anesthetic. It’s laughable today to envision that scene, a kid undergoing a medical procedure like this without having his mouth numbed, but I guess Dr. Morrison was of the era where Novocain was for pussies. World War II, longshoremen swinging hooks, why, all I ate was a baked-bean sandwich all day Depression era shit. I had a bellyful of it from Dad, but Dr. Morrison lived it.

It was agonizing. There were two types of drills: the high-pitched, keening drill that was used for the fine-styling along the edge of a tooth. Which sounded horrific, but really wasn’t that bad. And the low-rumbling, deep drill that took out the bulk of the cavity.

And that thing was a pain machine. Tear-inducing pain. White-knuckled, seat-rail clutching pain. Fucking agonizing. Smoke coming out of my mouth. Afraid to move despite numerous alarms going off in my synapses. Shaking in the chair like a dog dreaming. All I could do was stare at the light and try to put my mind somewhere else. The dental assistant at this recent trip commented that I was the most relaxed patient she’d ever seen. Another dentist years ago called me “stoic.” No. I just go back to those horrible visits to Dr. Morrison’s office when I realized the only way out was to disassociate my mind from the situation. Feel the pain, but put my mind somewhere else. It’s clear to me I still do it now, despite having serious dental work done under well-administered sedation.

You would think, having that done to me once, I would have said, forget Mom and Dad, I’m going to brush and floss twice a day, maybe more, now that I know what will happen when I don’t. But kids are stupid: I use myself as a prime example. I have a mouthful of fillings now as a result: not a bad set of teeth. But worked on … seriously worked on!

The stint with Dr. Morrison must have ended by the early 80s, because I remember a series of dentists in my teens and early 20s. Dr. Hale in Frackville? He seemed like a good guy – can’t recall why we stopped using him, unless he retired. A few quacks along the way apparently, as one of them did a number on my sister in terms of lousy decision-making that she still pays for today. Those few I saw in my teens and early twenties are a blur. I didn’t go that much.

In New York in my late 20s, a coworker turned me onto her dentist just around the corner from us at work in Manhattan. And he did all right by me, until he started in with mentions of the possibility of multiple root canals. This after having a clean bill of health the previous two visits? Come on, now. By this point, I had recently left that job and was uninsured. I didn’t get a second opinion because I thought he was pulling my leg … the kind of guy who took x-rays every visit. He did good work, but gave the impression he was running up the bill, too, with unnecessary work. That was my demarcation point from dentistry: had enough. Here was a guy who knew I was uninsured, had seen nothing wrong with my teeth just the week before, and now I need root canals?

“You’ll be in terrible pain if you don’t get these some time in the next two years,” he warned.

Yeah, well, those two years ended eight years ago, and my mouth hasn’t really bothered me too much in the last decade. Some pangs during very cold days in winter, a filling eventually falling out (which I just got replaced), but with daily care and a nightly mouthguard, my teeth have held up reasonably well. Granted, I could have used the cleanings and an occasional re-filling. The wisdom tooth he warned me about is going to get extracted two Saturdays from now. The tooth has been positioned above a gap over my last molar, which was taken out in my 20s. Thus, this tooth didn’t serve much purpose: teeth are meant to grind together to chew food. I know we don’t stop to think about that much, with all the crazy shit we’re being fed about million-dollar smiles and whitening (which always look like dentures to me, you can tell when someone over 30 has gone that route), but that’s what they’re in our mouth for. If a tooth can’t do that, especially a wisdom tooth in the back where not much chewing is going on, it becomes expendable. You surely want to hold onto your front teeth and that row of chewing teeth just behind the incisors: lose them, and life gets rough on you.

I didn’t appreciate the dentist back then not presenting me with that option: an extraction for a few hundred dollars as compared to a root canal for well over a thousand … on a tooth that was no longer serving its function due to the opposing tooth no longer being there. I realize these guys are in business to make money, but it seems to me they do pretty well just providing basic dental services to patients without looking to create situations for higher end/much more expensive work.

This recent dentist, in the neighborhood, seems to have that understanding, probably because he’s served a traditionally working-class neighborhood (that’s been gentrifying in alarming ways the past decade). The two times I’ve been in his no-frills office, when I’ve gone back out to the waiting room, it’s elderly Greek and Italian women in Terminator shades and leopard-skin prints. I’m hoping this doesn’t represent his entire customer base! It would be a shame if this guy’s business declined because of a changing neighborhood and lack of that “word of mouth” promotion most dentists thrive on.

This guy has a good, no-bullshit demeanor about him that I appreciate. He appears to be in his early 60s, was playing classic rock on the PA when I came in, so I immediately felt at ease. Before that massive cleaning, he took x-rays, the only ones he assured me, and gave me an exact rundown of what would need to be done over the next 3-4 visits, at which point, my teeth would be perfectly fine and working as well as they’d ever been.

What originally broke me down and made me go was two chips in my front teeth, on top and bottom, the top giving me a hillbilly-esque little gap, the bottom not even visible, but the back part of the tooth chipped, which was causing me to whistle my S’s and drive my tongue nuts when it touched the tooth and felt that craggy gap. This shit has been driving me nuts since just after Christmas. He took care of that back one first and will save the moonshine jug gap for last.

I feel all right. Will surely be going the “six month cleaning/check-up” route from now on which, I can guarantee, will be mostly cleanings and the occasional re-filling. But I still got that strange feeling in his office, as I’m sure I will in all dentist offices, of Dr. Morrison’s dark mahogany waiting room, the stifling fear, which is more anticipation than actuality, even knowing this guy was modernized and would be shooting me up for any sort of deep work. Some fears you never shake.

Consideration

2011-06-06T09:25:00.000-07:00

Life is made up of odd little moments that stick with you afterwards, sometimes briefly, others for the rest of your days. Brother J had one on Saturday that will probably hang around for months: one of those little things that seems innocuous, but leaves you pondering mankind for a long time afterwards.

He had to haul some heavy debris to the county dump: an old refrigerator, an air-condition unit and some bags of cement that had solidified in the tool shed. So he got in his pick-up and made the half-hour trip to the dump. Along the way, he noticed something awful. He had to go. Number 2. Real bad. A feeling that just kept getting worse with each passing minute. You know the feeling: bad.

So, he gets to the town dump, goes through the motions, gets the load dumped, then drives as fast as possible to a near-by McDonalds. At that point, he was scouting out heavy bushes by the side of the road, but thought, no, have some dignity, keep driving, hold it in.

He gets to McDonalds, beelines to the men’s room, and there’s a guy just coming out of the stall. Thank God, J thinks, he’s just leaving. The guy didn’t wash his hands and went straight for the exit door – even better. So J busts into that stall … only to find this guy had pissed all over the toilet seat and floor. The dilemma: do you run out into the restaurant to confront this jerk, and run the risk of shitting your pants in public, or do you just get wads of toilet paper and clean up after this over-grown baby?

It’s a pretty obvious choice. I’ve done it myself too many times. This is one of those things in gyms that drives me nuts. Happens at work, too, but not as much. Guys pissing on seats. Sometimes dumping on them, too. Or leaving a load behind. Spitting gum into urinals so they get caught in those little plastic urinal guards. I’ll see it this week as I go to the gym, at least once.

Again, there are so many things in life, little things like this, that just leave me shaking my head. What goes through a man’s mind when he does this? I can understand a child or teenager doing this out of some misguided universal spite. But a grown man? I’ve come to the conclusion that the guy is just a prick. Not absent-minded or full of jovial, mischievous humor. A prick. He knows someone will have to clean that up. Not a janitor. The next person to use the stall. It speaks volumes about the man, none of it good.

And let’s not forget the telltale sound of a guy standing on one foot to flush a toilet with his other foot. (It’s a slight shuffling of the feet you can hear if the restroom is quiet enough. Usually you hear the left foot coming down and slapping on the ground.) This guy is so conscious of sanitary issues in a rest room that he’s afraid to touch a commode lever … so instead uses the bottom of his shoe, which more than likely has even more germs than his hand … so the next guy behind him will unwittingly touch a lever that might have remnants of dogshit or human saliva on it. Thanks, pal. Ever hear of wadding up a ball of toilet paper to touch the lever instead of using your foot, or is that too much work?

Consideration was something our parents drove into our head. I don’t mean “parents” in a generational sense. I mean my parents. It was made clear to me after a certain age that no one was supposed to clean up after me, literally or figuratively. Not in a forceful, negative way. More in a “you should be ashamed yourself” sort of way. Always think of others – that was a thought I had constantly as a kid. And I don’t mean in some universal “save the starving children in Africa” sort of way. I mean in terms of making space so someone else could sit down on the bus. Or not blasting music so the entire neighborhood would be unwilling listeners.

When I encounter people like this who don’t have that understanding, then or now, I always get this surly mix of rage and pity. This happens all the time in Queens with people blasting car stereos on the street. A guido night club sits around the corner from my apartment (is there any other kind in Queens?), thus we’re spared the full-on noise blast of a place like that. But people have to park to go there, and that’s an ongoing nuisance. People pulling up in party mode any time between 10 and midnight, car stereo blasting hiphop or metal, sometimes for over 15 minutes … right outside my window! And everyone else’s windows on the block. Then when they come out of the club between 2 and 4 am, yelling and carrying on like idiots. It just bespeaks of a cruddy sort of human being. Not people I want to know. To be jammed into a nightclub with ear-shattering dance music with people like this, all night?

Man, that’s my idea of hell. That’s something else I’m coming to terms with as I go along. The signal-to-noise ratio of our society is just so mind-bendingly out of proportion (too much noise) that we’re getting this class of people whose entire lives are like a radio tuned into permanent static. Nothing is communicated. It’s not possible. Everything about them is a nonstop stream of senseless noise. The level of thought engendered by such a mental state … can you imagine? You don’t really have to – just walk around for awhile, and you’ll run into people who are lost in their own little worlds, oblivious of everything and everyone around them, the kind of people who would take an iPhone picture of someone dying rather than try to save the person’s life.

You can blame it on the gadgets, but that’s not the whole story. I think these people have always been around, save it was less obvious in the past because there were less ways for people to show off their self absorption and crassness. I think the difference now is you have people raised inside a culture where their disconnect with other people is the norm, as opposed to being something out of place. I sometimes get a sense around teenagers and twentysomethings of people being anywhere from totally disconnected to mildly detached from their emotions … as if they were floating through life on a gentle cloud of irony. I’ve noted in the past, they seem like space aliens to me, not quite human. Pod people? They don’t seem like someone anyone could count on.

And it leaves me wondering … are there just people being people out there? Not wrapped up in all these silly trends, not trampling through life like rhinos, not more engaged with hand-held devices than the people and world around them? People are people – how stupid does that sound? But whether it was 1400. Or 1781. Or 1929. Or last year. The world is filled with people just trying to live, to make sense of it all, to get along with other people, to get by. There shouldn’t be all these weird/offputting cultural qualities attached to the way they live. I’m doing the attaching? Not really – I’m just noticing what I’m seeing repeatedly, which spooks me. As opposed to getting a sense of meeting people who, I’d gather, would be much the same if I met them 50 years ago or two decades into the future. People who have a sense of their humanity, who can laugh at themselves, or respect your presence, or grasp that the world will go on without them.

It just seems like the things so many of us choose to build our lives around have little to no meaning or value. We’re not looking to help other people, or even just keep an even keel so no one has to worry about us flipping out or becoming dead weight to everyone around them. Everything seems geared towards the self now, whether it’s in terms of rudeness or lack of concern for others, or just that sense of closing off communication from the people around us, even if it’s something as silent and non-intrusive as choosing to thumb a device all day long instead of engaging anyone else.

This is what I think about when someone pisses on a toilet seat and expects me to clean it up afterwards! Not in so many words. If I could drop it down to one word, it would be, “Asshole.” I think we’ve been veering towards a world where it’s just as normal to be a careless asshole as to be someone with half an ounce of sanity or pride. For a long time now. How to stop it? Man, you got me. I’m all for grabbing the guy who pissed on the seat and trying to drown him in the toilet bowl, but then that would make me even worse for over-reacting. I think we’re just going to ride this thing out over the course of years, and not be able to fully grasp how lost we’ve become in small ways like this, because no one will have sense enough to know.

Musical Memories

2011-05-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

It’s often noted that people are drawn to the music of their youth, particularly their teenage years, sometimes to the extent of never again listening to any other kind of music. And that music is inextricably tied into memory, so that’s part of the reason why people get stuck in these permanent musical time warps. Part nostalgia, part memory exercise.

I’ve found that’s often true for people who aren’t really music fans of any sort. And the greatest irony of the recording industry, and what damages it so much, is that in their time, these people will be the financial engine driving the industry. All those kids buying Top 40 and such. In 10 years, or 20, or 30, most of them won’t be listening to any music at all … but they’ll have a greatest hits collection on the 2 GB iPod that recall a very set time period hearkening back to their teen years. When I say the music industry is being dragged around by people who don’t like music, this is what I mean. It won’t take long, less then a decade, to pan out the people who really love music and go on buying it for years from the people who won’t. And the people who really love music and go on buying it will be considered virtually invisible and worthless by the recording industry at large, as they're a much smaller marketing segment than senseless kids buying Top 40 crap. It's a short-sighted cycle of self destruction for an industry that needs paying fans desperately.

But I’m more interested here in memory. I’m not consciously aware of listening to older music from my youth as some form of nostalgia. I listen to it because I like it. Because decades later, it still sounds good. I don’t sit around pining for “lost youth.” I don’t listen to this music exclusively. I don’t really keep score. But I’ll always find myself popping over to certain folders and knocking out some old Joe Walsh songs.

Do I think that music is better than music now? Honestly, sometimes I do. There’s a lot more care taken in the vocals, particularly. And more time and money spent in the studio working on a sound. In pure pop/rock context, a lot of that music, simply stated, is a superior version of music that came afterwards, and the genre hasn’t grown or changed all that much over the years.

I know it’s a crime to say that for some music fans – you can’t acknowledge that music from your past is somehow better than music of the present – but I don’t feel any need to kiss that ass. There is still good music being made. Constantly. A never-ending stream from which I’m forever pulling new inspiration. And this isn’t apples (the past) and oranges (the present). I go on an artist-by-artist basis more than a time frame, and back in the 60s and 70s, a lot of great artists were in their prime. And I’m far from a lazy, middle-aged, pop-rock fan. I listen to a lot of new music (most of which goes right by me), across all genres, and I keep literally thousands of new tracks that range anywhere from good to great by my estimation. (The thing is, the great ones, will generally not be from great albums, from an artist not consistently putting out great albums. Maybe that’s what I’m getting at: consistency over a period of time as opposed to one-off shots of greatness. I’m used to the concept of artists having great bodies of work (or at least one astounding three-album run) … not a few stand-out songs over the course of albums.

It’s not a burning issue with me. I’m more interested in the concept of memory and how it ties into songs. What I want to do here is list out a few of those songs for me. The song, and what it means to me personally. May not have anything to do with the song, but something to do with my life. Supposedly the kind of thing people my age (in their 40s) do all the time … but this represents a very small fraction of my listening time and intent. Which doesn’t really matter, because I’m invisible anyway!

*

“Strange Magic” by Electric Light Orchestra. I don’t know why, but this song reminds me of summer, and mowing lawns. It’s a summer song. I should be thinking of romance, ocean breezes, a full moon. No. I think of bermuda shorts, tube socks, the smell of gasoline, pulling the chord on the lawn mower engine, watching the rows of grass fall in my geometrical progression, the smell of freshly-mown lawn and a $20 bill in my hand.

“Say You Love Me” by Fleetwood Mac. Another summer song, but this song reminds me of driving in the station wagon with my family, windows down, and we’re on a stretch of highway between Lavelle and Gordon, PA, the back road. We can smell the cow manure in the fields, over-powering at times. Sunlight, heat coming off the fields in waves, corn stalks, maybe even a pinwheel hanging out the window. We’re probably on our way to the public swimming pool at Hegins, down in farm country.

“Solsbury Hill” by Peter Gabriel. Lifting weights in the basement. Those cheap vinyl weights filled with cement. A shitty, no-frills weight bench bought at Sears (it’s still down there). No matter how much I lifted weights as a kid, I never got bigger. (Now I wish I could reverse the process, as I could easily make myself the size of a house with weights!) Stuck in my head because Brother M was playing this to death on his basement sound system, while he sat a few feet away, smoking and listening. I still don’t know how I managed to work out with someone smoking a few feet away from me, which happened routinely with us. The basement was his teenage domain, but I had no place else to exercise in the house. An uneasy truce. He didn’t like me being down there, but I didn’t bother him either.

“Love Will Keep Us Together” by the Captain & Tenille. My favorite song when I was 11 years old. Not the New York Dolls. Or Roxy Music. Or Led Zep. I was 11! This was the one song I recall listening to the radio constantly to hear, and I’d go nuts when I heard it. I never pasted myself to a radio like that before or since. I still think it’s pretty good for what it is. Only other song that had a similar effect on me as a pre-teen youth was “Crocodile Rock” by Elton John.

“Mistral Wind” by Heart. There are any number of Heart songs and albums I could pick for this, but all those mid-70s Heart songs take me back to Brother M’s car with the eight-track player. And driving around Point Pleasant, NJ on one of our summer visits. The ocean. Probably should have picked “Dreamboat Annie” as that’s surely the main connection. But when the drums and electric guitar kick in on this song, that’s like a time machine to a sandy beach road and the smell of the ocean circa late 70s.

“Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night. This song vividly brings back my second grade talent contest, in which all of us had to participate, and 80% of us did this song. Me, too. I was terrible. Chubby kid. Wearing red polyester checked pants. Skin tight in a bad way. Some florid dress shirt. Earth shoes and white socks. Dancing like The Brady Bunch in one of their show appearances. Warbling out this silly song in a cracking soprano as I tried not to shit those polyester pants. I suspect if this had been filmed and I saw it today, I'd go on a shooting spree.

“The Loco-Motion” by Grand Funk Railroad. Some nights in summer, kids would get together in a backyard with one of those Panasonic Hand-Pump Eight Track players, plug it in, and we’d get into our pajamas and dance in front of a blanket on a clothes line … the catch being all the other kids would have flashlights and would be shaking them wildly at the kids dancing, which would create a strobe-light effect. “The Loco-Motion” was the key song for this. I also recall another incident, while out collecting money for the Little League, in my uniform with all the other kids, doing our sweep through all the houses out on the main highway, this song came blasting out of a backyard, and when I went around to investigate, it was one of the girls from my class, dancing wildly in platform shoes, Daisy Dukes and a halter top in her backyard to this song … it gave me wood! So, there I was, with a hard-on in my Little League uniform, and this girl looks me straight in the eye and smiles as I peer around the corner of her house.

“Convoy” by C.W. McCall. All the kids in the neighborhood were carrying on about this song before I heard it. Carrying on so much that I thought I had to rush out and buy it to fit in. When I was buying it at Boscovs, one of the big mouths in our neighborhood was there by chance with his parents and saw me buying it – he somehow knew by the record label alone (think it was MGM with that lion’s head on it). Didn’t matter – he probably thought I was cool for doing so. But I rushed home. Pulled out the portable record player and plugged it into an outlet in the kitchen, I was so excited to hear it. And this hillbilly, piece of shit comes spilling out the tinny speakers! I was slackjawed. This stupid fucking song … they were carrying on about this like it was the coolest thing since Jimmy Page? I think that’s when I stopped chasing after whatever was deemed cool by other kids, recognizing other kids tended to be assholes.

“Black Water” by The Doobie Brothers. We played sports constantly in our neighborhood. Invariably someone would have a portable radio. Whenever “Black Water” came on, a kid in the neighborhood, George, would start singing the song scat-style in a strangely accurate Louis Armstrong voice, particularly that vocal breakdown part (“Take me by the hand pretty momma/Dance with your daddy all night long”). This song always makes me think of that 8-10 year old kid pulling off that perfect gargling baritone voice Louis Armstrong was famous for.

“Just When I Needed You Most” by Randy VanWarmer. This song doesn’t represent a memory so much as a realization. It was, what, summer of 1979? Well into my teen years, far into really good pop music like The Beatles, Kinks and Stones from the 60s, and Bowie, ELO, Queen and others from the 70s, the beginnings of punk and new wave with The Ramones, Elvis Costello, The Clash … so this song comes on the radio, and I love it! But can’t admit to loving it. It’s 1979. Man, I’m changing. Can’t have any more of this 70s ballad fluff. There were other songs like this that I couldn’t acknowledge liking in front of fellow teenage rock fans (“Heart of Glass” by Blondie and various ABBA hits), but this one really stuck in my craw for some reason. And just look at this guy in the video! That’s what 90% of all white males looked like in the 70s, and I was no exception.

Maybe it’s because I left this genre just when I needed it most? Nah. I’d go on in my teen years to be a sappy, lovestruck wimp a few times over, in ways that make this song come off like “Slow Ride” by Foghat. The strange thing about Youtube links: they let you know you’re not alone. When people aren’t carrying on like mental patients or pricks, they tend to be reflective in ways that can be overly trite, but they’re also just noting, this song floored them at a certain point in their lives. Could be a terrible song, which most seem loathe to acknowledge, but it doesn’t really matter. As noted, this type of listening experience represents such a small fraction of why I listen to music. And half the time, the memory is embarrassing! So maybe it’s good that I tie in memories of humiliation and awkwardness with youth, as opposed to glorification?

The Cornsilk Ghost

2011-05-15T17:33:00.000-07:00

This short story was dated 10/25/99 when I wrote it for the folks at Leisuresuit.net. I did a lot of online writing circa 1999-2000, and some of it, like this, sort of disappeared into the mist almost immediately. At the time, I thought it was a pretty good short story that would have made a good movie. Still do, although it would take some fleshing out of the main character’s back story, which would be easy. Many opportunities for obscure 70s soundtrack songs, too. And how many ghost stories are there about the 70s?

But I digress. I’ll give it another chance here, doing some minor editing, but pretty much presenting it as-is. Enjoy.

*

Last week, I came across a ghost story on my hometown newspaper's Web site. Living in New York now for years, I miss that small-town paper, bad as it is. Reading the condensed front page every day fills me with strange nostalgia for a life I don't understand anymore.

In the story, the parish priest, Father Malloy, noticed something strange after a Saturday Midnight Mass. He claimed to have seen an "eerie visage" of a teenage boy in a blue plaid shirt and jeans hovering in-and out of the edge of the cornfield.

"I could see right through him," Father Malloy is quoted as saying. "He moved like the wind was blowing him across the ground. But there was no wind when I saw him. He was shimmering--like a flag."

Father Malloy wasn't the parish priest when I grew up there, so I can't vouch for him. But there's little reason to doubt his word, as two sightings followed over the next few nights. The same thing: a teenage boy, not walking, but gliding, through the cornfield. And the assurance of both people, a retired postal worker walking his dog and the town's police chief on patrol, that this vision was not human. The police chief claimed that the ghost had shoulder-length black hair and was bone thin. The old man simply said it was a ghost, and that the only time he had seen his dog so spooked was the night they had come across a dead skunk.

No one knows the ghost's identity. Since there seems to be no religious significance to the ghost's appearance, the Virgin Mary crowd hasn't latched onto the story, or at least it hasn't gathered enough steam yet to get their attention.

The strange part for me? I know people back there are talking the kind of talk that never makes the papers. Just by the physical description of the ghost, I recognize my brother Freddy. Freddy killed himself in that cornfield 20 years ago.

It's far away now. Fred was two years ahead of me in high school. Not popular, nor smart, nor handsome. He got high a little too much and pulled straight C's and the occasional B. He wasn't into sports. But he was known around school for one thing: his passionate infatuation with his girlfriend, Tangie. They had been dating for three years going into their senior year, and everyone was sure they would be married one day. Tangie ran with the same crowd as Fred. They thought they were rebels, but they never seemed to do anything beyond getting stoned.

One day out of the blue, Tangie dumped Fred for one of the guys on the football team. Not a certifiable jock--one of those borderline party animals who kept a foot in both crowds. No profound reason--just one of those random teenage controversies that people talk about at the 10-year class reunion. Fred was devastated. He played Bread and Carpenters albums in his room at night--and this from a massive Black Sabbath fan. There was something really wrong with him.

I knew it. Our parents knew it. Everyone knew it. He wasn't the first kid to have his heart broken like that for no good reason and wouldn't be the last. He was quiet to begin with, and stoned half the time, so no one could tell if he had developed any "warning signs."

One morning, he didn't show up for breakfast. Our parents immediately notified the police, as they thought he might have run away. Later that morning, his body was found by a few of Fred's classmates cutting school in the cornfield behind the Catholic church. It was a popular place for kids to go get stoned at night. No houses were nearby, and they could park their cars a few hundred yards away on a side street by the firehouse and walk there through the back of the field. The farmer who owned it lived beyond a hill on the far side of the field and had no way of knowing if anyone was in it at night.

He left no note. They found him lying peacefully in a small clearing near the edge of the field, hands on his chest, gazing at the sky, with dried tear trails on the sides of his face. Empty bottles of quaaludes and Jack Daniels were found next to his body. An autopsy showed an overdose to be the cause of death.

The funeral, as all teenage funerals must be, was awful. One of the worst days of my life. Tangie must have been too ashamed to show. After she graduated, she left town, without the football player, and we lost track of her. My mother was hysterical, and my father was numbed. Two years later when I went to college, they moved to a suburb of Philadelphia. After college, I left, too, and ended up here in New York. I visit the town, and Fred's grave, every year in May, when he died, but I don't hang around long. I simply stay at the town's run-down motel for a night, drive around the next day, look at the house I grew up in and feel strange, go the cemetery, put some flowers on Fred's grave, then leave.

I've asked myself why Fred would come back. Or has he always been there, and it's only now that a few people have seen him? He spent many nights getting wasted there with his friends. I knew because his sneakers would always have corn silk on them. And he made a point of wearing his blue flannel shirt out, as it sometimes got chilly at night, and it reeked of pot smoke, a smell our parents didn't know.

Maybe it was the one place he felt he belonged with other people. I wonder if kids still get stoned there at night. And if they do, do they talk about Fred? He must be a legend. Stories like that always drive kids wild. I can see them now, in the field on a summer night, sitting in a circle, joints and bottles passing from one hand to another, and someone saying, "I wonder if that kid who killed himself over his girlfriend back in the 70's is here tonight."

And even if he isn't, when the warm summer breeze rustles the stalks, everyone knows Fred is there--a lost soul at a stoner's séance, forever young in a way they'll never be.

Fred would be happy to know he had made the paper, even if no one seemed to know him by name. I wonder if Tangie, wherever she is, read the same thing I did and felt the same warm thrill. My parents haven't read it, and I won't be telling them about it.

I've started dreaming about Fred--something I've never done before. It's always the same dream. I'm lying next to him on that night. I can feel the corn silk and stalks rubbing against my back and smell the soil. I can hear crickets and power lines humming. I look up and see the lines and scaffolding of the dark tower against the purple sky. I turn my head and see him. He's quietly crying. The bottles are already empty. The dream starts here, but I know that I have shared the bottles. There's nothing to do but wait until he closes his eyes. I feel like vomiting but keep the urge down, as I know I'll live if I do it. In the dream, I don't want to live.

This dream is the closest I've ever felt to him. We were never that close. We certainly didn't hate each other and got along fine. But in the dream, it's like we're twins who've decided to end it on the same night. Ten year earlier on a sunny day, we could have been laughing at a picnic, naming cloud shapes in the spring sky.

He turns his head, looks at me and smiles. I feel the same way I did when I had my tonsils out and woke up under sedation: stoned, like I'm lying vertically on a wall of grass. I'm floating in some sense. And then we talk. I can recall one conversation we had:

Fred: I don't want to live.
Me: I know. You kill yourself tonight.
Fred: Because there's nothing here for me.
Me: It's only a broken heart. It'll go away.
Fred: I'd rather go away.

He leans his head back and closes his eyes.

I'm never going back there again. Who knows, maybe in the next few weeks, a reporter will do some research, or one of the teachers at the high school will get a flashback, and Fred's gaunt face, maybe his yearbook picture, will magically appear on my computer screen.

Would Fred appear to me if I lay down in that cornfield on a warm night in late May? Would my dream become real? If I saw him roaming the fields, would he stop to acknowledge that we were once brothers, maybe with a certain smile or a wave of his pale, bony hand? What would he say to me?

I don't care. I could drink ghost whiskey from the same bottle, and I don't care. I don't need to see it to believe it. The dream is real enough. Even if it all comes down to a drunk priest, a doddering old man and a paranoid town cop, I believe Fred is out there. I wonder if, as with all those ghost stories, he's doomed to wander forever, never finding what he's looking for, or if there, in the stoner's cornfield behind the church, he's found his home.

The Bad Haircut

2011-04-24T05:30:00.000-07:00

It’s amazing how much a bad haircut will knock you off your perch, if only for awhile. I haven’t had a really bad one for years … until yesterday.

Allow me to preface this by saying I’m no stranger to bad haircuts. God bless Leo the barber – he was a kind old man. But when Mom used to drag me into his barbershop in Ashland, it was always a bad trip. She was in the habit of letting my hair get long as a kid – not hippie long, but definitely shaggy. And Leo specialized in one thing and one thing only: crew cuts. You could sit there and give him five minutes of detailed instructions. Didn’t matter. You’d always end up with the same box-headed crew cut. He cut hair like The Ramones made music – two minutes, electricity buzzing, and you were gone. The only difference was Leo didn't count off, "One - Two - Three - Faw" before dive-bombing in with his clippers.

His son who worked with him was a bit better, but it was always a gamble which chair would come open first. When I see small kids crying nowadays over what I recognize as very reasonable, longish haircuts, I have to laugh. Because Leo would give a kid reason to cry – it was like joining the army. It was that radical a departure from what you had previously seen in the mirror, just a total sheep-shearing experience that would leave most kids either wet-eyed or blubbering. The apologetic, post-haircut sucker was poor solace in that situation. You could have given me a complete set of Phillies baseball cards, and I still would have felt like shit afterwards.

This didn’t end at childhood – it went on well into my teen years, although I was relieved when Leo retired and left the business to his son, who always gave much more reasonable haircuts. And after that, I started going to a woman in my neighborhood with a chair in her basement who always gave great haircuts, which went on well through college.

New York City has always been a weird mix of barbers for me, sticking with Manhattan when I first moved here as barbers in the Bronx were geared to black and latin hair. The longest I stayed with was a Russian guy with his sons down by the gym I went to on Saturdays at 23rd and 8th. He and his sons were pretty good, but the price kept inching closer to $20 a cut, which is just too much for me.

Eventually, when I moved to Astoria, I settled on another Saturday barber on my way to the gym in the neighborhood, just walked in by chance, an old Russian guy and his son, and have stayed with him ever since. As time went on, his son stopped showing up, and the old man always seems to have a different barber working with him on Saturdays. Once, he had what was clearly a family relation, probably a nephew, and the kid made the mistake of giving me a haircut without buzzing the sides and back (which I like short … they grow in faster than the top). I should have sat there and made him do this at the end, but the kid also seemed a bit emotional, like he would be offended if I asked, and would do a bad job, so I just went to another local barber that Sunday and had him polish up the longish job the kid did on me.

Still, that wasn’t a really bad haircut. Too long, sure, but too long can be corrected. Yesterday, day before Easter, I walked in mid-afternoon, and the place was dead. The old man was sleeping. I’d have much preferred if he had snapped awake, cried out, “Hello, alt friend” and got me in his chair, because he knows my head by now and what I like. But he had a new Saturday helper, a younger guy with one of those “balding guy/closely-cropped hair” cuts who seemed real eager to cut my hair. I’m assuming he was bored out of his skull if business was so slow that the old man had been dozing.

This guy’s Russian, too, asks me what I want, I tell him #2 on the back and sides, but leave a little more on top, I like it longer on top. Da. He starts in on the sides, and man, he’s shearing me, which is good. I’m perfectly fine with the back and sides being short as I know they’ll grow in so fast, and the biggest mistake most barbers make with me is leaving them too long.

Before I know it, and without telling me, this prick runs the electric clippers over the top of my head, knocking off a huge plume of full hair.

“Hold on, buddy, hold on,” I yelled out, “I said leave it long on top.”

“But I thought you said #4 on top.”

Number 4 must be a buzz cut. I didn’t say #4 on top!

But right there, I asked myself, what does it matter now? This guy just took an alarming chunk of hair off the top of my head … it’s not like he can pick it up off the floor and glue it back on. The old man sees all this going on and cries out, “Oh, vat are you doink to my alt friend, he no like it that short!” But, again … what the fuck can you do when the guy has just made an uncorrectable error?

So, at this point, I resign myself to the fact that I’m about to get a buzz cut that would have old Leo beaming down from his cloud in heaven. There is no choice now. The guy runs the electric clippers over the top of my head … and I’m now left with the shortest haircut I’ve had since the early 70s, shorter than the one referenced above, I mean down to the nub all around, which I really don’t like, it’s just too fucking short for comfort, accents the shape of my skull, and I just don’t have one of those skull shapes that’s good for this kind of closely-cropped hair.

After he made that initial cut, the guy kept saying, “You don’t look happy.” No shit! I should have picked up on that assholish vibe the guy put out when I first walked in, that sort of brash cockiness I’ve come to associate with people who really don’t know what they’re doing, but think they can cover it up with an attitude. I’m assuming this guy must have spent some time in a barber school, getting his license and should know what he’s doing, in theory. But, as I find so much in my life, most people just don’t know how to listen. Not so much just don’t know how, they choose not to acknowledge what people tell them. Which normally doesn’t matter, but when you’re giving someone instructions on how to cut your hair …

So I’m resigned to the fact that I’m going to look like a mental patient for the next two or three weeks. Am steeling myself for going to work tomorrow, when coworkers take one look at me and ask what the hell happened. Worst of all, just feeling out of sorts and off kilter every time I look in the mirror. That's one place you should be able to look and like what you see. So I'll be avoiding mirrors for the next few weeks - really won't have any need as my hair is now so short I can't even comb it.

I’ll go back there again, probably late June or early July before I need it cut again, but that son of a bitch is never touching my head again. Hopefully he’ll be one in a series of Saturday barbers the old man has been employing, although I’m getting kind of tired of the quality of these guys coming and going. He had an Asian guy in there for a long time who was pretty good, but haven’t seen him the past two times. All I know is if I walk in, that guy is there, and the old man is there cutting someone else’s hair, I’m getting my hair cut elsewhere that rotation and trying him again in two months. I want to give this guy my business because I like him, but if his hired hands remain this incompetent and indifferent to customers, I just can’t do it. Something tells me I’m not the only one looking in the mirror after this guy got done with them and asking what the hell happened.

Two Kinds of People

2011-04-10T18:22:00.000-07:00

In that aborted novel of my late 20s (thinly-veiled fiction related to my life … which made me feel a bit sleazy), the older brother of the main character had a habit, as older brothers often do, of wrestling the kid to the ground in the living room and farting on his head. Much like used to happen to me! But when he did, unlike reality, the older brother always had a snappy one-liner before emitting his gas blast: “There are two kinds of people in the world – me and everybody else.” Pffffttttt.

In reality, that was my line. A great way to acknowledge one’s individuality while employing that “two kinds of people” cliché people use so often. Generally to designate whatever problem they’re having at the moment, with the “two kinds of people” coming down solely to people who relate to their problem, or those who cause it or don’t give a damn. Even within the limited context of the analogy, they’re usually wrong, leaving spaces for dozens of other kinds of people in that given scenario.

But lately, I’ve been thinking: there really are only two kind of people in the world. It’s those who can acknowledge the existence of other people and those who can’t. I’m not even getting into some hokey concept of “those who can love and respect other people.” It has nothing to do with love or respect. I’m talking the simple ability to recognize the existence of other people. You don’t have to love them. You don’t have to respect them (although it helps). You just have to acknowledge that there are other people in the world, many people, and you’re just one of them, trying to get by and make sense of it all.

As opposed to people who don’t give a shit about anyone else. I’m talking sociopaths, and not in that Manson/Dahmer sort of extreme. I work with sociopaths. I live around them. Run into them on sidewalks and subway trains all the time. They’re pretty much everywhere you go, New York or not. That previous post where I noted some creep parking a stolen shopping chart filled with discarded clothes on the landlord’s sidewalk and walking away? That’s probably a sociopath: someone who takes zero responsibility for his actions and doesn’t care at all what sort of effect his lack of respect for himself and others will cause. A sociopath doesn’t have to be a mass murderer; he may never even commit a felony crime. This website offers a great thumbnail description of sociopathic tendencies.

Do you know how many sociopaths I’ve worked with in New York? More than I care to admit. I’m not saying that in a “ha ha funny” way. If you read the main criteria for sociopathic behavior on that website, these are all qualities that are well suited to office work, a place where glibness and superficiality routinely are valued as common currency. If you want to know why corporations and institutions are so needlessly heartless and cruel at times … they’re often run by sociopaths who aren’t worried about the morality of their actions or repercussions. Sometimes it comes back to bite them on the ass (think Enron), but most times not (think Wall Street). I’d also put forth that a vast majority of politicians are sociopaths, regardless of the goodwill façade they present to the public. But I don’t really want to think too long about this, because it’s too disturbing.

I like what that above-noted passage on sociopaths points out: “ultimate goal is the creation of a willing victim.” I must be like Dr. Van Helsing, the vampire hunter, when it comes to dealing with sociopaths. I know what they are. They know I know what they are. Obviously, they don’t care: they’re sociopaths. I try to leave them to their own devices as much as possible, and when I can’t, just discourage and avoid situations where they can indulge themselves.

But sometimes women in an office around a sociopaths? It’s high drama. They make the mistake of investing their emotions with people like this. They get “involved,” somehow. They must “save him.” They must find reason in this person’s inexplicably bad behavior, mixed in with the charm and moments of clarity. Remember the vampire hunter. There is no cure for vampires, only wooden stakes. There is no slow turning of thought and emotion for the person to “see the light” and start behaving like a normal, caring individual. It just doesn’t happen. I’ll never understand how people get pulled into this other clearly troubled person’s self absorption. Your average sociopath is an emotional vampire, sucking the life and energy from everyone around him. These people don’t present mysteries and enigmas to me. Shit, they’re like wallpaper in New York!

Obviously, not every driven, Type A person is a sociopath. But I think we all deal with sociopaths far more often than we’d care to acknowledge. It sometimes feels like the American way, this way we have of gauging success by financial worth, is geared towards creating sociopaths, or at the very least deeply selfish, uncaring people. I’m hardly blowing the lid off a deep dark secret here, but it pains me to acknowledge that what we consider normal is far from it. We’ve all had that feeling of being at work, or just walking the streets, and being presented with a situation or person that is just so radically wrong, we’re left breathless, thinking, “Doesn’t this person know how wrong this is?” And the answer is, no, he doesn’t. In his eyes, he’s right and everyone else is wrong. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking some creep sending text mails on a smart phone on a crowded subway staircase during rush hour, or a division head laying off everyone who does real work in a department and promoting all the wrong workers.

Happens all the time. If we’re feeling sensitive, we stop to ponder how crazy the world has grown, and it only seems to be getting worse. But it’s always been this way. Hell, may have been worse in the past when you consider all the wars, bad politics and power coups throughout history. I usually cringe when people advance that line of thought, because they personally witness some type of bad behavior, that the world in general must be “going bad” in some sense. Compare a negative experience on the street or at work with, I don’t know, say that of someone in Japan right now who survived an earthquake only to watch his house get swept out to sea by a tsunami, can’t find his wife and may be receiving daily doses of radiation that will shave years off the end of his life.

There are bad days and bad people we deal with, but then again, there are some truly horrific situations that people go through daily, sometimes to the point of death. I try to remember that when I’m carrying on about garden-variety sociopaths and bad manners. It is a sort of petty whining on my part, but then again, what I’m noting has some truth to it, too. It’s surely better to focus on the good. If you are one of those people who can acknowledge the existence of other people, keep that thought in mind, walk it as you talk it, don’t let yourself slip into not carrying around that sense of recognition.

And I don’t mean to paint this purely in terms of good/evil. If anything, I recognize sociopaths really have little control over how they act and do not intend to be “bad people” in some sense. Thus, I’ll feel a mild sense of pity for a person with this issue, much more than contempt. I’ve noticed that sort of strange unhappiness in the upper reaches of the corporate world. Granted, a lot of that is massive pressure, mind-bending levels of stress I tend to avoid on purpose. But I gather some of it is just that general unhappiness with life, and no amount of money will change that. You spend all your time in power plays, aggressive behavior towards real and imagined enemies, forever functioning with your back to the wall, distrustful of everyone you meet, it surely takes a deep psychic toll. Sometimes I’m amazed when I meet seemingly happy, well-adjusted executives, because everything else about their lives (despite the money) seems like constant, massive trouble. I guess we all decide how much shit we’re willing to take, how much money we’re willing to make, forgive me for sounding like a Billy Joel song.

What I’ll never understand is these men thinking their ways of life are the ultimate expression of manhood. True, there are men out there using their backs for a living, or engaged in some manly sport, who exude manhood like a musk that everyone notices. How much money do they make?

That’s where these guys gauge their manhood. But you look at what goes on sometimes … and it’s like being cast back to the schoolyard. Remember how you used to fight as a kid with your siblings or neighborhood friends? Those knock-down/drag-out fiascos that would find both of you wailing on each other, mentally or physically, in ways that were meant to leave permanent scars? Those deep blasts of psychic rage you weren’t mature enough to contain or see past because you were a kid and didn’t know any better? Each of you looking for ways to embarrass and dominate your opponent by exposing every possible weakness and secret place?

Take all those ugly, bratty blasts of irrational selfishness and anger, put them in a guy wearing a suit and tie, and this is not all that unusual in an office. It’s virtually no different from those brawls between eight year olds … the same levels of understanding, compassion and empathy. It’s not manhood – it’s the worst of childhood. With monetary value attached.

Where most people go wrong is trying to find reason to justify this. There is no reason. We’re better off focusing on what makes people “good” in some sense and moving towards that. And understanding that most of the good we do, others will not see. Sure, the people in our lives will, those who know us for who we are, but most people won’t have a clue as to what good we’ve done in life and what legacy we’ve left behind. That was a strong feeling I got at Dad’s funeral, that he was essentially a good person who quietly went through life doing whatever it took to keep his family going. And the only people who really knew that were us, the few dozen of us gathered on that frigid, cloudless day in December to lay him to rest.

I bring up Dad because it pleased him no end that I was living in New York, not working in a factory, and in his mind, making more money than he did. (Maybe I have, but I’m still lower end of the totem pole, by far and by choice.) I never quite understood how he never fully grasped that he had a pretty good life – at least the factory he worked in treated and served him pretty well over the course of decades. Does so to this day with a healthy pension for Mom after his passing. But he seemed to think having more money magically made your life better.

Then again, on some level, he knew, as I recall him passing up a few promotions over the years that would have moved him out of the area or put him on the road – two things he had no urge to do after traveling the world on the tail end of World War II and the Korean War. He drew a line, as most of us do. I guess all I’m saying is watch out for people who don’t draw lines. I used to think that sort of wild ambition was a wondrous thing, but now that I’ve lived around it in various guises for the past two decades, I’m not so sure about that.

Eternal Spring Quest for Cotton Windbreaker

2011-03-31T19:33:00.000-07:00

It happens every spring. Most years, I don’t really need one. This year, the black cotton windbreaker I have has started showing its age of five years or so. The cuffs are starting to fray. Polo by Ralph Lauren, paid way too much for it at the time, but that’s how it is with good cotton windbreakers. When you see one, you buy it on sight, because you may not see another one for awhile. Still have a tan Nautica windbreaker from a few years before then, but it makes me look like a UPS delivery man.

You would not believe how hard it is to find a good cotton windbreaker these days. Go ahead and try – I dare you. All I could find was an over-priced new Ralph Lauren model at Macys that had a weird design I didn’t like (as opposed to just a straight cut, short-waited, cotton jacket). A jacket on Eddie Bauer’s website that could be good, but cost $80.00, which I won’t spend without trying it on first. There are unlimited numbers of micro-fiber and weather-proof windbreakers, which I don’t like. The fabric doesn’t breath – whether it’s 45 or 65 degrees, sooner or later, I start sweating in those micro-fiber things.

I’ve been wearing these jackets all my life, and buying a cheap cotton one used to be about the easiest thing you could do every spring. They were everywhere, and never more than $20 or $30. James Dean didn’t start the trend, but he surely capitalized on it and made it cool. It’s a basic, no-frills look, and if you haven’t already gathered, I’m very comfortable with these sort of no-nonsense relationships in life, whether we’re talking people, clothes, music, etc.

I can’t recall when the massive switchover occurred to polyester blends and micro-fibers. These sort of windbreakers often don’t look bad – the design is right – but, again, I’ve had the experience of buying these, wearing them around, and there’s just something smothering about the fabric. So it keeps the rain off. I don’t live in England or Seattle; when it rains, I use an umbrella. I like cotton. It’s a great fabric: light, breathable, feels good on your skin.

So why is it, that every fucking spring, when I start spelunking around the web or department stores, be they high or low end, it’s like pulling teeth to find a cotton windbreaker, good or bad quality? The LaCoste section at Macy’s actually had one featured this year … for $150! Adding insult to injury, when I tried on the XXL size, it didn’t even fit, about a size too small. I always hated that LaCoste alligator symbol, mainly because all the unimaginative kids at college in the mid-80s would wear LaCoste sport shirts, collar turned up, with Vuarnet sunglasses on a rope. I never got over that sickly association with dudes grooving to Tears for Fears songs in these things. But such is my desperation for a cotton windbreaker, that I would have bought that LaCoste windbreaker at Macy’s for $150 had it fit.

I can’t stand being made to feel like a yuppie on a spree when all I want is a basic, no-frills, black cotton windbreaker. The Polo Ralph Lauren one I own, I periodically black-out the little horse/polo player on the left breast with a marker so it doesn’t stand out. (I think it was originally white.) And I don’t want to knock the company too hard. I love the cut and feel of the jacket, suits me fine. But I’m just not one of those people who loves showing off labels (unless it’s Woolrich or Champion).

I’m not sure what grates on me more – that sense of not being able to find what was once such a basic staple of American life, or the realization that time has passed me by. Not like I’m a vinyl record guy living in a digital world – more like an eight-track tape guy, because there are still plenty of places you can buy vinyl records and have it deemed cool by people of all ages. Try finding a place that sells eight-tracks, and when you do, I can guarantee you it will be a kiosk in a forlorn mall in southeast Arkansas run by an aging hippie.

But it’s been that kind of spring. Having a ragged time at the office, doing tons of work to little or no fanfare and feeling about as appreciated and valued as … well, a cotton windbreaker. Been making a lot of lasagna lately, as it helps me to make these things a few times in a row when I first learn the recipe, but I’m also learning that eating heavy cheese dishes a few nights a week is a bloating experience, like I should start looking for hay in my bowel movements every morning. Weather has been much colder than usual, with a last winter blast expected for April Fool’s Day, although we’re going to get lucky here and only have freezing rain and high wind.

Some prince left a shopping cart filled with discarded clothes sitting against the lamp post on my landlord’s sidewalk tonight. A real sore point with me as she went through a very bad spell for a long, long time with Queens douche bags littering her sidewalk with construction debris, garbage bags filled with bathroom tile or dozens of pounds of empty liquor bottles, broken beer bottles, once even a toilet. (Oddly enough, the bathroom tile and toilet magically appearing a week after her next-door neighbor had those items in front of his house after stripping down an apartment in the building …) So when I see something so clearly out of place sitting on her sidewalk, knowing full well she’s going to be fined $100 or more for “littering” because some jackass parked it on her sidewalk, I don’t think, “Oh, must be some poor homeless person nearby searching for bottles” … because I know, in Queens, it’s just some senseless creep dumping nonsense in a public place and walking away.

I just wheeled the cart down around the corner to the public playground and left it there in the drizzly rain, knowing full well that someone will come along and take that shopping cart for his own personal use and probably dump the clothes there, where the parks cleaners who come by every other day will deposit that stuff in a trash bag and dispose of it. (For every time this happens, there are five or six times I’ll just silently stuff whatever's out there on the sidewalk into the landlord’s outdoor trash bin and dispose of it myself … nothing like cleaning up after anonymous bums!) If I had been in a better mood, I’d have bagged the clothes and took them to the Salvation Army bin a few blocks away at the supermarket. But it’s been a ragged week, so I left it at that. As predicted, there was no enraged homeless person appearing moments later bawling, “Who took my shopping cart?!” I sometimes wish my landlord would get a camera installed on her property so I could see the type of people who routinely do this sort of thing around the neighborhood.

So, as you can imagine, the concept of walking into a store, finding a basic black cotton windbreaker for a reasonable price, really looks good to me on a number of levels right now, personal comfort and a sense of connection to a simpler past chief among them. I don’t ask for much, but, man, a good cotton windbreaker would really hit the spot right now. Every spring, I tell you, it's the same damn thing.

Days of Screw-Top Wine and Wild Irish Roses

2011-03-20T17:31:00.000-07:00

Oh, for the days of screw-top wine and Wild Irish Roses. A short time in my 20s that ended as quickly as it began. I don’t know if kids still drink screw-top wine. Someone is, because I see it every time I’m in a liquor store or supermarket. (My local in Queens favors Boone’s Farm.) The local bodegas don’t have any, but they’re still carrying cans of Four Loko, which was recently outlawed in the state. No one seems to be sweating it. I’m sure those guys are charging kids a fortune to drink that swill. Not sure how that stuff is anymore lethal then Red Bull and Vodka, which people have been pounding down since that energy drink came on the market a few years ago.

College made me a little full of myself, at least in terms of tastes in alcohol. I was a college student, branching out in the world, refining my tastes. No longer could I drink simple beer. I needed wine, because this is what intelligent people drank. Having the occasional drink with a college professor? All these guys drank wine. This was clearly the way to go.

One slight problem with that: college and redneck bars were in no way geared to cater to wine drinkers. I found out fast that ordering wine in these places was an eye-rolling endeavor for the bartender, not a discussion on the merits of red vs. white, or “that was a fine year,” etc. It was a pain in the ass for them to pull out the one gallon-jug bottle of red or white that they had stowed behind the bar, next to the baseball bat, and listlessly pour it out.

I was never quite sure why this was such a negative experience for them. It wasn’t a mixed drink. They’d generally charge a dollar or two more than they would for a pint of beer. But it was always a chore for them. The worst came in a bar back in rural PA, when I pulled my “glass of wine, please” stunt, and the bartender barked, “If SHE wants anything special, all we got is this jug bottle of Gallo.” The assumption was a man would never order a glass of wine. Luckily, I never took a shine to wine coolers, and was never quite sure why these sickly carbonated beverages weren’t placed on the same taste level as screw-top wine.

They wore me down. I’d say there are after-effects to all this. I’m not a big wine drinker. I keep a BOX of red wine in the refrigerator after reading of the heath benefits of drinking a glass of it daily in terms of circulation. That’s really the only reason I have wine around. I would never go to a wine bar, more so because of the crowd who would. But I did branch off into imported beers later in my 20s, having had my first good taste of Guinness, and branching out from there, more recently having the great experience of hitting the Belgian Beer Café in Manhattan and going to town on their heavenly, over-priced ales.

I have become a sort of beer snob and couldn’t tell you if Bud or Miller or Pabst suck because I haven’t had the stuff in years. Put in a situation where the choice is one of these or soda, I’ll go with soda. I don’t drink to get falling-down drunk. I drink to get a nice buzz and leave it at that. So if I’m going to do that, it never hurts to spend a few dollars more and drink quality beer, which you can find just about anywhere these days (not so in the 80s …). Even that will raise a snigger from the blue-collar, Bud/Miller/Coors contingent. If they want to spend the rest of their days drinking shitty beer, that’s their business. (I do make an exception for Yuengling beer, as it’s my home county beer, but I am alarmed these days by how widespread this beer is growing, not to mention the import prices people in NYC pay to drink it, with me full well knowing the same thing is going for $1.50 a pint back in the Coal Region.)

But that screw-top wine phase. I can see it now as my recognition of the somewhat “faggy” aspect of ordering wine in a redneck bar, getting out of college, recognizing I was being guided away from my working-class roots in many ways I found suspect, and trying to pull my tastes down as a half-assed tribute to those roots. And there’s a novelty of otherwise sane, healthy guys in their 20s drinking rot-gut wine generally consumed by winos and bums who couldn’t afford anything else.

It started in that loose time after college was over and my move to NYC about a year and a half later. Brother J got into it, too. We were forever reading novels and short stories by Beat writers that featured characters drinking cheap wine. Rock stars would pontificate on it in interviews – still remember Peter Wolf from The J. Geils Band recalling how much he loved buying Thunderbird Wine because the bottles would come with a bonus Bic multi-colored pen taped to the side. (I guess to write out one’s will later that night?) Thunderbird had that great rhyme: “What’s the word/Thunderbird/What’s the price/A dollar twice.”

The state stores back in Pennsylvania were all well-stocked with Mad Dog 20/20. I think “20/20” is just the company name, although it sounds like something you’d associate with a rifle. The official name is MD 20/20, and I’ve gather MD really stands for Mogen David. But what a great nickname for an alcoholic beverage: an angry, crazy dog. Grape and orange were the main flavors on the shelf. I also get the impression these cheap wines are very high in alcohol content, much higher than beer, so that only added to their allure.

And I hate to say it, but in a Cheez Whiz sort of way … these things tasted good! You knew you were drinking shit, but it was flavorful shit that was strangely easy to put down. That was the goal in any Mad Dog session, put the whole bottle down. Puking would be a vodka/orange juice affair: doing so would turn you off that flavor for a long, long time. But you’d also get over it.

I don’t need to say that aside from Brother J and I, very few people took the same ride on the Night Train with us. It was purely a novelty act that lasted for a year or two. I’m not sure what the state-store clerks thought who sold us the stuff. Probably the truth: “A bunch of college kids drinking shitty wine on a lark.” We surely weren’t the only ones in the history of mankind, but I would have been curious to hang out at the state store to see who else was drinking Mad Dog.

The most memorable Mad Dog binge came at a party in Frackville, PA. It was summer, I recall, and I had just graduated, was truly at loose ends back home, not working. This also coincided with my regrettable bib overall phase. As you can see, this was all a put-on. Everything I did at that point in my life was done with ironic intent. It was just that age: hard to be serious about anything when you’re 23, just spent all your life in school, and now have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing. I wouldn’t classify it as free-falling. I’d call it being dumbfounded and directionless at a time in life when everyone expects you to take off like a rocket.

One of my sister’s friends was holding a big Fourth of July party to which everyone was invited. Good and bad news. This particular friend was a fairly flighty/wealthy girl who just ran with a different crowd, the few moneyed people we knew, that paper-thin layer of people in any small town who come from wealth and keep it to themselves. At that point in our lives, the money issue wasn’t big at all. Probably still isn’t, but as you get older, you see that some people have five or six-digit figures routinely shuffled their way through familial connections, while the rest of us work for a lot less. It surely affects how all of us see the world! Having spent my adult life around people in New York making much more money than any of us, it sort of shoots the whole concept out of the water. But I still recall that gulf and can still feel it sometimes back there.

Well, this was at the height of our Mad Dog obsession. So we each brought a bottle of grape to this thing, in bib overalls. We liked to romanticize that our hometown was a little crazy, but honestly, you’ll find drunks with their shaggy-dog stories in any town back there. The good thing about bib overalls is that flap on the front has a pocket in it that’s a perfect fit for a bottle of Mad Dog. So the gist was to take a few swigs, unbutton that pocket, screw the top back on, put the bottle in, then either wipe your face or hold it in your hands depending on how far you’d gotten into the bottle.

We sat there all night, pissed off that nobody knew who The Replacements were, in our bib overalls, pulling a one bottle per Mad Dog session while, I don’t know, Howard Jones and Bruce Hornsby cassettes played in the background. We thought we were impervious. Everyone does at that age. I wouldn’t dream of downing a whole bottle of Mad Dog now in one sitting. The worst I ever got was here in NYC, the time old pal John visited from Delaware, and we went to O’Hanlon’s under the N Train, who had a “buy three get one free” drink special. We worked our way through that cycle for four free pints of Guinness, meaning we drank 16 pints all together, two gallons of stout. We didn’t puke, but the next day, it felt like we had our heads in vices, and there was a constant buzzing sound in our ears. I remember John gazing out the window for minutes on end with a pained look on his face and then barking. We felt a lot less impervious.

That Mad Dog session, all along, people kept sauntering up and treating us like cool rednecks, which was the exact effect we were shooting for. We weren’t cool, and we weren’t rednecks. But we were drunk off our asses and daring enough to dress like hayseeds in the time of La Coste sport shirts with turned-up collars. I think it was more Tom Hanks in Bachelor Party than Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy.

Everybody got profoundly drunk that night, falling down drunk. I had to drive home (about four miles). That was the night where we got just outside of Frackville in the yellow hornet station wagon. I pulled over the side of the road. Held up my finger to denote that I had to do something. Opened up the door, daintily leaned over, and puked for about thirty seconds solid. Wiped my mouth off. Gingerly shut the door again. Then drove home. Fell asleep on the lawn because the grass felt so cool on my face. Neighbors must have had a good laugh seeing me splayed out on the lawn at 6:00 am in bib overalls, at least not piss, shit or puke stained.

You can only get away with that shit so many times. I never pushed it like that again. Probably drove drunk more times than I’d care to admit back then – we all did, before driving with a few beers in you became crime of the century. But I haven’t driven drunk in decades, mostly because I no longer drink when I go back there. Too many friends who wandered down the DUI path and paid a heavy price for it. The county’s had multiple DUI check points set up weekend night for the past decade, and there’s something a little too gestapo-like about all this to routinely chance having a few beers (by which I men three or less) and driving home. And the bars just seem to get more seedy as time goes on back there, or maybe I just have a thing about multiple facial piercings, tribal armband tattoos and NASCAR regalia.

Maybe I’ll pick up a bottle of Mad Dog next time I see one, for old time’s sake, although I’m hardly nostalgic for it. It would sit nicely against the bottle of moonshine in the fridge I never touch.

A Madame Sousatzka Moment

2011-02-21T07:55:00.000-08:00

The other night coming home from boxing, I got a seat on the subway train when it pulled into Times Square, and the usual tourist riff-raff and people who just didn't look like they rode my train got off. (You ride the same train long enough, you can spot people who are going to get off in Manhattan before the train hits the neighborhood. And the people who are going to get off on the first stop in Queens to grab the 7 train connection.)

Of course, this concept has been turned on its head in the past few years. People I had once pegged as tourists turn out to be moneyed nudges who now live in my neighborhood, and still carry themselves like tourists.

I'm not going to get into a prolonged bashing of the type, much as I love to. It's always college-educated white folks in their 20s who carry themselves with a seemingly unintended arrogance, despite the glaring fact that there's little physically striking or notable about them. And the insult "tourist" doesn't do justice -- it's more like tourists on safari. Like driving around in an armored jeep taking pictures of animals in the bush makes you one with the land. Meanwhile, the guides can tell what kind of animals are moving around a few hundred yards away in pitch darkness just by the sound of their paws on the grass.

Anyway, I’m sitting next to a hipster couple who, for years, I would have assumed were going to get off at 57th Street to go back to their hotel. At the latest, 59th and Lex, as people like this, once upon a time, would have turned into pumpkins on a subway train exiting Manhattan. But, endless articles get pumped out in magazines and newspapers, rents and real-estate prices sky-rocket over the course of years, and wouldn’t you know it, that air of exclusivity you can only get from paying too much for too little draws in nowhere nudges like this. People who base their lives on magazine articles. A different breed from those of us who moved here because it once was an affordable place to live. We moved here it because it was unhip … now the Converse Hi-Top is on the other foot.

The woman next to me was nothing special. I wouldn’t call her a dog, because that would be unkind, and even if she was technically a dog, she thought she was hot stuff. Just that sort of mousy, sandy-haired, glasses, designer bag, featureless girl who moves here from (insert mid-sized city from Midwest) and now thinks she has the world by the tail because she’s in New York. Again, I feel no need to call her a “dog.” Just an average-looking woman riding the train, nothing wrong with that.

What was deeply annoying about her, aside from her boyfriend whom I’ll describe shortly, was that giggly “sideways glance/whisper into boyfriend’s ear” affectation she had. You just don’t pull that shit on a subway train. Sooner or later, the person next to you is going to be a Cro Magnon who takes umbrage at the frilliness and drops a well-deserved elbow into a rib cage. How many dozens of times have I sat next to assholes like this on a subway train? I used to think, “Is she laughing at me?” when I was a lot less secure. Now, I just see life more clearly: “Asshole.” Not just an asshole – an asshole who will not be part of my life in 15 minutes, so just let it roll. Dozens of times, at least. Although, for the record, it’s usually teenage girls who pull shit like this, not women who appear to be mid-20s.

The boyfriend had a purple/orange mohawk. And white-framed Vuarnet sunglasses. The End.

Honestly, he didn’t seem like a horrible guy. A typical guy whose “hipness” meter has been set to the numbingly low standard of his home suburb, where guys like this are “wild” because of “that hair” and “the attitude” … but in NYC, dicks like this are a dime a dozen. They come here to “belong” … when they don’t seem to realize they’ll always have a spiritual home anywhere with that guy who put a lampshade on his head at a party. Or endlessly quotes lines from movies for “comic” effect. To me, a mohawk seems like a punk version of a comb-over. You’re trying to hide just how ordinary you are with a hair affectation.

He wasn’t throwing off angry or negative vibes – just the same annoying “above it all” vibe as his mousy girlfriend. I’m not sure how you’re above it all with a purple orange mohawk. Riding a subway train. To a neighborhood you never knew existed as little as two years ago. Where you now live on your parents’ dime. Because it’s too damn expensive to afford on your own. And you can’t get any real work. Because it’s so damn hard to find real work with a purple orange mohawk. Why does the world have to be so cruel, man?

But even if you strip away all my disdain and snap judgments… these people annoyed the shit out of me. Would have been the same had they been dressed in corporate garb, or as rednecks, or hiphoppers, or whatever. I can live with the hipster vibe. That same guy, sitting next to me, quietly reading a book, or acting like a normal human being, I got zero issue with him. That’s how subways work. If people act like normal, reasonably-caring human beings, they can be whatever they want, and no one is going to take issue with them.

It was the cute couple vibe that grated on me. Always does. Being in love is not synonymous with being a shithead. Granted, they often appear to be one in the same, but they are not. I’ve been there. When you’re with someone, you feel like you’re traveling around in your own little world. And, in effect, you are – like a rock star with his or her one-person entourage. You have this bubble that the rest of the world will not understand, and defends you from their slings and arrows.

Which is nice when you’re a kid, but sooner or later? You realize, as we all do, the world is not spinning around you. That would be the one thing I’d impart to these two knuckleheads if provoked. Not just to them, but to anyone walking around with a false sense of privilege, which seems like a national past time these days. The world is not spinning around you.

Was I ever like this? Not as a rule or way of life. But I do recall minor incidents of displaying this same kind of arrogance. The one that sticks in my mind was hanging out with college friend Eileen and her roommate Joyce, who had gone to the same college as us, but I did not know her then. They had both moved to the city a few years after I had and got an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Those were the days of drunken 2:00 am subway rides home on a work night. We had yet to be beaten down by the realization that going to work the next day hungover and on three hours of sleep was a very bad idea. I wish I could sit back now and say it was all worth it, but it wasn’t. Nothing magical happened those nights. Just people getting drunk. As they have done for centuries and will do forever. It was part of our images to live it out, until it slowly dawned on us that walking around like a zombie the next day was a drag.

We were at the infamous east-side bar, P.J. Clark’s. The kind of bar I wouldn’t be caught dead in now. Because people hang out there for the name of the bar – it’s not a local for many people. I guess every night is a different mix of characters, but there’s no character to the place. The people running it will surely tell you otherwise, but it’s no different from a generic concept like Hogs and Heffers, which may be a thousand times more obvious and canned, but just as touristy in its own way. Most Manhattan bars suffer from this in one way or another. I’ve found the only way to make them work is to hit happy hour early and get out when it starts getting SRO.

I was flirting around with Joyce, although that didn’t end up going anywhere. And how I got away with this … the bar was so packed that we were wedged in tightly, so I took the liberty of rubbing her lower back and keeping my hand there as we got progressively more drunk. She didn’t seem to mind. I recall working that number a few times back then, which just strikes me as being sleazy and manipulative now, but I guess made a lot more sense with a semi-erection, a belly full of beer and little to no shame.

But that one night, there was a middle-aged woman there by herself. Probably no older than I am now, but one of those people who went to a bar alone to wander around and see what developed. I could never do that – still can’t today. I’m OK with meeting a friend or two at a bar (not a ton of people – as noted, I find myself offended when groups of people try to take over a bar), but drinking alone has just never suited me. Some people love doing that – rolling the dice to see what happens.

Right around that time, Shirley Maclaine was starring in a movie called Madame Sousatzka, in which she played a middle-aged Russian immigrant piano teacher in London who served as a zesty and “wise in the ways of the world” guide to a young Indian boy under her tutelage. Maclaine really did it up: the clipped English accent, the imperious glances, the shawls, the sense of deep culture her students will never fully grasp. (I haven’t seen this movie in years and am not even sure if it made it to DVD.)

Anyway, this woman at the bar, I don’t know if she was drunk or just plain weird, but she spent most of the night walking through the crowded bar, eye ablaze with mascara, clutching a brandy glass she never seemed to drink from, making eye contact with everyone she came across, not saying anything, but either smiling warmly or tossing her head aside, I’d imagine when she came across a face she found undesirable. It was strange. She was done up in shawls, like Stevie Nicks, and was a bit round, not enormous, but heavy. I wouldn’t say people were afraid to talk to her so much as she put out the vibe that one wouldn’t know what to say to her, unless it was to ask her to read a palm or break out the Tarot cards.

As you could imagine, a 24-year-old guy, drunk, with his hand just about on the ass of a beautiful girl … we spent the whole night calling her Madame Sousatzka and giggling under our breath whenever she passed. I recall thinking how pathetic this woman was, wandering around alone in a bar, making eyes at strangers. I don’t know if she heard us, but she had to know we were goofing on her.

And I can see now, this was just a woman feeling lonely, wanting to go out in the night and be around people, but made the mistake of going to the bar that was filled mostly with people half her age. We probably weren’t the only ones making fun of her. But I put it in the context now of my own life and feel bad about that night. Because I can look at how I was then and know I was sincerely full of shit, really had nothing better going on than that woman, no better grasp of life, save I thought I did because I was younger. And I know now being younger means nothing, is no excuse for anything, no reason to feel superior, save physically, which is where so many of us make the mistake of extending that false belief to every aspect of our being.

I couldn’t help but thinking, sitting next to these giggly douchebag hipsters, that they somehow must have been having a Madame Sousatzka moment with me. Who knows. The girl may have been saying, “Doesn’t that guy look like my father?” But I got more the vibe that these two were sharing some secret joke on the world, may not even have involved me, but if I had wanted to be really rude, could have taken off my headphones and got into her face with a “what the fuck is your problem” moment that would have escalated to these two having a moment they’d never forget. I was doing nothing unusual. Looked no different than I do any night of the week, heading home after work or working out, not drawing attention to myself, if anything, as usual, striving to be left alone while I relaxed after another day of running around.

The difference, of course, is back then I was just a guy in a bar, dressed in a relatively normal fashion, whereas this more recent experience, the young guy may as well have been dressed as a giant penis in terms of drawing attention to himself. It was my attitude back then that I didn’t have to draw attention to myself. I was a reasonably good looking guy at the peak of my youth and knew I didn’t have to do anything to make people look at me.

And it never would have occurred to me to carry around that same arrogance on a subway train. Which would have got me killed or severely beaten at the time as one of the few white people in the train, and drawing any more attention to myself, particularly in a way that insinuated making fun of the locals, would have been a bad idea.

I guess I should put it all in context. That same subway train in Queens, heading out of the neighborhood around 3:15 in the afternoon will be packed with gangs of ghetto kids heading back to their grubby neighborhoods from the local Catholic school, many of them carrying on like mental patients and exuding an arrogance that makes anything mohawk boy could come up with seem mild. Would I feel any more reflective tolerating a bunch of jackasses like that? Probably not, and that’s a post you wouldn’t want to read!

The Holy Grail

2011-02-13T17:26:00.000-08:00

It’s shameful to admit that most of my knowledge of the holy grail myth comes from repeated childhood viewings of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Excalibur. Both movies, aside from being a comedy classic and featuring Helen Mirren in her prime (respectively), do a nice job of imparting the myth: King Arthur setting himself and his knights on individual quests to find the holy grail in hopes of recapturing the glory of his kingdom. The grail, of course, is the golden chalice that Christ used during the last supper, thus the mystical connection to a higher power.

What does one do when he finds the grail? In the Monty Python version, while storming the castle that held the grail, King Arthur got arrested by modern-day English bobbies for earlier lancing a TV documentarian who had crossed into the time-space vacuum created by good comedy. The gist is you find the grail and sail off into a golden eternity of permanent grace … sort of like suicide bombers getting X number of virgins in paradise. (I’m not sure why having sex with virgins is considered paradise … reality would be a lot of crying, belly-aching teenage girls asking is it over yet? in pained tones and then cat-fighting while you set about relentlessly jack-hammering the rest. 80 porn stars, I understand. Not 80 virgins.)

I’ve since come to understand that most people are living their lives by the holy grail method. Instead of a golden bowl that held Christ’s blood, they’re thinking wealth and fame more than anything else. Find these things, and you’ll be happy forever. Or someone to marry. Kids. Big house. Not much else fits the bill. Usually a small handful of archetypes that make people feel secure in their lives.

Well, funny things happen on the way to the grail. And even funnier things happen when you get the grail. Sooner or later, it dawns on you that the grail is made of plastic with “Made in China” stenciled on the bottom. Christ’s blood is Cherry Kool-Aid. The myth of the grail fades to the reality of your life, whether you’re fruitlessly chasing it the rest of your days, or have found “it” ten-fold. If you’re married and have kids, it all just sort of fades into who you are. Ditto, fame and fortune. You can surely enjoy the fruits of these labors, but you’re still whoever you are, whoever you were before you set out on this mythical quest.

I’ve never understood the concept of transformation in our lives which, in essence, is the Holy Grail myth. You will be transformed from something lesser to something greater by obtaining this magical thing. Unhappy girlfriends carry on about “personal growth” when all they really want is boyfriends getting new hobbies that cater more to their interests. A vice president strives to become senior vice president so he can move into a more expensive house in a more expensive neighborhood that ratchets up the pressure from coal-shoveling in a boiler room to tightrope-walking level. An actor works his ass off to become famous, only to realize this way of life prevents him from ever walking down the street unaccosted and finds people with cameras chasing him his every waking hour.

I seem to get into these themes of ambition on here regularly – probably because I’m in my 40s and find myself, especially living in New York, puzzled over why people do the things they do. I’m trying to understand the roots of this blind ambition I see in so many people here – and wondering whether I should recognize it as an enlightened state of being or a character flaw. I don’t believe either extreme is entirely true, but having spent enough time around people who have “made it” in some sense, I believe their lives are no better than anyone else’s, save it would pain them to acknowledge that. Way too much time, money and hard work has been spent to ever ponder that.

Value seem to be what all this comes down to. What do you value in your life, and what are you willing to do to obtain what you value? I’ve learned that I value sanity, physical health, reasonable financial security and minor creature comforts. Earlier in life, I thought I would want or need a big house with property to live on. I wouldn’t mind getting a house, but not for the obscene price tag you’ll find in the immediate NYC vicinity. In the back of my head is that concept of a nice house with property – sure, I’d like to have that – but it’s not a burning priority. I’m shocked that I can live in a small apartment, but I’ve learned that having a ton of physical space to roam around in isn’t a necessity. I would value that sense of privacy – I feel like I’m missing that in my life – but I can make-do with what I have. Living anywhere in an urban area, save for the highest-end real estate, you will have to put up with other people’s bullshit.

Which, I’ve learned, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. I’d prefer not dealing with pricks on a routine basis, but doing so gives you more worthwhile experience on how to get by in life. Of course, live here long enough, and it’s hard not to try on the “prick” hat occasionally and find it fits very nicely. It’s impossible to spend decades here and walk around in that sanctified state where you forgive every transgression and have eternal patience in every situation. I was that way for about five minutes in 1987.

I don’t’ know exactly how or when I stopped worrying over all those things I once desired – to be famous, married, tastefully wealthy, benevolent lord of the manor. I wouldn’t say no to any of these things, but again, I’m noticing how life works more than what I desire. Living in New York tends to make people strip down their lives to core essentials. How much money do I need to live. How much time and space to stay sane. How many people to feel loved. The answer tends to be “not a lot” to most questions. But in having that reductionist way of seeing the world, that sense of closing ranks also sinks in emotionally.

I think when we’re younger, we sense all these possibilities swirling around us and feel like we have to spread our arms out wide to pull them all in, whether or not we ever pursue them. As times goes on, our arms are occupied only with what we can carry. And carrying things is harder than thinking about things you want to carry. As with so many other things, if you think you’re failing or doing something wrong, the simple ability to stop and question yourself means you’re doing better than you think you are. But we’ve been trained to think anyone who doesn’t make himself highly visible as an archetype of power and success must have failed in some sense.

The quest for the grail! I don’t know where it goes for some people … the quest for the morning can of Old Milwaukee, and anything good that happens after that, icing on the cake. I sometimes think all of the things I noted above are just rationalizations and bullshit I tell myself to get by. But even if that is the case, that’s how life goes, you go along, things happen or don’t happen, and you learn from each turn in the road. When I write things like this, I sometimes think, “Christ, this sounds stupid, like it should be written in crayon, it’s so easy to understand.” But it’s not that easy to understand and often takes years of getting it wrong before getting it right – and I mean living it, not writing it down and thinking that makes it real.

For me, it feels like a sort of muted epiphany, the slow transition from possibility to reality. Our childhood and teenage lives are all about imaging possibilities for ourselves, but the rest is dealing with reality, and finding out what we desired may not have been what it appeared to be. Maybe it was exactly what it appeared to be, and passing time made us see it differently. As a kid who wanted to be a writer and loved rock and roll, so much of life back then was lived inside my head. I distinctly remember doing this constantly – imaging myself as the rock star creating the music I was listening to. I did this for years and listened to a lot of music this way. Again, I can’t pinpoint when I moved away from that fantasy. But now I just listen to music and get as much pleasure from it. Maybe not that lightning bolt of recognition I felt as a teenager, but growth and understanding like I never new at that time.

I think Dad passing along a few years back wiped out that fantasy world. Even before that, 9/11. I can’t explain it, but before that I enjoyed reading, and writing, fiction. Afterward, some aspect of my nature just closed down on fiction. I had no urge to read or write it. To this day, I’ll rarely read a work of fiction, or write any. I guess when you feel your life directly threatened in some sense, it makes the mind shift gears into survival mode, for me at least. And when Dad passed on, that sense of no longer being a kid really sank in. Even at the time it happened, on the cusp of turning 40, I still felt that fantastical sense of being child inside. I came away with much more of a sense of fending for myself in the world, which is exactly what happens when you lose a parent. I wouldn’t even call it losing Dad as a guide – just the reality of one of the few people in the world I knew I could absolutely count on in any situation, no matter what, no longer being there. God bless you if you’re cracked the code and feel that sense of security with a lot of people, because I surely haven’t.

Would Dad be proud of me now?Hell , yeah. He’d be annoyed that I wasn’t making more money and didn’t have a wife and kids. But he’d roll with it. I suspect he always thought “the writing thing” was a load of BS and was over-joyed when I started making more money in NYC offices than he did as a factory worker … in his mind, that was why he sent me to college. Of course, I’ve never been all that happy with this turn of events, but not miserable either, and able to live my life with certain levels of self respect and security that surely made no sense to me through my 20s. Obviously, I think I should incorporate professional writing more into my life, but if you take a good look around the writing world over the past decade, paid writing positions have been disappearing like the rain forest. So I'm not holding my breath on that one.

I think the grail for me was simply being able to write, like this, however I wanted. If you went back to the garden of Gethsemane, chances are Christ wasn’t passing around a golden chalice to the apostles. It was probably a grubby wooden bowl. These guys were on the run, outlaws, about to get the hammer dropped on them by the Romans, not working in any traditional sense, wandering around in dirty robes, just trying to survive the crazy path they had set themselves on against all sanity and reason. I relate to that more than I do golden chalices, and blood, and kings and knights wandering the land, thinking having that thing is going to make everything hunky dory. I always had the grail. Something tells me you always had it, too, in whatever sense the world felt right to you. The trick is not to lose it.

Riding the Storm Out

2011-01-30T19:27:00.000-08:00

Man, what a winter. Right now, New York has around a 56-inch total for snow, with the record being 72 inches from that awful winter of 1995/96. At that time, I was living in the Bronx and recall the first blow, that huge, three-foot blizzard we had that January. It sticks in my mind mostly because I watched Elvis Presley movies all day on AMC while the city ground to a halt. When I got to work the next day, the powers-that-be asked where I’d been the previous day, as one of my lunatic coworkers actually made it into work from Brooklyn, a four-hour trip that normally took 30 minutes.

“I stayed at home because the mayor was on the TV telling all non-essential workers to not go to work. There was a blizzard? My train wasn’t running until 4:00 in the afternoon, and then only sporadically? Did I miss something? Were you here?”

“Well, Eugene made it in from Brooklyn yesterday.”

“Anybody else?”

“Well, no.”

“So, why are you asking me why I wasn’t here, which was obvious, when only one person came in, and I’m guessing he spent all day doing nothing?”

I didn’t last much longer at that place. I’ve always wondered what goes through an employer’s mind with a little head game like that, asking a very dumb question, the sole purpose of which seems to be to humiliate what in this case was a very good worker. I didn’t make it into work because I was sane and realized I’d be taking my life in my hands to try to get to an empty office. The real question should have been mine: “Why did no one in a position of authority contact each of us and let us know not to risk our lives trying to get to work?” (I’ve since seen that “just play dead” management technique used many times on questionable snow days. Each time by managers who never showed up for work themselves.)

I didn’t have to worry about snow cleanup at that time as my landlord, Eddie, had it under control, and only had a small swath of sidewalk in front of the house to worry about. Unlike the 60 or so feet of sidewalk I clear out now for my landlord in Queens, which took three hours with this last winter blast, 18 inches of wet, heavy snow that I had to pile on drifts of over a foot frozen over from previous storms. It’s getting to the point where I think six inches of snow is a blow-off.

The worst came two Fridays ago when I badly twisted my knee on the ice … on my landlord’s sidewalk, adding insult to injury. Friday night, just after dark, walking home after picking up some Thai food. Sometimes the mounds I shovel, on a sunny day followed by a freezing night, will melt and leave ice patches that are hard to see on the black macadam leading up the sidewalk.

Well, it got me this time. My left knee slid straight out from under me, bent outwards at an awkward angle, and I sensed I should lean back into the snow bank to avoid an even worse bend, not going down hard, but knowing my knee had just twisted at a horribly bad angle. I sat there in the snow, feeling like a dick. Some people across the street had seen what happened and asked if I was OK. “Yeah, I’m fine. Only embarrassed.” They laughed. I felt like an old man, like I should have had one of those fur hats with a feather in it, a pipe full of Borkum Riff, big Woolrich coat, pair of horn rims, a schooner of Cutty Sark waiting for me by the fire, a Mitch Miller album on the hi-fi.

I told myself I was OK, but I wasn’t. The knee felt a little stiff that night, but not debilitating. The next morning, I could barely move it, as with all serious injuries that never feel that bad before a long rest period. Lo, two weeks later, I finally feel back to normal, but have lost my boxing chops in the mean time and feel even more pudgy than usual. A bad feeling for January, but by the same token, if you’re going to miss time in a gym, there is no better time than now, with all its temporary “resolution” members who won’t be there come late February.

And I keep seeing this mental patient walking the streets. I’m not going to snap his picture, lest I draw his attention to me, and he turns out to be a serial killer. I’ve seen this guy at least half a dozen time the past month, each time I was shoveling out from a storm, and once on the coldest day of the year, with the temperature around 15 degrees that morning. He must live in the newer apartment complex at the end of the block. This cheap block of apartments sprung up on the other side of the playground a few years back, and I get the distinct vibe it’s a bit of a post-college playground, drawing in those “first apartment” kind of people who seem hopeful and stupid in ways that can be either endearing or revolting. A few times I’ve walked by Saturday morning to find the sidewalk littered with cigarette butts and empty drug baggies, meaning a late-night party, just the kind of thing you should do when you have neighbors above, below and on each side of you. The people I see walking up the block from those apartments skew hard to either party bozo or earth mother in training.

But that morning, it was 15 degrees, agonizingly cold and as warm as it would get all day, and up the block comes this white guy, appears to be mid-20s, good-sized guy, clean cut, wire-frame glasses, short hair, could have been a linebacker in high school. Did I mention all he’s wearing is a white t-shirt, blue gym shorts and a pair of sandals? No socks – socks would be uncool. The first time I saw him dressed like this, after shoveling out from that 12/26/10 blizzard, he was carrying a hard drive. At first I thought, oh, this guy’s just walking a hard drive over to his friend’s apartment. I saw him minutes later on the train with the hard drive … in his shorts and t-shirt after he had walked the same 8-9 blocks like I did in knee-high snow.

But the coldest day of the year, this guy comes up the block in the same outfit. Only this time, it’s during the school load-in next door, dozens of kids being dropped off by their parents to get into the local PS, appears to be grades 6 to 8, or so, kids around 10-13 years old. I figure, this guy’s going to hook around the block to avoid walking through the milling bunch of kids just up the block. Most people do as the kids are giddy and full of themselves first thing in the morning, goofing on each other and looking to be brats before they walk into school. No … this guy heads straight through the kids. And they all start pointing at him and laughing. It was like an episode of The Little Rascals, the type of braying laughter that would accompany Alfalfa running down the aisle with firecrackers going off in his pants pockets.

And this guy was totally oblivious. Just let a path clear for him, which it surely did, while all these little brats laughed their asses off. I couldn’t help laughing myself. This guy was nuts. And I’ve seen him during every storm since, which has been a weekly occurrence, walking nonchalantly through the dead of a brutal winter in only shorts, t-shirt and sandals. He appears to be going to work. I’ve seen him on the train. Where he works that requires that sort of outfit, I don’t know. I fully expect to see him walking around in the summer with a parka and a pair of snowshoes. I must admit, he’s constructed a wonderful urban defense mechanism – everyone he meets must surely think he’s crazy and not to be messed with – but at what cost?

I’ll treat his presence as a good, albeit insane, omen. You need to get a little crazy to deal with a winter like this, because to deal with it head-on is to encounter a floating sense of depression that will spread out for weeks, each passing storm serving as a reminder that it aint over yet, and we still have a ways to go. I have to believe February isn’t going to be as bad a month … but who knows? We could conceivably stick with this “storm a week” pattern through the rest of winter and have mounds of snow with us well into March. Shit, I hope not. But at some point you have to entertain the possibility and ask yourself how you’re going to cope with that reality. And while I wouldn’t say walking around in a pair of shorts and t-shirt is the answer, it at least points in the right direction, of making yourself oblivious to your physical environment and walking your own path, however warped it may be.

Forecast is for more snow/rain/sleet weirdness this Tuesday and Wednesday. At this point, a depressingly familiar weekly occurrence. Gone through six bags of calcium chloride from the local hardware store – went through three all of last winter. Here’s hoping the gods smile on us, and we don’t beat that shitty 72-inch record. This winter has been a matter of degrees, seeing just how far you can go before you snap, and realizing you most likely will not snap, but spend a lot of time, shaking your head and muttering, what the fuck over this Book of Job type weather. Got the long winter vibe way ahead of schedule this year.

Living in Stereo

2011-01-16T17:54:00.000-08:00

The space that would contain all of the audio equipment I’ve owned in my life would look like the back row of a deeply unpopular Salvation Army store. Stuff that was dirt cheap to begin with and can’t be given away now. There would be few hidden gems of audio history (think Sony Walkman cassette players) in that pile, but not many. The department-store stereos and such, I surely got years of use from each. Over use. Abuse.

And I was slightly too young to buy into the “stereo as furniture” systems. Brother M had that in the basement back in the 70s. I can’t recall if he bought that system, or if it was simply passed on from our parents. A hulking wooden bureau/cabinet with a lid that opened onto a turntable/radio/eight-track component, with the speakers taking up the bulk of the cabinet on each end. The thing was enormous and weighed a ton – people often had “entertainment systems” along these lines, with both a TV set and the stereo system noted above. And sometimes even a wet bar! (For some reason, my best stereo/furniture memory: going to the Scanlon brothers house, who lived just up the block, and them playing “Theme from Jaws” on it with the lights off, while their Dad mixed a Rob Roy on the other end of the stereo and laughed at us for being so frightened by the music.)

If one of my records went down to the basement stereo, fuck it, it was gone. Either literally gone or scratched to hell. We all took terrible care of our records back then. The mammoth 45 collection Brother M had was kept in a cardboard barrel next to his chair in front of the stereo … I was thunderstruck when Mom threw them all out at some point in the 80s. It felt like my past had been junked as that sort of campy 70s fluff was not being reissued at the time. Little did I know I’d end up replacing all those scratched 45s eventually, thanks to magnificent reissues series like Rhino’s Have A Nice Day 25-volume set of 70s Top 40 hits. (If you want the truth of what it was to be a kid in the '70s, find these songs. Brutally honest stuff that imparts exactly how it felt to me then, along with all the other more respectable stuff we reference to demonstrate how great the 70s were.)

I’m noting all this because the other day, I had to buy a new CD player. In this day and age? Talk about a wild-goose chase. The five-disc changer I’ve had for the past six years simply stopped working – it would grab a disc to play and then not let go, thus jamming the system for any other type of use. There were so many superfluous features of that changer to begin with: AM/FM radio and a cassette deck (!) on top. I bought that thing in 2004 or 05 and remember being shocked at the time that I couldn’t buy a dual MP3 dock/CD player, but they weren’t being mass-manufactured at the time.

I eventually settled on a DVD player (all of them play CDs, too), for around $60, because it was that, or really low-end CD players ordered online, or $300+ high-end equipment that I don’t need, as I now buy about a dozen discs a year and will use a player more for other mixes people forward to me. I’ve been moving with the audio times since the late 1990s, but this felt like a bit of a shock, to see how hard it was to find basic audio components these days. Everything now seems geared towards massive “home entertainment” systems that are built for movies and video games.

Shit, I’ve never been into that much audio rigmarole. The first system I could call my own, bought specifically for me for Christmas around 1976 or so, was a Soundesign compact stereo. Oh, God, a quick web search found almost the exact same model. The one I've posted here has a cassette, which is what I would “step up” to in the early 80s and college. The same model in the 70s had an eight-track cassette player. (I’m heartened to see that seller on the website I pulled this image from is asking $25.00 for this – that sounds about right! I think it originally cost at least $80, which was a lot of money at the time.) If I’m not mistaken, this exact same stereo is in the basement back in PA, sitting on a refrigerator, covered in coal dust, and still works! At least it did when I worked out down there a few years ago.

Soundesign meant working-class, at best. Much like Sparkomatic. Just the most basic, no-frills, shitbag audio systems you could buy. That was my reality as a kid growing up in rural PA. Not just mine – most of my friends, too. Some kids with a more moneyed background would have good-to-great audio systems, but most of us were Soundesign by class design. This is probably why I’ve never been an audiophile – it’s simply my heritage to have no-frills audio systems. Never had anything against audio guys, save the neurotic collectors’ mentality so many of them had. (Check out Steve Hoffman’s Music Forum for a current sampling: give these guys credit, they know they’re weird and have learned to live with it.)

I would cling to that all-in-one stereo design for a long time thereafter, simply based on economics. As a teenager and through college, I simply couldn’t afford to buy separate audio components. It occurs to me now, the best records I’ve listened to in my life, the best of 60s and 70s rock, 60s soul, 50s rock … all this essential music, I absorbed on the shittiest stereos possible! And I also had many thunderstruck moments in cars, hearing what would be hit songs for the first time, on choppy AM/FM reception that faded in and out from tinny speakers. I still recall being so blown away the first time I heard “Every Breath You Take” by The Police that I had to pull the car over and just listen.

Out of college, move to NYC, and it felt like time to step up to audio components. Brother J had already done so with a pretty nice receiver/cassette/turntable system … that he still has, collecting dust in my old bedroom. I followed his lead and bought lower-cost Technics and Pioneer components. Nothing special, but there it was, my first big rack of equipment, one component stacked on top of the other, turning that thing on was like switching on the controls of a jet airliner.

At the time, New York was rotten with electronics stores: Crazy Eddie’s and The Wiz stand out the most, but there were dozens of others, packed with myriad choices for components, anywhere from $100 to thousands. And each had the same: that really cool “back room” you’d take a special door into, like the Western swinging doors leading to the porno section of video stores, that you’d enter to sample the truly high-end audio equipment. (I rarely went back there … the audio room, not the porno section.)

Oddly enough, the best audio equipment I ever had was found in the garbage. My friend Jose lived in an apartment building on the Upper West Side for which his father was the super. A lot of people in NYC have had the experience of finding cool, usable stuff in the garbage that other people haul out and leave on the curb, thinking, “If the garbage truck doesn’t take it, someone else will.” I’d wager that in Jose’s building, which was upscale, some of the stuff left out for garbage was in great condition, being replaced only because people wanted to upgrade.

Well, one day, someone left out a Technics receiver, just a magnificent piece of equipment, built like a tank, as all those great 70s stereo components were. And a pair of floor model Yamaha speakers with monster cable. Jose already had a dynamite stereo, so he called me up and sold it to me for $50 or so, and drove it up to the Bronx himself. I already had a linear tracking turntable (over-rated), a very good Pioneer cassette player, and a fairly standard Sony CD player, which still felt like an exotic piece of audio equipment in 1990. (I had already bought a few long-box CDs by that point, after holding out for years on buying a player as I hated seeing how vinyl had been phased out in the mid-80s. First one: Let Love Rule by Lenny Kravitz … still not a bad album.)

That system took me straight up to the year 2000 or so, surely the longest I had any single audio set-up. By which time, I had already downsized, losing the turntable in the early 90s, then the cassette deck in the mid-90s. It occurred to me after awhile that I was only using the receiver and the CD player … and the computer more and more as time went on, which seemed alien at first (but is now second nature). The power switch on the receiver was broke. The CD player was routinely jamming. One of the woofers wasn’t working.

And that’s when I chucked it all and switched over to “bookshelf” stereos with their compact design and speakers. I already had my first MP3 player (the brick that was called Neo 25, literally the size of a brick). I still remember the head of I.T. at the investment bank I was working at laughing his ass off when I showed him the player later that year … as he had just bought the first iPod model to come out, which he slipped out of his pocket to show me. I immediately felt like a teenage girl with a bouffant at a Grateful Dead concert in 1969.

That crappy 5-disc changer was the last straw for me and any sort of stereo equipment. I was hardly using it before it broke. Dumped their clunky speakers and bought a nice pair of Creative desktop speakers that sound great. I’m down to that, the new CD/DVD player, my laptop and a small iPod dock/charger (that I love using as well). Compared to the four-foot high audio rack and speakers to match, it feels good to have so little. Sound quality surely isn’t at the same level, but it isn’t bad either. I’d wager that aside from the audio-component set-up I had, this rates a close second. If people can truly tell the difference between MP3s burned at a high rate, CDs and vinyl, God bless them, because I can’t, and am perfectly happy with the way things have gone digitally.

Besides which, it looks to me like we’re going to go on for awhile with all these audio options (MP3s, CDs, vinyl) openly available, depending on personal preference. I’m still pretty fond of CDs, was blown away by that development, got behind it 100% eventually, as did anyone who recalled hundreds of scratched records. While that wonderful sensory vibe of opening a vinyl album (the tearing of the plastic wrapper, that new album smell wafting out, the opening of the gate fold, the reading of the liner notes and lyrics …) was gone, compact discs played the same every time and didn’t get anywhere near as scratched up as my old vinyl.

I’ll say this: I’m no longer as well-versed as a fan as a result. With albums, I would read everything that came with the album. I became familiar with musicians, who played what, which session musicians, producers and engineers found their ways onto so many albums, the strange connections you could sense between artists based on this, all those little historical things that became lost to me with CDs, and are surely kaput with MP3 files. I don’t “know” the musicians the way I once did. Which is fine, because I shouldn’t have to depend on whatever feigned or real personal connection I feel to a musician: it’s the music that matters most. That's a major change for older fans like me, forfeiting the massive culture we had erected around the music and focusing only on the music itself. I'm not sure I like this -- I thought I would -- but it also seems to devalue the music somehow without that same cultural weight that was once attached to it.

So, now I’m sitting here, watching a Nat Geo documentary about pot smoking with the sound off, while I listen to the new Cake album on this DVD/CD player that looks like a George Forman grill, and frankly, it sounds great. Same way that ELO album did in ’78 with the Soundesign turd and my trusty pair of Radio Shack Nova 40s. Time marches on, and I’m still listening, same as always. The difference? Well, nothing in the experience itself. But a friend forwarded me a DVD+R containing every album Elvis Presley ever put out, and I still have to listen to a massive collection of Motown acapella mixes that have been floating around the web the past few years that I downloaded earlier. Those last two things sure as hell didn’t happen and were inconceivable in 1978. Life is good!

Thumb Generation

2010-12-30T18:26:00.000-08:00

Year’s end, city in borderline chaos due to a blizzard and profoundly awful Sanitation Department response, resolutions, regrets … all the same old stuff. There’s only one thing that has really grated on me the past few days. Monday was a full-on snow shoveling day. Two-foot base of snow, at a minimum with drifts of three to four feet. A huge shoveling job, the most snow I’ve ever shoveled. Streets blocked and drifted over, home and car owners struggling to dig out, four-wheel drive vehicles spinning out in snow drifts …

And among all this, that Monday night, someone took the time to build a snow pyramid in one of the recently-vacated parking spaces along the side of the house. A crude pyramid, sloppy, nothing special, but someone took the time, probably an hour or so, to sit there and scoop up loose snow sitting around them and fashion a pyramid. Factoring in time to tweet pictures of the work of art in progress to followers, of course.

You’re thinking a bored kid? This had to have happened after 11:00 at night, as that was the last time I went out to do a spot check on whether or not plows had come through and walled over some of my work. (Plows didn’t come through here until Tuesday night, and did a lousy job, to boot.)

I know it was twentysomethings, not drunk, just giddy with excitement over the snow. How am I certain? I’m not, but from what I’d seen of the neighborhood during the course of this massive storm, the only people out “gallivanting” and “having fun” have been twentysomething apartment dwellers with no responsibilities, acting like they were Snow White in an animated movie with no queen witch and handsome princes all around. This commercial imparts the vibe perfectly, and these people feel like space aliens to me, or maybe gingerbread people? (Confession: I want to drill holes in the skulls of this couple … is the movie Hostel based on a true story … can I be one of those guys who pays $25,000 to go to the Czech Republic, don a surgical mask/smock/rubber gloves and get medieval on these two with Black & Decker power tools?)

On one hand, I don’t mind people like this. They literally have no responsibilities save for paying rent and feeding themselves. No kids, probably no pets, no vehicles, no property. In theory, I’m in the same boat, but as noted about my situation, I help my aged landlord (and myself) by keeping her property in order. I understand that feeling of freedom. Mixed with a snowstorm? Get out of here! Time to make snow angels! Piss your name in the snow! Frolic! The world is ours tonight!

On the other, these pricks just wasted a parking space in a situation where parking is dangerously sparse and confrontation-inducing. Someone’s going to have to either drive over their wondrous art work (and hope they don’t get stranded on the mound underneath their parked car) or just wait until it melts … when they could have spent five seconds blasting through the snow-plow wall and parking snugly in a relatively open space.

It got me thinking about the mild disconnect I tend to feel with twentysomethings and teenagers these days. Nothing like in the 90s, filled with dingus kids pretending they were ghetto gangstas or saddled with a navel-gazing sort of self loathing and parental distrust, that crappy sense of depression and antagonism kids in the 90s had threaded into their generational DNA. In theory, I see progress in kids in the last decade. That’s just the thing. I now include people through much of their 20s in the delineation of “kids.” They seem like kids to me. They act like kids. They do childlike things constantly. They appear to have the emotional development of kids.

And I relate most of it to thumbs. Not thumb sucking, although that would be an apt analogy. This is the thumb generation: people who over-use their thumbs, whether it’s spending hours upon hours wasting time on asinine video games, or being overly obsessed with cellphones and other hand-held devices for the sole reason of texting, to the extent of dozens or hundreds of messages sent in one day.

I wouldn’t mind if the texts were brilliant one-liners and bon mots. But it’s an endless stream of disjointed bullshit, the only message of which is, “I need your attention now, for no other reason than I’m deeply insecure.” And it’s not a personal insecurity … it’s a sort of culturally-bred insecurity, that sense of generational inclusiveness, that’s at the heart of this. Don’t be the last kid on your block to send over 100 texts in a day!

I can even handle that concept – empty people drawing too much attention to themselves have always over-populated the world. But to have this concept of handheld devices serving as modern necessity lorded over me as progress of any sort … no. And I am a tech-friendly person, who is growing less tech-friendly with each passing year, the slow realization that tech-friendly means spending $100/month on a device, and thousands more a year on devices and gadgets, and a way of life that represents only minor cosmetic progress in our society. It represents the ability of tech companies like Apple to foist a huge ruse on the world and make a fortune off it, which I respect, but this is not moving forward. If anything, if you’re paying attention, it’s a strange sort of devolution, at least in terms of real communication between people. A world in which people who position themselves as more advanced than previous generations spend all their time sending nonsensical messages to each other that are closer to cavemen hieroglyphics than higher written communication of any sort.

I’ve gotten into the topic of video games before, a practice I consider relatively harmless, and probably healthy in reasonable doses. Most kids don’t seem geared towards that “reasonable dose” mentality. Addiction is more accurate, hours every day, online, fighting fantastical battles with friends and enemies online, glued to the screen, thumbs constantly in motion. Again, even with the concept of addiction, and kids, I can roll with this. We all get hung up on silly shit at that point in our lives.

But I can’t roll with 30-year-olds in the same teenage mode, and you better look around, because they’re out there. My parents’ generation had fought a world war by the time they hit 30. This generation has fought dozens of wars, battling Nazis, space aliens, Vikings, urban street trash, kung fu masters, monsters, wizards, dragons … all in the safety of their heads and bedrooms, bag of cheese curls at the ready, a can of Four Loko on the nightstand if they’re living dangerously. These guys … they can kill you with their thumbs, man. They can shoot you in the head at 300 yards while running with a sawed off shotgun as you weave around the edge of an industrial park in a dune buggy. They’re that good, man!

Mom was worried about the draft coming back with all the trouble in the Middle East, not quite realizing I and my older brothers are probably too old to be drafted and are “retirement age” in armed forces parlance. But when she kept mentioning this on the tail end of Bush’s presidency, all I could envision was a bunch of draftee soldiers in a desert, hands in front of their stomachs, flicking their thumbs madly and mumbling, “Dude, why don’t you go down like you do on the Playstation!”

I don’t want to knock these kids too much. I know if I was a kid now, I would be indulging, too. But hopefully not to the extent of being one of these hollow-eyed beings thumbing it 3-4 hours a night after school. Video games and arcades were around when I was a kid – I indulged mildly, to say the least, mostly because the amount of money you spend on these sort of endeavors becomes more tangible when you’re pumping quarters into a machine in the mall arcade. My general feeling after about 15 minutes in any arcade was abject boredom after feeling childish for pumping quarters into a silly game. Shit, I can trace that feeling back to playing Pong in 70s arcades while pinball machines rang all around me.

But again, where does being a kid end, and being an adult begin? That line just continues to blur more and more into this area between, say, 25 and 35. I would say that since the Boomers came along in the 60s, each generation has prided itself on its sense of self absorption. You can still see that now with aged rock stars and actors who just can’t let go of the only ways of life they know, as stars and cultural forces, even though nearly all of them haven’t been for decades. There’s a refusal to let go and assume that quieter, less obvious role of older people who simply watch over younger people and guide them. The concept now is to compete with them in every possible way, to never acknowledge that they can be equal or better in any sense. I’m all for people feeling relevant at every point in their lives, but there still seems to be a real need for Boomers to remind everyone just how great their generation has been ... and still is.

Thus, you get kids who on one hand recognize this vanity in previous generations, yet can’t overcome that innate self absorption that they were imbued with from day one. They’ll reject a lot of things about their parents, but never that sense of being special little kings and queens to whom everyone must acquiesce. It’s a strange mix of self loathing and narcissism. Troubled people. When you’re around someone incessantly thumbing a device in public, just can’t stop, never looking up, do you get the vibe that person is happy? Is the person smiling? Nodding quietly to himself? Relaxed?

That hasn’t been my experience. I’m sitting or standing next to someone who can’t sit still, is constantly squirming, scratching at their arms and faces as if they have eczema, leg twitching uncontrollably, seemingly unable to stop and absorb anything outside of themselves, perhaps resistant to do so, knowing that to do so would be to acknowledge that people outside their chosen circles of influence exist, and exist just fine without them.

I first got inkling of that vibe around 2000, when iPods really caught on, and people got in the habit of wearing them everywhere. To this day, I can easily spot anyone listening to an iPod in public just by how they move, even if I can’t see the wires. I can tell by their shadows approaching behind me on a sunny day. Their sense of spatial relations is so skewed that they approach and move with little regard to people around them. They don’t bump other people – they rarely do. But they pass so embarrassingly close, in a quiet way that’s understood in urban parlance as wrongly invading another person’s space, that I can sense they don’t realize how off their instincts are. It’s wrong to compare them to blind or deaf people, who instinctively sense other people around them and react accordingly. Someone walking with an iPod going full blast just seems willfully ignorant of anyone or anything around him. Everything exists as a backdrop to their internal soundtrack. In a sense, everything around them, including you, is not real.

But that sense of willful isolation now seems downright quaint and worldly as compared to people who just can’t stop thumbing their devices. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I like reality. Christ, I sound like a hippie tripping on acid saying something like that. But think about it, device obsession, simply stated, is avoidance of direct reality. These people are choosing to focus on this floating reality of meaningless one-line messages to disembodied beings they find more pressing and important than the immediate reality around them. It’s like an addiction to ghosts, or DJs of some sort, calling out in the night, playing your favorite song, which always has “you” in the title, and is all about you.

One thing I’ve grasped as time has gone on is that a key difference between child and adulthood is the ability to not just genuinely care about other people, but simply to recognize their existence, whether you like them or not. When you’re a kid, you don’t do that as much (even though you think you do). So much of being young in our culture is geared towards worshipping that stage of life, to encourage people at that age to gaze at themselves in the mirror, to firmly believe this is as good as it gets, and all eyes are on you. Have a talk with any famous actress in her 40s, and she’ll talk your ear off about this reality, and what happens when the world starts deciding you’re no longer that archetype of physical beauty we must all longingly gaze upon.

Somehow that fleeting hubris has become entangled with gadgets. In the 70s, younger people were referred to as the “Me Generation” … but compared to now? Still, it’s wise to recognize these threads of self absorption have been running through every generation since the 60s, and maybe this gadget obsessions is just another physical manifestation of that warped personal fascination. I don’t really believe that. I believe what’s going on now is a bit worse, that people are being culturally trained to devolve how they interact and communicate. But if you want to be optimistic, you can look back over the past four decades and recognize, all of us who have come along since, we’ve all been a little too far into ourselves for comfort.

In 1977, Jackson Browne put out a great song (and album) called “Running on Empty,” in which he fretted that he, at the age of 29, was spiritually void, and the only thing that kept him going was the ability to live the life of a traveling musician who could constantly move and avoid the realization that he was empty inside. Little did he know at the time that the simple ability to recognize that sort of emptiness inside himself and question it was a sure sign that he wasn't empty, that he felt troubled over his vanity and pride, and wanted to somehow do something about it.

I thought Jackson Browne was a bit of a pussy at the time. But I can look back now and realize that guy, in his 20s, was laying out hard truths and questions that most of us wouldn’t get anywhere near until our 30s and 40s. He somehow knew how to get these concepts across, the same way people like Hank Williams Sr. and Bob Dylan did long before most people sensed the same questions in their lives.

I don’t know what qualifies as “Running on Empty” these days. Running on empty seems to be some kind of goal now, a spiritual void that’s become preferable to sensing meaning and purpose in yourself and the people around you. Fill yourself up with emptiness so you can no longer discern what true emptiness is. Avoid passion, avoid contact, avoid interaction, unless it’s purely on your terms and preferably at a distance, bounced off a satellite and sent to someone you might only see once or twice a year, or people you see all the time, but communicate very little to because you’re all too busy taking calls and thumbing your devices in each other’s presence.

I don’t think I’d ever ask that people abandon their devices. Hell, I spend way too much time fucking around on the internet myself, even without Twitter or Facebook or an iPhone. I guess I’m just looking for a little context in our lives, places for everything, without these things overwhelming everything else in our lives. I sense an emptiness in myself when I spend too much time on the internet and can only imagine how much larger that feeling must be for someone who spends hours every day addicted to this shit. When I die, I’m not going to look back and think I should have spent more time at work, fucking around on the internet, or sending people text messages. I’ll want to know how much I’ve lived in that immeasurable way of understanding the people and places around me. Don’t we all?

Christmas Pasts

2010-12-05T17:46:00.000-08:00

An odd thing about kids is how they can achieve far more than they’re capable of, but only when there is some dubious reward. I’m thinking in particular of my brothers and I a few weeks before Christmas. Pick any Christmas between, say, 1971 and 1978. In our early stages, we believed in Santa. We visited him at the mall routinely, excitedly read off our laundry list of toys we wanted. We’d see him at the firehouse, too, which had Christmas parties for all the kids in town. We believed in Santa Claus … but we knew the closet in our Dad’s room.

The closet in our Dad’s room was where our parents stored the presents they were buying us in the weeks leading up to Christmas. We’d see them coming home from shopping trips after work, vainly trying to hide the names on the bags: Boscovs, Sears, Listening Booth. Up to Dad’s room they’d go. Close the door. Shuffling sounds. Door creaks. God damn, they’re putting our shit in the closet for safe keeping.

Even earlier than that, we could rationalize that Santa would break into our house and leave everything in Dad’s closet because he’d be too busy to come down our chimney on Christmas Eve night. But after awhile, no, we knew Santa Claus existed in theory, and accepted this, knowing all the goodies were sitting in that closet.

But it wasn’t enough to let them sit there for weeks leading up to Christmas. We needed visual evidence that our shit was there. We had to see it, take the stuff out of the shopping bags, hold the boxes, and know we were getting that stuff.

This is where the diabolical brilliance of children comes into play. My brothers were handy with tools, in this case, the properly sized screw driver. That closet door was locked. Granted, an older, feeble lock that probably could have been picked if we were so inclined. But, like seasoned bank thieves, my brothers thought it made more sense to simply remove that ancient lock apparatus that was screwed to the wooden closet door.

Not as easy as you’d think. The key was to not chip any of the yellow paint – the screws were painted over, so we’d have to get an old cloth, not too thick, and wrap it around the screwdriver. And there were at least two screws and accompanying gaskets that we’d have to assiduously remove from the casing holding the lock, pry it from the wall without chipping any paint on the wood door, then reassemble it all afterwards … like marines re-assembling their rifles blind-folded.

That was the first part of the mission. The second was to take a mental picture of the closet layout. If our parents were smarter, they would have stacked a ton of shit – old board games, winter coats, shoe racks –against the inside of the door, made note of the order it was stacked and wrote it down. So that when they went in again, they could check if these items had been moved, as they would have if we’d swung the door open and they all came crashing down on us.

We were that meticulous, sometimes even writing down the order of the bags stacked in the closet, but usually just taking that mental snapshot of what was there so that when my parents went in again, they wouldn’t recognize that we had been in there on our recon mission. I’m surprised we didn’t wear gloves to hide our finger prints.

And previewing the booty was incredible. I remember that feeling. Such a rush of excitement to realize what we had asked for, we would be getting. I recall this feeling with records, and two in particular: Queen’s News of the World and ELO’s Out of the Blue. Christmas 1977. I loved those albums like you wouldn’t believe, floored by both, the last really good album by both bands. I could imagine my Dad buying these albums at Listening Booth, thinking, what in the hell is this kid listening to, but it got a lot worse than that! Both albums inspire those teenage memories of rushing upstairs, slapping on the Radio Shack Nova 40 headphones, cracking open the cellophane, getting that new album smell, opening up the gatefold cover, dropping the needle on the vinyl, and getting lost in the music for a good few hours. Just sitting there on the bed, facing the stereo, with headphones on, reading the lyrics and liner notes. How many hours did I spend in that pose for the next few years as I absorbed the bedrock sounds of my musical education.

So, right about now in 1977, my brothers and I would be in that closet, looking at stuff like this, never taking more than five or 10 minutes. We’d also be wary of any sounds – a car approaching, a door slamming, footsteps on the street outside, as presumably our parents could come home any minute and catch us up there. Putting everything back was a painstaking process. Again, meticulous order had to be observed for replacing the bags exactly where they were, and then rescrewing the lock to the wooden door. It wasn’t easy! And the odd part was, we’d do it routinely, a few times every Christmas season, to see if anything new had been added to the collection in the ensuing weeks.

When I think about Christmas, I don’t think about love, or baby Jesus, or even the presents themselves. I think about activities like those noted above that are indelibly stamped on my mind as “1970s Christmas in rural Pennsylvania.” Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve is one of those things, and one of the few uncomplicated memories I have of my childhood Catholicism. In short, it was a beauty. A candlelight mass around midnight, with full choir, and the congregation bearing candles, all other lights dimmed or off, the priest swinging his can of burning incense. Just a magical mass that was always SRO. We'd get a free box of chocolates on the way out. And it didn’t end there. The capper would be coming home to find all our presents laid out (our parents would bag this mass for that reason), tearing them open, and having a blast.

Why we didn’t do that every year, I don’t know, as it was a perfect formula. When we didn’t go to that midnight mass, the same thing inevitably happened: us waking up at two or three on Christmas morning and busting downstairs to open the presents that our parents had laid out an hour or two earlier. We never could make it to a typical Christmas morning to rip open the presents. Christmas Day itself was always anti-climactic.

In our teen years, I can also distinctly recall bagging the early Christmas Eve mass, which was nowhere near as magical as the midnight one. Pretty much a typical mass around four or so, I guess we were given the choice of going then or Christmas morning … at a time in our lives when our grandmother had had a debilitating stroke, could no longer attend mass, and we liberated ourselves from the responsibility of church-going. In general, I really disliked church – still do. It bored me, felt much more like dull punishment than a spiritual calling, and always felt more appearance-based than soul satisfying. You want to believe in God, you surely don’t need a church to do it. Nothing against churches – I can clearly see their purposes in any given community – but it just wasn’t for me.

The one year that sticks in my mind was all of us going to Long John Silver’s and having a fish dinner, a bunch of teenagers, in our Sunday finest. It just felt too weird. And I didn’t like Long John Silver’s to begin with. I could sense the guilt floating around the table at that meal, that maybe we should have bit the bullet and gone to church. It’s one of those gloomy parking lot memories of my teen years, waiting in a parking lot of a mall for the driver (usually Mom) to show up – it just felt like such a depressing few minutes. For some reason, every time I hear the song “I Never Cry” by Alice Cooper, I can remember waiting for Mom one Christmas season in the parking lot, on a dark snowy night while that song played on the radio. Bagging church at any time felt like that: watching and waiting. Waiting for the bells to ring, or the driver to show up, setting us free to go, back to our normal lives, where we didn’t have to indulge in these charades.

Right now, I’m watching a VH-1 special on Fleetwood Mac … Tusk. Yet another great Christmas album from that time period! I guess Christmas will always be indelibly tied into music with me, as it meant getting 3-4 usually very good albums. Starting in October of any given year, I’d have my musical radar up for potential Christmas albums, and bands would often release good albums in the fall, and “Best Of” albums meant for huge Christmas sales. I can’t remember who got Elton John’s Greatest Hits for Christmas the year it came out, probably Brother M, but that had to be the biggest album of the early 1970s. That thing was worn out by February, and I was the one who went on to be the huge Elton John fan, buying all his albums as they came out and back-tracking his earlier ones. (As I may have noted earlier, the first album I ever bought was Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, with snow-shoveling money. And I can just about pinpoint it to January or February of 1975 as buying it directly proceeded flipping out over the greatest hits album.)

Even without Dad passing on over the holidays a few years ago, Christmas just aint what it was for me. I think you need kids for this, and even then, you’ll be observing their excitement rather than experiencing it directly. It’s all about the food for me now, hanging out and relaxing with a few days off from work. Not this milestone of happiness that sprung up annually, the kind of thing that haunts you in a way as time goes on. I don’t recall being a particularly happy or sad kid, remember bursts of both with a lot of down time in between the highs and lows, but childhood Christmas is one of those memories that always seems like nothing but good. I have my doubts about adults who don’t sense that bridge between childhood ecstasy and adult pragmatism when it comes to Christmas. But I can’t blame them for trying.

Act Your Age

2010-11-28T18:36:00.001-08:00

One of the largest changes I’ve seen as an adult, as compared to the lives of my parents, is the concept of prolonged adolescence. My Dad fought on the tail end of World War II with his older brothers. They all came home in their mid-to-late 20s, and either immediately settled down, or took steps to settle down: free college on the G.I. bill, marriage, the first few kids of my generation. These guys had lived through the Depression, remembered what it was like to be hungry all the time, to want to work, but have no work available. They got thrown into the ass end of a war that the country was dragged into. I’d wager their sense of pragmatism and “reality” was equal in their 20s to what I feel now as an American male in his 40s.

In my 20s, I felt like a teenager. In some ways, I still feel like a teenager now. Part of that is this illusory belief that we somehow never age, despite our bodies telling us otherwise. You feel one way inside, but look another. People treat you as you look. You could put me in a room with a guy my exact look and age, dress me in a suit and tie, put him in hipster garb (big dumb glasses, ill-fitting ironic t-shirt, vest, pipe jeans, scarf, Chuck E. Taylor hi-tops, duck hair), watch people interact with us, and they’ll treat both of us differently. Especially if we’re sitting in an office.

I wrote earlier about that brick-wall experience of realizing I could no longer wear clothes ironically, which was a good thing. As a teenage kid and young adult, I’d wear bowling and air-conditioning company shirts with someone’s name emblazoned the left breast. Military gear. The concept was I found this stuff cool and funny: I would never actually be on a bowling team or named “Gus” and installing air conditioners. The day came when I realized, if wear these shirts, people are going to think that’s my name and what I do, because I look like I could be that person, as opposed to the under-fed, smirking, teenage-looking waif who sported such garb for a kick.

I recently saw this 2008 interview with Anton Newcombe, the lead singer of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, a much-maligned band due to the 2004 documentary Dig! which presented Anton as a brilliant musician, but raving nutcase who would always be at odds with his bandmates due to his ego and mentality. I thought he got a raw deal with that documentary – take snippets of the worst moments of anyone’s life over a few-year period and you can make that person look like a complete asshole. I have about a dozen BJM tracks on the iPod, all good stuff, found a lot of their songs too derivative of mid-60s British rock, but every now and then, they’d really click. In this interview I watched, Anton was roughly 41 years old.

And there’s the rub for me. I gather that being a musician, particularly an indie-rock musician, you’re cast into a world of post-college graduates, people who are always in their mid-to-late 20s, at loose ends, trust-fund kids dressing like bums, guys with rich parents starting small rock clubs in hip parts of town, college town people who never want to let go of that loose college-town vibe. That way of life seemed endless at the time. Didn’t have a lot of money. Didn’t care. The body appears not to be aging. Can still eat anything I want. Some friends have freaked out and got married/had kids/got way into long-houred corporate jobs. But most feeling their way around, still going out to see bands well into their early hours or morning despite having work the next day. Seeing bands implying standing for four hours in a packed club, getting drunk with a gang of people before or after.

When does it end? For me, I’d say a few years ago, early 40s, I just stopped going to see bands in clubs. Very rarely in theaters or arenas, as the price gouging has been terrible. The concept of being packed sardine-like into a small club for 3-5 hours, sitting through 45-minute sets for two bands I’m not there to see … by the time my band comes on, I’m so physically uncomfortable, stiff from being wedged in, just not enjoying myself, and then contemplating a late-night subway train ride, which is always a drag … man, I just got tired of it. Whatever transcendence was generated by the music was negated by the physical experience of being crammed in, and then trying to get home afterwards.

But it’s not about music or even physical appearance. Watching that interview with Newcombe, I couldn’t help but feel the guy was perpetually frozen at the emotional age of about 23 or 24. He’s not the only one. I’ve met a lot of people like this, who want to be that age forever in that sense of always teetering on the verge of adulthood, but still grasping the essence of what it means to be a teenager. The guy could have a few kids. A mortgage. More adult responsibilities than I do. But the overwhelming desire is still there to present himself as someone who is 24 years old forever. Hip in ways a teenager will not get, a college kid can hint at, and a 28-year-old will catch glimpses of in his rear view mirror as everything in his life shifts gears into full adulthood.

You see it in movie stars, too, the unbearable urge to have the hair always longish and full, but never gray, the face relatively unwrinkled, body in perfect condition. The average person doesn’t seem to grasp that for a 45-year-old, this implies, at a minimum, tens of thousands of dollars spent on plastic surgery, hair colorings and dental implants, and more than likely personal chefs and trainers to conduct two-hour per day workouts, liposuction for those pesky body areas that will never come around despite advanced exercise techniques. There are very few people my age who look naturally like they’re in their mid-20s. And, as noted above, more than the look, the perception that this person is timeless, unattached to thoughts of impending physical decline, unaffected by deaths of parents and friends, everything in his life running smoothly, in perfect working order, like a machine that will never break down and never require any maintenance.

That’s 24, or at least how I remember it, the well-meaning illusion that your life, and you, will always be this loose and care-free. You have no reason not to believe that at 24. Look at you: you’ve hardly aged a day physically from the age of 18 onward. This could go on for a very long time, you think, I’ll be one of those people who are mistaken for someone a decade or two younger, get carded routinely in bars and clubs, a flip of the hair: no, really, I’m 34!

In a short story, I once described that feeling as looking out over the ocean on a summer’s day and not seeing the end, just that distant line on the horizon where the sky meets the water. I was in my late 20s when I wrote that story and must have been thinking about that line, and realizing there was no line, that if you got in a boat and kept traveling, sooner or later, there would be an end. Life is getting in that boat and taking the ride instead of looking over that distance and mistakenly believing it went on forever.

I'm not sure why I find myself vaguely annoyed by the “24 Forever” contingent. Jealousy? That’s probably part of it. Most of the people I pigeonhole with that vibe are clinging to creative ways of life, playing in bands, or married to a responsible, working spouse who serves as caretaker to the illusion. I don’t know anyone professionally ensconced in that way of life, although look around, these people exist. We’re trained to worship them, and all I can think, these days, is what the fuck is wrong with these people? It’s unnatural to live this way, the constant youth obsession, the refusal to accept the reality of your own aging process. I think a large part of the refusal to age emotionally has to do with responsibility, of any sort, to present that illusion of weightlessness. Married? Kids? Mortgage? Whatever, man, let’s do mushrooms and have a bullshit session on the local golf course, late at night, splayed out on the 15th green and gazing up at the stars. That sort of looseness gets a lot harder to pull off when you have to get up at 6:30 and do your thing for money. Or have kids who might see you stoned and pretending you’re a lot younger than you are. We’ve all tried – the war to live that illusion forever tends to get lost in our 30s, with a few minor battles won along the way.

I guess the issue is I used to imagine my adult life being that way forever. That’s how I envisioned a writer’s life being, that sort of eternal freedom, getting up whenever, pulling off all sorts of crazy stunts and adventures while the rest of the world punched a clock, and getting paid well to do it. God bless anyone who can pull that off, but it ain’t me. Even if I was writing full time and living off it, I can see, from having people in my life who do this, it ain’t easy, and not that open, limitless field with a clear path I once envisioned. It’s a lot of financial issues, periods of little or no money coming in, unwelcome down time. The dream in high school was doing something with your life that would be exactly what you wanted to do and never having to answer to anyone. Very few people live this way. The kids I remember most wanting to live this way, the wild ones, the ones who flunked out or were never around, most got roped into working-class lives more regimented and dull than anything they could have imagined in high school. You want that sort of freedom, you have to work at it from an early age, be very good at something creative, and get some very lucky breaks along the way. You just don’t cop an attitude and be granted that sort of limitless freedom. Most of the poor bastards on suspension in the rubber room never seemed to understand this.

And these days, I don’t even think I want that limitless freedom. Whatever does or doesn’t pan out in my life, I’ve come to realize there are certain things I’m in control of: my health, my sanity, my sense of well being. If I have control of these things, whatever else happens, life is good. I think you’ll find a lot of “successful” people make themselves that way because they lack some or all of these things. So we long for that sense of security they put forth in their images. If you could strip away the image, I think you’d see what those people are really worth. Some would be no different – some would be a mess. I don’t envy anyone who has to impress upon me how powerful/happy/secure they are. If they are, it goes without saying.

And I think that’s the heart of the issue: my inability to accept someone who refuses to move past an age, past a way of looking at the world, that is all possibilities and no hard choices. That attitude is perfect at a time in our lives, balanced between teenager and adult, wanting the best of both worlds without forfeiting too much to either side. But when I catch vestiges of it in people in their 40s, much less their 30s? Man, I had that shit beat out of me a long time ago! By life. By myself. By reality. By things that happened. By things that didn’t happen. I changed, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. But I changed. That’s what happens as you get older. Things change. You change. You move forward, even when it’s down dead ends and in the wrong direction. Time doesn’t stand still. Neither should any of us. A wax museum of eternal youth is no place I want to be ... and seemingly what our entire culture is geared towards.

Muriah … Muriah …

2010-11-07T18:18:00.000-08:00

The other day, I woke up to the sound of my landlord singing upstairs. As with so much Greek music, it sounded vaguely Middle-Eastern. She was really going at it, must have stumbled across some memory over her coffee and decided it was a good time to let loose. Sometimes in the shower, I’ll get hooked on a line or phrasing from a song and keep repeating it. An objective listener would think I was nuts. At least her singing must have had some personal meaning behind it.

That got me going on memories of my late Aunt Bess. A brassy, brick shithouse of a woman, the last of the Port Carbon widows. She out-lived all her sisters who were in that crooked rowhouse in the rain. I still can’t even recall the exact number of sisters living in that house – four or five. It was like that specter of aging sisters living together in an old house created this gray force-field that could replicate an elderly woman at the drop of a memory. Dampness. Clouds. Cigarette smoke. Songs like this playing on the hi-fi. The unidentifiable hard candies in trays next to ash. The nasty chihuahua and friendly setter. Wallpaper, drapes, furniture, lights, all faded and brownish. Minutes passing like hours, hours passing like days. The ragged, rock-faced hill in front of the house. The forlorn park between the shit creek and power plant. Instant Belfast.

If there’s one mystery about the Port Carbon memory, it’s the man who was always there with the aging Irish-Catholic sisters. I can’t even remember his name, an old man who was perpetually planted in a ragged easy chair, unfiltered Camel in one hand, a Rob Roy in the other. He rarely said anything. A family friend? A suitor? It was never made clear, or I’ve forgotten. He owned that chair, wouldn’t move an inch, would just sit there with Rudy Valee's voice and cigarette smoke floating around him. Didn’t seem happy or sad. Just there.

And there would be Bess, in her perpetual pillbox hat. She must have slept and bathed wearing it. Unfiltered Camel always planted firmly in mouth. Cat-eye glasses. Faded dress covering her boxy frame. Stockings. I recall her doing something very odd: hiking up her dress to tie some kind of strange knot in her stocking garters. This was in no way erotic – it was frightening. Her booming, raspy voice. If she didn’t like you, she’d tell you so. And didn’t give a damn if you didn’t like her.

I don’t know what happened that 4-5 aged sisters would end up living in a house together. Being the coal region, maybe their husbands were miners and passed in their 50s? This was never made clear to me what lead up to the circumstances of that house. They never married? People think that’s strange now. In a small town in the 1930s/40s/50s? Even stranger then.

Going upstairs there was like visiting a vampire's den. We had to go up there to use the bathroom as that was the only one in the house. Of course, we'd take the opportunity wander around their rooms. Old lady things. Faded pictures. Sweaters. Jewelry not worn in decades but gathering dust on a dresser. That cigarette smell saturated in every fabric. I don't believe in ghosts, but there were times up there when I was certain I'd turn around to see one gazing out the window at the falling rain.

This all seemed alien from my child’s point of view, but now that I’m older, I can see, you do whatever comes along to get by in life. You got a house to live? You live in it. You get along with these people? (And they all seemed to get along in a very deep, abiding way.) Then go on doing so. It occurs to me that the person I am now, and how I live, would seem very strange and alien to me as a seven-year-old boy. Why aren’t you married? With kids? Living in a house? With a car? Most kids have that expectation of adults because those are the adults they deal with in their immediate vicinity. But there are always those strange characters – bachelor uncles and aunts with “special friends” who never settle down. I’d be the bachelor uncle, save none of my siblings have had kids, and probably won’t from what I’ve gathered. If they’re waiting for me, they might wait awhile, too. Life goes on.

Aunt Bess in the Port Carbon homestead was one thing: a perfect blending of human being to her physical environment, as if she wafted out of that ancient browning wallpaper in a haze of Camel smoke every time we visited. Out of her environment? Man. I’ll describe a typical situation in our house circa 1970-80. Family is at home, at various places in the house, going about their routines. I’m on the living room floor, reading the sports section of the local newspaper, eating a bowl of ice cream, relaxed.

We suddenly hear the back door in the kitchen slam open. Someone’s breaking in! We can hear the door slam against one of the kitchen chairs. And then that unmistakable gravel voice:

“Muriah …. Muriah … Muriah …”

It was Aunt Bess, on one of her unannounced visits (seemingly her only kind) to see her sister/my grandmother, Marie. She’d just pile into her badass 1973 Chrysler Newport, floor it up the Broad Mountain, pop out and slam through our back door like the house was hers. Seconds after hearing her croak out her version of “Marie” … there’d she be, standing in the living room, cigarette smoke trail following her, looking at everyone in the room as if we were the ones out of place there and intruding on her.

We goofed on her use of “Muriah” as there was a 70s hard rock band called Uriah Heep, and the act of associating this tough old woman with a band like that tickled us no end. We pictured her jamming to “Easy Living.” If we wanted a good laugh, all we’d have to do was start burping the words, “Muriah, Muriah, Muriah” at each other, and we’d break out in laughter.

The visits were usually on the long side, hours, and often meant her and our grandmother camped out in the kitchen, drinking tea, Bess chain smoking, and talking about local priests, bingo and dogs. It was easy enough to avoid her. And I find now, all these years later, I was perfectly in my right to be annoyed over these sneak attacks. It wasn’t her house. Every time we went down there, the visit had been set days in advance, often associated with other relatives visiting and making the usual pilgrimage. These visits felt like some mild form of harassment, to remind us that our grandmother was her sister, and that relationship trumped whatever we had going on with her. It didn’t bother me one way or another, and I knew my grandmother loved spending time with any of her sisters. I just had problems with the mild disrespect she was showing the family, which was simply her way, she would not have seen it this way, but it surely was. And I was in no position as a small child to take a stand or even mention it. I’m sure Mom and Dad thought, correctly, “Getting into this will be far more trouble than it’s worth.”

Adding insult to injury was the time she made me eat a bar of Irish Spring. Yes, that old wives tale about kids with fresh mouths eating bars of soap is, or was, true, once upon a time. As with most adverse forms of punishment, I can’t recall the circumstances of what I did wrong, but I can surely recall the punishment. I can’t even recall exactly what I said to her. But I can tell you, she was ordering me around in a fairly bad, disrespectful, “I own you so do as I say” sort of tone, which I could handle coming from my parents in rare bad moods while feeling uncharacteristically surly. But from her? I remember barking out, “Go to hell!”

You … just … didn’t … do … that … to … an … elderly … female … relative … in … rural … Pennsylvania … in … the … 1970s.

Yes, society had gone mad in the 60s, but not there. Not in that house either. I elongated that sentence to underline the sense of shock and impending doom when I uttered that fateful phrase. I knew when I said it, this was going be some heavy shit. I remember her swatting me once or twice on the bottom, with the ensuing drama, and then my grandmother going out to the bathroom to get a bar of soap, in this case Irish Spring. I’m not sure what my Mom or Dad were doing while all this was going on. It would have been nice if one or both of them had said, “Wait a minute, that’s our son, and we’ll discipline him accordingly. You’re in our house, and you don’t do this here.”

But that fantastical morality did not exist in this scenario. That crabby old bitch made me sit in the kitchen with a bar of soap in my mouth. Couldn’t have been much fun for her and my grandmother, with me staring daggers at both of them in between mild bouts of weeping and moaning. I remember her asking me, “Well, have your learned your lesson now?” I sure did – which was don’t ever let me catch you in a situation where I hold the power over you, because I’ll return the fucking favor! Of course, that would never happen, and she would start declining within 10 years, and all the ill feeling generated in this one situation would slowly blow over. I can’t recall which was worse – having the bar of soap in my mouth for that long, or having to listen to old-lady talk and inhale her foul cigarette exhaust for upwards of two hours, which was an eternity in hell for a small child. Besides, I got the vibe she respected me more after that for actually standing up to her, which rarely happened with anyone.

I can barely recall when she passed on, a few years after my grandmother in the 80s. All her sisters had passed on before her, and for the life of me, I can only recall their passings vaguely, which troubles me now, as anyone dying in my childhood tended to leave an indelible mark on me. With them, it was like ghosts fading off in the mist, one after another, and I do feel some form of shame that their passings aren’t burned on my memory. Not even hers.

What I do remember is that 1973 Chrysler Newport, mainly because my brother inherited the car when she passed on. This was no ordinary car: it was a beast. A road beast. We could have taken that car into battle and come out victorious. It was the size of a small boat, got about six miles to the gallon and had a back seat that could easily fit four adults in it. My brother would hit the gas on that thing and be doing 75 seconds later. Had he floored it, he might have broken the sound barrier. The car growled, even when cruising under 30 MPH. Much like the house in Port Carbon, there was something gray and foreboding about that car, the same brown-ness to everything inside it. The coup de grace was the crucifix glued to the dashboard and St. Christopher medallion on the glove compartment. We felt like were riding with Christ every time we got in that car. And Christ had a pair of Wayfarer shades and a screaming eagle forearm tattoo.

That car was another physical extension of Bess, the act of things in her life taking on her character and living on after she was gone. Much like that house. When she passed on, the house was sold for some humble price, and new people moved in. When I go back there, I have very little cause to visit Port Carbon, as it’s generally not along my normal routes, and to get to their house, you have to be leaving town, headed towards Tamaqua, which is a trip I rarely take.

But every now and then, with time on my hands, I’ll head over that way and purposely drive by the house. It still looks exactly the same. The dumpy bar on the corner with the Pabst sign in the dirty window is gone, but I suspect that forlorn park may still be there on the other side of the shit creek. And that craggy, rock-faced hill will surely be there forever, with the meadow and a nicer park on top of the hill. I can’t even recall how to officially get up there, but I’d guess there must be a way back there on the other side of town, marked roads leading up the other side of the hill. I’d like to go up there, just one more time, on a clear day and take a good last look down on the town, especially that house, and remember all those old women who were my only connection to a past that feels long gone.

The New Yorker

2010-10-25T04:58:00.000-07:00

I’ve reached a milestone this year: I have now lived in New York for as long as I’ve lived in rural Pennsylvania, a few years short of 25 years in each case. A long time!

What have I learned in all this time? That unequivocally, without a shadow of a doubt, I am not, nor have ever been, nor will ever be, a New Yorker. How does that work, you might ask? I’d say it’s simply a recognition of what one’s nature is as related to where he was born and raised. From what I’ve seen, at least as it applies to my life, that never changes. Many things have changed about me over the years. Developing different interests. Losing others. Having a different range of people influence me and how I see the world. All sorts of intricate and detailed elements leading into who I am.

But at the end of the day, how I see the world, how I feel comfortable in it, is still based on being from a small town in Pennsylvania. And I like that. Some things are permanent, no matter how much you think you’ve changed, no matter how far away you think you move from certain things. A thought like that would have terrified me in my mid-20s. In my mid-40s, it comforts me.

I remember once at a local bar back in PA in the early 90s, I was talking to a guy who had moved into my hometown about 20 years earlier when he and his young wife had bought a small house down the block as they planned on starting a family (which they did, two daughters). He said something to the effect of, “You know, I’ve lived in this town for two decades, and I still feel like I just moved here yesterday and am not really on the inside of anything.”

It took me by surprise, but now that I’ve spent about the same amount of time in New York, I know what he’s saying. His kids surely felt differently, as they were born and raised in our town. But he wasn’t and still felt that sense of being an outsider all those years later. We’re talking a very small town, too, less than 500 people, so it makes sense that this feeling would be even stronger in a place that changes so slowly over the years. The odd part was I’m sure he could go back to his hometown a few miles away, go to a local bar, hang out with guys there who never left town, and in his own way, reclaim that feeling of being rooted and from somewhere.

He was stating this to me as if I had the answer. At that point, I’d lived in New York close to a decade, and he chose to approach me to say this, despite the fact that there were a half dozen guys in the bar who were born, raised and still in our hometown. I had no answer, just a shrug, and said, “Don’t sweat it. No one really cares.” I know I didn’t. But it was odd that he thought I held the secret to that sense of belonging when I hadn’t live there in so long.

I’d say that’s the bond of childhood friendships more than anything. Kids think they own a town … they don’t. I’ve lived in my neighborhood 13 years now. A 13-year-old isn’t going to tell me a god-damned thing about living here, save how he sees it from a child’s point of view, which is going to be vastly different from mine. I came here with a wealth of life experience, knowledge of other places, the strength to support myself, the ability to compare/contrast the neighborhood with other urban neighborhoods and places. But in that kid’s mind, it’s HIS neighborhood and I’m the outsider. Not just his mind, probably his parents’ minds, too. They’re gauging life with the only reference point they understand.

To which I say I can respect the sense of territoriality, but sooner or later, you’d do yourself a favor to stop being such an asshole. I don’t mind that attitude from kids, but when I get it from adults, forget it. If all you cling to in this world for identity is one place you never ventured from, you got very little to show. (There’s a huge difference between understanding your nature and lording it over someone else as some type of trump card that only you get.) I get dog tired of that attitude in Queens: smugness does not go well with working-class humility. These people think they’re living in a humble fortress, but it’s more like a very elaborate cardboard box that will turn to mush next time it rains. It’s as if they’ve sensed that comfort of never growing up or old through their teenage years, a well-meaning lie, is something they want to hold on to the rest of their lives. If the place they’re from is godforsaken enough, no one’s ever going to challenge that false sense of ownership. But New York City has long been a transient place, whether people want it to be that way or not, the place just rolls over every few decades and becomes something else. If money takes root and becomes the sole entry point to a neighborhood, it may take decades or longer to change. But it will.

The blessing of New York is that it constantly underlines one’s powerlessness. Even if you have money, you see that it gets you only so far. There are so many great equalizers here (the subway, the street, the supermarket, the laundromat) that if you use them, you sense you don’t have this whole thing cornered, that you’re just another person living here, and the best you can do is bob along like a corked bottle on the ocean, hopefully catching some nice breaks along the way. You carve out a little place for yourself, the same way any settler would in the wilderness of days gone by, and make the best of it.

But to live here, you also get that a lot of people here have the exact opposite misbelief: they think they’re gods who rule the universe. Generally, any time you try to get a handful of people on the same page to hang out, it’s like negotiating with warring tribes, each of which is convinced it’s the most powerful. Jockeying for power. Bluffing. Intimidation. False indignation. Each assumes its time is more important than the others. And I’ve learned my time is unimportant. Sure, it’s important to me, but not to you. So why offend you by pretending that there’s some type of premium on it, that when not trying to find a cure for AIDS, or hanging out with David Bowie, or sailing on a yacht in the Hudson, or dining at a four-star restaurant that requires reservations months in advance … I might be able to pencil you in, but I might not. (I’ll often catch the attitude from non-native New Yorkers like myself who came here after I did. The worst thing I’ve seen with non-natives is their adoption of a crass, pushy attitude because they think this stereotype is “how people are” here. It’s a major city. You’re going to find all kinds of people from all over the world. People act like rude pigs everywhere. It’s not a “New York” thing.)

You can guess how I feel about the attitude. Most nights, I make myself free, because I like being free. Felt that way long before coming to New York. The best part about being single, anywhere, is the sense of freedom you carry with you. Believe me, married people with kids envy it, they’ve told me as much. The concept of presenting a façade of importance to anyone, much less a friend, is just something I’ve never humored. People in my life who make themselves hard to reach, sooner or later, I stop reaching. Once upon time, that was cause for great concern and perhaps wondering what I was doing wrong. But I wasn’t doing anything wrong – nor where they. People just fade out sometimes, inexplicably. Imagine the hundreds of people you’d have in your life if everyone you knew from childhood on stayed in the picture … and how little real time you’d have to spend with any of them. (I think I just described why I think Facebook is a pile of insincere bullshit.)

I do know city life is nothing like I expected it to be before I moved here. I had that “Dylan” sense of expectation about moving to New York, that it would change me irreversibly, and I’d become someone else, shedding old identities, creating new ones. Well, to a small extent, that has happened. But to a much larger one, I got through that first decade where you try to shed your skin, then settled back into who I really am, with revisions, as most people do. To this day, I’ll try different things, but I fail to see how that’s any different from me doing the same thing at eight, or 14, or 27. In our early 20s we attach that weight to our ability to try different things, that doing so will present these life altering situations that propel us into different realities.

And I guess that’s true in some respects, but the ultimate reality is every night, you put your head on your pillow the same way you always do, and probably think and feel the same way you have your entire life, whether you’ve lived in dozens of places or only one. I tried to break the straight line of my life by moving here, realized there was no breaking it, accepted it, and saw that no matter how much crazy shit you pull, or where you go, life is a straight line from Point A (birth) to Point B (death), with whatever detours you want to throw in the mix (travel, different lifestyles, marriage, children, divorce, work, etc.). It’s not prison. It’s not a race. It’s gradual movement, unnoticeable most of the time, from Point A to Point B. I look back on any conversations (more like unwelcome monologues) regarding “personal growth” with old girlfriends, and have to wonder how that factors into maggots eating our bodies one day in the ground. Not a morbid thought. Just an after thought. And wonderment over the stilted self-help vernacular people wrap their emotions in to claim victory in mutual failure.

It occurs to me when I write things like this, that some people might see it as negativity. It’s not. The second half of your life, more of the changes that come your way are going to be hard, in the form of illness, loss, death, unforeseen personal problems and disasters. I’m just trying to figure out ways to deal with these things realistically, as opposed to treating them like total destruction that beats you down permanently. If there’s one thing I like about most religions, it’s how they underline that life will beat the shit out of you, and you need something not so much to protect yourself (because you ultimately can’t), but to help you reason out the big picture, that good things that happen to you will always have a bad side, and vice versa. It’s the vice versa that becomes the shit you deal with post-30 in life that requires a different take than “smiley faces all the time.” Sooner or later, you need more than good looks, a nice smile, and a care-free attitude to get by in the world.

So, if you ask me what I’ve learned after all these years in New York as compared to coming from a small town. I’d say be true to yourself, understand whoever you really are, and never become too attached to identifying yourself with a physical place. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re in a small village somewhere or a major city here. You leave one place and never truly arrive in another. We’re all just renting space here, and most likely paying way too much for it, too.

The Late-Night Web Crawl

2010-10-04T04:38:00.000-07:00

Saturday night found me watching the tail end of a college football game that didn’t matter. Closing in on midnight. Bored. Laptop on top of my lap. Scrolling around the web in search of old girlfriends, former coworkers, childhood friends and relatives. Googling for images of “best ass.” The late-night web crawl.

Chances are, you’ve done it, too. I don’t do it every night, but every now and then, the crawl rolls around. I’m not sure what the expectation is. You find a Facebook site for someone who has dropped out of your life. (I’m not on Facebook, or Twitter for that matter, and won’t be.) Now what? If you were on Facebook, you would drop the person a line, see what happens. Nothing happens. Nothing ever happens. You “friend” this person who is no longer your friend, have a few slight exchanges, then both go about doing what you were doing, which is living your life without that other person in it in any meaningful way, save as a memory. Facebook has become an unnecessary reminder that our memories are real, and life goes on without us.

There are times when we should all just turn off the computer and figure out something else to do. Even if it’s watching bad TV. That’s something I become more aware of as time goes on, and time spent screwing around on the web does not pan out as anything meaningful. I don’t even want to think about what goes through some kid’s head as he sends out 100 texts a day. What matters to him? What’s real? How do you build any kind of life where you even have a field of memories to refer back to when a vast majority of your time is spent thumbing a gadget that communicates nothing real?

The main reason why I’ve become so anti-Facebook/Twitter isn’t out of any sense of rejecting popular fads. It’s the aggravating realization that these things have become an unhealthy addiction for far too many people. You live in New York, where people walk around with their devices all day, you can’t go more than a few minutes or feet without someone thumbing a device or loudly wrapped up in some embarrassing personal conversation that he should not be having in public. This used to irk the hell out of me but has become so commonplace now that it’s more like an ugly shade of wallpaper than a genuine nuisance.

I remember when the internet first rolled around in the mid-90s, getting on via dial-up and a profoundly slow modem. Having conversations with people from all over the country and world in chat rooms. Man, that experience should have nailed the coffin shut. You couldn’t go more than five minutes without flame wars breaking out, strangers fighting with each other over nothing, outrageous insults … and it was all just unbridled loneliness. And the anger that generates in lonely people. I remember getting into a chat-room conversation with a woman in a small town in Scotland telling me about her life, the highlight of which was kids in the neighborhood smashing her windows every other night with rocks and treating her like the town pariah. And she was one of the more normal people! For every insightful one liner or thought, there were endless waves of unimaginative, angry people with nothing worthwhile to say. Man, this was what, 1995? 1996?

Things only went South from there. I’m not totally hung up on privacy – I wouldn’t be maintaining this blog if that was the case. But things like Facebook and Twitter are just overkill, divulging way too much personal stuff in ways that suggest blatant exhibitionism as opposed to genuinely sharing thoughts and emotions. And does so in such meaningless and inconsequential bursts that it’s hard to make sense of any of it. It’s changing the nature of communication, turning it into a disjointed monologue that makes no sense. I’m not sure what’s being communicated when I overhear a cellphone conversation that’s basically someone saying, “Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Did I mention me? It’s me. Me. Me. Are you tired of me yet? No? Me. Me. Me. Me. (I don’t give a fuck about you.) It’s me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. What? Goodbye. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. I'm really going to say goodbye now. Me. Me."

I'm always hearing stories regarding how people have become so incredibly self absorbed. People confronted on buses or trains over some outrageous cellphone behavior, and acting as if they are totally in the right, and the rest of the world is wrong for not spinning around their axis of self involvement. A coworker told me of a soccer Dad flipping out on his son's coach, cursing him violently in front of small children, literally threatening his life, the coach calling the cops, filing a police report, gathering a dozen eye witness accounts, then going to the man's home with the league president and a local police offer off duty, confronting the man, telling him he and his son were banned from the league, the guy flipping out again, risking a citizen's arrest from the off-duty cop, even at this late stage of the game, unwilling or unable to admit he was radically wrong in his actions. This is the kind of people we are creating and nurturing with these self-centric devices. People can't determine reality from their own perception of reality. I don't believe that guy was nuts -- I just believe he's become incapable of recognizing or respecting anything but his own point of view.

Myspace was just as bad as Facebook/Twitter and seems to have faded like the chintzy wallpaper of that site. It doesn’t seem to occur to many people that the same will happen with Facebook and Twitter, once some other social networking site rolls in, which is the nature of this age, constant change, not in the interest of enlightenment or betterment of society or humanity. Because someone’s going to make a truckload of money from it. No other reason.

The strange thing for me as a writer is my past keeps following me around. To this day, I’ll sometimes go back and read over articles I wrote for Leisuresuit.net around the turn of the century … and people, to this day, are leaving comments on those articles, some of which are a decade old at this point. I stopped responding about 2005; the editors stopped forwarding me responses around that time. But people read these articles as if they came out last week and respond accordingly. This stuff is radioactive: it never dies. It’s fun for me to read the comments now, especially the insults, which I’ve since learned are part of the deal with any sort of internet exposure. I’m not sure if the people reading don’t notice the “Published 6/28/00” note at the top of the article, or they actually think the writer’s going to respond to something he wrote a decade ago?

Much of what I wrote for the NYPress, mid-90s through the unceremonious canning of much-loved editor JS on Christmas Eve 2001, seems to have disappeared into the mist as the paper was sold at the same time and went through eras and permutations afterwards that suggested hitting the road. (We all should have quite when JS got canned, as he was what made the paper great.) And I wrote a ton of stuff when they started a section called “The Daily Billboards” which existed before the concept of bite-sized pieces of opinion and information flooded the net – we were among the first, and very good at it, too. I’ve kept all that stuff and have PDF copies of all my stories, which is much more than I thought it would be.

What I was shocked to find recently is that all the old newspaper columns I wrote in college are now permanently on-line as part of the university’s project to document all publications from the past, which they’ve done with the college paper up through 1987 (my tenure was 1984-86). It’s been a jolt for me to read that stuff again, as some of it is just the worst shit you could imagine. It was wild stuff at the time, a real departure from typical newspaper columns, but most of it feels like bluster and bad writing to me now. Of course, there is some genuinely funny and well-written material in the mix, but the bad stuff makes me cringe too hard. I just can’t link to that stuff publicly! I know there are people out there who loved what I was doing at the time and remember me fondly for it, but a lot of that stuff is just bad writing to me now. It was a talented kid trying hard to be noticed, and succeeding wildly in that campus microcosm. (The stuff that really makes me cringe was when I tried to write seriously, as humor was my forte at the time. The “serious” stuff is just so frighteningly bad. Twenty-year-olds in college have a bad habit of appearing more substantial than they are. It's just not possible for most people at that age, me included.)

The pain of it? When I went back to read that stuff (and found that my friends on the paper at the time were quietly writing stuff that still holds up well after all these years), I started reading the current campus newspaper, and the editorial writing is horrendous: dull, self-serious, studied, stiff. Exactly what I was trying to refute in my time. I’m not sure if it’s because writing skills have diminished across the board over the past few decades, or they just have boring editors running the joint. But it reads like high-school newspaper stuff instead of kids spreading their wings and having the courage to fail on occasion. I’ll give myself that much: I failed spectacularly when I wasn’t writing solid humor pieces. Maybe that’s another Facebook/Twitter offshoot: fear of failure in terms of actually creating something real, as opposed to comfortably utilizing template communication methods that guarantee uniformity and lack of risk.

I’d rather leave legacies like that, or what I’m doing now, than wasting time on meaningless one liners, insincere Facebook relationships, or getting too far into message boards, which tend to be a colossal waste of time and talent. Hell, what I’m doing now could be considered a waste of time, but I think you gather that I’m at least trying to communicate something other than an insipid emoticon or glib one-liner. I think what turned me away from writing after Dad died was I looked back on what I was doing, and most of it was criticism, harsh and bitter at times, but somebody who wasn’t creating anything of his own, but spending most of his creative talents commenting on other people creating some type of art. It felt like bullshit. A lot of things felt like bullshit after Dad passed on, but that one stuck with me, that I’d rather be the one putting it out there for people to accept/reject/embrace/despise … whatever they felt, so long as they read along and felt something. There’s such a glibness now in terms of how the web works that I’m pretty much OK with anything that takes a real chance, or tries to hold your attention for more than five minutes. I don’t think people who are shaping the web realize how destructive it has become to minimize and sound-byte the entire process … it truly is destroying people’s ability to think, reason and feel beyond anything but the most shallow thoughts and emotions.

So, I guess, an old girlfriend googles my name, comes across this site, reads this, and thinks, “He’s still an asshole.” And I’m fine with that. You can always count on me to be an asshole. I will not let you down! But I wouldn’t know how or what to comment on with an old friend’s Facebook page, assuming I was in that network, shooting back the occasional message that really had nothing to do with anything, but we all felt better in some odd way about life because we were banded together by some website that sees us, ultimately, as a dollar sign. As opposed to our actual shared memory. I’m all alone out here, no social network, which is not much different from a kid with a spiral notebook, writing at night on his bed in a small town in rural PA. Or the same kid sending a story to a college editor his second day on campus and striking gold. Or the same kid doing much the same with a city newspaper and making his way into that fold. It’s all comes down to a guy, alone in his room, trying to fill out a blank page with something worthwhile, that will last beyond the act of reading it. That’s the difference. I don’t want what I do here to be disposable, as so much of it is. And if it’s going to last, I want it to be representative of who I am. Not some fake “everybody’s my friend” template. I think that vibe is what I look for in the late-night web crawl. Not realizing I’m just looking at myself and wishing I was doing what I’m doing right now.