Dewey Beach: Asshole of the Universe (Part 2)

So, the story picks up again with John S., his wasted friend Rich and I watching Rich's idiotic ex-wife dancing on a lawn like a headless chicken in Dewey Beach, Delaware: Asshole of the Universe. Just watching that woman move, I could see the Dewey Beach partyville ethic expressed in her being: awkward, shameless, Wonder Bread and way too wasted for its own good.

Another thing occurred to me, especially with this lawn party. I was meeting an inordinate number of people from Washington DC and its surrounding suburbs in Virginia and Maryland. And these folks spooked me. Being from DC, they had a big-city attitude, mixed with that special sort of arrogance you get only from people who work in political or governmental jobs. If you’ve never seen the TV series West Wing – and if you’re one of those special people, I congratulate you on your superior taste – you can see all the characters have this sort of brusque, condescending tone about them that would be funny, I guess, if they stopped long enough to laugh, which they can’t, man, because they’re saving mankind with Martin Sheen, while walking through a dimly-lit hallway, and then a burst of sunlight, and then a dimly-lit hallway, and then a burst of sunlight, etc. Imagine these people drunk and trying in vain to relax, and you get another aspect of why Dewey Beach is so desperately fucked up. It’s crawling with these insincere DC vampires, who drive a long way to be just as uptight and annoying as they are in whatever foo-foo Georgetown watering hole they favor.

After about an hour of this torture, John suggested a drive over to Rehoboth Beach, where “all the fags and families go on weekends.” I had heard Rehoboth was a legendary “fag” beach, along the lines of Fire Island. And while I’m certain there are designated bars there and such where that fag vibe is overbearing, for the most part what I saw driving and walking around there for an hour felt like heaven compared to Dewey Beach, Delaware: Asshole of the Universe. There were gay couples all over the place, and families having dinner. And they weren’t drunk off their asses and roaming around in packs like eternal frat boys wandering a circle of hell. The worst that happened to us was a bunch of cute guys in a jeep stopped and blew their horn at us, but we played hard to get.

John tired of Rehoboth quickly, and we made the short trek back. Dewey Beach, Delaware: Asshole of the Universe is a town that normally has a population of about 300 that balloons to about 30,000 on summer weekends. And the town is geared towards servicing 300 people in terms of the highways and such. So every time you get in a car, you’re automatically in a traffic jam, and chances are good you’ll have a very hard time parking again. If you’ve rented a parking space, as many people do, someone will probably be parked in it, and it will take forever to get the local cops to ticket and/or get that car out of your space.

So, we got back around sundown, and at that point, I was exhausted, going on about three hours sleep in the past 24 hours. We grabbed a bite to eat at the local legendary burger place, where the owner treats everyone like an asshole, and the burgers are nothing to write home about. As darkness fell, we did what most people do all day there: the bar crawl. Once again, every place we went was jammed with shitty dance music blasting away at ear-splitting volume. By about 10:00, I told John, look, I got to go back to hell house and crash, I’ve had it.

I forgot to mention, but when we were back in the house in that wondrous afternoon time, I took that "alone" time to do my laundry – the only chance I had all weekend to do my normal laundry load. Nobody was around, it didn’t seem like a big deal. Well, as people started filtering back in, one of the harpies in the share with John flipped her lid when she found out I did one washer load of laundry. No reason why. Hadn’t broken any rules. She was just peeved that a house guest did something normal. I can’t recall exactly what I said to her, but there was a threat of physical violence, and she recognized it. Probably something like, “If you don’t stop bothering me for no good reason, I’m going to knock you the fuck out.” You’ll have to forgive me – I tend to grow more eloquent with anger. But at that point, I’d had it with the pig Delaware attitude. I was literally on the verge of attacking someone.

So, at 10:00, I take the chance and go back to the house. After I threatened that woman in the afternoon, for some odd reason, she became very nice and suggested that John and I should get space in one of the bedrooms on Saturday night, which would probably mean both of us on the floor while some rude, drunk skank slept on the bed. The house was empty when I got back. I went up to the room we were promised, closed the door, turned off the light, lie down on the bed and tried to sleep, which was impossible with the noise level of drunken parties and Skynyrd blaring from every house on the block. I managed to slip into a fitful half sleep.

I can’t recall what time it was. Probably around one or two in the morning. House still empty. When I heard banging come up the steps. A man and a woman’s voices. Drunk. Laughing. The door slammed open and the lights went on. I pretended I was asleep, but discretely peeked out through half-closed eye lids.

It was Connie and her boyfriend. Connie was a rotten cunt – there, I said it. Sorry to use the “c word” – if you’re offended, I apologize. But Connie was a rotten cunt – a walking black cloud of negativity, bad vibes and just an open sore of a human being. Every second I spent around this woman, it was like a scene from The Exorcist, where the room goes ice cold, then smells like sulphur, and some psychic force cries “Get out!” in backwards Latin. Understand that there was one nice woman in the house sharing with John, and it’s to my discredit that I can’t remember her name. The other handful were just awful people – how John got to know them, I can’t recall. How he ever trusted to them to the point where he agreed to a summer share with them, that’s a black mark on his character for the rest of his days.

“Who the fuck is that sleeping my bed?” she cried out.

I couldn’t believe it – this was like being in a profane version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Only it was Sane Man and the Multitude of Delaware Pricks in my case. Again, I’d pretty much had it. I snapped my eyes open, bolted out of the bed and got straight into Connie’s homely Italian face.

“I’m sleeping in your bed, asshole! What are you going to do about it? Kick me out? Have your faggot boyfriend kick my ass? Let’s go, bitch! I’ll fight both of you right now!”

To the boyfriend’s credit, he kept a cool head. Actually, he looked kind of scared, too. He knew Connie positioned herself as some sort of bad ass, and now she was being called out on it. Also understand, I can count on one hand the times where I got this nuts to the point of violence, two of them occurring that weekend. This is what sleep deprivation and being placed in a hostile environment will do to otherwise sane people.

“Oh. I’m sorry. We’ll get another room,” she murmured. I could see she was about to cry. Maybe it was that sort of thing where you had to violently confront these people to get them to understand just how far gone their manners were? I don’t know. Whatever it was, it worked. If I’d known this sooner, I would have smashed a beer bottle first thing Friday night and put it into Connie’s face -- like a new guy in prison kicking someone's ass so he doesn't become someone's bitch.

Connie and her man quietly shut the door. But that wasn’t the end of it. For about the next half hour, I could hear her sobbing and whining downstairs. I guess she was too freaked out to go to another room. The game plan was probably for those two to come back to an empty house and fuck, but I inadvertently rained on that parade. But since I went psycho on her, that took her out of her game, and all that was left to do was mutter recriminations and vague threats out of my presence. I could hear stuff like “I’m going to get that asshole kicked out” and such. To which I thought, oh, please try that, honey, please try. And you better hurry, because I’m out of here in a few hours, and if I ever see you again, it will be because I lived a wrong life and ended up with you sticking a pitchfork in my ass somewhere in hell.

So I floundered around in that weird sort of dream state for awhile. Eventually, probably around four in the morning, John got back. He was laughing his ass off. Apparently, he had run into Connie downstairs and got the lowdown on what had happened. He was in heaven, as he couldn’t stand her. No one could, but he was one of the few people in the house who was up front about it. We had that whole room to ourselves that night. And we sat around laughing our asses off like a pair of grave diggers sharing a bottle of whiskey. I just couldn’t believe what he had gotten himself into. And every now and then, I’d call out “That cunt, Connie!” in my loudest voice to let her know we were talking about her. John wasn’t worried about getting kicked out of the house, which he would have welcomed at that point, especially if he got his money back.

This went on until about 5:30 in the morning, at which time we decided it was in our best interests to sneak out, get some roadside breakfast about 30 miles up the road, then make a straight shot back to Wilmington so I could get an afternoon train back to New York. This is pretty much what happened. When we got downstairs, Connie and her sad boyfriend were sound asleep, as was everyone else. We ran into Butch in the driveway, and he shook our hands and was actually pretty pleasant. A nice way to leave. When we stopped at the roadside place, John did what he had to do: shook me down for $40, the fee all house guests had to pay. A nice little side business they had going to help them all get money back on their original investment. Let’s say a minimum of ten guests a weekend? That was $400, and I gather that most of these people, when you got right down to it, were doing these hellhole weekends for free – minus the cost of gas, food and, most importantly, drug and alcohol intake. But theoretically, they could all make back their nut in terms of the original four-figure sum they all laid down for the house in the spring.

This wasn’t the last time I’d see Dewey Beach. The next summer when I visited John, he was living in New Castle, Delaware: Not the Asshole of the Universe. And he had just leased a jeep and wanted to road trip. So we took the bridge outside of New Castle into New Jersey, drove straight across those wicked pine barrens and hit that stretch of primo Jersey shore resort towns south of Atlantic City. It was a sunny day, and we both got burned before investing in some sun-tan lotion in Avalon.

By the time we hit the Jersey-Delaware ferry in Cape May, I was red as a beet. I hadn’t looked in a mirror in a long time either. That ferry ride was wonderful – basically a nice long boat ride while you sun on a deck. When I came in off the deck, this teenage kid blurted out, “Look out! Here comes the Heat Miser!” He seemed to be talking about me, but I couldn’t tell. I mentioned it to John, and he started laughing his ass off. That’s when I saw myself in a window – burnt cherry red with my hair standing straight up from riding in a jeep for about three hours. The little bastard, he was right, and I couldn’t help laughing at myself.

But we got off the ferry in Lewes Beach, a much more sedate Delaware shore town where John eventually lived for a few years before moving back to Wilmington, and then down to Florida to be closer to his parents who had retired there a year or so earlier. Haven’t spoken to him in years over some silly falling out we had around one of our friend’s wedding, but he did send a nice card to my Mom when he learned my father had passed on. I know John and his dad are big fans of reading our home county Pennsylvania newspaper online for the obituary section.

But we spent that afternoon in Dewey Beach, and it was fine. I knew it was afternoon lull time from the previous year, when most people are just getting up, lazing around cramped houses with hangovers and awkward conversations with strangers. I could see that the right way to do Dewey Beach, Delaware: Asshole of the Universe, or any shore town, assuming you aren’t lucky or rich enough to have a house to yourself, is to simply drive there early on a Saturday morning, spend all day at the beach, then drive back Saturday night, foregoing any predictable drinking games at shitty, over-priced bars and missing the horrible Sunday night traffic jam. I strongly doubt I’ll ever lay eyes again on that godforsaken town, and not so sure I’ll ever pass through Delaware again. If I want to be treated like a worthless asshole, you better believe I can do it for free here in New York.

Dewey Beach: Asshole of the Universe (Part 1)

I’ve never been much for the beach-house scene. In New York, that implies going in on a summer rental of a 3-4 bedroom house in Long Island or New Jersey, for some extortionate five-figure sum, with literally dozens of other people, most of them strangers, who arrange a strict “every other weekend” schedule in which the renters can or cannot use the house with guests, and the number of guests fluctuates wildly so that a dozen or so people are invariably camped out on the living-room floor in sleeping bags. A majority of those people will be drunk and ornery.

The last and only time I went on a beach house weekend was back in the early 90s, with old pal John S., who lived in Wilmington, Delaware and had a summer share with a dozen other people in Dewey Beach: Asshole of the Universe. I’d trademark that delineation if I could, because as far as I’m concerned, forget about the Bronx, or Beirut, or the slums of Rio, or Fallujah. Dewey Beach, Delaware is the asshole of the universe.

What was I then – 27, 28? Thereabouts. Late 20s, which may be the most volatile time in most adults’ lives, when they get it into their heads that everything must happen by 30, that success or failure is determined at that age, and if not reached by that point, then something must really be wrong in their lives. This, of course, is thanks to our deranged youth-oriented culture which has zero understanding of reality or passing time. Never trust anyone over 30? The folks who came up with that bon mot will die of old age soon, god willing, if all the coke they did over the years doesn’t clog their arteries first. (Side note: I much more think about life as an ongoing series of small successes and failures, no matter what age you are. I’ve met way too many people in New York whose professional lives are radically successful, which is all they’re judged by, while their personal lives are rubble, and a lot more indicative of the real person.)

Thirty is also the mating age. Why guys fall for that shit, I don’t know, whereas I can see women wanting to cash in their chips before the dew is off the lily. Thus, any time you get people together hovering around that 30-year mark, you get a group who are still teenagers in their minds, very old teenagers, but have been socked with elements of the adult world so that they’re filled with a sufficient amount of fear to view 30 as an artificial dividing line between youth and adulthood, when there really are no dividing lines, just a whole bunch of experiences and choices (many of them bad) one has to glean some sort of knowledge from.

Throw in alcohol abuse, the beach and people who want good times greater than their dollar value, and you have Dewey Beach: Asshole of the Universe. I’d imagine a summer share set-up in any resort town tends to be a dice roll, even if you know the parties involved. My experience that weekend showed me that the type of folks who go for the “summer beach share” scene are party people, drink too much, stay out all night, insert hard-living cliché here. If they lived alone, no big deal, but put them in a house with a dozen other strangers, most of them with the same mindset, and you get a very bad scene.

This was what I walked into with John that summer. The strange thing was, he knew I’d hate it, but I think he wanted to show me the burning hell he had foolishly signed on for earlier that spring so that I could understand why he was so depressed. He was working one of those shitty computer support jobs that pays very well, but demands a beeper (at that time – surely a cellphone now) that invariably goes off Saturday night and requires one to make it into work to help some schlub on midnight shift who could fix the computer problem by turning the machine off and on again. So he had that draggy, overtime kind of existence during the week, followed by weekends where he’s always tense in a house full of drunken strangers for the most part, living like a bunch of punk kids who just ran away from home.

Just getting there was a hassle. John lived in Wilmington, which I got to via Amtrak train from New York, and normally that alone would be a good hike for me – and we had plenty of good visits just doing that, as Wilmington isn’t a bad town at all. But from there, we had to drive south through Delaware to the very southern tip, which took a few hours. Don’t know if you’ve ever driven through Delaware, but it’s like Kansas without the cornfields: mile after mile of farms and small wooded areas once you get outside the major cities. On top of which, for this trip there was a light drizzle the entire way and bad traffic once we got halfway through the state.

So we got there later on a Friday night – about 10:00 as opposed to 8:00. Admittedly, when we first got there, it wasn’t so bad walking into the small beach house. A few people were hanging out, playing cards and drinking at a table in the kitchen, and they were friendly enough. I thought, “Well, the rain must have scared a bunch of people away, this should be a fun weekend.”

We put our stuff in a corner of the living room and headed out for some drinks. There was very much a college-town vibe to Dewey Beach – college town in the midst of a Division I-A football game. Drunken people everywhere – and not kids, adults anywhere from their mid-20s to their 40s. Wandering around in packs. I remember that this wasn’t unusual at Penn State, especially on a football weekend. The thing was, I was almost a decade away from that sort of vibe, and it now struck me as being lame, like I was at a very bad party that should have ended a long, long time ago. You get that many drunken people stumbling around, and stupid shit happens, be it meaningless fights, various displays of beer muscles, girls getting way too slutty for their own good, guys just acting like total goons because they’re hammered and have an audience, etc.

What really depressed me was half a block away, we came across a hotel with an outdoor area for bands to play. According the marquee, Marshall Crenshaw was playing there that night, and I could hear the echoes of some bopping, rockabilly type song playing. All I could think was, “Marshall, you poor fuck, it comes to this, playing a hotel in Dewey Beach, Delaware in 1998.” Then again, most of his audience was so falling-down drunk, he probably could have played “Freebird” on a kazoo all-night long and received standing ovations.

John and I ended up in some nondescript shore-town bar that, of course, was jam-packed. One of his housemates was there, and we got into a vacuous, “adult” conversation about real estate – always a mistake, because the person starting a conversation like that is looking to rub your nose in shit. Some of the folks in John’s house seemed to be like this – yuppies in training, the LaCoste knit shirt/country club crew. Not my kind of folk! Luckily, one of the most obnoxious people John knew in Delaware, this strange, extremely wealthy guy named P.J. who made all his money shaking down working-class folks on high-interest loans and credit-card payments, wasn’t in his house – but we’d see him off-and-on all weekend. To me, the guy was obviously gay – it wasn’t just the pictures of bare-chested male models he kept on his refrigerator (claiming they gave him inspiration to lose weight). He was gay – but in his mind, he was a young gun on a prowl for a wife. His denied sexuality was a non-issue, especially compared to the spoiled rich kid vibe this guy oozed like chronic flatulence. James Spader would have a field day playing him in a movie.

So, we spent the requisite few hours crammed into this bar, then decided to call it a night. When we went back to the house at about 2:00, we found it jammed with people, most of them total strangers to John. Some passed out, others drunkenly wailing, some fighting. This was bed time. And this is how bed time is when you’re dealing with a bunch of spoiled brats ripped to the tits on $7.00 beers. I just couldn’t believe the scene. We’d have to sleep on the living-room floor in the area where we flopped out our personal stuff upon arriving. Every bed was taken, the floors of the bedrooms were taken, the little screened-in porch was taken, leaving only the living room and kitchen for people to sack out on. John said he shared the house with about five other people – there were about 20 people in the house that night.

I’m a light sleeper to begin with – put me in this kind of set-up, and forget it, I got about two hours sleep, if that. People farting in their sleep. Getting up to piss or puke every 15 minutes. Some people having strange drunken conversations with each other in the dark. Like I said earlier, if I had been a kid in a punk-rock band, this would all be very cool. For a 28-year-old guy who thought he was coming to a beach house with a few people casually hanging out – and all sleeping in beds – it was a bit of a shock.

I think I started nodding off in earnest about 6:00 in the morning. The house was finally quiet as the sun was rising. At which time, I heard someone stomping around upstairs. He takes what has to be the loudest piss I’ve ever heard – it was like he had a garden hose with a nozzle pointing into the toilet. He farted and burped all the while. He stomped down the stairs. I could see this guy was stone white trash – probably late 30s, scraggly-looking, forearm tattoos, smoking. He stomped across open patches of the living-room floor and kitchen so he could slam-dunk an empty Bud can into the trash. He slammed out the kitchen door. About the only thing he didn’t do was crash two trashcan lids together like cymbals.

John later told me this was Butch – one of the more normal house members. Something I haven’t mentioned about Delaware, and something Delawarians will either deny or hate me for. But Delaware has to be one of the unfriendliest states I’ve ever been in – and I can say this after dealing with the worst New York City pricks you can imagine for the past 20 years. I can’t vouch for southern or middle Delaware – they could be fine for all I know. But northern Delaware, which is where all these beach-house people were from, has a really odd vibe to it. “Unfriendly” might be too strong a word – “prickly” might be better. And I suspect it’s because there are so many corporate headquarters and such centered around Wilmington (because Delaware has such lax tax laws for corporations) that this corporate vibe seeps into the every-day fabric of life for people living there. Probably no different from any Westchester County suburb in New York. But every time I would visit John, I’d find myself thinking, “What is it with people around here? Why are they so rude?”

And that was Butch, even though he was a factory worker. How he got tied in with John’s crew, I have no idea. I’d see Butch all weekend, stalking around, grunting at people, smoking and staring at the sky like a caveman waiting for a pterodactyl to swoop down and snatch him away. This was fun for him? He looked like he’d be better off drilling holes in his skull. The guy didn’t once go to the beach. All he did was drink and smoke. John and I were the only two people in the house who actually went to the beach which, as far as I was concerned, was the only reason to be there. You could be a drunken, miserable prick for free at home just as easily as you could paying money for a beach house.

Since Butch had me wide awake – amazingly, everyone else seemed to sleep through his barrage – I decided to slip out of the house and go running on the beach. This was the best decision I made all weekend. It was a hazy/sunny day, and I gave myself a good 5-mile run along the shoreline, taking time afterwards to just sit there and take it all in.

When I came back, a few more people were up, sitting around the kitchen table. One of them was a bleached-blonde floozy, a really hammered looking woman, clearly still drunk from the night before, smoking. She takes one look at me and sarcastically blurts out, “Who the fuck is that?” loud enough for me to hear.

Understand that this house was filled with people she didn’t know. John would later tell me he didn’t know who she was, and he’d been there every weekend for the past month. She turned out to be a house guest, just like me, and a total fucking pig to boot.

I walked over to the table and introduced myself.

“My name is Bill. I’m a friend of John’s.”

I pointed to him sleeping on the floor.

“John’s one of the few people here who has a share in the house. Are you one of those people, too?”

I was talking at her like she was a bank teller, but I figured what the hell, if you’re going to lay this ugly Delaware charm on me, I’m giving it back in spades. She explained that no, she wasn’t, but she was tired of all these people showing up she didn’t know. Luckily, John got up right then, and he knew a few of the people at the table. I took him aside and told him we needed to get the hell out of there, get some breakfast and hit the beach.

Which we did. And that part of the trip was also good – just body surfing and such most of the day, lazing on the beach, I managed to get about another hour of sleep. The beaches in Delaware are no great shakes. That area of water is basically a very large bay with New Jersey on the other side. As a result, the water is pretty tepid and lifeless – you probably get better waves on one of the Great Lakes. Still, the beach is the beach no matter where you are, and this was far better than hanging around a bunch of strange drunken bastards.

Coming back to the house was possibly the epiphany of the weekend. We got back around 3:00 pm, and the house was empty. Bathed in sunlight. I guess that was about the time all the drunks had finally woken up and decided to go out and get something to eat, or maybe start drinking again. In any event, we had the place to ourselves, and just sitting around the living room on a nice shore-town Saturday afternoon, I could easily see the attraction of having a beach house. The catch being you had to be rich to do this for yourself, and we had no chance of having an entire weekend this peaceful and normal.

All this time, John is gauging my emotions, and I’m making no bones about them. I tell him his beach house is filled with a bunch of miserable alcoholics, and I’d be suicidal if I had to spend all my spare time on weekends around such a bunch of pricks. I think he was looking for that sort of confirmation from a friend, and I gave it to him, both barrels. The guy wasn’t happy to begin with, and placing himself in this sort of environment every weekend, and paying good money to do so, wasn’t helping matters any. He seemed relieved to hear this. And he knew that I was pissed off that I’d be living like an animal all weekend. I think we both sensed that the beach and these few minutes sitting around an empty house were about as good as it was going to get.

Sure enough, people started filtering back in, so John took me to a lawn party he had been invited to. Where we ran into his pal Rich, who was drunk off his ass in the mid-afternoon, probably blasted on coke, too. But having no fun … because his ex-wife was there, dancing up a storm. Rich was a good guy – he had a really likable personality and was one of the few people John hung around that I could actually stomach. But to see how hang-dog he was in the presence of his ex-wife. Who was every over-rated suburban harpy you’ve ever met rolled into one. Not a total zero of a woman, but deeply average looking, not very intelligent, and totally bereft of personality in that sparkling Delaware way. She told us she was a dancing queen and was going to dance all night long. The thing was, I’ve seen people on crutches with better moves – picture that episode of Seinfeld where Elaine tries to dance. She was awful, and totally in the dark about how awful she was. And to see Rich pining for a woman this clueless was painful. No wonder he was blasted out of his mind every waking hour. He just couldn’t see life clearly. Not that any of us can, but I’d cut off one of my hands before I lost one minute of sleep over a woman like his ex-wife.

Why I Like Country Music

Well, just sitting here with no pants on, watching Dog the Bounty Hunter on TV. It’s been awhile since I posted anything. Got myself into a short work gig that’s been nonstop, very intense Excel work from the second I sit down in the morning to the second I leave. Ergo, I haven’t had much urge to be around computers after work. On top of which, when I have, I’ve been engaged in a few big MP3 projects with various folks, which tend to take a lot of organizing, leg-work and CD-burning.

One of the fruits of those MP3 labors has been acquiring a “Top 500 Country Songs of All Time” batch of MP3s (courtesy of Lonesome Ray) based on a magazine article from a few years back in which critics went to town with their top choices. Being that the list is from critics, some of the choices are just ludicrous. Pop bands from the 60s with their one or two country songs. Soul songs from the 60s, too. That’s a real no-no for me. Partially because there’s no way you can draw an easy line – literally every soul singer of the 60s has at least a handful of songs, probably more, that you could notice the song has all the trappings of a country ballad, save for the instrumentation and arrangement.

My problem is that most critics tend to favor a reverse racism, in that when they’re queried to write about “Top 500 Soul Songs of All Time,” you can bet your sweet ass there will not be one white country artist on that list. Not even Tony Joe White doing “Polk Salad Annie” – which is a soul song, and perhaps the best "grunting" song. I’d write this down more to critics being candy-assed rejects than the fact that a lot of 60s soul and country was interchangeable, and one of the greatest crimes of the past 30 or so years has been the separation of color musically, with all of us being instructed to worship black music unequivocally as the cultural voice of a people (it isn’t), and view country music as the domain of hillbillies and, well, guys sitting around their houses watching Dog the Bounty Hunter with no pants on.

Most of that 500 song set is stunning, and put together with another collection of roughly 500 songs my friend P.J. and I threw together a few years ago on our own, and it makes for one intriguing overview of country music, from the mid-1920s through today, although, admittedly and much to my chagrin, the list thins out greatly from the 1980s onwards. And I’m wondering if that’s more because we’re also being trained to see older country music as the only kind that matters, whereas anything more pop-tinged from the 1980s onwards is somehow tainted. Granted, when I watch CMT and see all the Oprah-style issue songs and material geared towards sassy middle-aged women who think they know more than you ever will, I get kind of sick. But if I hang around long enough, there will always be some song that isn’t so bad, whether or not some cardboard cutout with a cowboy hat is singing it. Chances are, that guy’s a front for some very good songwriters and some deeply talented studio musicians who’d never have a hit these days under their own auspices.

Why do I like country music? I’m not really sure. That wasn’t always the case -- my liking it at all as opposed to not being really sure. I’m under the impression that anyone under the age of 30 who likes country music is just weird. It’s a music not meant for young people. Like the blues, it’s meant for people who have done some living, who have lost as much or more than they’ve won, who understand that there is very little heroic in life, that it just goes on, and you live it to the best of your abilities. Pop music is about firsts – love, the exhilaration of experiencing things for the first time, even the morbid fascination with various forms of heartbreak, nay, the wallowing in heartbreak and depression, as best exemplified by the truly shitty grunge rock trend of the early 90s. Grunge rock killed hair metal? What a fucking shame. I like hair metal more than I like grunge rock. At least those guys were honest about their shallowness, and were smart enough to have as much fun as possible before it all caved in on them.

A movie like Garden State, replete with its hip indie rock soundtrack, perfectly underlines the division I sense between pop and country. I rented the movie on DVD two days after my father died. And short of putting my foot through the TV screen, let’s just say I thought the movie was a load of twentysomething, navel-gazing shit. A shiftless, guy in his early 20s with mental problems meanders home to New Jersey when his mother dies. The movie’s about how he deals with his mother’s passing? No. It’s about this weird little twerp falling in love with a future mental patient, while he pals around with a hometown friend who is literally a ghoul with his gravedigging job that finds him robbing corpses. That’s cool? That’s zany, funny, hip stuff? I just put my fucking father in the ground. You put a parent in the ground, the thoughts and emotions centered around that act dominate every second of your life for days, in my case months, on end. Every inch of that movie felt like a lie. It still does. It had nothing to do with the stark reality of a parent’s death that I’d just experienced. That guy's dead mother was just a morbid after-thought to his self-realization hijinx. Real life aint like that -- unless you have no heart.

(Sidenote: that same night, I rented Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. I laughed my ass off at a time when I really needed it, and am now a big Will Ferrell fan. I thought Talladega Nights was brilliant – it set its sights low, and hit every mark along the way. Maybe not a work of genius, but a deeply funny flick where you know exactly what you’re paying for, and it delivers.)

The pop music in Garden State drove home the self absorption and shallowness. A lot of pop music, while pretty and fun to listen to (I do it all the time), is basically heartless. Or more to the point, the people writing and singing the songs haven’t lived enough to convey any real depth of emotion in their art. The music tends to be excellent. But they play at being heavy, or cynical. Hell, I did the same. But I grew out of it, or more specifically had life beat it out of me. That’s what life does when you live long enough. In one sense, it makes you harder, but in another, it opens you up. Being hip and cynical is fun, but sooner or later, shit, where’s the beef? As life goes on, you want to have people in your life you can count on, more than you want people who entertain you, and vice-versa.

And I guess that’s how I came to like country music. It means what it says. Even when it’s lying to you, it feels like it’s telling the truth. Kevin Russell, co-lead singer of The Gourds (my favorite band), called it White People’s Soul Music, and he’s right. I tend not to like country music that doesn’t convey any sense of soul. As noted earlier, switch over to CMT and you’ll get a healthy dose of that. I’d say commercial country music tends to be just as if not more cynical than all the awful little hiphop acts parading around with their faux gangsterism, much less whatever junky faux-punk crap kids are listening to these days.

But every now and then, they get it right and cut through all the bullshit. I wish music could go back to the early days of rock, up through the soul and country of the 60s, when a lot of the music, given a different arrangement, maybe a mandolin and fiddle instead of a horn section, was similar in ways that seem very distant now. People mourn the rock and folk of the 60s, but from a musical standpoint, they’d be better off mourning the 50s, about 1954 through 1960 or so, when the great blues and country artists were going full gun, and younger guys like Chuck Berry and Elvis were pulling as much from both sides and incorporating it into rock. That must have been a time, and if I had my druthers, I’d go there much more than musical place in the 1960s. As it is, I can play that music now, especially the country stuff, and hear a purity of purpose, and a sense of soul, that’s hard to find in most pop music. You think rock is the hardest music ever made? Then you haven't really heard the blues. Nor any number of country songs that nail the hardness of life in ways pop music will never get anywhere near.

In Concert

I went out to Jersey Saturday and saw a Willie Nelson/John Fogerty concert at the PNC Bank Arts Center (formerly the Garden States Arts Center) in Holmdel. Tickets were gratis, courtesy of my friend Andy S.’s mom working for an organization associated with the center.

How was it? Fine. Glad I got to see Willie Nelson – didn’t know the guy was such a lead guitarist, and it was great fun to hear him do classics like “On the Road Again” and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” This is the third time I’ve seen Fogerty and as usual, the guy does nothing but rock the shit out of his old CCR classics. The first time I saw this was about 10 years ago in Wallingford, CT on his comeback tour. This was when he first decided it was time again to play his own songs, after not doing so for decades due to unwittingly signing over ownership of his songs to Saul Zaentz, Hollywood producer and former owner of Fantasy Records, who gave CCR a typical bum publishing deal and never reversed ownership. (On the other hand, a movie like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which Zaentz produced, may have never been made without that CCR money.)

And that night was incredible. Please understand that growing up in a small town in the 70s, it was common to go to a block party or a bar and, without fail, whatever rock band was onstage would have at least a handful of CCR songs in their repertoire. So I’ve heard these songs played dozens of times live by bands that have ranged from awful to pretty good. To hear Fogerty play his own songs for the first time since the early 70s, and see the joy he felt in doing so, was probably the top concert-going experience of my life. It helped that the setting was perfect. He had a beautifully-designed stage set featuring a backdrop of a bayou at day, and then night as the lighting changed. Just a magical night. These past two times, including last night, it was good, but not quite as good as the first. A special bonus was Fogerty dragging out Bruce Springsteen for an encore of a Little Richard song – Springsteen looked and sounded great, although I suspect Fogerty gave him a background singer’s microphone so his booming voice wouldn’t compete. Wish they had done “Rockin’ All Over the World,” which Springsteen has often played live.

It was a strange crowd, too. A lot of guys who looked like Kenny Rogers. Even more guys who looked like Willie Nelson. Older white guys, clearly working class, who had one long, white pony tail trailing down the back of their $50 concert shirts. Each of these guys had a sanguine look on his ancient face, like he knew something you didn’t, and he wasn’t going to lord it over you. Some bozo, drunk-ass New York Giants fans types. Beefy dinguses with large heads, 40% body fat, small mustaches and lousy “fuck you” attitudes, purposely smoking, well, because they’re going to smoke wherever and whenever they want, eh, whatta’ you gonna’ do ‘bout it. I guess you can’t go to a concert anywhere in Jersey featuring a white rock act without dealing with these folks.

Some biker types. At one point, Fogerty went into a spiel about owning a Harley, met with howls of approvals by Harley owners, all of whom looked like they’d be better off with one of those big geriatric bikes with saddle bags, a windshield and tassels on the handlebars. Speaking of handlebars, a lot of handlebar mustaches. One guy next to us had a really bizarre Rollie Fingers ‘stache, must have been about six inches long curling out on each side, and he was dancing like a maniac the whole time. Pretty much just glad he stayed the hell away from me.

Most of the crowd, it was honestly hard to tell if they came to see Nelson or Fogerty, or both. Usually you get two big-name acts like that on the same bill, you can tell. But we’ve reached a point in concert-going where the average age of your Fogerty fan is probably in the mid-50s, and Nelson’s slightly higher. And there were plenty of younger people, but to all of us raised in a concert-going golden era, where the idea of going to concert meant a stadium filled with twentysomethings under a hovering cloud of pot smoke, it was strange to see a venue filled with Wilford Brimley’s. There’s a Toby Keith concert in that venue this coming week – that crowd would surely make an interesting sociological study!

If the tickets hadn’t been free ($55 face value … probably would have been over $65 with Ticketmaster charges attached), I wouldn’t have gone. My rule of thumb is to never spend more than $20 to see a band, which is easy to do in New York City, and preferable to see a band I like in a club where I’m a few feet from the stage. Still, I find that as I get older, the less I want to see live music in any setting. It’s just something that’s faded out of my life. No great tragedy. Just a sign that I’m less willing to put up with all the bullshit that surrounds going to see a show. What bullshit would that be? Let me fill you in:

Ticket prices. As noted, any sort of big-name act these days tends to charge upwards of $50 for a basic ticket. Most much more than that. It’s a rip-off. What’s happening is this last great era of rock stars, who are all pretty long in the tooth for rock stars and years past their prime, are bound to stop touring in the next decade or so. And when they do, there really is nothing that will replace them on that level of filling a 5,000 seat or higher venue. So the concert industry is trying to cash in while the money’s there. It should be interesting to see how the concert industry is in 2016 – I can guarantee you, it will be vastly different from what it is now, probably for the worse.

Parking. Not an issue with me and city shows. But Andy was going out of his mind trying to find a parking space at this awful PNC Bank Arts Center. The place is run by shitheads. There were no clear guides on where to park, and the folks who should have been doing so were pretty much standing around in their yellow vests, not doing anything unless someone pulled over and yelled a question at them. There were douche bags putting lawn chairs in open spaces, to save them for late-arriving friends, which should have been ix-nayed by the staff. And then there was the “Premium Parking Lot” – which was damn near empty, as the Arts Center was charging $30 to park there, the idea being that it was close to the venue, and people should pay more. A truly hideous, unfair practice. We were eventually directed to “Lot 3” – one brief turn from the Garden State Parkway, and about a quarter of a mile hike through a wooded area to the venue. Absolute bullshit. We were pretty steamed by the time we got there.

Food and drink prices. $5.00 hot dogs. $7.00 beers. The usual bullshit you see in professional sports stadiums. No different at concerts. I should have suggested to Andy that we hit a Subway or something on the way down, because the food prices were outrageous. Not to mention that the soda machines in their food court weren’t working, and customers had to scramble around to find warm bottles of Coke for $4.50. People, or at least people like me, get tired of being fucked over like this. $55 for a ticket, I don’t want to drop this much on food and drink. Obviously, some people don’t have any problem with this to judge by the deluge of empty plastic Bud bottles littering the lawn around the amphitheater after the show. You have to be out of your fucking mind, or an alcoholic, to pay $7.00 for a 12-oz. bottle of Bud.

Personal comfort. I’m not a giant. I’m a good-sized guy, but there are plenty of guys much taller and wider than I am. Seats in these venues are designed for guys who are about 5’ 9” and weigh 150 lbs. Any bigger, and you’re wedged in. Next to us, was this truly giant guy, about 6’ 4” and at least 260 lbs., and his large wife. We were packed in like sardines. I sat with my arms pressed in, like I do on a crowded subway. What choice was there? It’s just a sign of cheapness and inconsideration that venues are designed with seats this small. I can go to “stadium seating” movie theaters and have a good-sized, comfortable, rocking seat. No idea why this can’t apply to major venues, save it would cost all of them a small fortune to re-design, and probably knock out a few thousand seats. It really is a problem when you’re in a place for three or four hours.

(Maybe I should have got up and danced? Er, um, no, not my thing. Whether it was the freaky couple in front of us who could have been father-daughter but appeared to be more, doing their hippie-ish sufi dancing, the Rollie Fingers nut doing his acid freak out, or the creepy Giants fans doing their ogre stomp in between smoking and chanting “USA! USA! USA!” for no apparent reason, I wasn’t getting anywhere near these fucking people.)

Ditto clubs. Most Manhattan clubs, you are wedged in to tightly-packed tables with no room to move. Or, even better, you are standing. I can recall many times, going to a club like the old Roxy, and standing all night, through four bands, which meant from about 8:30 to one in the morning. My ankles and knees would be killing me. If it was a crowded show, I simply couldn’t move for hours on end, save to shift weight from one foot to the other. Fuck this! Damn near every show I’ve ever seen, whatever pleasure I felt from watching live music being played, it was always offset by the personal discomfort I felt in one of the above seating/standing situations. It’s just too much of a hassle these days – or at least I’ve reached a point where I’m not willing to put up with all the B.S. just for the music.

The fans. This is a touchy subject. But I really don’t know why a lot of people go to shows. They seem to have little or no interest in the music. They’re going, I guess, because a spouse dragged them along, they got free tickets, or they wanted a break from watching professional wrestling. In short, they just don’t give a shit about music or the artists onstage. Constantly talking. Not paying attention. Not into the music at all. Taking piss and/or food breaks every five minutes. They’re assholes.

On the other end of the spectrum are the uber-fans, the ones who seem a little too into the band and are clearly having some type of spiritual epiphany – which, again, I find impossible because I’m so physically uncomfortable. I don’t know what happens at live shows. What, if any, information is exchanged between artist and audience. Sometimes I feel like I’m a heretic attending a religious ceremony where I have no business being. I don’t look at recording artists as anything but recording artists – and this is no insult, I love music and appreciate the musicians who make it. I enjoy seeing a band rocking out, or an artist singing a song that genuinely connects with me, and thousands of others, in a very real, human way. Job well done – I appreciate it.

It all feels a bit like a berserk pep rally, and I’m not quite sure what I’m cheering for. I guess it’s my distrust of crowds and their willingness to be lead. That’s always made me uncomfortable, especially with rock crowds, who pride themselves on rebelliousness and individuality, but at concerts, become willingly-led sheep. The artist punches his fist in the air, the crowd punch their fists in the air. The artist says something like, “people, help me out with this next verse” and thrusts his mike outwards to the crowd. The crowd sings the line. At a Ray Davies solo show I went to a few years back, during his old Kinks number “I’m Not Like Everybody Else,” Ray excoriated the crowd to get on their feet and clap their hands. But I sat there thinking, “I would Ray … but I’m not like everybody else. And I don’t fucking feel like it.”

In a sense, I feel let it down because I sense the possibilities, and have experienced it on occasion, when an audience and an artist truly connect, making a show a memorable experience. Hell, the first show I saw, J. Geils Band tearing up the Stabler Arena in Allentown, PA the week their Freeze Frame album went Number One, and those guys were so elated, and such consummate showmen, that the place went wild. It helped that I was stoned out of my mind from second-hand pot smoke and wearing a DEVO-style plastic flower pot on my head. But there are times when all the bullshit is transcended, and things happen. Actually, this happens at some point in nearly every show. Willie Nelson made it happen when he cut into Hank Williams’ “I Saw the Light.” Fogerty made it happen a few times with his classics. Just a moment where it all works, and you can feel the energy.

But the truth is, it’s hard to make that happen and maintain it for an entire show. It rarely does. Meanwhile, there are plenty of us out there, tired of being wedged into shitty seats, or standing stock still with our arms at our side, because we simply can’t stand any way else, or next to some shithead having a cellphone conversation during a ballad, or a bunch of guys reliving their frat days. Or what have you.

Music has always been a mostly private experience for me. The times when it’s reached me the most have often been on headphones. Sitting on my bed back in Pennsylvania. Popping open the cellophane on the Ziggy Stardust album. Or Chuck Berry’s Great 28 double album. Or the Kinks Chronicles. Or any great album, where I put it on, and even that first time, I knew something important just happened, and sure enough, I sit here nearly 30 years later just as touched by the same music, along with thousands of other songs and artists I’ve picked up along the way. It becomes shared in the sense of friends being into the same music and having those same cultural references.

What I’ve learned is that when you get out of that small circle of friends, shared musical taste is often about the only thing I’ll share with a lot of people. Before the show, Andy and I were sitting there having our shitty, over-priced food when an older guy looking for a seat asked if he could sit at our table. Sure, we said, sit down. I heard you talking about seeing Jethro Tull this guy said to Andy, who had been reminiscing over all the great shows he saw in his college days. Sure enough, this guy was a Tull fan, and we spent the next 15 minutes or so going over past concerts.

I guess if we were all 23 or something, it would have been more unifying. But this guy was borderline space cadet, on the verge of having his eyes pointing in different directions. I don’t think he was stoned so much as just putting out a very strange vibe – not a bad guy at all. Just deeply weird. And sooner or later, you have enough of these experiences with people you obviously share common musical tastes with, and you realize you’re not all in the same boat. (I've had experiences with Lou Reed/Velvet Underground fans where I realized I'd be more comfortable beating the shit out of them than trying to feel any sense of human warmth with them.) And that’s fine! I guess what I’m reiterating is that music is mostly a private experience, with a rarely realized potential to be a genuinely shared one. And most of that is simply due to the rigid format all concert venues of any size tend to favor, which are not designed for comfort or unity. They're designed to make as much money as possible.

Corporate Casual

If ever there was an oxymoron, the description “corporate casual” applies. As most of you know, this phrase is used to describe an office practice of employees being allowed, sometimes permanently but often just for summer Fridays, to dress in a more “casual” manner, i.e., in the case of men, not wear suits and ties. It implies a looseness, an acceptance of humanity in both management and employees. It’s a gift to the workers from the bosses: here, please accept this warm gesture, we want you to be happier and more comfortable in our work place.

So why is that “corporate casual” simply means men in an office adopting a new and just as strictly enforced uniform that has all the leisure comfort of a cow having a 100-volt cattle prod being shoved up its ass in a slaughterhouse?

That new uniform consists of three things: a knit shirt, khaki pants and Bass weejuns. I’ve worked in many offices. How many times have I seen this? As many times as I’ve seen men in suits and ties. And just as often, the men adopting this new uniform wouldn’t know how to be casual if their lives depended on it. These are not casual people. Their lives are financial tightrope acts, making enormous sums of money to support a lifestyle that burns through money like a blazing furnace. They’re often not fun people. They don’t know how to relax. When they do relax, they become obsessed with work and break out their Blackberries.

Their lives are work, which they’ll probably come to realize when they put their spouses in the ground many years from now and feel a strange emptiness that they’ll mistake for true mourning. Nah. It will be confusion that they’ll be able to recall feeling much worse over lost battles in business than for people who have played secondary roles to money. In younger days, I would have frowned on this, but now I see that people simply make their choices in life. I’d appreciate it if people were more honest about what really mattered to them instead of playing these asinine emotional games that falsely ensure they “win” everything. Nobody wins everything, that much I have learned.

But getting back to clothes, I recently had an odd jolt, courtesy of your stock Human Resources impresario at a small company in midtown. (And let’s not get into what I think of Human Resources in general!) As with any job, my first day there I came in wearing a white shirt and tie. I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m entirely comfortable with the look. It took years to get here. Like most people, I associate ties with assholes, with pencil necks, with the kind of people who’ve never done real work. But it’s just another uniform, and what’s funny to me is that you’ll get a bunch of construction workers having their 11:00 am lunches, all splayed out over the sidewalk with their coolers and roast beef sandwiches, nothing but jeans, dirty t-shirts and work boots … and I’d bet at least one-third of those guys are making just as much or more money than the guys with ties they’re condescendingly smirking at. It’s been my experience that everyone gets a healthy dose of shit to eat at work, whatever uniform they’re wearing. It’s a bad mind-fuck for working-class guys to think office-working guys in ties have an easier life. They don’t. Chances are, you put these guys in an office, the mental stress and head games of dealing with money-hungry weirdoes would blow their minds and have them quitting inside of a month.

I usually make note of what other guys are wearing when I come into an office. And this place was a mix of business casual types, and guys in white shirts and ties. So, I figured, just wear a white shirt and tie unless otherwise instructed. Not a big deal. Late that afternoon of the first day, the woman I’m helping out on this project comes by and says, “You know, we’re business casual here. There’s no need for you to wear a tie if you don’t want to.” So I immediately ask her, “Would wearing a clean black or navy blue pocket t-shirt be all right?”

I made that request specific because that’s what I own, and I can often get away with wearing them in a “corporate casual” environment. Ultimately, I don’t like wearing shirts with collars, although I’ve learned to tolerate them. If you get right down to it, I don’t like wearing shirts with sleeves! In summer, I spend months wearing sleeveless white t-shirts – when it gets this hot, I don’t see the point in wearing anything else. Think I’m monochromatic and dull? That’s fine. I don’t give a shit. I’m not “showing off my guns.” I box much more than I lift weights, and my “guns” aren’t that big a deal. I just like being as cool as possible, temperature – not image – wise.

“Sure, you can wear that!” she said.

And so I did the next day. Everything seemed fine. I went out to lunch. When I came back, this woman had left a note on my desk asking me to come see her. I don’t like seeing notes like that – they’re usually bad news of some sort. I went by her office, and she had a sheepish look on her face. She started off by saying she had just had a conversation with the Human Resources manager.

And at this point I’m thinking, “What could I have possibly done in a day and a half with virtually no contact with anyone in this place to merit the attention of the highly-esteemed HR manager?”

And she carried on, “I’m sorry, but I was wrong about t-shirts. He told me that you need to wear a collared shirt.”

“Look, I’ll wear a tux if you people want, it doesn’t matter to me. I guess we both know the rules now!” I answered.

We laughed it off. As well we should have. The clothes we wear in an office are basically a non-issue to me. I have no problems wearing a white shirt and tie every day. But understand that the woman laughing with me was wearing a light blue blouse, with straps, bare shoulders, and what appeared to be light red, some type of satin shorts and flip flops.

Which brings me to the core problem: “corporate casual” is a deeply sexist policy. Women can wear just about anything they want in these kind of environments, whereas men have to go the usual stodgy, not-really-casual (knit shirt, khakis, weejuns) route. If I had mimicked that woman’s dress style, I’d be wearing a tank-top, a pair of shorts and sandals. Please understand that I have never seen a guy dressed like this in any office – maybe if I had worked for the Grateful Dead’s record company, I might have seen this. (I might have even seen guys wearing sandals with black socks.) But otherwise, it’s either suits and ties, or this cruddy knit-shirt look that I will never endorse. Meanwhile, you have woman with bare shoulders, wearing shorts, wearing summer dresses that show off about half of their thighs, fuck-me heels, t-shirts – you name it, short of hot pants and crotchless panties, they’re wearing this stuff.

What is this shit? Why are women allowed to truly dress in a casual fashion, whereas guys have a strictly delineated style they must adhere to, all in the name of “corporate casual”? Please understand I know this is not a life-and-death issue. It’s just one of those creepy, totally senseless, completely insane things I notice about office life that make me extremely suspect of office work in general, and not willing to commit to it in any real way. You know, it gets much worse than this in terms of that distancing – usually in the ways I see companies genuinely mess with people’s lives, firing them at a moment’s notice for no good reason, trying to lance them from their positions via wars of attrition, hiring people who are basically evil and just no fucking good by anyone’s standards, engaging in meaningless, harassing bullshit with workers that have nothing to do with them simply doing their jobs well, demanding so much from employees in terms of time that their personal lives become a sad, secondary joke, etc.

It gets much worse than these nonsensical dress-code issues. But, again, it’s just one of those things where I shake my head and think, why not just have everyone wear a jump suit? We did that in my dad’s factory, when I worked there in my summers during college. Whatever department you worked in, you got a certain-colored jump suit. I got a white jump suit, and I thought it was cool as hell. I remember Pete Townshend wearing this sort of thing on stage. It was the kind of thing DEVO would wear. It made sense. You had no option of “expressing yourself” via clothing. You simply got into the locker room every morning, took off your real clothes and slipped into that jump suit. It felt great. Everyone looked just like you did.

I strongly advocate the same for offices. And not just because a jump suit would be a thousand times cheaper than a suit! But because it would take away these nonsensical rules about “casualness,” which, again, has no place in an office. It would encourage workers to work as a unit – we all look the same, we’re doing the same jobs, we’re one. From what I’ve seen in offices, that vibe is sorely lacking. You get people talking that team-work horseshit, but usually that ruse comes from a corner office. Most people are out for themselves and use concepts like “team work” only in whatever sense it will further their personal fortunes. The only people I see engaged in real team work are the ones who would never consider some corny pep talk about “team work” itself. I honestly believe you put everyone in a jump suit, maybe even get rid of offices, put everyone in a cube, use the corner offices for meetings rooms, you’ll get much more team work out of people.

Of course, I know this will never happen! Offices exist so that people can exercise and demonstrate their status. It’s a totally insane system, I know this, but work to keep a business functioning must get done. This is the ultimate goal you have to concern yourself with, not all the extraneous nonsense that has absolutely nothing to do with people doing the work they are assigned to do to keep a business functioning. Actually, the ultimate goal is to get paid – but you have to work to get paid, and that’s why you’re here. I love to work – I’m one of the best pure workers you’re ever going to come across. I sense the value that comes with keeping yourself occupied and accomplishing whatever goal is placed in front of you. I just got no fucking use for all this other nonsense.

Going back to the factory and the jump suit, I have to say that the only jobs I’ve had where I had a sense of true work-place camaraderie were in working-class jobs, of which I only had a few before, during and after college. Once I came to New York, it was all offices after that. But back home in Pennsylvania, in those factories, I had a sense that my coworkers weren’t out to fuck each other over, weren’t money hungry, and most importantly, were sincere. You couldn’t get away with the sort of insincerity I regularly see in office places – it just doesn’t wash with working-class people (save for the management in any given factory). There were other problems. A lot of my coworkers were dumb as nails, prone to burning all their sick days and often deeply unhappy with life. But, surprise, it’s no different in the corporate world in that sense!

What does all this have to do with a pocket t-shirt? Call it a symbol of my discomfort with the corporate world, why I choose to stick with temp and freelance gigs, unless I find tolerable work places. (And the last place that happened was an investment bank, believe it or not, where I simply had myself in a good work environment and stayed with it for about four years. The place also had free lunch and beverages, which I sorely miss!) That pocket t-shirt is symbolic of a purity of life I respect. It’s just who I am in some sense. I fully expect and accept having it rejected in an office environment. But in some respect I also tie that t-shirt in with youth. And when you’re young, when you first encounter this kind of insanity, you tell yourself, “I’m never going to be that crazy. These people are nuts. Can’t they see that?"

Now that I’m older, my answer is, no, they can’t see that. And however young and wise you think you are, chances are somewhere along the line you will drink the Kool Aid and, at the very least, play along with those things you understand to be totally insane. And this is assuming you don’t take it a step further and actually start accepting it as gospel. My mantra: all I have to do is stay sane and healthy, and financially support my chosen way of life. The rest is bullshit. Sounds easy enough? Most people I know only get two out of three right in that equation. Guess which one they're missing!

CON(n)ED

If you’re reading this at home or in your apartment, I want you to do something. Kiss your TV set. Kiss your CD player. If you have a fan and/or air conditioner, kiss it. Whatever kind of lighting you have, kiss that, too. Do not attempt intercourse with any outlets, nor insert any wand-style electrical devices unless they are made explicitly for this purpose. But you get the gist: embrace any and all things electrical.

Why? Because I live in Astoria, Queens, and I just spent the past five days without any electrical power. Those words don’t quite register if you’re not familiar with the area, or what it means not to have electrical power for more than a few hours at a shot. The area of Queens that had power outrages followed by complete blackouts entails over 100,000 people in a very tight, enclosed urban area. We’re talking Astoria, Sunnyside, Woodside and parts of Long Island City. Temperatures in this area, at the start of the blackout, where in the high 90s those first few days of the blackout, and in the high 80s the rest of the week – all with high humidity, a few torrential downpours and thunderstorms.

Here’s a picture of what I, and just about everybody else, has looked like in this time period. I know – it’s the cover of Led Zeppelin IV. But I know exactly how that guys feels now, stooped over, wearing a jaunty cloth peasant cap, carrying a bundle of sticks on his back.

IT SUCKED!

Understand that I know it gets worse, that I know people in Third World countries live like this all the time. Use the concept of life being worse for someone who was rich losing money and becoming poor, as opposed to someone who always was poor. I live in a major city in America where the expectation is that a power outage of any sort will last only a few hours. A few years ago, the entire city of New York lost power one summer night (child’s play compared to the last few days in Queens) and had it fully up-and-running again within 12 hours. This time, we’ve had an area of Queens that represents a very small, single-digit percentage of land area in New York City without power for days on end. From what I’ve seen of the neighborhood, some of it still does not have power today (seventh day for some folks), and I’m over-joyed and thankful that my block, for whatever reason, does appear to have it again.

If you’re young and healthy, you’re asking what’s the big deal. If you’re older, as many Astorians are, namely old men or women living alone in their homes, you’re basically isolated with no way out. If you’re on any medication that requires refrigeration, like insulin, you’re fucked. Ditto if you have respiratory problems, mobility issues, an electricity-based water heating system (i.e., no hot water, possibly no water at all), or any number of issues that conveniently never occur when the power is on. You have a refrigerator filled with rotting food and are most likely depending on a long walk to a Red Cross truck by the subway train that has been dropping off fruit, sandwiches, water and ice, which you strap on to your cart and roll back to your dark hovel. The area around the truck is like a film clip from an African village where the UNICEF truck just rolls in stacked with food/water – a lot of angry, frustrated people fumbling for position. It’s some pretty foul shit to see happening in your neighborhood.

The worst part is the past week has been one big mind fuck. It started with that first day, which for me was Tuesday, and the power slowly browning out that night. Everything just sort of went halfway on, and over the course of about two hours, faded to black. The next day, I made it into Manhattan – the subway trains were unaffected, as they run on a separate power source from the neighborhoods they run through. Life was normal in Manhattan. Well, whatever that’s worth. I picked up a paper … to read virtually nothing about the then two-day-old blackout in Astoria. There was a footnote to a short article about heat/power problems in New York City in general, a small paragraph stating that 350 Con Ed customers in Astoria were without power.

And right there, I knew something was deeply off. The day before I had walked from above Ditmars Boulevard down to Broadway, about half a mile, to find that everyone in that section of Queens was without power. 350 customers?! My ass. I think 100,000 people is a conservative estimate, although that’s what I’ve been reading in various news sources.

Luckily, I had work the rest of the week which brought me into Manhattan. And there was a deep disconnect between the normality that was Manhattan, and the borderline riot world of Astoria that I would leave in the morning and return to at night. How or why the neighborhood hasn’t slipped over the edge and into random acts of pillaging and violence is a tribute to the people who live here. Again, a big deal was made how this didn’t happen in New York a few years back with that summer power outage. And that was 12 hours as opposed to just about a week. Hats off to the people of Astoria for not just keeping their cool throughout this, but for not reacting like a bunch of savages and turning the place into a war zone. I can goof on this place all I want, but the reality is there are enough sane people here, greatly outnumbering the lame-ass street bozos I often deal with, who prevent bad shit like that from going down. Much like any neighborhood I’ve ever lived in here in New York, it’s the people you don’t see so much in a neighborhood, the ones who are too busy to be annoying street trash, who keep it going.

As the week went on, a few stores, especially the supermarket on Ditmars and 37^th, rented out gas generators, which cranked away in front of each establishment, and this probably went a long way to keeping the neighborhood halfway sane. Most stores went dark and stayed locked up the entire week. No idea how much lost revenue this would account for, but a vast majority of stores have simply been closed for nigh on a week.

At night, the neighborhood went pitch black. Some limited street lights from Con Ed rigs, but houses were darkened, and there was an eerie, all-encompassing silence, save for the jerk-offs across the street who have a perpetually crying baby which I normally don’t hear thanks to my fan and TV set. It wasn't that cute “let’s pull up lawn chairs and hang out” vibe from that earlier all-NYC blackout. This was some deep shit with no end in sight, and not too many people have felt like socializing.

I killed as much time as I could in Manhattan during the day, came home around sundown, lit up my stove with a match, ate some noodles or soup, read a book by flashlight until about 9:30, then went to bed. Had to throw out a bunch of meat, fruit, yogurt and such that started reeking after day two. Realized that non-cooled freon smells like rotting vegetables – the smell of it sitting in my useless refrigerator was almost as bad as the rapidly-spoiling food. I basically sweated it out in my apartment, reading, listening to the sound of nothing, the occasionally passing car or dingus on the street, but silence and darkness for the most part. Go to bed early, because there’s simply nothing to do, and those first few nights, sweat the sheets, which now smell like mangy ass, although I beat the stink back a little with some Febreeze. Thank God my landlord has a gas-powered water heating system, otherwise the smell would have gone straight from moldy ass to outright shit. It’s been like living in a Pink Floyd album, one of those mildly depressed Roger Waters ballads from The Wall, where you hear disjointed sound effects, a wailing child in the distance, a slamming car door, the sound of shuffling feet, and minor chords played dolefully on the piano.

Next morning, get up, shower, shit and shave by flashlight, get the hell out of my apartment, out of Astoria and into Manhattan, where it finally started registering in the newspapers that something was way off in Astoria. It was hard to explain to people at work that I was going home at night to a radically different world that was no fun at all. And it really is depressing to have no power for that long. Never experienced something like this before, but you get these draw-out moments of deep despair, sometimes rage, that really become like mild psychotic episodes. I’m a reasonably sane person, but I can see how you get a bunch of people together going through the same shit, you could easily have a riot on your hands.

All week long, my sweaty clothes piled up in the laundry basket. By Thursday, I’m thinking, if this thing doesn’t blow over by Sunday, and even if it does on Sunday, I’m not going to have clean laundry come next week, be it work-out or work clothes, as the laundromat will be mobbed. And I mean stinking, sweaty summer laundry piled up.

But I noticed something Thursday night. All week long, I made it a point to take a very long walk an hour before sundown, usually down to Astoria Park on the East River, and back. Again, mainly to get out of the apartment. But I did notice that down closer to the park, there were certain blocks that did appear to have power, however limited it may have been. I stopped in at a few delis for Gatorade, which was on the warm side, but these places clearly had some low-level refrigeration going. I didn’t ask if it was gas-generator supplied or not. I didn’t care.

Sure enough, on one of those blocks was a laundromat with an open door. I walked in on Friday night, and there was this old guy in there all by himself. I asked if he was open, he said sure, we got power, we’re open. I asked where everyone was, and he said I don’t know. It didn’t make any sense. This was the only laundromat I had seen open for a few square miles. I asked if he’d be open tomorrow morning. Sure, he said, come on back, I’ll be here.

Well, next morning, I got up, put all my shitty laundry into a soft-shell suitcase, strapped the load on my back, and did my best imitation of the old hobo on the cover of Led Zep IV. I walked 15 street blocks and two avenue blocks with that thing on my back, and sure enough, that great old bastard was there to greet me at 7:00. I knew you’d come back, he said. Thank God you’re open, was all I could say. Again, I got there early because I was certain the place would be mobbed. It wasn’t. I left around 8:30, and it got a little more crowded, but far from a mob scene. I didn’t quite get it. But leaving, I thanked the old guy again, and his response was, ah, go on, just doing what I do every day. But believe me, that guy was a fucking saint. I wouldn’t be surprised to go back there next week and find a vacant lot where a laundromat used to be 50 years ago … a celestial laundromat sent just for me!

One thing I should note about the walk – every two blocks, there were a pair of cops walking the beat, along with a traffic cop in each intersection. Which made me feel pretty good, a shame we can’t have beat cops around all the time. But round about Thursday night, when the media started jumping on the story, that’s when a heavy police presence came in, with vans of cops driving all over the neighborhood dropping off guys for their assignments. I understand the fire departments were kept pretty busy, too, with strange little blackout-induced fires along with the predictable manhole electrical fires as Con Ed crews went to work.

Those bastards showed up around the same time as the cops. Until then … I was walking the streets, thinking, where in the fuck is Con Ed? I might have seen five trucks before Thursday – after which time, there was practically a truck on every corner. It made no sense. What was more important than a total blackout in an urban area encompassing over 100,000 people, thousands of small business, dozens of factories, Rikers prison and a large sewage treatment plant? It was unbelievable how long they took to show up. And when they did … I was lucky to have power after six days.

I didn't know what they’re doing, and I don’t want to know what they did. Whatever it was, it must have been hellish. Reports of exploding manhole covers and such. I saw this happen once a few years ago … a massive explosion followed by the unbelievable sight of a manhole cover flipping 20 feet in the air like a tossed coin, flames blasting out of the hole, the manhole cover hits the street and rolls around like a giant quarter, finally shaking to a stop. You don’t forget a sight like that too soon!

I’d been seeing these guys the past few days, and actually heard one of them Saturday around 5:00 pm tell a neighbor that the power would be back on “real soon.” Well, this put me in a worse frame of mind then before, when six, then seven, then eight rolled around, and there was still no power. I went to bed around 11:00. I was woken around 12:45 am Sunday by the sound of a generator and what could have been a concrete saw. Loud as hell, right outside my window. Once the sound let off, I heard this, in loud, gruff Queens accents:

“What’s the reading on that meter, you fucking moron?”

“88.75. Too low. We better put in 30 more feet of cable, you fucking moron.”

“Got it. I’ll let the guys down on Ditmars know to send more cable up, you fucking moron.”

After each time someone said “you fucking moron,” every other guy, of which there must have been five or six, would laugh uproariously. Eventually, one of the Con Ed crew asked, “Why are you guys calling each other ‘fucking morons’?”

It turns out that one of my neighbors, a cranky old Italian, had heard them working, ran out of her house and called them a bunch of “fucking morons” at the top of her lungs. I know who they were talking about, this wacky old Astoria bat who looks like a midget Ernest Borgnine with size 44D tits pointing magnetic south. Just one of those total nuts who lives around here and makes her presence known. I sort of dread talking to her on the street, because I know I’ll never be able to get rid of her. Generally speaking, any time a woman has more facial hair than I do, that's real bad news.

While I didn’t appreciate how loud these guys were, I was glad as hell they were dealing with electrical shit right next to the house, meaning that the end was probably near. And I could also appreciate the camaraderie, as it meant they had a sense of humor about their lot in life. These guys were simply the rank and file, engaged in a very shitty job, crawling down rat- and sewage-infested holes in the street to untangle yards of fried electric cable and replace it. I wouldn’t call them heroes – they were simply doing their jobs – but by no means would I ever call them fucking morons either. It wasn’t their fault that upper management had dropped the ball on this whole scenario. (Please remember this next time there's a crisis and you get the urge to fuck with the rank and file trying to right the situation. They're not having fun either!)

I sort of dozed off to the pounding of pneumatic drills, which are actually very relaxing when they’re the only sound for miles, and woke up with a start around 4:15 am – to the sound and feel of my fan blowing wind on my body, meaning the power had just come back on. I was in heaven. It was like Christmas morning, the best I had felt all week. Sure enough, it’s been on ever since.

And sure enough, a walk through the neighborhood Sunday afternoon let me know most of the neighborhood is still without power and suffering. A whole lot of complaining, too. I don’t like complaining – it’s a waste of time – but I sure can tolerate it at a time like this. When I was at the laundromat, there was another old guy there, carrying on like a busted chain saw. Blah, blah, blah – those guys in ties sure screwed this one up – blah, blah, blah – don’t care about the little guys like us – blah, blah, blah – don’t need us until there’s a war going on, etc. He was basically painting the truth with a broad brush, but saying it once would have sufficed, and he went on a good half hour, retreading the same thoughts in the same words. Afterwards, I felt like soulfully wailing, "Yeah, yeah, yeah! Little pink houses for you and me!" I noticed this incessant whining a lot in the past few days, and I guess there’s just a comfort in some people to constantly complain and have other people nod their heads in silent agreement. It makes no difference to me. If things suck, I’d rather just deal with them.

What have I learned from all this? That Con Ed is a stereotypically evil corporation who first tried to downplay the truth, dragged ass in terms of dealing with a serious, life-threatening issue and since then, hasn’t done enough to compensate or even assure their customers. It’s borderline evil how they’ve handled this crisis. I’m thinking reaction time more than anything. Why weren’t there all these work crews on the street on Tuesday, when it became obvious that the system was either down or well on its way down for this entire area? What were they waiting for … the power to come back on all by itself?

I’ve also learned what I knew from 9/11, or the last power outage, which, as noted earlier, was a walk in the park compared to this one. And that’s the simple fact that when you get placed in a shit situation, the best you can do is try to maintain some sense of normalcy and move forward the best you can. Shit, I cleaned my apartment on Wednesday night in the dark – dusting and the bathroom. Why not? I got tired of reading by flashlight, realized I could do this without electricity, and got to it. Ditto cleaning out the yard and sidewalk yesterday. You just have to make yourself useful when everything else shuts down. Besides, it was way too hot to masturbate.

It gets worse than what we've been through, but it sure as hell gets a lot better, too. All I know is if you get placed in the same shit situation, in 90-degree weather, with a total runaround in terms of the powers that be speaking any kind of truth, you’re going to be deeply pissed off, and hopefully in a position where you can fend for yourself. What I’ve really learned is the value of electricity, and, people, I’m never going to take that for granted again! If you haven't hugged your fuse box today, think about it.