Heavy Bag Blues

Every now and then, an asshole will show up in one of my boxing classes. Sometimes it will be a guy, but it will just as often be a woman. With guys, you’ll get the hyper-macho jackass who doesn’t know anything about boxing and spends the class pushing the heavy bag with his punches (mark of the novice), shirking the conditioning and walking around with a smug look on his face like all this is beneath him. He rarely shows up again, much to everyone’s relief.

But one of my favorites is the middle-aged woman with an attitude. Usually she’s not that good at boxing either, save that, unfortunately for the rest of us, she’ll show up repeatedly (but never go the distance and become a regular). I had a mild exchange with one the other night in class. The situation was that our instructor was on vacation, and the gym had mistakenly thought he was coming back that day. But I knew that he wasn’t coming back until the next day, which he had told anyone who asked. As a result, there was about a dozen of us standing around at the appointed time, with the gym manager coming in a few minutes later and telling us the situation, and that we could hang around and work-out if we wanted as we (i.e., me) had already hung the bags.

I usually don’t hang around for these situations, because you can get some real bozos in unsupervised sessions. But I had missed Sunday’s class due to the train running late, and I felt the need to hang around and do something. Besides which, one of my boxing pals from Ireland was there for the first time in weeks, and it was nice to chat for awhile. So, half the people left, half stayed, and we all went about our routines, some jumping rope, others doing calisthenics, others hitting the heavy bags. Not as physically demanding as a regular class, but still a reasonable workout.

Towards the end of the class, as I’m merrily pounding a heavy bag, this middle-aged woman walks up to me. I’m willing to bet I’m as old or older than she is, but she looks at least mid-50s. Frumpy, not in good condition. I’ve seen her here before and have noted that she always shows up five to 10 minutes late, the mark of someone who knows the class is front-loaded with harsh, boot-camp style calisthenics and is purposely late to avoid this. Some people do this because they have some type of physical infirmity – a bad knee or back – that prevents them from doing these exercises. I’ve seen a few heavy women do this, too, just because they know that introductory blast of conditioning is too much to handle, and they wisely sit it out. But more often than not, the person is just lazy, not up to it physically, and I wish the instructor would lock the doors and keep horse’s asses like this out of the class, which tends to be over-crowded anyway.

This woman is the latter. Doesn’t appear to be anything wrong her. Is frumpy and egg-shaped, but I’ve seen women with that body type kick ass in these classes. It’s just the way she is, and folks like this usually don’t last, for whatever reason. It’s always a minor annoyance to see them. Remember, this is a group class. As with any other class, you get people clowning around, not taking it seriously, cutting corners, or dragging ass, it has a residual effect on everyone, i.e., I don’t like shitbirds, nor do any of the other regulars.

So, we’re all doing our thing, late in the class, I’m wailing on a heavy bag, really enjoying myself, when she walks over, stops next to me, dead-faced, and exclaims, “You don’t ever throw jabs, do you?”

This is the first time I’ve ever exchanged anything with this woman … and her introduction is a passive-aggressive insult. Even before this … why is she not concentrating on her own workout and instead watching me? And apparently watching me enough to “know” this about me? All I can figure is that you can actually hear me hitting the heavy bag, because I hit hard, when a lot of people in the class, particularly women, don’t hit hard. Which is not an insult. But in my mind, it’s a heavy bag, the object is to pummel the thing as hard and fast as you can. The instructor uses hand pads to perfect combinations. Sparring is for self defense and movement. The heavy bag is for pounding all the shit you have in your system out of it. You have to learn how to cut loose, with near total abandon – and that’s the one crucial thing I see a lot of people in these classes never do. If you never learn to hit hard and fast like that, you’re wasting time. In a real fight? You’re not going to tentatively jab at someone as you would in a boxing match, or score points for well-placed rabbit punches. The heavy bag is the place for you to get in touch with some primal urges. You could be the next bag over, cutting it in half with a chainsaw, and I won’t be paying any attention to you.

And I don’t throw a lot of jabs when I’m on a heavy bag, because the jab is mostly a defensive punch meant to keep an opponent away from you. I have seen guys with unbelievable jabs, and there’s an art form to that; it’s a hard punch to throw anywhere near as effectively as a well-placed hook or upper-cut. Most boxers I see cutting loose on a heavy bag, including the instructor, aren’t over-doing the jab either, because they know they’ll be doing plenty of that in sparring. They’re blasting combinations where the power punches, the cross, hook and upper-cut, come pounding in a lot more frequently … because they’re on a bag, they know this, that they’re hitting an inanimate object, which is not fighting or boxing reality, and the greater lesson here is to learn how to hit hard and fast. On top of all this, most of the bags in the gym are worn out and soft in the jab/upper area of the bag (because that where most people throw their punches as opposed to hitting lower body shots, where the bags tend to be much harder.)

I should have replied, “Why are you watching me?” But I’m in the middle of a workout, sweating profusely, breathing hard because I’m genuinely exerting myself. This woman hasn’t even broken a sweat, and we’ve been working out for close to 40 minutes now. I don’t try to explain anything to her, mainly because I’m insulted that this ass-dragging, out-of-shape, always purposely 10-minutes late d-bag thinks she’s going to tell me anything about boxing. On top of that, in all my years of taking classes, not once have I deigned to drop helpful hints on anyone in any class. Why? Because I’m not the instructor. I see people doing wrong stuff all the time – I’ve already noted what I’ve seen wrong with this woman, and that’s hardly even paying attention to her. It’s none of my business. We’re all there to get a hard workout above all else. I keep that in mind when it comes to lecturing fellow classmates. I just don’t do it – because I recognize what they do, that I’m not an authority figure and in no position to do this.

She then goes on to explain to me how her trainer made her jab for three weeks before he even let her learn any other kind of punch. Huh. For one thing, she needs to get her money back or get a new trainer – that’s the sort of shithead stuff you pull from Rocky movies, he probably had her chasing chickens in an alley, too. For another thing … this bitch has a trainer? Really? The kind of shape she’s in, she can’t even fully function in a group boxing class, and she’s telling me she has a trainer? Generally, when you get a trainer, spending hundreds of dollars for individual instruction, the one benefit, no matter what else happens, is that you get yourself into phenomenal physical condition. It’s part of the deal with individualized instruction. In the past, particularly on weekends in the summer, my instructor would occasionally get me in the gym one-on-one, and those were “point of physical collapse” style workouts since the instructor could concentrate solely on me, dotting every “i” with the calisthenics and working hard on every combination and bag session. If I worked out like that all the time, forget it, I’d be in astonishing physical condition. Not this frumpy, egg-shaped being in front of me. She’s either lying about the trainer, or she might have meant her trainer years ago … when she gave up after three months and started boxing again recently to get “her fire” back.

I had every right to tell this woman to go fuck herself – even if she knew what she was talking about, which she didn’t – but instead I mumbled a few things, yeah, you’re right, I don’t jab so much on the heavy bag. But I’m so annoyed by this nosey jackass that I move to the other side of the bag and ignore her. She has her boxing gloves on. At this point, a few people have peeled off, and she could have her own bag. I’m not sure what possessed her to walk over and give unsolicited advice to someone light years beyond her skill level. She keeps mumbling about her instructor, blah blah blah, importance of the jab, blah blah blah, you’re not doing it right. She has a sour look on her face the whole time. All this is dropped in a condescending tone, as if she was a master of the form doing me a favor, which only underlines to me how deranged her view of the world must be. After awhile, she realizes I’m not listening and saunters away. I’ve learned that’s the only way you can handle people like this: ignore them. I’m not sure what sort of delusional garbage passes through someone’s mind when they do something like that … this is the mark of a person with her head completely up her ass.

This would have been like me going up to a Golden Gloves champ in the middle of his workout and telling him he was doing something wrong. In which case, the guy probably would have kicked my ass, or at least made a very bad scene over someone on a much lower skill level trying to tell him what to do. You just don’t do shit like that! It’s tactless; it’s a mediocre mind not seeing reality. What I’m thinking? She just doesn’t like me! She hears me wailing on a bag, has her attention drawn to me, while she slowly and daintily practices her robotic, predictable combinations, feels insulted in some sense, and thus feels some hoary need to inject herself into my situation … like I’m going to listen to her when I've routinely seen how negligent she is in terms of determination, punctuality, conditioning, simple abilities, etc.?

Of course, I hope this woman never shows up again, but she will. Always 10 minutes late. Standing off to the side, staring into space while the rest of us get run ragged on wind sprints or nasty squat-thrust pushups. I can’t recall when she started showing up, but I gather it wasn’t until the past year or so. Seen her type before, will see her type again, and next time, she might very well be a he … same difference. And I’ll probably be cordial to her if she starts up again with her gibberish. Why? Because I know she won’t be there a few months from now – the greatest lesson I’ve learned from a decade of boxing and applied to life. Bullshit artists don’t last.

The Pyramid Scheme That Wasn't

There are so few “legendary” events in our adult personal lives, the kind of which happen routinely when we were kids. There are obvious things, like weddings, funerals, births, etc. Monumental events like 9/11 and natural disasters. But comparatively few of those sort of situations that we’d end up turning into legends as kids: fist fights, first drunks, dozens of weird, memorable moments related to school, etc. Most of adult life is rote work and responsibility – at least mine is.

But every now and then, something happens that you know you’ll be talking about years later. Such an instance occurred with my high-school friends T and J about 15 years ago, had to be early/mid 90s. J was infamous for getting us all into bizarre adventures that we’d curse him for at the time, but somehow knew these things would be shaggy-dog stories one day, and understood this almost immediately.

But this one was T’s doing. T was married to his first wife for a few years at that point, in his mid-20s, with a son and two stepsons. I knew things were rocky when I saw a hole in the paneling of his living-room wall and was informed that his wife had thrown a full beer can at him and missed. This was a bit of a shock to me, as I was just starting my tenure in New York City, and their marriage ceremony was fresh in my mind, a grandiose church affair, huge party at a local hall afterwards. That stuff is one thing, and the day-to-day reality of marriage is another. And sometimes there’s a hole in the living-room wall with a story to tell.

That marriage would peter out a few years later, but at the time, T was married, with kids, working in a more-managerial position at a company in a town about an hour north of our home area, where he had started as an engineer. Making so-so money. (He’s now making great money, especially for back there, but also seems to be under enormous pressure, too.)

T and J were always scheming ways to make more money in their lives. Money was a burning issue between both, a competition of sorts, although neither would have admitted it. To a certain extent, many things were a competition between them. I recall vague stories of measuring penises and such … must have phoned in sick that day … but in that event, J was hung like a horse, T not so much, so I guess that one didn’t pan out so well. It was often my duty to referee when they got too nuts with each other … assuming I wasn’t too busy getting nuts with one or the other. They were much closer friends than I was with either one separately, but prone to fighting much more as a result, as that sense of competition influenced nearly every part of their lives.

One summer, I came back for a visit, and T told both J and I that he had something special planned for us that Friday night. We had no idea what this meant. A strip club? We were going to get laid? Something wild? This was the vibe J and I got from T talking up what we were going to do that Friday. He picked us up at sundown in his VW Rabbit, still blaring Van Halen from his Big Brute speakers, as was the case when we were teenagers a few years earlier.

We drove through the summer night, the sense of expectation growing. We were heading north, towards Danville, a town which was not in our normal driving area. T pulled up the Rabbit in front of a Best Western hotel that seemed pretty crowded. It was a very strange crowd. Half of it was bikers. I don’t mean Hells Angels, but more scraggly, unkempt, chunky middle-aged guys in full biker regalia (leather chaps, denim vests with no shirt underneath, chrome nazi helmets, etc.), hanging out around the entrance and at the bar inside. The other half was guys in tuxedos and women in gowns. It looked as if the hotel was double-booked for a well-to-do wedding reception and biker rally. Both parties were unrelated and clearly couldn’t stand each other. What in the hell were bikers doing hanging out at a Best Western hotel? It was like some bad 80s video ... we were waiting for Night Ranger to come rocking out of the men's room.

T calls out, ‘Hey, Fred, hey, I’m here!” We see a nebbish middle-aged guy in wire-framed glasses and a collared shirt and khakis wave back and walk over to T. Fred looked like the kind of guy who would hang out at a hotel bar, hoping for homely women to get too drunk to notice how meek he was, and then go back for a romp in their room. There was something mildly off about him. What kind of person hangs out at a hotel bar? Not me! Not us! Immediately, J and shot each other a deep “what the fuck” look.

“Ah, you brought your friends, good, good,” Fred said, “unfortunately, it’s total chaos in here tonight, didn’t know there was so much stuff going on here. Where can we go to talk?”

Talk? What on earth were we going to talk about with this guy? I started getting stink-eye from J, believing that T had somehow guided us to a weirdo or pervert of some sort … visions of us waking up in one of the hotel rooms, in a bathtub filled with bloody ice, and a bad stitch job where one of our kidneys used to be.

Well, we were right about the “weirdo” part. Fred formally introduced himself … as a sales rep for Amway. Motherfucker! T had somehow fallen under the spell of an Amway salesman, and was looking to bring us into the scheme. This is something J and I would have never gone for … and I think T knew this by being so cryptic in how he framed the night’s events, keeping us in anticipation of what we were heading up to Danville for.

“Say, I noticed a McDonalds across the parking lot, let’s go there instead,” Fred said cheerily.

I was going to spend a good chunk of Friday night, in my mid-20s bar-hopping prime, sitting in a fucking McDonalds, listening to an Amway salesman’s pitch. I tell myself that these days, I would have just blurted out, “No, no, this ain’t going to happen,” but keep in mind, T was driving, and we were about 45 minutes from home, i.e., if we got weird on him and he responded in kind, we could conceivably have a very bad night thumbing it. It just didn’t seem right to offend T on this topic anyway, as he seemed to genuinely believe this guy was somehow going to enrich his life. It wasn’t as bad as T having a Born Again experience he wanted to share with us, but it was still pretty mind-blowing.

So, we walked over to that McDonalds, got some burgers and fries, and Fred went into his pitch. At this point, the whole thing was so absurd, I couldn’t make eye contact with J, lest we both burst out into unstoppable laughter. We felt like dicks, sitting in a fast-food restaurant, while a librarian-looking middle-aged man went into his expansive “let’s get rich quick together by selling worthless shit” scheme, the first step of which was buying his start-up kit of “how to sell effectively” tapes and various PowerPoint documents illustrating the path to success.

Fred was sitting awkwardly in one of those McDonalds swivel chairs, lecturing the three of us in a window booth. It just looked weird, especially on a weekend night. Kids were pointing at us and laughing. Of course kids were hanging out there – this is what kids do in small towns, hang out at fast-food places. J and I were dressed in t-shirts and shorts – T had anticipated the mild formality of the even and had on a short-sleeve knit shirt. I guess when you sell Amway, you adapt to any situation. This guy had probably sold Amway in topless bars and church basements. A McDonalds made as much sense to him as any place else.

Fred’s whole spiel, and he talked nonstop, was the usual horseshit – drop a few hundred bucks on his training materials (obviously how he made most of his money) and then start attending seminars where you, too, could unlock the secrets of success. The whole idea was to rope all your friends into buying and selling cheap Amway products. That’s all it was. Avon calling. Only Avon had a niche – cosmetics – while Amway was all over the place. Think Tupperware parties. I could understand the logic of grouping people together to buy one type of product. But Amway just seemed like the worst sort of horseshit sell, the concept that we were all going to be millionaires by exploiting our friends into buying and selling this utter garbage.

Fred got done his spiel, and immediately blurts out, well, where should I send the learning materials. Like any good salesman – closing the sale metaphorically when he senses the people he’s talking to think he’s an asshole. J got into it a bit with Fred, picking over his logic and points. Man, I just sat there stewing. T was already into the program, had put money down on the learning materials and such, already signed up for a seminar. J made the mistake of trying to engage this con artist in a real conversation, and all he got were circular replies to his real questions. No one asked me what I thought – I gather Fred picked up on the negative vibes I was emanating and figured just let that one go.

The kicker came when we finished up our Big Macs and headed back to the hotel parking lot. Fred made a big show out of his car – I can’t recall what it was, surely some type of luxury vehicle. He beeped open the trunk, an in it was a fishing rod that cost him a few hundred dollars. I guess he figured that since we were in a rural area, we were rednecks and into fishing. T was, but not J or I. He took out the rod and mimicked fly casting over the parking lot, inviting us on a fishing trip he had planned next day in the Susquehanna.

He already had T – hook, line and sinker – but he sensed J and I were lost causes. I later told J I had pondered the possibility of kicking Fred’s ass and stuffing him in the trunk of his car. We weren’t going to do anything, much less go fly-fishing, with this guy. From the second we met him until we bid adieu with his fishing rod in hand, J and I had felt nothing but radical discomfort. You have to understand, this guy’s whole spiel was based solely on the concept of making truckloads of money. It was a pure, unabashed advertisement for greed – every sentence finished with a reminder over how much money we would make (and we surely wouldn’t … he might if he hustled enough mooks in this fashion).

Having lived in New York a few years at that time, I found myself unimpressed by greed – still do, even more so now. I wasn’t impressed by garish displays of financial power – wasn’t repulsed either. It just never mattered to me. The rich people I sometimes worked for didn’t seem overly happy – many of them seemed much worse off than the middle/working-class people I’d always known. Less happy. Less sane. Less healthy. If there were a few things I was certain of, it was that their lives were no better than mine, and that I didn’t envy them. It seemed like a lot of work to keep up appearances, and very few opportunities to genuinely relax.

Most working-class people I’d known sat around fantasizing what it would be like “to be rich” … never quite realizing they’d go on being the same people, only with more problems generated by their increased income. We have this illusion that financial security exists in our lives – it just doesn’t for most people. And for the ones it does, as noted, their lives are not fantasy worlds of happiness and pure delight. People who live in mansions are always “on” in some sense – how you relax in a house filled with assistants and servants, I have no idea. Your whole life is geared towards maintaining that façade. Not kicking back after work in a tank top and shorts, with a beer, listening to the Dead, or what have you. You do that in a mansion, people think you've turned into Howard Hughes and start looking at the length of your fingernails.

How do you explain this to an Amway salesman in a McDonald’s parking lot, who reeks of “dick” but has himself convinced he’s got the world by the tail because of the things he owns? In short, you don’t. You just recognize that this is the guy’s thing in life, more power to him, and let him go off spinning in that wondrous constellation of seminars filled with easy marks who will end up unhappy, but only after he’s fleeced them for a few hundred bucks a piece. The difference between Fred and me was I knew I didn’t have the world by the tail – that it had me by the tail and the best I could do was try to make sense of the insanity around me. You don’t sell people when you see the world that way – you just live in it.

We said good night, T chatting a little longer with Fred to make sure all was cool with the next week’s seminar, and J and I finally got off on our own and started howling with laughter. Fred probably heard us … again, there was nothing new under the sun for the guy with his sales pitch, hell, he’d probably been physically attacked after giving his pitch, so a few 24-year-old guys laughing at him in a parking lot was no big deal.

When T got us back in his rabbit, he was a little angry with us, but he just wasted two hours of our lives on this horse’s ass salesman, and if anyone should be angry here, it should be us. But we weren’t really angry, probably because we sensed the insanity of the situation and rode with it. Actually, we started mercilessly haranguing T with the little self-help aphorisms and sayings Fred had sprinkled through his pitch, laughing uproariously after each bon mot. T wasn’t taking it well, and I knew not to ride him too hard. There was an instance in high school where he got the world’s worst haircut, literally a bowl cut, that left him looking like Moe from The Three Stooges. That day, I harassed him endlessly with Stooges riffs, making Curly “nook-nook-nook” sounds, doing that finger-popping/hand waving routine they would do before slapping each other upside the head. The kicker came when I started singing “The Alphabet Song” from one of their episodes (“Bah-aye-bay, Bay-ee-bee/ Bay-eye-bippie-bye-bye-boh-boo.”) T eventually flipped out and started punching me in the arm, which was excruciating.

I knew not to get the guy stewing, and he was stewing that J and I thought Fred was a complete asshole … which implied even worse for him if he was following Fred. As it turned out, we were right. T took the seminars, dropped another few hundred bucks into Fred’s pocket, started trying to sell Amway to his friends, immediately realized they resented being sold to, as any friend would, probably made a little money, but far less than he had invested in Fred, and gave the whole thing up a few weeks later. I don’t know how he didn’t grasp what J and I did immediately – that you would have to see your friends as potential customers – and this was not kosher. You don’t exploit your friends. You don’t see them as avenues for you to make money. I take that back – there are plenty of people in New York who do nothing but network, and everyone in their lives falls in that category of “how can this person help me.” But they have no real friends, which will become painfully obvious when the chips are down in some sense. I use the word “mercenary” a lot in New York because it applies.

We didn’t hold it against T because we knew he’d meant no harm. We had to play it cool that night, but we would later laugh about how he was led astray by the Amway salesman and his pyramid scheme. I’m not sure what people think when they have these schemes laid on them by enterprising salesman. Either you have a strong set of values in life before that, which may very well include pursuing monetary wealth, or you seem to expect this person to grant you a new set of values that allows you to make truckloads of money, like they’re introducing you to a new, better belief system than the one you had. They’re not. They’re hustling you. But I guess capitalism is built on that sort of “pie in the sky” hustle, and always will be.

The Computer Still Wears Tennis Shoes

Just returned from a mid-summer trip to Pennsylvania, which was bracketed by two strange sightings. A few years back, I wrote a story about a well-meaning nut who was roaming the earth as a Christ-like figure to spread The Word, and how that particularly related to the Coal Region where I was raised and he was spending some real time. You can find the story here, still on the Leisuresuit.net website. In that story I mention Buddy, the odd local still roaming the back roads and highways of the same area, and the strange, sometimes violent circumstances of his life.

Well, this trip, I saw Christ and Buddy. I don’t think this was whatsyourname. But the day I came back, the bus was driving through Tamaqua around 7:30 on a late June evening, that “golden sunset” time where everything glows. A guy dressed like Christ was on the street – thin, early 30s, long dirty blonde hair, beard, white robe, sandals, throwing his arms out wide and laughing as a crowd of senior citizens applauded. The bus driver gave me a “what the fuck” look, and I explained what I knew of the previous Christ imitator – like I said, this didn’t look like him. But I guess the concept must have caught on, and frankly, if you’re going to imitate someone, why not Christ. Or a guy who thinks he's Christ.

Buddy, I saw this time just outside of Tamaqua on the Sunday morning bus heading back to New York. Naturally, he was thumbing it, with that big shock of red hair, a goofy grin on his face. He made that honking motion with his right arm to get the bus driver to blow his horn, and the driver obliged, causing Buddy to clap his hands. Buddy looked like he had put on a few pounds since I last remember seeing him about eight years ago, but god damn, if he still isn’t out there thumbing it every day. Some things never change back there.

Sandwiched between all that, the madness of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett dying on the same day. Fawcett, I found out about early afternoon, but Jackson, I had gone out to have dinner with an old friend, and the restaurant was ablaze with the news that the King of Pop had expired. It’s been a landslide of Jackson news ever since, really disturbing, too. I guess my issue with Jackson, beyond the weirdness which is irrelevant, is that most of his music just doesn’t hold up to legendary status. Sure, the hype and image do, the methodical creation of style over substance he worked to an art form back in the 80s. The guy was a tremendous showman, no way around that. I recall the hype and self aggrandizement he generated being beyond belief and truly sickening at the time. Once a musician dies, and the hype wears off, only the music remains.

And the music just wasn’t that good after awhile. His best stuff, far and away, was with the Jackson 5, when he was a kid and had very little control over his creative choices. I can always go back to these songs and find unassuming greatness. But as he went along as an adult, he kept growing more slick as an artist, to the point where the music was meaningless, just a backdrop for him to dance to onstage and in videos, which occurred simultaneously with the advent of MTV. Welcome to the new age … because that became the formula for so much of soul/urban music from the 80s onward. Jackson, and surely Madonna as well, were the first to usher in that sense of style over substance. And it's been all downhill ever since: they were the best of the bunch, and their music was, and is, mediocre for the most part. The music industry started dying for real when this shift was made in popular music in the 1980s.

The guy worshipped James Brown, who brought the whole package, like a monkey wrench upside your head. I’ve been listening to a lot of James Brown lately, especially his live material, and he made a great case for style and substance. Even the way he screamed and grunted made some type of profound sense. But I’m hearing a lot of Michael Jackson on VH-1 and the radio and such, and the songs just aren’t there. “Billie Jean” and “Black and White” are about the only songs I can hack from his adult life – there are a whole slew of others that aren’t bad … but just aren’t that good either. (And there's stuff like "Man in the Mirror" and "We Are the World" that are utter shite.) I’d feel a lot better about this Elvis-like mania surrounding his death if he actually had the musical chops to back it up. I just aint hearing it! Somebody like Prince passing on would hit me harder. Granted, the guy hasn’t put out anything great in decades, but he has put out enough challenging music to register as a musical force above and beyond any style issues. (August Darnell, of Kid Creole & the Coconuts fame, put out as much great music as Prince and Jackson combined ... but no one gives a shit about this guy these days!)

It was just a weird few days for me this time of year, that particular death pushing me back to an early 70s time frame … and then stumbling upon some cool Disney movies at the local Walmart, in particular, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and The Strongest Man in the World, both starring a very young Ken Russell. Both staples of my early 70s childhood film experiences, seeing them at the then-decrepit Roxy Theater in Ashland, which was on its last legs and felt like it. For some reason, I distinctly remember seeing The Legend of the Boggy Creek Monster, The Jungle Book and Song of the South there – the latter two because they had the audience singing along and clapping, and the first because it scared the shit out of me. I still suspect if I had to spend any time near Texarkana, I’d be on the lookout for that furry manbeast creature.

In regards to the Russell flicks, I had already made a copy of The World’s Greatest Athlete (starring Jan Michael Vincent) from my cable system in New York, and thus was already in that mind frame to appreciate that early 70s Disney vibe. And it’s a good one. I find all these movies fun to watch – they’ve held up well despite being incredibly dated. Although I have to wonder what college campus Russell was on in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes … every kid in that movie has a reasonable haircut and seems more like a wholesome 50s teenager than an early 70s college student. Remember, this was the age of Kent State, hippies, drugs, Woodstock and such. But I’m sure Walt Disney himself stiff-armed any such concepts appearing in his movies, which makes sense. Besides which, I somehow suspect that if I could get in a time capsule and go back to 1971 or so on a college campus, the environment would probably be a bit more sedate and button-downed than the radical hippie utopia I have built up in my mind. I’m always meeting people in NYC office work who were college students around that time and were decidedly NOT hippies in any overwhelming sense.

About all I didn’t do back there this visit was find old video footage of Karen Valentine in Room 222 and Julie Newmar as Catwoman in the Batman TV series to masturbate over. I can just about guarantee you, the first few hundred erections I had in my life could be attributed to those two: those “roll over and cover my crotch with a pillow, because I’m pitching a mean tent in my footed pajamas” sort of woodies you can only get when you’re eight or nine and not really sure why that’s happening, but know you have to hide it.

I don’t know why, but deep summer is that one time of year I can go back to that part of Pennsylvania and have a more clear connection with the past. I’d guess this is because nostalgia ties in with focusing on good memories, and most kids have good memories of summer, even if that only means not being in school. Thus, adults relate more good memories to summer than the season truly deserves. It also underlines to me how oddly disconnected you become from your past when you move to another place and live there a long time. For me, it’s a blast to drive down all those all roads and re-connect myself to where I’m from. If you still live there, have always lived there and never left? I’d imagine it’s a much less romantic view of the place. I wouldn’t even call my view romantic. But when I go off on a long morning run on a back road through woods and farmlands, it’s a night-and-day experience from where I’d been only 24 hours earlier, i.e., dodging packs of annoying tourists on Broadway and fully immersed in that much quicker/more alert city life.

City life is good in that way: keeps you on your toes. Best to have your head on straight, lest you enjoy being taken advantage of. Gets tiresome sometimes, especially when you’ve run across more than your fair share of wolves and assholes, so it’s always good to get away to a place where they’re less plentiful. I’ve seen urban dwellers put forth about how great the city is in terms of setting yourself free in some sense, but from what I’m gathering about life, if you don’t have balls enough to be yourself anywhere, in any circumstance, that stance is pretty much bullshit, and will go on being such until you learn to be yourself at all times. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve underlined that basic tenet of life, but it’s not so easy to follow at times. I guess I’m veering off in this direction because I came across a website that had a few gay guys carrying on about the Gay Pride Parade this past weekend in New York, and that seemed like a basic thread in their musings. Man, there’s always someone who’s going to hate you for no good reason, whoever you are, wherever you go. You’re not living for those people, if you’re smart. The idea that “homophobic rednecks” are keeping you from being yourself is utter bullshit – only one person can keep you from being yourself. (And if you know city life like I do, you’re just as likely to run across packs of homophobic jackasses who will throw a scare into gay folks as hard as any rednecks in a rural bar would.)

The lines are more blurred now between here and there, although I can still clearly and easily feel the difference in that long bus ride, from one place to another. But I find that coming and going aren’t as shocking as they once were, there’s not that sense of letting my breath out when I get back to the country, or tightening my game when I get back here. I guess I’m just “on” all the time in the sense of being aware of other people and how they act, maybe because I’ve noticed more boorish, trashy assholes walking around back home in the past few years, and had just as many unexpectedly nice experiences in the city that are as genuine as anything you’d find in a small town. I can tell when I’m around good people, and when I’m around shitheads, and I avoid shitheads, no matter where I’m at. Are you writing all this down? Words to live by here!

Soul

Yesterday at the gym, I experimented with the concept of not using my iPod while hitting the weights circuit. I always feel like I’m missing out on something in the gym by wearing headphones, as I well know from my boxing class, where people interact and get to know each other. Well, nothing really happened. Like most people, I’m there to work out above all else, not to meet people. Weightlifting, like the cardio machines, is not a group exercise: you’re on your own.

But what really struck me, as I’m also well aware of via the too-loud PA system in the locker room, was how god awful their music is. I’d gather that as a gym chain, they’re using some prescribed service aimed at their marketing demo (which I’m assuming is 25 to 40, although with an emphasis on 25 as people want to feel “younger” when they work out). Their version of classic rock is No Doubt, Creed and The Goo-Goo Dolls. But a vast majority of what they play is Top 40 pop music, leaning towards club/dance music, erased of hiphop to avoid bad words. It really sucks – the music isn’t awful, per se. It’s just bland, limp, totally devoid of creativity or substance. Top 40 now is worse than ever, and from the 70s onwards, it’s been pretty bad in general.

Soul-less. That’s the quality occurred to me most. I always thought it would be a great idea for gyms to allow the membership to upload MP3 files into their sound system, like a jukebox for people as they work out, chosen by the people. But I gather doing so would be a licensing nightmare and nigh on impossible. Take my word for it – the ear buds are going back in next time I hit the weight circuit! If I make eye contact with some hottie on the seated bench press machine, just write it down to a nice moment while I listen to The Beatles, or Hank Williams, or Chuck Berry, or Supertramp, or The Ramones.

Or any number of other great artists who will never be on the gym P.A. system. Like Otis Redding. I’ve been on a bit of an Otis kick the past few days, tracking down missing songs from his canon that I have mostly covered with a Rhino four-disc box set. It’s got me thinking I need to re-vamp my abbreviated 60s Soul output on the iPod, as I had originally played it very close to the vest when uploading tracks on my more space-limited Nomad player.

I think it would also make a nice read to describe how I got into soul music in the first place, since I wasn’t raised with that appreciation, to say the least. White kids in rural America in the 70s were pretty much into pop and rock music, and nothing else. Soul music was around us, but I remember that being more of a Top 40 singles thing as opposed to a deep, abiding appreciation. Stevie Wonder stands out in my mind. You couldn’t avoid hearing multiple songs from Songs in the Key of Life when it first came out, and for two years after. I somehow willed myself not to like it (while later realizing the guy was a genius, and this was his crowning moment). That horn-section intro to “Sir Duke” … you play that now, and I think summer 70s.

Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Barry White … all these artists were going full gun in the first half of the 70s. Including Wonder, the only physical product I had at the time from any of them was the 45 of “Got to Give It Up (Pt. 1)” by Gaye, and White grumbling the romantic intro to “Kiss and Say Goodbye” by The Manhattans. White artists like The Bee Gees registered with songs like “Jive Talkin” and “Nights on Broadway.” It’s important to mention them, because with the dawn of disco, unfortunately for dumb kids with zero sense of history, that sense of soul music being tied in with that format sort of killed the idea of appreciating soul music in any form for a LONG time afterwards.

Which was a shame, but I think that’s a fair assessment, and not entirely racist. Disco got to be pretty disgusting, pretty fast. Not so much the music itself, more so the sense of lifestyle and party-guy emptiness tied in with it. Its presence was smothering. And all these great soul artists had a choice – veer in that direction or fade away. So disco, in effect, did co-opt soul music, roundabout the mid-70s. (You can argue that Barry White always was disco, but I’d put him more in category of very tasteful, inventive disco, like a lot of it was before it became such a massive cultural phenomenon.) You can see the same culturally stifling shift with hiphop, which has decimated other strains of “black” music in terms of popularity in an extremely negative, empty way. My age-old gripe, of course, was disco lasted less than a handful of years while hiphop has had a stranglehold for close to two decades. To someone who was raised with the concept of pop music culture shifting every few years, this sort of creative stasis is mystifying, and depressing. (I gave up on all this shit by 1995, when it became obvious major record companies were pile-driving hiphop and not looking for any new growth areas, save shitty boy bands and pop idols. We’ve been in that same grotesque mid-90s doldrums ever since.)

But getting back to soul music, I had very little knowledge of it as a kid. Again, as noted, singles. “The Bertha Butt Boogie” by The Jimmy Castor Bunch. “Jungle Boogie” by Kool and the Gang. Even early disco like “Doctors Orders” by Carol Douglas. Stuff like that registered, but 60s soul? I think Motown was the most prevalent at the time, but that was pretty much played only on Oldies stations, despite being only a decade (or less) old. I think my first stirrings with soul came with buying a huge Motown singles box set in my freshman year of college, which would be 1982. The one Motown song that would always slay me when I heard it on the radio was “I Can’t Help Myself” by The Four Tops – eventually realized that I just had to have it. I recall that box set being incredibly cheap for what it offered – dozens of Motown hits.

It was cheap for a reason: all the songs were ruined by “historical” spoken-word intros by DJs and the artists that spilled into the first minute of each song. It was fucking terrible … but I could still recognize how great the music was. In my mind, I used that box set as a bookmark, figuring that one day I’d buy this stuff again without those shitty introductions (and I surely did … a few times over on vinyl and CD). When I went to Penn State’s main campus for my junior year, the used bins at the time had those incredible two-album Motown artist retrospectives, and that’s where I got the full blast of Motown, picking up sets by The Four Tops, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross & the Supremes, etc. I bought those things like candy, and they were great.

This might be embarrassing to admit, but my real immersion into soul music came with a John Hughes movie: Pretty in Pink. If you recall, there was a scene where Ducky, the nerd played by Jon Cryer, dances around a record store to the tune of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” I was floored … not by Cryer, but by the song. I had no idea it was a classic covered by many artists from the Big Band era on. (And I can only imagine how revolutionary Otis’ version must have sounded at the time.) I rushed down to the nearest record store, which was the shitty National Record Mart chain on the main drag, and stumbled upon a greatest hits package for Otis in the shit bin for $3.00. I spent the rest of that week burning that song in particular into my brain.

That kicked open the doors to that great Atlantic Rhythm & Blues series that came out in two-album volumes covering the entire 60s. I’ve found the series was released just before this time period for me (late 1985/early 1986), but now that I was aware of what I was missing out on, I jumped in head first, spending all my money on nothing but them and various Motown compilations. It’s safe to say that the first half of 1986, I listened to nothing but soul music, and most of it was revelatory, stuff I had never heard before that simply blew my doors off.

It was my habit to buy one of those Atlantic sets a week, record the whole thing to cassette, and if I was driving back home that week (a two-hour drive on a Friday night), blast that as I barreled through the woods lining Route 80 all the way. I don’t know if that’s the best way to appreciate soul music, but it worked wonders for me, with a 7-11 Cherry Coke Big Gulp between my legs and the wind whipping through the windows. I drove a yellow AMC Hornet station wagon: badass.

Can’t say too many people shared my enthusiasm! Most of my college friends were headlong into indie music, which was a huge college thing at the time (still is, I’m sure). My old friend PG from the paper did have a pretty solid soul collection, but mainly because she was older and actually bought those records when she was a teenager in the late 60s. Back home? Man, forget it. I think Brother J developed an appreciation for the harder-edge soul songs like “Soul Man” and “Mustang Sally,” but most of it didn’t register with anyone back there.

The oddest connection I made with soul music came one New Years Eve in the late 80s, I’m thinking 12/31/86. Having recently returned from Venice, CA with my tail between my legs, an aborted attempt to strike out on my own, but things just didn’t go well out there, staying with recent college friends on the verge of dumping each other. I was surely at loose ends that winter, the employment situation being awful in rural PA. It wouldn’t be until that fall that I’d move to NYC and get a new start – that period when college ends and your adult life really hasn’t begun can be a genuinely spooky time, or at least was for me.

I had no plans for New Years Eve (which I’ve since realized is the best plan), so neighbor JB put forth that we head out to the Millman’s house out the road, as he’d been invited to a small get-together there. I knew Mr. Millman’s kids, a guy a year behind me at school who was a nice kid, and his two daughters who were slightly older than I was, both hot. I knew Mr. Millman himself from my Little League days, as he coached his son’s team and seemed like a good guy in general, one of the more rational, friendly coaches.

So, we drove out there, and Mr. Millman greeted us at the door … in a prison guard uniform. I had no idea the guy worked at the local federal prison that had just opened up. His being a Little League coach, and a respectable one at that, had conditioned me to seeing him as a staunch authority figure. Which I’ve since learned isn’t a hard number to run on kids. If you are an adult, and you act like one, kids will treat you as one. But … the dude was a prison guard? Man, it made no sense. On top of which, I had a mental image of prison guards being large, nasty guys with attitudes. Mr. Millman was one of the nicest guys you could ever meet, and well under six feet and trim. I’d have expected him to be a guidance counselor, or insurance agent, or something like that.

“Yeah, got double shift at the prison starting at midnight, come on in, guys,” he said with a smile. I should have guessed Mr. Millman wasn’t some executive type just by his house, which was your average small two-story place that must have felt cramped with five people in it. We came in, and his two daughters were there with their boyfriends, along with a few other guys I knew from high school, but wasn’t really friends with. It wasn’t an awkward night, although it was strange to learn that a kid who had positioned himself as a bad boy in school made a batch of toll house cookies that was pretty good. With their father there, the girls were on good behavior. Alcohol consumption was reduced to a few beers, a few glasses of wine. I’ve surely had worse New Years – this one was sedate and pleasant in an odd way.

The night was moving right along when Mr. Millman excused himself and went into the next room. The whole time, he was in his prison guard’s uniform, not sure why he got dressed hours before his shift started. I heard the telltale ker-chunk of an eight track tape being popped into a player. Believe me, that’s a sound I haven’t heard in years, but must have heard thousands of times in the early 80s. Seconds later, it was Otis Redding singing “I Can’t Turn You Loose.” Jesus Christ, that was the last thing I had expected visiting a prison guard in rural Pennsylvania. Then I thought about it. Mr. Millman must have been in his early 20s in the late 60s, so this could have easily been “his music” from that time.

The girls looked at each, than ran off into the other room. I looked in. These two hot girls, a few years out of high school, were dancing with their father in his prison guard uniform, to Otis Redding. And I mean cutting loose, doing all those 60s dances: the Mashed Potato, Hully Gully, The Bird, The Pony, etc. They knew them all. And I could see they had their moves down, i.e., Mr. Millman must have raised his kids teaching them these dances and giving them an appreciation for 60s soul music. And that’s pretty damn interesting, for a guy whose lot in life was to be a prison guard, in a place where, I can guess fairly accurately, there must have been times he popped in that eight track and got, “Get that nigger music off the stereo” in reply.

It was a cool little moment that’s stuck with me years later. I remember him waving me over to dance, and I blew it off, mainly because I didn’t know how, and I didn’t want either of the boyfriends, both former badasses, getting uptight about me. But those three stayed in that room the rest of the night, winding it out to Otis, and I guess that’s a pretty good way to ring in any new year. Of course, Mr. Millman would later put on his tie, grab his hat, and drive through the snowy night to the federal prison to pull his shifts. But such was his spirit that you could meet him after the shifts, and he’d no doubt be just as friendly and open as he always was.

I’ve since realized that there wasn’t a lot of difference between soul and country back in the 60s. Sure, the fast/dancing songs were different, but when you listen to the ballads, the types of music are very similar, in ways that I find encouraging. And in ways that no longer seem to exist, once hiphop flooded over everything and demanded a sharp turn towards all things black as opposed to sharing any kind of common ground with more white musical influences. A real shame, but that’s how the times went, even when disco rolled around. I recall reading a passage in a book where the few white musicians in the Stax/Volt studios in Memphis tried to walk around the neighborhood after Martin Luther King was assassinated, they could feel something was way off, and their presence was no longer welcome there. So maybe it goes back even that far, to the death of the 60s in some sense with cataclysmic events like that. A real shame, but as I learned that New Year’s Eve back in the mid-80s, and in my own life as I grew to love 60s soul, all was not lost.

The Phillies T-Shirt

I don’t have kids, and that’s a real mixed bag. I can plainly see people having a blast with their kids and can recall many cool moments from my own childhood. But once you get into teenage years, it seems like every kid is a dice roll, and you’ll often find snake eyes and seven in the same family, sometimes the same kid over the span of a few years. It’s occurred to me more recently that one of the ulterior motives in having kids could be having someone to take care of (or at the least watch out for) you in your old age. But from what I’m seeing, that’s far from a given, and you run equal chances of being shunted off to a nursing home, with the requisite awkward quarterly visits, or simply resented for not batting a thousand with your kids.

It must be like anything else in life: not what you expected, in good and bad ways. I have two friends now going through stressful situations with their almost-grown sons, which I will not get into to avoid embarrassing them, suffice to say it’s all shit no one planned on and a load to deal with for each. Hard stuff that represents a sharp, hazardous turn in their lives they’re going to have to take to move forward, and no one knows where that new road is going.

There’s one thing I’ve gleaned from their problems: kids, more specifically teenagers, tend to be fucking idiots. There, I said it. Makes me crotchety and old? So be it. When I’m made aware of the arrogance and stupidity that some kids walk around with, the kind that would get me killed or shunned like the plague as an adult, I just shake my head and hope it’s a maturity issue that will be out-grown one day. I know it’s not an “old age” issue, because I can clearly remember my friends and I being just as idiotic and immature.

We’ve constructed this shrine to youth in our culture, which has to be about the most empty thing we’ve done in my lifetime: empty because the building of it has entailed painting the act of aging as a crime, when most sane cultures throughout history recognize it as a good thing, at a minimum. I’ve recognized it in my own life. I wouldn’t call it getting better. But I’ve found that if I keep my eyes open and try to make sense of the things going on around me, generally based on experience, there’s a sense of reason I never had as a kid, or well into my 20s, that makes me feel self assured and hopeful. Aging and moving with time are blessings, not crimes of nature for which we must feel like imbeciles because the bulk of pop culture is aimed at making kids feel like temporary gods. Like many lies in life, it’s a shallow money grab once you peel away the layers.

I can recall one particular instance with my Mom where I did something that may not strike you as horrific, but still cuts me to the core because I sensed how hurt she was. I’ve been a Philadelphia Phillies fan since the early 70s. I’m from northeast Pennsylvania: Philadelphia was the nearest big town, thus I’ll always be a Philly fan in all sports. I grew up with this and could never abandon it; I’ll never trust sports fans who aren’t tied to a team by childhood geography, unless they have a very good reason. Usually that comes down to kids glomming onto winning teams. Not me. The Phillies sucked donkey balls for years when I started following them, as did the Eagles in football.

This must have been 1978 or so, my mid-teen years. Early summer, probably right about now season-wise. The Phillies were just starting to get good as a team, with guys like Steve Carlton and Mike Schmidt hitting their professional stride. Mom knew how much I loved the Phillies, and while she was out shopping one day, came across a Phillies t-shirt that she thought I would love. A basic white t-shirt, with that big fat 70s Phillies “P” in the middle, with the word Philadelphia on top in red letters, and Phillies on the bottom. A very basic look, which she thought would suit me fine.

She brought it home for me, apropos of nothing. Not my birthday, hadn’t done anything to merit her surprising me with a gift. Just the kind of thing a good mother would do for her son because that’s what good mothers do. She comes through the door, and I’m lazing on the couch, watching TV. I got a surprise for you, she says, and pulls out the t-shirt, smiling. I take one look at the shirt and blurt out, I hate it, I’m never going to wear it.

I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking. But I can still remember my verbatim response to this day, and the look on her face, which went from a warm smile to a look that implied I just shot her through the heart. It wasn’t just hurt. It was hurt and pissed off. That she took the time and money to think about me, and like the spoiled kid I could be at times, it just didn’t register. On top of the lack of manners to not just graciously accept the gift. I remember she dropped the shirt on the floor, shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes, and walked away.

The thing was, when I picked up the shirt a few minutes later, after pretending it wasn’t even there, it suddenly occurred to me that I liked it. I really liked it. Sure enough, I’d go on to wear that shirt constantly, until I out-grew it a few years later. And I never apologized to her for the way I acted. Put it in context. Slightly too young to drive, so that meant I had to tag along with Mom when she went to the mall. Kids at that age tend to be resentful that they’re still that dependent on their parents. I’d make sure when we were in the mall that we weren’t walking together, lest one of my equally emotionally-stunted friends saw us walking together, and what would they think of me walking with my Mom. I was willing my parents NOT to exist because doing so acknowledged that I was still a kid.

And … I … was … such … a … fucking … idiot. That incident shames me to this day. You have to understand, my mother is a saint. I don’t mean that in a corny mother-son way. I mean that whenever she goes, hopefully not for a long while, a lot of people are going to come up to me and tell me she was a saint – and mean it. Always a kind word for everyone she meets. Friendly to everyone. Everyone who has ever met her has later told me they couldn’t believe how kind she was … and I could tell my friends were impressed that I had such a good person as a mother. There have been many stray dogs and cats who lived much longer than expected because she pulled them off the streets and fed them for awhile. I can guarantee you that the times in my life where I stumble upon or make genuine efforts at random acts of compassion, that’s simply me trying to be more like Mom. Because I know she got that right in life, and things go a lot easier when you show people kindness. (Women seem to grasp this concept a lot more readily than men do. But I’m trying!)

I can still recall those warped years where every ounce of common sense I now have regarding parents and kids was turned on its head, and I acted like a complete asshole more than a few times. When I think that sort of baseless cultural shame of acknowleding your parents’ authority has been woven into teen culture over the past few decades, it makes me sick. Forget about out-growing it – it should be something you never experience, unless you're unfortunate enough to have bad parents. I had plenty of time as a teenager to develop my own identity – much more time than kids are allowed to do so today, what with cellphones serving as dog leashes, and parents monitoring their kids’ whereabouts and actions as if they were on parole. We were set free like wild animals in the 70s, in comparison. I had much more time and freedom to get into shit if I so desired. Much more time on my own or with my friends to get into whatever questionable behavior. To think I couldn’t cut my Mom some slack and walk with her for 15 minutes in a shopping mall is a tribute to the arrogance of my youth.

I have a lot more respect for cultures of the past, or even other cultures in the world now, where there are no artificial dividing lines purposely drawn between generations. We should all realize this junk is mostly the product of post-World War II American popular culture which has surely imparted some very cool things on the world, but this unfortunate stance aint one of them. I think I’d be a lot more prone to having kids if I knew I could raise them to disregard this cancerous crap, to live like a family where we’re going to have each other’s backs, no matter what age we are, or what little gripes and personal scrapes come up along the way. From what I’m seeing these days, again, it seems like so much in the world conspires against that basic foundation. And from what I’m seeing, too, if you’re going through life without that sort of foundation, it’s often by the seat of your pants and getting the shit knocked out of you routinely.

This is small beans, I know, in terms of mistreatment and bad memories. Plenty of people out there with angrily divorced parents, missing and errant parents, sometimes horribly abusive, etc. It gets a lot worse than a grown man remembering an incident decades earlier where he treated his Mom like an asshole. I guess that’s about as bad as I got, or at least I don’t recall giving Mom or Dad worse grief than that as a kid. Either way you cut it, if you’re smart, you make up lost ground in your adulthood, and make amends with these people, or at least see them as just people that you can hopefully befriend in some sense. They’re always your parents, but it helps if you can see them as people, too, and recognize they didn’t pitch a perfect game. I’d imagine if you have kids, it must make even more sense to come to this place, because you’re seeing what an ordeal raising kids can be.

As for my friends, I wish them luck. I can see both of them sailing into this uncharted territory, and it doesn’t look like any fun for anybody. As an outsider, I can offer impartial advice and such (which I’m good at), but the reality is I don’t have to live with any hard decisions the way they will. It does help to see these things happen, though, because there it is, life itself in all its thorniness, as opposed to some paint-by-numbers picture of happiness. I wouldn’t even say I distrust that. When people try to portray their lives to me like that, I just roll along with it. Because that’s what they want me to see, whether it’s reality or a wish on their part. It’s probably a good bit of both, and there are worse things to wish for. I never ask people, “How are you?” – not because of bad manners. It’s because if they’re being honest, the answer will take about five minutes and have no easy response. I’d rather just accept the fact that if you’re conscious and walking upright, something’s going right in your life, despite having problems, as we all do.

Jay Bennett

I don’t know why, but whenever a musician passes on who never got his full due while alive, I’m on it. The last time I felt this way was for Sean Costello, the young blues guitarist who was just starting to find his voice before checking out in a run-down hotel room in Atlanta. When Ronnie Lane passed on quietly in a small town in Colorado, that hit me like a thunderbolt, as I had spent the past few years discovering the great music he made after leaving The Faces.

And, now, Jay Bennett, formerly of Wilco, checks out far too early. Not sure if it was misadventure or on purpose, but I don’t think anyone’s scoring that too closely. He was a year older than I am, which I found shocking … thought he was much older than I was, or I was much younger. He always seemed so middle-aged, probably due to his body type and big head. He had one of those burly midwestern bodies and head, you could picture him in a pair of horn-rim glasses, a black leather hat with ear flaps and a big-ass Woolrich coat. Shoveling snow, or selling newspapers on the corner in Chicago, or bouncing a niece on his knee at a cookout. The dreadlocks were out of place on him, but that was his thing, to be this typically midwestern-looking guy who had a lot more going on.

Apparently, he was in the process of suing Wilco over the issue of royalties related to his appearance in the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart which, let’s face it, has created this “story” about Jay and the band that will be his legacy. (Jay was also needing a lot of money for a long-delayed hip operation, without health insurance.) In the documentary, Jay is made out to be this mad genius, constantly smoking, who spends all his time in the studio and eventually gets too nuts for Jeff Tweedy to deal with, so he’s asked to leave the band. We never get to see this happening. Sure, there’s a scene where Jay’s fretting over an intricate segue between two of the songs, complete with Tweedy vomiting in the rest room when the tension over their disagreement on this issue boils over, but that didn’t seem all that harsh to me. If you know bands, you know that break-ups tend to result over a long period of fights and issues that make stuff like that passage seem like small change. Whatever caused Jay to be dumped from the band, we didn’t see it happening.

And that’s a shame, because Jay was responsible for pushing the band to its creative peak, with Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Only the band knows for sure, but both those album, Jay’s presence is all over them, whether as a songwriter, arranger, producer or musician. When he left the band, that musical density and greater pop sense disappeared with him. I still love the band, but you can hear what Jay meant to them when he left. This two-part interview from Glorious Noise – the first part letting Jay expound upon why he left and the second outlining exactly what he did on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – gives excellent insight into just how integral his role was to the band.

I’m guessing his imprint was even larger on the previous album, Summerteeth, which many fans consider the band’s peak. I do, too, although I didn’t think much of the album at first. Brother J was a Wilco fan before I was, because of their alt country beginnings, but Summerteeth, he threw his hands up and said fuck these guys. Their previous album, Being There, was considered their creative breakthrough, and even then, Jay’s imprint was being felt in more loose/trippy arrangements. I know more than a few people who couldn’t stand this sort of “branching out” and thought the band was over-rated, but there are certain songs like “I Got You,” “Red Eyed and Blue” and “Dreamer in My Dreams” that are the sound of a band hitting its stride.

Jay leaves the band, and Tweedy veers Wilco into a more lean, less poppy direction. Which I still love. Every time I listen to Wilco, I feel like I’m listening to a guy, Tweedy, who really likes marijuana. Everything he does is trippy in a way suggesting that intelligent, but slightly askew take on the world so many heads have. But you can hear that pop sense Jay imparted greatly decreasing, and when Jay was with Wilco, he was writing material that’s about as good as pop music gets. Two songs in particular represent Jay’s creative peak.

“My Darling” from Summerteeth underlines the issues so many older Wilco fans had with the band: too much shit going on. I recall Brother J’s reaction to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot: “These guys are writing basic songs that sound fine and then lumping all this sonic shit on top of it to make it sound experimental.” Which he thought was bullshit, and sometimes it was. This was truly the case for “My Darling,” which was mostly Jay’s song, maybe all Jay’s song from what I gather, and if you want to hear the best version, try this one from his first post-Wilco album, The Palace at 4 am. Less is more in this case – I put this song on the same shelf as “Imagine” by John Lennon. It’s that good! To come up with a melody that basic that hasn’t been used before, to me, is a sign of someone who has the ability to function on a higher creative level than most musicians.

The absolute best, though is “California Stars” from Mermaid Avenue. I don’t know what Jeff Tweedy has to do with the song, and I suspect that asshole Billy Bragg just sat in a corner strumming an acoustic guitar. It’s my understanding that this was one of Jay’s song, too, with lyrics, of course, by Woody Guthrie. “California Stars” is one of those songs that defined the 90s for me, maybe the best song of the 90s, along with other songs like “Creep” and “Common People.” First time I heard that song, it made perfect sense: that sad, floating feel that did impart someone looking up at a night sky and wishing he was back in California. The lap steel work by Corey Harris is also outstanding, really makes the song.

Those two songs alone put Jay Bennett on a higher plane for me. He didn’t stop making music after Wilco either, putting out solid solo albums that had flashes of the same brilliance. Try “My Little Wicked One” and “Hank,” which now takes on new meaning. I hadn’t known it at the time, but Jay’s musical presence was in my life back in the early 90s. Brother J had read a review of the band Titantic Love Affair that compared them favorably to The Replacements, with their first album having a cover designed by Chris Mars. “Planet Strange” was their big song, and they weren’t quite The Replacements. I never warmed up to that album; it just wasn’t on quite the same level. Still, that’s Jay Bennett, skulking under his straggly hair in the background. I think Brother J still has that CD back home in his rack, although I’ll bet he hasn’t looked at it, much less played it, in years.

His legacy will always be the work he did with Wilco which, of course, will be tainted by the negative vibe attached to his departure. I’m watching I Am Trying to Break Your Heart right now, and it still seems like Jay got a raw deal, although, again, none of us have any idea what went down between him and Jeff to blow things apart. Like most bands, Wilco seems like a strange beast, full of guys jockeying for position and “yes men-ing” it to maintain status quo in that floating perception of power within the band. Which never seems real until you’re thrown out on your ass. I gather being in a band is like being in a reality TV show, like Survivor, where you can tell yourself this isn’t real, but it is. I would never do these things in my real life, you tell yourself … but this is your real life. The camera following you around is your fame, your image, and it’s always watching you and influencing how you act. I don’t think Tweedy or Wilco are bad people at all – quite the opposite. But I’d gather they’re a bit fucked up, like all bands are, which is what happen when you travel around for years in a bubble with the same people all the time.

But poor Jay punches his ticket over the Memorial Day weekend. He deserves better than to be thought of as some talented crank who talked his way out of a great band. He wasn’t full of shit regarding his place in the band, as it became evident how important he had been when he left, and the band’s direction took a sharp turn. Summerteeth will be like summer itself, representing a time and place that stays the same while you go on, or don’t go on. Man, Jay looks like hell in this documentary, constant cigarette, hangdog face, clearly some kind of drug usage going on. Ditto Tweedy, they look like hell. But that hell they put themselves through left behind some great music. I don't doubt Jay was a pisser to work with, but the end results speak for themselves. Hats off, Jay.

Forgetting How to Ride a Bike

I haven’t been to a high-school reunion in a few years, think the 20th was the last. The 25th didn’t happen – apparently not enough interest. The old class seems to function better on the zero years, and 10 years is a nice round number to see people again. But this isn’t about high-school reunions, per se.

I commented a few weeks back about Facebook – the concept of our lives turning into permanent high-school reunions by constantly keeping in contact with people from our past. When I first moved to New York, and even now, it felt important to me to maintain contact with people “back home.” Some people move to cities to leave their pasts behind, but that always struck me as foolish. You can’t escape it. Whatever you were there, you’ll still be that here, no matter how hard you try to bullshit yourself. New York is crawling with douchebags – a lot of them were born and raised here. And you get that certain kind who moved here, who would be chased out of any town where more than a small circle of acquaintances and coworkers knew who they were. They move here to escape, not realizing they can’t escape themselves, that it’s not where they’re from, it’s who they are that’s so troubling.

Going back home these days implies knowing a lot less people: a handful of old friends and immediate family members. This has been the case for a long time now. There was that era in my 20s where there were still plenty of other guys in their mid-late 20s at relatively loose ends (unmarried, going to bars, etc.), but that scene faded out over time as people either got married or moved away. I go back home to clear my head out for a few days in a rural area as much as anything else. But it’s still important to me to maintain that connection. What something like Facebook would do is point out numerous, maybe dozens of, other people back there whom I’ve lost contact with and put them back in my life in some respect.

While that would feed my ego in terms of hang-out options, I’d also have to wonder how genuine it all was. I don’t crave having dozens of people I’ve lost touch with pushed back into my life – the concept neither offends or appeals to me. It’s just not something I’d do on my own … so why have a website do it for me? I’d see through the ruse and realize this “homecoming” of sorts would be more a tribute to social networking websites than any real urge I had to know these people again. I’d rather a relationship developing like that be more organic – you meet someone by chance, hey, we still get along, let’s keep in touch, here’s my email address, etc. This is what high-school reunions are for: to meet with these people again, have some drinks, kick back, talk about old times, then all go our merry ways again for another 10 years.

I don’t think that particular social construct was meant to permeate our every-day lives. It’s a privacy issue at heart. Or maybe just relates to the kind of person you are. I’ve come across many people in New York offices who don’t seem to have any real sort of relationships: the ones they do appear to have are related purely to what the other person can do for them. That may sound mildly evil – it’s a way of seeing the world I’ve never quite accepted – but that’s just how some people are. They’re “networking” sort of people no one ever really gets to know. They don’t know you – they network you, in hopes that if they scratch your back, you’ll scratch theirs somewhere down the road.

And that odd way of seeing the world is in synch with horseshit like Facebook, Twitter and the Permanent High-School Reunion these things hope to perpetuate. You’ll never really get to know anyone, but you’ll “know” hundreds of people. In effect, everyone you know will be an acquaintance, and only in way that somehow serves your sense of well being, with little regard for theirs. It’s an extremely mercenary form of friendship that, as noted, I’m already familiar with via dealing with business people in NYC offices. The focus is on self, not on others, not on how self and others interact. It’s all about you, which is why this stuff gives me so much trouble. The ruse, the selling point, is that you’re building this wonderful world of people around you to help each other get through with life, when the reality is you’re only building a monument to insecurity.

What are real friends? That’s always a good question to ask. I look at my own life and can see how these situations change over the years. It’s obvious how it works when you’re a kid, and well into your 20s: these people are around you, you spend real time together, you go through a lot, most importantly, at times in your lives when you’re far more open to trust people and create lasting bonds that could run the rest of your lives. Before you get out on your own, you’re forced into these relationships simply because the people are physically there in your life, in the same house, or street, or town, or home room, or math class, etc. You find some like-minded individuals, and you bond, in ways that you think will last forever, but you’re not fully aware that the simple passing of time will push you in different directions, with some of these relationships ending, some going on.

It’s not as easy after that. You get exposed to the world; you move around in it. You see how genuinely awful some people are, and this taints your view of humanity. You become more careful with whom you trust. Some of the people you trust turn out to be awful; some would die for you. Some people you thought were assholes turn out to be all right. Most are varying mixes of both. Chances are good that the physical sense of everyone you know in your life being right around you will disappear – either they will, or you will, or you’ll just stop knowing each other once you no longer have reason to be in regular contact. Marriage, kids … things like this tend to take up people’s every waking hours on top of work. Some people will work like fiends, with time for nothing else.

That traditional way of defining friendship no longer applies to my adult life. Most of the people I know are spread out. Some back home in PA. Some are in NYC. Some were, but most moved around the general area, so that even being 30 miles outside the city represents a travel scenario that's a pain to deal with. My neighbors are pricks and weirdos for the most part – I’m not going to befriend them. It would be nice to meet people around where I live, but as noted, the casual trust that’s so abundant with kids fails me as an adult. I find it a lot harder to make real friends as I get older. They seem to spring up here and there through various circumstances, but again, the way these things go, it’s never in that traditional way.

I recall in the 80s TV show Thirtysomething, there were the friends in that age group, all living in the Philadelphia area, who always seemed to be constantly, and physically, in each other’s lives (not relatives either). I feel like seeing Joe. Hey, I’ll just get into my car and drive over to his house, and we’ll have some beers in his den!

Does your life work that way? Man, mine doesn’t! I have to make appointments days, more likely weeks, in advance to hang out with people, and half the time those plans get jumbled or tossed along the way. I get the impression if you, as an adult, live where you grew up, you do have a more built-in network of people constantly in your life. I also get the impression you wish you could kill some of these people, and both they, and the concept that you never moved, gets to you after awhile. I like the idea of portraying myself as a rural sort of guy, but part of that is being in a city and really appreciating certain aspects of that way of life (more space, less traffic, more greenery, etc.) … while conveniently ignoring certain aspects that would drive me nuts were I to live there all the time. This last trip, I couldn’t stop noticing how trashy so many people look back there these days: missing teeth, idiotic tattoos, dingus facial hair … and this was just the women. I’m usually against using a term like “white trash,” but man, there were a lot of trashy white people around! Much more than a decade ago, much less two. And these folks seemed to be not just self conscious over how grubby they were, but taking a perverse sort of pride in it, too. Soap, deodorant and toothpaste are your friends, folks!

Every so often, “Bob Dylan’s Dream” will come up on the iPod, and it always gets to me:

While riding on a train going west
I fell asleep for to take my rest.
I dreamed a dream that made me sad
Concerning myself an' the first few friends I had.

With half damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon.
Where we together weathered many a storm
Laughing and singing till the early hours of the morn.

By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung
Our words was told, our songs was sung
Where we longed for nothing and were satisfied
Joking and talking about the world outside.

With hungry hearts through the heat and cold
We never much thought we could get very old
We thought we could sit forever in fun
And our chances really was a million to one.

As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right
And our choices they was few so the thoughts never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter or split.

How many a year has passed and gone
Many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a first friend
And each one I've never seen again.

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.

I guess these days with that group of friends, one would be Twittering on his iPhone, while another sends a text to someone he'd be meeting in five minutes, while another cuts off one who was talking to take a meaningless call, and the last two would be stone-faced in front a TV set with a Playstation for hours on end. None of them would give a shit about each other. Dylan wrote this in his early 20s, a time in which I knew what he was singing about, but never would have come near defining it as well. The song means a lot more to me now. Of course, I also think if you reunited those friends in a room with Dylan, he’d shuffle around uncomfortably, making goat sounds, and would excuse himself after five minutes. He longs for that feeling of seemingly endless stability and certainty more than the friends. Another song by Jonathan Richman, “That Summer Feeling,” hits the same nail on the head with the great line: “Do you long for her?/Or the way you were?”.

A few weeks ago, I youtubed my old high school and town names around that area, and came across this: two teenage girls goofing around to 60s songs on an iPod. What really struck me was that both girls had memorized the lyrics to ALL the songs, so they knew how to anticipate each line and silly mannerism. And they're listening to great pop music that's 40 years old! I can guarantee you, we weren't sitting around in the 70s with megaphones crooning Rudy Valee and Bing Crosby songs... but I think their love and appreciation of the music is a very cool thing.

It was also a nice little moment, documented for all time, the kind of moment you rarely have as adult, but seems like second nature when you’re growing up. Every high school reunion aspires to a drawn-out moment with the same feeling these girls have effortlessly clowning around in the living room on a boring Friday night. What happens to that feeling? I don't know, but it gets harder to find with passing time. Call it forgetting how to ride a bike.

Trash Weekend

I was going to call this one “White Trash Weekend,” but, as you'll read, that title wouldn’t have been all-encompassing. Back in my 20s, I used to get these “vibes” along the lines of “why is the world closing in on me,” generally based on a combination of minor things going off-kilter in my personal life, coupled with random events on the street or at work, that left me feeling like I was under some type of cosmic attack. I had somehow displeased the gods, as if Zeus was hurling thunderbolts at me.

Well, I’ve since written that sort of mental state down to self absorption. The world wasn’t spinning around me. Good and bad things happen to everyone all the time, the only recognizable pattern being that sometimes they will be caused by my previous thoughts or actions, i.e., you’re gonna’ reap what you sow. And the random things that happen just walking down the street are just that. Random. I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time and being exposed to douchebaggery, which never makes anyone feel good, but as I’ve learned, just keep moving, and that shit is gone. In other words, no reason to question why you’ve stumbled on a very minor, temporary losing streak for a few hours or days.

Friday started with the news that an old friend had been diagnosed with a severe disease, and that’s about all I’m going to say about that, because that’s about all I know at this point. Never good to hear news like that.

When I went to leave for work that morning, I took my usual glance down the side street to see if there’s anything I need to address on my landlord’s sidewalk: graffiti on her wall, garbage on her sidewalk, etc. Sure enough, there was garbage on her sidewalk. Upon closer inspection, the remnants of an informal party: two pizza boxes stuffed with uneaten crusts and about two dozen cigarette butts. Three empty six packs of Heineken. Various plastic bags with napkins, plastic cups and shit like that. Someone methodically made a neat little pyramid pile of all this junk, as if they were sitting in a car, everybody got done, very nicely put all their refuse in one spot on someone else’s sidewalk: how nice of them to be so thoughtful.

That’s pretty typical stuff for me to deal with – I get that immediate flash of anger (“what kind of wretch would knowingly dump garbage on someone else’s property?”), but sooner or later realize no one else is going to pick it up and throw it out but me, and if I don’t, the asshole Sanitation folks may very well ticket my landlord for that. At this point, I know the drill: deposit whatever’s there in the garbage bin and get over it, because it will happen again, and there’s not much I can do to stop it.

Rest of Friday was thankfully routine. Saturday morning, I wake up to what smells like burning plastic and rubber. A really harsh “this is not good” chemical smell. This part of Queens is routinely under attack by various toxic orders, usually of two kinds. One, a very sickly-sweet smell like burning maple syrup, or cow shit. The maple syrup smell has since been identified as some type of confections factory in New Jersey (!) wafting its odor over the entire New York City area, and the cow shit is a sewage treatment plant about a mile away that’s has had ongoing issues with a failing turbine. It must be hell to live right near that plant, but this entire part of Queens, you get “that smell” sometimes, and it’s foul. Welcome to New York … and this has grown into one of the more “exclusive” areas!

I never did found out what this smell was – if I had to guess, I’d go with one of our bozo, broken English neighbors who occasionally get up to some weird, illegal chemical disposal hijinx that people normally do in zoned areas of factories wearing space suits and respirators. Not a good smell to wake up to, and I never did find out where it originated. There must be a trailer park in Athens that’s spiritual home to some folks around here.

I get online and check out my home county newspaper to find that the gang of teenage creeps who beat to death an illegal immigrant in Shenandoah, PA have all been let off with a simple assault charge, i.e., a bunch of drunken kids in a mob got away with third-degree murder. Horrible stuff, makes me embarrassed for my home county. (Can’t write it down to a typically Shenandoah thing: the trial took place in Pottsville, the county seat, and presumably had jurors from all over the county.)

An unbelievable verdict. I know how court rooms work. A defense attorney’s job is to create reasonable doubt at every corner – the O.J. trial is a tribute to this. And if you get people dumb enough on a jury, they can be lead like sheep, i.e., made to feel they have to toe a defense attorney’s line of reasoning instead of recognizing a few basic truths. There’s a dead body in the street. Not suicide. A bunch of kids were seen by numerous witnesses beating this person before he died. No one denies this. They killed him. Want to get picky over minor issues of who delivered the final blow, or what color his sneakers were? Go ahead. Somebody got murdered. Someone is accountable. Only two kids were charged. From what I gather there were more than five kicking and stomping this guy as they yelled racial slurs. This is reality non one refutes. Courtroom reality is no one is to blame unless you can prove it without a shadow of a doubt; this form of reality blows, and our world would be chaos if it existed outside a courtroom. It's not justice; it's bullshit.

Shenandoah has always been a mess of a town, but this takes the cake. I have one friend who lives there (and I wish he’d move), but that’s all I’m ever going to have to do with that town from now on. Frankly, if there are demonstrations and riots all summer long, so be it. This is foul. What kind of message it sends to these assholes, I have no idea. I can only hope federal and civil cases are in the works.

And just when I’m getting myself into a nice “white racism/bad” lather, something else comes along to remind me jackasses come in every color. Later in the morning, I got into my usual routine: laundry, groceries, quick sweep up of the landlord’s sidewalk. My Saturday mornings tend to be pretty busy, nonstop activity once I get rolling. So, I’m out there cleaning up the sidewalk – an easy one this time, probably won’t be out there more than 15 minutes. As I’m doing so, two black kids, couldn’t be more than 13 or so, who had been playing basketball at the schoolyard next door come sauntering by.

From the corner of my eye, I can see that dumb walk long before they get near me. Walking very slow with their heads tilted back, frowns on their faces: they’re already mimicking the affectations and attitude of street trash. Just goofball kids who can’t even walk down the street without getting into shit. When I lived in the Bronx, I would see this transformation occur constantly – from a sweet/open 10-year-old to a fake wanna-be thug by 13. I can see the logic in adopting a stance like that as a defense against the world, but right there, that's admitting cowardice and defeat. You can’t face the world as you are, so you pretend to be something you’re not. Teenagers of all colors are prone to this sort of insecurity, and woe unto the numerous adults I’ve come across who never break through this shithead barrier.

As they get near, one of the kid pulls out a plastic bottle of some garbage concoction, looks pink, and it’s frozen. He makes a big show out of repeatedly smacking it against the wall along the landlords property (to break up the ice) … thinking in his mind that this is going to antagonize me into a confrontation. Got news for you, kid – if I’ve gone through years of black and hispanic kids spitting as I pass them on the street, you’re going to have to try harder than this to get me to hit you. Kids don't realize what adults are up against if they get caught beating some them on the street: not just various assault charges, but also child abuse charges, and in this case, probably some type of racial intimidation thrown in for good measure. It doesn’t serve my purpose to lay a finger on this kid; it could open up a very bad can of worms that could haunt me for years afterwards.

But the kids keep walking. Understand, this is all peripheral vision on my part – I’m not even looking at these kids. I didn’t see it, but at the far end of the sidewalk, the other kid drops a foot-long scrap of tin foil, obviously on purpose as he sees me out there sweeping, and thinks it would be cool to make “whitey” pick up after him, because he’s such a playah.

Can I tell you how many times I’ve come across this Dance of the Dumb in my travels in New York? Dozens and scores doesn’t do it justice: hundreds, if not thousands. Always the same attitude, the same “please hit me” vibe that, clue me in, I outweigh both of these kids put together and would pulverize them in a street fight. They might be carrying guns? I strongly doubt it; try playing basketball with a gun in your waistband.

What they’re doing goes all the way back to slave days, although they’re probably unaware of that. They’re treating me as the authority figure who must be “secretly” taunted to show how smart they are and how dumb I am. I have seen this lame, defeatist attitude thousands of times with black kids. These kids don’t realize they’re already conceding power to me by acting this way, that instead of treating me as a normal, equal human being and passing, they’re viewing me as an authority figure they feel some need to get over on, because they feel inferior, although they have no reason to feel that way. I don’t see them in terms of inferiority or superiority – they’re just kids walking down the street. I’m just a guy minding my own business. If they saw me as inferior and wanted to prove it, they would attack me, which I would welcome!

You tell me – I’d love to be enlightened on this. Rank stupidity and total lack of self awareness strike me as debilitating diseases of the mind. I’ve seen this sort of role playing enough to note it as a common occurrence. Do I feel sorry for this kids? I feel sorry for their level of stupidity, sure. But, no, I don’t feel sorry for them at all. As noted above, you’re going to reap what you sow. You go around acting like that, bad things are coming your way, and I’d rather not be one of them. I let them pass on crap this minor, because engaging assholes like this in any sort of real dialogue is a waste of time. I wouldn’t know how to tell these kids that manhood is not allowing anyone else to control your actions, that you don’t go through life burdening other people with your bullshit.

Besides which, I know that sidewalk, little things get dropped along the way all the time, whether I’m there or not: water bottles, empty potato chip bags, etc. I’d be like King Canute ordering back the sea if I got into a physical confrontation with every scumbag littering out there.

So, this, too, passes. I take a nap, listen to some music, then head out to the gym later in the afternoon, normally a relaxing walk down to 30th Avenue, about half an hour each way, and a workout that usually clears me out nicely. But two blocks from my apartment, I come across something odd unfolding. A man and a woman, in their 20s, white, arguing. At least, it looks like arguing – from a distance, they could be monkeying around in that annoying way couples do in public that comes close to physical assault. As I get closer, I can see they're not monkeying around. The woman takes a swipe at the guy’s head, and he ducks back with a grimace on his face. He’s got club-hopper written all over him: grotesque Ed Hardy t-shirt, little square soldier’s hat cocked at asshole angle, pencil-line facial hair and soul patch. If I were to look up "douchebag" in the dictionary, there'd be a picture of this guy with the definition. The woman is pretty good-looking: angular, long black hair, blue eyes, a real looker. What she’s doing with a guy like this, I haven’t got a clue.

Nor does she at that moment. I hear her blurt out, “You’re going to jail! You hear me? Jail!” She’s trying to dial her cellphone. I get the vibe that I’m walking in on an ongoing, bad confrontation between a woman who, for whatever reason, must have a court order out against this guy to stay X number of feet away from her. It has that feel, the “couple gone seriously awry” sense of two people about to get physical, like many times before.

As I’m about 10 feet away, she looks at me, and this is where I decide how I’m going to deal with this. If her look in any way says, “please help me,” or if she flat-out states that, I probably will help her, which would could mean nasty business with Pencil Beard. I’m not too big on violence against women, especially with a guy who looks like this, on the street, in my presence. This guy can see me, too, can see that I’m walking straight towards both of them, not moving, making eye contact, letting them know I’m not intimidated, just want to go along my merry way.

But her look says, “I can handle this.” I look at the guy, and I can see the same sort of stupidity and arrogance I saw with the black kids a few hours earlier. Just a lost little jackass who can’t deal with a woman properly, which I don’t care about one way or another, just don’t do it in front of me. And for however attractive that woman is, the burning question: “Whatever possessed you to be with a lost little boy like this?” So if she looks like she can handle it, and she’s dumb enough to have this clown in her life, I feel fine just walking on by. Hell, for all I know, I’d side with the guy on this if their full story was explained to me.

But all in all, I had a pretty good weekend! Wrote this, cleaned my apartment from top to bottom, did my usual routines, got about 400 new songs transferred onto the iPod for an upcoming trip to PA, a very productive few days. This is how life is. I don’t understand people who carry on about being happy or sad. Life isn’t like either all the time – if you think it is, you’re delusional. In the course of a day, I’ll go through both emotions, and then some, a few times over. As far back as I can remember, life has always been like this. Trying to label your life, or periods in your life, is a luxury you shouldn’t indulge. Just get on with it.