A Madame Sousatzka Moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Holy Grail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riding the Storm Out

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

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

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

“Anybody else?”

“Well, no.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living in Stereo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thumb Generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christmas Pasts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act Your Age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Muriah … Muriah …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Muriah …. Muriah … Muriah …”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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