Mirrors in the Headphone Section

I expect to see mirrors in all sorts of public places.  Gym walls are lined with them, so people can gaze at themselves as they work out.  Stores with clothing sections.  Bars.  Restaurants.  Elevators.  People like looking at themselves.  Part vanity.  Part desire to make sure we don’t look like complete idiots.  As if running our fingers through our hair will change that.

But a few weeks ago, I got a cultural jolt with mirrors.  I try to do all my audio/computer shopping at B&H Photo on the west side of midtown Manhattan.  I love the place.  Owned and operated by Hasidic Jews offering every-day prices on stuff that always matches up to sales prices in big-box retailers.  They’re hard to beat.  And it’s always a kick to have a relevant conversation regarding high-tech audio and computer equipment with deeply Jewish guys, who you would figure would be hard to talk to, but tend to be very hang loose and open, fully understanding their products and customers.

I often go on Fridays, which is a mistake.  They’re Hasidic Jews … they’re home by sunset every Friday, meaning they close down the store around 1:00 that day.  It’s like the fall of Saigon going there over lunch on a Friday, the sense of urgency overwhelming as customers are looking to make purchases before being pushed out of the place by announcements at 12:45.  They’re closed Saturdays, too.  And on many odd Jewish holidays that I’m far from having memorized.

A few weeks ago, I decided to treat myself and buy a real set of headphones.  I’ve written in the past of my trusty Radio Shack Nova 40’s that got me through my teenage years.  They were cheap and dependable, but shitty, much like the now-failing Radio Shack empire.  The earbuds I’ve had over the years, again, dependable, but they’ve all been pretty average under $50 earbuds.

So, I read a few audiophile websites and realized to get a really top-end pair, I’d have to go higher than $300 in most cases.  I didn’t need that level of quality.  I was thinking more the $150-$200 level of headphones that most audiophiles would scoff at, but average people, like me, would find entirely worthwhile.

Once I found the headphone section at B&H, I could see I had dozens of choices, whether I wanted to drop $30 for a very low-end pair, or well over $300 if I wanted that high-end audiophile experience.  (Let's cut the shit: audiophiles tend to be assholes in my book.  I can’t stand them, can’t stand the prissy, precious meticulousness so many of them have towards music and have never picture myself sitting in that mahogany-lined den listening to Dark Side of the Moon on my $5,000 system in my ascot and kimono.  Not my way of life.  Much more in the "wearing my Fruit of the Loom underwear and listening to Rocket to Russia on the Soundesign console in my basement apartment" camp.)

I settled on a pair of Bose headphones for about $180 that sounded very good when I sampled them, very clear, deep and full, the kind of sound that appealed to me in that price range.  Forget about calling audiophiles “assholes” – writing what I just wrote about Bose headphones has done much more to mark me as a rank bullshit artist to these folks.  They hate Bose by the legion.  Bose is everything wrong with audiophile equipment: over-priced equipment aimed at people with too much money and not enough sense.

Yeah, well, they also make pretty good product, whether audiophile snobs can acknowledge that or not.  I’m not a “Bose” man the same way I’m not an “Apple” man.  My audio, video and computer tastes are all over the map, different products for different purposes, I tend to mix and match and like what I have.  I hated iPods for years, until I actually owned one.  I still hate the completely closed system of it, and their inability to grasp that making a larger SSD drive player for people who don’t want to depend on streaming for music would be a good move.  But the 160 GB iPod Classic is simply the best audio invention of my lifetime, in regards to how I relate and listen to music.  The 250 GB version I ordered from some dude in China on E Bay offering these Frankenstein iPods because Apple refused to go past 160 GB?  It’s my prized possession: I use it every day and wonder what’s going to happen when it craps out as Apple shows no signs of making larger-capacity audio devices.

As I was trying on those Bose headphones, I looked at myself in the mirror.

Wait a minute.  Let me think about this.  What the fuck am I doing staring at myself in the mirror of an audio department?  Why is there a mirror here?  Have I ever seen a mirror in any audio department before today?

This snapped me out of my Bose reverie and made me realize: there are mirrors here for all the dipshits buying Beats headphones.  Let me clarify: there’s nothing really wrong with Beats headphones.  The pair I sampled before the Bose pair really didn’t sound that bad.  It’s just the comparable version to what I was buying was just over $200 as opposed to under $180 and sounded very bass heavy, which I guess is more a demographics than audio thing with how they're built and for whom they're built.

I’m forever seeing guys (always guys) wearing Beats headphones on the streets and subway.  I’d hardly call the people wearing them "assholes."  They’re not rapping to themselves like idiots have in the past.  They’re not audio snobs.  They’re not solely hipsters (although I’ve seen more than a few hipsters wearing them).  They’re usually younger guys, sometimes stylish, sometimes not.  But proudly wearing their Beats headphones.

What I really liked about the Bose headphones: they were light and looked very cheap.  They looked basic.  Which is exactly what I want from a headphone!  Black, small ear cups, close-fitting, they don’t look like anything special, don’t draw attention to the fact that I’m wearing a $180 pair of headphones for a $300 listening device.  There were a few other name brands in the same price range, like Sennheiser, that would draw accolades from audiophiles, but they simply looked too bulky to wear in public, or had wires coming from the cups, looked too fragile in some cases, etc.

Headphones are not a fashion statement … to me.  But that mirror made me realize, read it and weep, THEY ARE a fashion statement to some people.  Mostly younger, in their 20s, maybe 30s at the latest, who want to appear stylish and “with it” in some sense.  Frankly, I liked the Beats headphones I sampled, they weren’t bad, but I can’t stand the logo, the act of drawing attention to something I’m wearing on my head in public.  It’s probably why I avoided iPods for years: I never could stand the “fashion sense” attached to these things.  I’m about the music, not the device, not the headphones, not the receiver, not the speakers, not the turntable, not the CD player.  I care about the music.  Period.

But what kind of dick poses in front of a mirror in a headphones section of a store to see how he looks wearing a pair of Beats headphones?  Making a duck face?  Snapping a selfie and tweeting it to various friends: How do I look?  Of course, not one has the heart to honestly respond: Like a dick.  Because chances are he’s tweeting other dicks.  Who are probably thinking: Bro, chill!

It unnerved me.  And from what I’ve heard from friends, it’s not unusual to see mirrors around headphone sections in any store now.  I really don’t get the impression anyone buying Sennheiser or Bose or Audio Technica or Beyer or Grado cares all that much about how they look while wearing them.  I do care, but more so in the sense of not wearing a gaudy/flashy piece of audio equipment that would encourage someone to rob me at gun or knifepoint.  Then again, I’ve had that concept driven home to me by moving to New York City in the 80’s and living in ragged neighborhoods for a long time, knowing that people can and will be targets for the things they wear in public.

It’s not even that.  It’s that nagging self absorption I’ve been noticing since the turn of the century, the turning inwards of an entire society, the gazing at one’s self routinely and constantly, whether literally in a mirror in a headphone section of a store, or on Facebook or any other social media, or with a cellphone on a crowded staircase during rush hour … or, shit, let’s face it, everywhere now, all the time.  I’m forever hustling around people on the sidewalk who, I can tell coming up behind them by their body language, are so self absorbed and unattached to their surroundings that it’s too irritating to get stuck behind them for more than a few feet.

Then again, why am I buying headphones?  To turn on my music and turn inwards in some sense, away from the world, into myself.  Headphones are all about self absorption, when you think about it.  Always have been: put them on and tune the world out.  I realize that in some deep, abiding sense.  It just seems like overkill and a radical error to attach fashion sense to something that already implies self absorption, literally in the act of using the product itself.  Nobody should be using the headphones for any reason but to listen to music in a better manner than ear buds.  But now we have this creepy, physical aspect of using headphones as another layer of narcissism for something that’s already insular enough.

I give up?  No, like most of you, I just shake my head and walk on.  The world will move forward with me, and these assholes, and everyone else who doesn’t even pay attention to nonsense like this.  When the cyborgs are killing us with laser beams a few years down the road, I can assure you, none of them will be wearing Beats headphones or have any need for Twitter, mirrors, iPhones or headphones.  Robots, take over the world and kill us already!

Mirrors in the headphone section ... and pink champagne on ice.  We are all just prisoners here of our own device.

Snow Day, 1982

A few weeks ago, my old high school had a fire.  It turned out to be not so big a deal, a small fire in a heating duct that was discovered and extinguished quickly.  This was a Thursday, and the administration decided that since there was an ongoing smoke condition, school would be cancelled on Friday and marked as a snow day.  That Friday, the sun was out, temperatures in the high 20’s, no wind, maybe some residual snow on the ground from a previous storm.

And that got me thinking ... January and February are such odd months that most of us just write off as a “woodshedding” time of year.  Stick to some bullshit resolutions.  Lay low.  Dread Valentine’s Day.  Don’t really reap the full benefits of having MLK and Presidents Days off.  Life will start again when the weather gets better.

Growing up in the Coal Region of Pennsylvania, I viewed January and February as bleak times.  They’re bleak times anywhere, I’ve learned since.  In New York, it’s a time of howling winds and gray corner slush moats.  But something about the Coal Region: the snow, those great, black coal banks by old mines between towns, looming like Transylvanian mountains through the fog of a defrosting car windshield on a cold, slushy day.  It was pretty god-damned depressing sometimes.

By the same token, a sunny, clear day like that Friday the kids recently got jailbreaked from school?  I can guess how elated they were.  A gift like that in the dead of winter is a great thing, and I’m certain most of them seized the day as opposed to lazing around, Facebooking, watching shitty reality shows and pounding junk food.

What would I have been doing given similar circumstance circa 1982, given a gift of a day like that?  My high school days winding down, feeling that directionless pull of a senior not quite sure how the world is going to change when all this ends.

I’d have gone running, as I did every day back then.  That shorter route around Hampton’s Hill (as described here in my recent dog bite misadventure).  I miss running in the morning as I recall how relaxed I felt after working out at sunrise.  Doing the same now would require getting up before 6:00 am, and it just aint happening.  It was nothing to run four miles in the morning, and I hated myself if I skipped for any reason, which was rare.  Snow?  I loved running in snow.  As noted in the dog-bite story, I was elated to do so again recently.

After that, sure, the TV would have been on, like on a sick day, and I’d have been drawn into shitty Love Boat/Gilligan’s Island reruns, or worse, The Price Is Right.  Sick days, and I mean real sick days which were the only kind I’ve ever taken, often lost their allure after two or three hours of reruns of bad 70’s shows, which seemed like Citizen Kane compared to the afternoon soap operas soon to follow.  (I recall one of the cool things about college was having time off during the day one could use any way he saw fit, which just as often found me hitting the great pool hall on campus or listening to cool shit on a friend’s stereo in his downtown apartment.  I’d love to have a lifestyle again with that sort of informal breathing room, but it hasn’t happened!)

But I’m sure the main draw of the day would have been gathering the tribe for a long lunch at the Ponderosa Steakhouse at the mall, followed by shooting pool at Holiday Lanes.

This meant rock and roll, too.  Listening to it on a car stereo, driving from place to place.  If it was my friend G driving, that would have meant Zappa, T. Rex, Joan Jett, The J. Geils Band, Billy Squier, and a host of other 70’s and early 80’s rock acts.  If T was driving, one thing and one thing only: Van Halen.  However many albums they had by that time in the 80’s.  David Lee Roth, only.  Sammy Hagar was a solo act at that point (and G had a few of his albums on cassette).  I grew to hate Van Halen at the time (but changed my mind later when not being force-fed their music multiple times a week).

Just because Ponderosa was a steakhouse didn’t mean we had steak.  In fact, I don’t think I ever had a steak at that Ponderosa.  They had an open salad bar for some outrageously low price (less than $5.00 if I remember correctly).  And while you think we would have eaten an endless supply of lettuce and tomatoes, it was more like all that other hideously wrong shit you’ll find at cheap steakhouse salad bars: really bad soup, potato salad, mac and cheese that was somehow worse than the instant shit we made at home, and I can’t recall much else.

Actually, I did eat a lot of vegetables, probably two or three plates worth.  The absolute worst though was the soft-serve ice cream.  We would see people getting large dinner plates piled four inches high with soft-serve ice cream.  Of course, judging by the size of most of them, they were on a diet, and this was some sort of concession.  We ate like horses and had free soda refills.  Back then we were kids and seemed oblivious of the fact that a glass of non-diet soda was over 200 calories, and we’d have five or six.  In theory, salad bars should be healthy, but steakhouse salad bars were more like the cheap end of a very unhealthy trough, for pigs like us on a budget.  We thought actually ordering a steak along with an unending salad bar was ostentatious over-abundance.  This is what Rome must have been like before it fell!  (Rome, Georgia, maybe.)

Sometimes we’d end up puking in the parking lot, JB in particular who seemed to have an aversion to any non-meat related food.  Those Ponderosa lunches were essentially drinking sessions without the alcohol: those freewheeling, hours going back and forth types of myth-making bullshit sessions were the same kind of things we’d do a few years later in bars, with the added allure of beer and women.  We already had it all in some sense, that underlying sense of camaraderie which is what most guys really want from a good night out at the bar (despite telling themselves they’re trying to get laid).  And the older I get, the more I miss those sort of informal male-bonding sessions as it grows so much harder to get adults on the same page to enjoy each other’s company.

From the Ponderosa, it was a short ride to Holiday Lanes just outside of Shenandoah.  It became a pierogie factory after that, then a storage space, then I don’t know what.  Last I saw, they were trying to launch a farmer’s market there.  It’s hard to believe I spent so many teenage nights in that space, working on my pool skills.  While the bowling lanes took up most of the space, I don’t think I’ve ever bowled more than a handful of times in my life.  Off to the right side of the entrance was the pool hall, where you’d pick up a rack of balls from the counterman and work up a few hours at an open table.

I can see why we never got laid in high school when the most fun we were having was in exclusively male-bonding scenarios, like the Ponderosa and pool shooting.  Aside from G, who had a table in his parent’s basement, we were all pretty average players, despite getting off the occasional Minnesota Fats, table length, multi-bumper shot that always felt like a gift from God.  Such a shot would usually come with a game on the line, a desperation hail-mary of a pool shot that found us aiming in the general direction and praying the crappy side bumpers actually responded according to our on-the-fly geometrical projections.  Such a winning shot would generally be followed by our opponent ass-hammering us in the next game, and so on, all night long, until we got tired of taking up space and hit the road.

As usual, rock and roll was blasting the whole time, adding to the cool factor, I recall many air-guitar solos fingered on pool cues, pretending I was Neil Young when "Powderfinger" came blasting over WZZO on the radio.  There were no jocks, or stoners, or kids who got A’s, or kid’s who got D’s, in the pool hall, just guys shooting pool, from the ages of about 14 through 30.  Pool is one of those things that just fell away for me after college.  I recall going to a few radically over-priced halls in Manhattan when I first moved here, but it just didn’t take hold and no longer had that same allure of a gritty place like Holiday Lanes.

How many hundreds or thousands of hours did we waste there?  Of course, none of it was a waste.  That time we spent as kids, who had just learned how to drive as teenagers and reveled in those new senses of freedom and identity, it’s the kind of time I no longer have a sense of after decades of adulthood.  Everything I do now in a similar sense of spending leisure time has a purpose of some sort.  Whether that means working on my physical and mental health in a gym, having dinner with a friend, or going out for drinks with coworkers and such, everything feels weighted with purpose, even if it’s the same purpose (bonding) as we had back then.  I felt directionless back then doing stuff like the Ponderosa/Holiday Lanes circuit, in a good way.  Time suspended, all the time in the world to hang loose, let’s just hang out and enjoy each other’s company.

That’s what we would have done, set free a glorious, sunny school day in late January.  I can see the physical impossibilities with ever having that same sense of freedom again.  Everyone I knew back then was in the same school, so we all had the day off.  We all had nothing to do.  We all did the same things in our spare time.  So it only made sense that we’d band together and take advantage of a free shot like that.

Flash forward a few decades.  Everyone I know is spread out among various jobs, living in various states (and even countries), living in various circumstances (married, with kids, divorced, working 14 hour days, etc.).  Some of us aren’t even on the same page, warring over various issues that sprung up over the years, falling in and out of touch, whatever time brings, I can see it brings strange sometimes troubling shit no one saw coming.  I’m finding, even with an old friend, that when she gets on Facebook and tries to gather troops for a night out when I’m back there visiting (really, just an excuse for anyone to hang out for a few hours in a nice bar/restaurant to have a few drinks), people either play dead or act like it’s pulling teeth to make time to spend 2-3 hours of their lives doing this.

Once upon a time, we’d do that with no warning, on a moment’s notice with a phone call, and everyone saying why the hell not, got nothing better to do.  I would love my life to be that way again, and if there’s any sort of resolution I’d make, for a new year or otherwise, it’s to allow that sort of freedom into my life again, instead of acting like I’m too important or busy to have that sort of important fun.  I like to think kids are idiots, but so long as they understand this, they’ll always have something over adults.  And I don't know why we're so stupid.

Let the Zombie Bite You

I’ve been thinking a lot about zombies lately.  The concept of zombies and how this whole bizarre culture surrounding them has formed over the years, mainly thanks to the AMC television series, The Walking Dead.

Not just with this series, but with zombie movies in general, there are some serious flaws with the concept.  We’re talking zombies: formerly living, healthy humans who, through some type of virus, or being bitten by another zombie, become this “undead” type of being who may have technically died, but has “come back” as this crazed, flesh-eating zombie with apparently no flicker of its former humanity, no ability to communicate, just this permanent, blood-crazed haze where the zombie exists only to find normal human beings to eat their flesh, particularly their brains.

Got that?  It was a pretty cool concept when George Romero first came up with it way back when, my favorite example being Dawn of the Dead, which perfectly sent up the relatively new shopping-mall culture by setting the flesh-eating frenzy in an abandoned mall turned fortress for some desperate, ass-kicking humans trying to stave off the zombie hordes.  Hard to believe that was 1978 … I took special pride in that movie as it took place at a shopping mall outside of Pittsburgh that some kids I went to Penn State with actually shopped at back then.

In the context of those first few zombie movies, what was happening made perfect sense.  The action took place in a matter of hours or days, and the audience got a real sense of the humans fending for themselves in the here and now, fighting desperately for their lives against overwhelming odds.

But … we eventually got into the concept of 28 days later (after the zombie apocalypse), then 28 weeks later.  Bear with me on this.  A zombie appears to be nothing but a human body, with the mind completely gone or replaced by this animalistic mind that exists only to hunt down uninfected humans to eat them.  The zombies still have human bodies.  Put your mind in another context, bereft of zombie culture.  The human body will cease to function without nourishment, zombie or not.  Eating is part of it, but without water or some other type of fluid, the human body will perish in a matter of days.

When’s the last time you saw a zombie in a zombie movie drinking water?  Craving water?  Having anything to do with water?  OK, they crave brains and flesh.  The same way I crave, say, frozen yogurt or pizza.  The reality is without water, I would be dead within a week, much less 28 days later, much less however many weeks, months or years are supposed to be inferred in the plot line of The Walking Dead.  Presumably, zombies would die in a matter of days without water as their bodies are essentially the same as when they were alive.  Their minds are gone.  They no longer have human sense enough to turn on faucets or pull beverages off supermarket shelves.  Even if they did, we never see that as the viewing audience.  I know, movies don’t dwell on seemingly mundane trivialities like drinking water, or taking a shit.  (Besides, unless you’re really quirky, do you really want to watch someone taking a shit?)  But we’d be dead inside of days without these “trivialities” … God help you if you ever go a week or two without shitting, you’ll surely be hospitalized if you’re still alive.

That’s one major problem with zombie culture.  The other major problem is food, i.e., in the case of zombies, normal humans.  I don’t quite grasp this.  Zombies in these movies don’t seem to grasp the fact that they could eat each other … they’re human flesh.  They only respond to the “warmth” of humans as they’re somehow cold and dead?  I don’t know … I can eat a cold turkey sandwich the same way I’d eat roasted turkey on Thanksgiving.  Turkey is turkey.  Flesh is flesh.  Maybe zombie flesh won’t taste as good, but it would be sustenance, wouldn’t it?

Still, as portrayed in movies and television, living humans are the only food that zombies can eat.  Never mind that they could still eat the food they once ate as normal human beings.  It doesn’t seem as though they crave that sort of thing.  But in lieu of a rapidly diminishing human population, wouldn’t they?  If I’m a zombie, maybe some flicker of memory plays in my mind, and as I walk past a supermarket, I go in, pop open a bag of potato chips and start mushing them into my slobbering, gaping mouth.  I groan.  Good, I think, even if I can’t formulate the word.  Not as good as a nice warm human brain I’ve just gnawed out of someone’s skull, but this will do.  Seeing as humans flee zombies or try to blow their brains out when they see each other, wouldn’t my mute zombie mind think, this is so much easier, I should hang around this place and break open more bags.  So I’m not eating at the zombie equivalent of The Four Seasons.  I’m getting by.  Nobody’s trying to kill me (again).  I’m already dead.  And these chips taste pretty good.  Not brains.  But I’ll make-do.

So we have this unrealistic, unsustainable mass of zombie hordes, always traveling in hordes, it seems, chasing after these few remaining humans in hopes of eating them.  A vast army of zombies.  Think about armies roaming the land.  We don’t have that concept in our minds anymore because that sense of warfare doesn’t exist.  We have occupying forces, like in Afghanistan and Iraq.  But not vast, roaming hordes of warriors like there used to be in military history.  Think the American Civil War.  Hundreds or thousands of soldiers walking the country side, looking to engage and defeat opposing forces.  When not doing that … these men need to be fed.  They need water.  Every day.  A few times a day.  There’s a lot of work involved in doing just that, whether it means carrying around enough supplies to at least have a base level of sustenance, or pillaging the land, killing local cattle, confiscating local harvests, finding clean water supplies in terms of rivers or lakes.

Hundreds or thousands of zombies clawing at the gates or windows of some temporary fortress the remaining humans have set up?  That’s a very real moment.  But it’s not a very real week.  Or month.  Or year.  If those humans just sat still and defended their ground for a week or two, most of those zombie would be dead-dead from lack of sustainable nutrition and water.  No need to waste ammunition on them.  Their bodies simply would stop functioning.  But then again, wars of attrition, while often more real than war itself, don’t make for good movie and television viewing.

Those are the physical issues I have with zombie culture.  Let’s get into the mental ones.  The whole zombie culture may have started with the Richard Matheson novel, I Am Legend, from back in the 1950’s.  One of my favorite childhood movies was based on this novel, 1971’s The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston as one of the few survivors of a plague that had turned most people into strange, nocturnal zombies.  Not vampires or even flesh-eating zombies: sentient beings with greyed-out hair and eyes who couldn’t stand the daylight.  Heston holed himself up in a townhouse in Los Angeles and spent most of his nights shooting at the zombies with a high-powered rifle and his days trying to find their nesting places in hopes of wiping them out.

As usual, Heston is cast as the tragic hero who goes down fighting in the end, trying to save the rest of whatever unaffected humanity remains, with the hope that a serum he’s developed can be administered to the zombies to bring them back to normal humanity.

I never read I Am Legend, but from what I gather, there’s a stark, shocking difference to how the protagonist ends up in that novel as opposed to the movie.  (I’ve never seen Will Smith in I Am Legend and can’t vouch for how that movie plays out.)  He comes to realize that it’s not the zombies who need to be exterminated … he needs to go.  For whatever reason, even if it’s some type of plague, disease or fallout from nuclear war, these zombies now represent the mass of humanity, with isolated humans like him fighting for their lives.  He’s spent so much time feeling threatened by the zombies that he can’t unravel his memories and emotions to realize that his horror and revulsion were conscious choices he made when first faced with these zombies.  Chances are, they had done nothing to him.  He just saw groups of them after dark, felt threatened as he knew there was something “wrong” and not traditionally human about them, and most likely started killing them as a defense mechanism.  Naturally, like any threatened beings, they came to hate him and defend themselves accordingly, knowing that they had to kill him before he killed them.

That’s not the sort of thought process that makes for good movies.  Self realization rarely is, as the clouds parting that way always occurs as voice-overs or montages leading up to the protagonist staring off into the middle distance while this new wisdom sinks in.  It’s bullshit from a movie and television point of view.  But it’s something I can relate to as a relatively normal, thinking human being.  I’m surrounded by nocturnal zombies.  Hundreds or thousands of them.  How long can this go on before they kill me?  How much effort will it take for me to kill all of them when it appears there’s no end in sight for how many of them there are?  What’s the point?  All wars end.  This war would never end, or at least not in my favor.

That’s how my mind would work in that scenario.  In other words, I’d let the zombie bite me.  I’d become one of them, the slobbering, stumbling, stinking, flesh-eating shit bags waiting to be blown away by someone who hasn’t grasped how the world has turned.  Probably wouldn’t like it, but I’d look at the big picture and realize, man, do I want to spend the rest of my days fighting for my life?  Fighting for a past version of the world that no longer exists and will never exist again? 

(I often get the same feeling on the rare occasions I watch cable TV now and see ads for survivalist reality shows … I think I’d rather die than live in a world filled with these people.  Then again, if I’m being totally honest, I’d rather die than live in a world filled with reality-show people … and it’s too frightening to contemplate how vast and close to every-day reality in America circa 2014 these fucking awful shows are.  Wait a minute ... are these d-bags on reality shows, the overweight, tattooed, shaved-head, bad-facial-haired, do-ragged, white-trash jackasses ... the zombies ... and I am the Omega Man in this scenario?  Sometimes I frighten myself.)

This makes me want to read I Am Legend because I can sense that when it was written, the world was changing fast, in that post World War II haze of the 1950’s, just before the 1960’s kicked into high gear, and there were surely a lot of people hankering for “the old days” much as many of us do now as we age.  Imagine a world ravaged by war, millions of Jews exterminated, millions of people, soldiers and civilians, killed and maimed in an insane war that had to be fought, countries decimated and destroyed by bombs … you get a sense of what Matheson was shooting for in his novel.  That your perspective must change with time, whether you like it or not, whether you understand where the tides will carry you (and no one ever does).  This really rings true to me now that both my parents are gone, and that orphan sense one develops without those very real guides in one’s life.  I’ll always have the past, but there’s no fighting for a world that no longer exists, just the realization that I have to step into this new world and find my way.  Sure, the memories of them walk with me like comforting shadows, every day.  But in effect, I become a zombie, forget the complexities and desires of the old world, the myriad number of ways I felt I had to justify my existence, all that matters now is brains.  No worries.  No legacies.  Just now.

Food for thought?  Or have they already eaten my brains?  For the love of God, if anyone receives this transmission, I’m running low on ammo!

Dog Bites Man

Until this past Wednesday, the last time I got bit by a dog was about 1973 or so.  Way back.  And it happened in roughly the same area, the back roads running through the farms and open fields around my hometown in Pennsylvania.  In roughly the same fashion, passing through, in 1973 on a bicycle, Wednesday while on a morning run, along a route I first started running in 1978.

It was a traumatic experience that first time.  We called that stretch of road “the Milee,” I think after the mile-long creek that ran parallel to the road.  Back then, housing was sparse: a few old single-frame houses, but mostly bolted down trailers on small parcels of lands between wooded areas.  I’m sure if someone had filmed a simple car trip along those road back then and showed it to me now, I would be shocked at how “wild” the area was, as compared to the dozens of small, sometimes expensive homes that have sprung up in the woods and fields in the passing decades.

But there was that one stretch of straightaway road that remains virtually the same today, a few small trailers, two or three houses, farm equipment.  One of the home owners has expanded over the years and now has a field for two horses and a mule, along with a bunch of ducks and dogs that I hear barking every time I pass.  All behind fences.  Unlike back then, when it was common for all those farmers to have dogs wandering free in their fields.

This became a problem periodically.  The worst incident was the big German Shepherd owned by the Hampton family, I think his name was King, getting loose and killing a few chickens in a neighbor’s coup.  Only to be shot dead by the teenage son in the family that owned the chickens.  Unfortunately, he was in his right as the dog was trespassing on their property.  We all sided with the Hamptons, because the kid shooting King seemed like a wild over-reaction.  But looking back now, King was a pretty frightening animal, a large dog, who loved to bark and chase.  He would often pick up small, cut-down railroad ties with his mouth and carry them around.  I never got bit by King, but I got chased many times, and had I not known the dog as well, would have been scared shitless in his presence.

A German Shepherd much like King attacked me one day in the summer of 1973.  We would often take field trips on our bicycles back then, along the Milee, where we’d park and drink from the streams or simply go in the woods and enjoy them, skipping stones, swimming, playing hide-and-seek.  I wouldn’t dream of going into the woods today, and couldn’t as most of that land now has homes nestled between wooded lots.  Going out to the Milee Road seemed like a big adventure, and it was to our pre-teenager minds where every distance more than a few hundred feet seems impossibly long.  It was only about two miles from our house: I would go on to run five and seven mile routes along those roads in a few years.

But I recall riding along that road with my brothers and sister, probably another kid or two from the neighborhood.  We knew about that dog who lived in one of those farm trailers, but also knew if you sped up around there and kept your mouth shut, you’d be way past the property by the time he started barking.

It was drizzling that day, a misty summer rain, and I recall us picking up speed as we pushed our 21-inch Huffy’s fast through that forbidden zone.  But it was hardly forbidden, just an area of public road where a guy was too cheap to buy some fence to keep his dog in.  I recall that dog snarling and barking, which of course scared the shit out of us.  I was bringing up the rear, peddling my ass off, and I could hear the dog’s nails clicking on the macadam of the road as it approached.

Next thing I knew, I heard a ripping sound, could feel the dog’s snout on my upper thigh, then a searing pain shooting down my leg.  I knew he had got me, and I started screaming.  But didn’t stop pedaling.  I figured, this son of a bitch will kill me if I stop.  I don’t remember much after that, save all of us pulling over a few hundred yards away, me sobbing, and showing everyone my leg, where there was a six-inch long gash where the dog had bit tried to get hold of my leg then slid off, blood seeping into my shorts.  I don’t even know how we got home, as I was carrying on as though a shark had chewed off my leg, but we did.  My parents rushed me to the hospital, where I got tetanus shots, and various ointments and bandages for the leg.  As bad as it looked, it didn’t take that long to heal.

I can’t remember how the situation with the dog was handled, save to say my parents called the cops, and we never had a problem with that dog again, whether it was put down or sent to a shelter or what.  It was like a demon being removed from our collective dreams, just one less thing to worry about when we got on our bicycles.

This past Wednesday, I got the nostalgic thrill of getting bit again.  Honestly, I was surprised that this still could happen today as most farmers with dogs either have them trained not to go near the road, put them on long chains or build fences so they have an area to wander.  Everywhere I go on my runs around the woods back there, dogs are there.  Always barking.  There’s the family in the log-cabin house with the old Irish setters coming up the Spring Crest Hill, dogs that don’t bark, but will chase.  And those dogs have always been friendly.  When they catch you, they want to be petted.  Unlike the dog at the house on top of Hampton’s Hill, which will bark horrifically at anything non-automobile that passes.  Then again, I haven’t heard that bark in at least two years, so maybe he finally died.  I think the same happened to at least one of those nice Irish Setters, and the one I still see looks pretty old.

In any event, while I hear dogs all the time on my runs, I’ll often only see them through rails or fences, hear them barking through windows.  There are public ordinances back there against dogs roaming free that apply whether you live in town or along the rural routes.  Some owners of dogs out there along the back road tend to be oblivious of these rules.  Their dogs are nice to them, but bark like hell at anything else, often aggressively, which I’m sure they’ve been trained to do.  Unfortunately, not trained to be real guard dogs, but sort of morally-retarded guard dogs: make noise at anything that moves.  They somehow know not to bark at cars, but go crazy over everything else that: a. moves, and b. isn’t their master(s).

There are two such dogs like this on the other side of the Spring Crest Hill.  Again, farm folks, not sure exactly who they are, but I gather a young couple owns one of the two houses next to each other just over the top of the hill.  Each has a dog, both barkers, both usually locked in on their porches.  They go nuts when I run by, only to start dolefully howling after I’m about 30 yards down the road.  Their howling usually alerts another dog just down the road who used to roam free years ago, but must have been chained up since as I haven’t seen him in ages.

I like dogs but can’t stand idiot dogs.  Much like people.  Most farm dogs are idiots.  They’ve been trained to be friendly to maybe five or six people, immediate family or neighbors, and treat everyone else like potential meat, despite the fact that public roads snake all along these properties, and I can’t be the only one out there running, or walking, or biking.  Generally when I’ve had snags with dogs along these roads, there’s always something annoyingly condescending about the owners, who are invariably rednecks.  I don’t say that as an insult, more as shorthand for you, dear reader, to gather with whom I’m dealing.

I’ll be there, in my shorts and t-shirt, paused as I try to coax a barking dog to get off the road so he doesn’t get run over as he chases me down the road, then backs off when I run towards him, then chases me down the road as I start running again, then backs off when I again run towards him, repeat for about five minutes.

If anyone should be pissed off and condescending, it should be me.  I’m minding my own business, traveling on a public road, and this shithead animal, who is illegally roaming free, is making me stop.  But the farmer who comes out tends to have a bit of a been here/done that attitude, oh, you’re messing with my dog again, don’t worry, I’ll save you, here Schep, leave that wandering homo in shorts alone now, I know he’s a dick, but humor him, old canine friend, he doesn’t know any better.

I’ve been on the receiving end of that attitude literally since 1978, when I first started running those roads.  Back then, daily, now more like every two months when I visit.  And it’s a rare occasion when I have to deal with an unchained dog, as I gather most dog owners foolish enough to let their dogs run free have either paid the price with dogs run over by cars or euthanized by the SPCA for attacking pedestrians.  It’s a no-win situation for the fools who do this, and they’ll surely spend the rest of their days cursing the 10-year-olds or relatively innocent car drivers who lead to the pre-mature deaths of their family pets.  Never once realizing they essentially killed their own dogs with their rank stupidity.

With the dogs on the Spring Crest Hill, this wasn’t the first time I’ve dealt with them running loose.  I gather both dogs are normally locked in on the porches of those houses, and there doesn’t appear to be any fenced-in area for them to roam around.  But back in September, I came over the hill, and sure enough, coming up the house, the smaller black dog (not a pit bull, but some type of larger terrier) came barking up towards me on the road.  I’ve learned with dogs to not show fear, to either stop, or if they appear not to be in attack mode (and aside from that crazed dog in 1973, I’ve never seen this), to run towards them, as nine times out of 10, that dog will retreat, still barking.

Sure enough, I ran towards him, and he retreated.  Just as I did, a guy in his 20’s came down the hill from the house, calling out the dog’s name.  I told him, I’m trying to get your dog off the road so he doesn’t get hit by a car.  Thanks, buddy, I appreciate it, Red (not real name), come on over here, stop barking now.  Again, that sort of casual attitude that I don’t equate with a dog running loose.  No apologies, again, the vague attitude that it’s somehow my fault for inconveniencing this asshole animal who can’t stop making noise.  I’m used to that, no need to escalate the situation, which I’ve often thought to do, but I know it will lead nowhere good as this horse’s ass will feel threatened on his home turf and respond accordingly.  When I used the word “redneck” before … this is what I mean, that attitude, the counterfeit authority from someone who is exerting no real authority.

Well, Wednesday morning, I come over the hill, and sure enough, I see that black dog rooting around in the tall grass on the downside of the road away from the house.  I can only imagine how many cars have had to slow down coming over the lip of that hill to avoid killing this animal.  Then again, I don’t live there, I have no idea how much they’re allowed to roam free like this, but if I see it twice in four months, I have to assume it’s too regular for their own good.

I approach, dog starts barking, and now I hear the other dog barking, a large mixed breed from the other porch, who is also roaming free.  Not a big deal, just slow down, make the occasional charge towards them, and they back off.  The usual.  But this time, as I start to run away, the black one comes towards me.  I stop and hold out my gloved hand (it was in the 20’s that morning) so he can sniff.  He does.  I start running.  He lunges out and nips at my hand, doesn’t hurt, but I find it annoying that this dog is playing games with me.  As I start running, the other dog comes up behind my right leg and snaps at my calf.  I felt a slight thud on my leg, like bumping into a hard object, but make no note of it.  A woman in her 20’s on the porch finally calls out to the dogs, and they run away.  We wave at each other, and I take off running again.

I really didn’t think anything was off until I got home and saw there was a small puncture in my sweat pants on the back of my leg.  I then rolled up my pants leg to see that there was a small blackish-red spot on my calf where the dog must have bit me, with a small trickle of dried blood beneath it.  It looked more like I had fallen and scraped my leg.  It didn’t really hurt; I hadn’t even felt or acknowledged it when it happened and ran four miles afterwards.  I guessed that the sweat pants absorbed most of the blow, and I was left with this flesh wound that would have been a whole lot worse had I been running in shorts.

In any event, I gave it a thorough cleaning and have been treating it with Neosporin and a bandage every day – it’s not a problem.  When I got back to New York yesterday and told a few people, the response was the same each time: are you going to sue them?

Sue them?  I didn’t even bother going to a doctor.  Those are essentially kept family dogs, not wild, rabid wolves, and people get bit by dogs all the time.  I know I did when I was a kid and had dogs, nips here and there, dog grabs your hand while you’re playing and inadvertently draws blood.  Shit happens.  Not going to be suing anybody.  Not going to the doctor.  It’s been enough to annoy and inconvenience me, but not enough to worry me or have me thinking we’ll have to amputate.

By the same token, the experience has brought back memories of when that dog ripped into my ass back in the 70’s, and it has unnerved me in that sense more than any.  I realize if I were to report this thing to the local police, chances are good those people could lose or be forced to put down that animal, which I don’t want.  I guess I just wish rednecks could be a little smarter?  Have a little more common sense?  See the world from someone passing them along the road instead of that same place they remain along the road?  That sort of healthy realization has clearly happened with most of the people along those country roads back home, but every now and then I’m reminded that some things don’t change.

Failed Gangsta Rapper in the Desert

For some odd reason, a coworker and I got into a discussion about The Manson Family the other day.  How Manson, or any dimestore maniac, got so many people not just to believe in him, but to do utterly crazy, violent nonsense for him.  We’re sane people.  Know how to present ourselves in public.  Can be persuasive when the need arises.  But to get a few dozen runaway teenage girls to be our sex slaves and kill people for some totally insane cause?

I guess drugs, limited intelligence and under-developed emotional maturity in the participants really go a long way towards megalomania.  I pictured myself on one of the Manson girls parole boards:

Manson Girl (now Grey-Haired Woman): And as my syllabus states, I found Our Lord Jesus Christ in the summer of 1978.

Bill: Thank God you didn’t find him in the summer of 1969.  Otherwise you might have stabbed him 47 times and carved Beatles lyrics into his chest.

I ask myself what the Manson Family means now, considering how the world is, with maniacs chopping off people’s heads in the desert.  And not just that, but having the presence of mind to film it and use it as a berserk recruitment tape for other like-minded maniacs.  (That’s what I think is really going on with terrorism.  The horrible acts in and of themselves are meant to scare and intimidate the people these maniacs consider enemies, but the real deal is always a visual record of their work that they can use as an integral facet of their marketing pitch to other doomed assholes.  They know their numbers are small.  They need more people to join their cause, more than they need to kill the enemy.)

What’s really strange to me is not the use of old-world torture methods but mixing them with “cutting edge” technology – filming the act, possibly with a smartphone, and then uploading to Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.  I’d say “these guys are no dummies” … but they’re idiots.  We know this.  Their version of a good time is filming a beheading in the desert … while ours might be filming an ice-bucket challenge and hoping it goes viral via our group of Facebook friends.

The age of wonder?  It feels more like the age of wandering.  Aimlessly.  Covert marketing, envy and materialism masquerading as progress.

The world now feels like a surly mix of things that will always be with us – like death in any form – and these trendy play things we’re supposed to flock to like sheep.  As you could guess, I’m more inclined to things that will always be with us, but you’re reading this now on one of those trendy play things – the internet – that surely heralded the beginning of this new and confused age.  I’m typing this now on a bus, an act that was unthinkable 25 or 30 years ago (with all 10 fingers … call me a luddite).  If I wanted, I could upload the story and put it on the web, although this bus’ wifi system is pretty choppy and I might be denied.  But my words must get out and reach the waiting masses!  You’re waiting for this, right?

That’s what I’ve realized as I’ve grown older.  Nobody’s waiting.  Maybe the Grim Reaper, but he waits patiently for everyone.  Nobody waits for anything anymore.  Earlier this month, I was in the supermarket, back in rural PA, waiting in line.  A guy in his 20’s in front of me.  Big.  Not just fat, a guy who clearly lifted weights, but was chunky on top of that.  At the counter, an elderly man, who appeared to be chatting about nothing in particular with the cashier.  It was mildly annoying.  There was a line, and this guy was killing time, maybe lonely, needed someone to talk to, seemed oblivious that the cashier’s function was not to be his sounding board about whatever was on his mind.

While I was mildly annoyed, the guy in front of me was fuming.  Started to shrug and sigh, turning around to make eye contact with me as if to say, “why do I always get stuck behind assholes like this” … I knew the feeling, but I could also see the big picture.  Lonely old man, needs someone to talk to, this is it for today, let him run it out, will tag on two minutes to my wait in line, this, too, shall pass.  There were no other cashiers, so we were stuck.

In New York, the younger guy would have been flipping out, making his impatience verbal, as that’s how the manners meter rolls here.  But in rural PA, he just stood there seething, in ways that struck me as vaguely threatening, given his size and demeanor.  He wasn’t smart enough to grasp that his size combined with a lack of patience puts other people on edge, which will not serve him well when he runs into like-minded individuals with better self-defense skills.

Nothing happened.  As it normally does.  His options were clear.  Pick up the old guy and drag him out to the parking lot to possibly kick his ass.  And get arrested.  He took the easier choice, to feel bad for a few minutes, as if the world had it in for him, as it always does.  So if that was the case, it made more sense to look at his own big picture: down that Muscle Milk and eat three meals of meat each day, keep pumping that iron, getting bigger, getting bloated.  Because the world has it in for him.  And no douchebags in a desert are ever going to lop his head off on Twitter, no sir.  The world is your oyster when you can bench 250.

(Sidenote: isn’t it amazing that you can say so much on Twitter visually – cut someone’s head off – and never get anywhere near to communicating what that means in 140 characters?  You’re not prohibited from showing things that would take thousands of words to fully express, but 140 characters are too heavy to get across in one tweet.  They banned that video from Twitter, despite the fact that it perfectly, and brutally, underlined their philosophy.  Which is lightning fast communication of concepts.  Lopping off an infidel’s head in the desert … do you get the picture?  Not even sure why they allowed the failed gangsta rapper to make his asinine, comic-book villain speech … totally unnecessary, like when a “bad guy” professional wrestler grabs a microphone to pontificate in the ring.  Madonna could have told him that in 1985 with her experience on MTV … people don’t really listen to the words, especially with videos.)

You better believe, if we had all this social media available to us in 1969, the Manson Family would have filmed both trips they made, to Sharon Tate’s rented house and the LaBianca residence, to film the whole thing.  Living on an abandoned movie ranch in the desert?  (Funny how deserts seem to attract these folks!)  Eating out of garbage bins.  I assure you, at least one of those dislocated upper-middle-class runaway chicks would have had a smartphone, probably more.  And they’d have filmed the whole shebang.  Not just the murders, but the orgies, the insane speeches where Charlie made the connection between The White Album, messages from God, and their role in the upcoming race war that The Bible predicted.  Just trying to imagine now what The Manson Family's Facebook page might have looked like, aside from the obvious Beatles and Biblical reference links.  Would you "friend" them?

Do you ever get the feeling that life is passing you by?  I can guarantee you, Charlie Manson didn’t feel that way for a good part of the late 60’s.  I often look at people like him, or David Koresh, and wonder how in the hell they got people to follow them.  Koresh seemed like an REO Speedwagon roadie, the kind of guy who would try to “rock” while wearing wire-frame glasses and sporting a shag mullet.  What I’m trying to say: he was a dick.  Ditto, Manson.  A petty criminal from the middle of nowhere who spent most of his formative and adult life incarcerated.  Manson was roughly the same age as Mom, which shocked the hell out of me at the time.  This crazed maniac with hair down to his shoulders and swastikas carved in his forehead … could have been one of those dorky guys with a crew cut in Mom’s Class of ’50 high-school yearbook?

George Carlin, too.  While guys like this were out there doing their thing in ways not indicative of their generation, Mom was quietly raising a bunch of kids in rural Pennsylvania, supporting values passed on to her as a child raised in the shadow of The Depression and World War II, and all those other working-class Irish things we all had in The Coal Region.  The funny thing was, particularly with Carlin, that I’d later read interviews with him and gather that he fully understood my Mom’s world, that era in the middle of the 20^th Century.  Maybe he rebelled against it, but he also seemed to have a begrudging respect for the hard sense the world made at that time.  Or he could have just been nostalgic for that rough-and-tumble Irish Catholic upbringing he had in NYC.

Where do you draw the line between living a relatively normal life and going over the edge?  It’s hardly a line: it’s a radically different lifestyle choice.  Manson simply took his hardened upbringing, particularly the mannerisms he learned pimping women when he moved out to the West Coast and had to find some dubious way to make money, and used them in a new environment.  One where he sensed there were a lot of stoned, lost, impressionable kids congregating in California.  People forget that the Baby Boomers wanted to be lead; their generation was one that flocked towards cultural icons to guide them.  One good thing I’ll say about kids now: they seem much less impressionable in that sense.  Then again, I don’t see too many worthwhile leaders to guide them anywhere either.  Other than blank materialism, devices and the burning desire to use them all day, I’m not quite sure what guides them anymore.

It might be a strange way to look at it, but the failed gangsta rapper in the desert … isn’t he just being nostalgic?  And I mean real, old-world, let’s roll the clock back centuries kind of nostalgia.  Burning witches, or throwing them in a lake to see if they float.  That kind of “world was better before we were born” nostalgia that really drives home the concept.  There’s a safe kind of nostalgia where you can long for how the world was when you were a child.  I understand that and indulge in it quite a bit.  (And it’s harmless, too, if you ask me, despite what some jack asses may tell you about indulging at all.  It’s a good idea to understand your past, because most of it is going to guide your future.)

The failed gangsta rapper in the desert looks at the world the way it is and thinks, “This is a load of shit.”  How many times have I had the same thought?  Countless.  You, too?  We all have.  But then I catch myself and think, “The world isn’t really that bad.”  It might be bad enough that I’d buy a bunch of Civil War duds online and pretend I’m fighting for the Union in some weekend re-enactment of Gettysburg.  But to actually kill someone in that re-enactment?  Come on, now.  War is over.  The South lost.  And they aint gonna' do it agin, no matter what Charlie Daniels says.

I’m starting to believe anyone who believes in a religion, or any cult-like belief, large or small, simply imagines a better world that used to exist, or the promise of a better world that was put forth in an age-old book of wisdom.  They want to be guided.  “We” want to be guided?  “I” want to be guided?  At this point in my life, I’m not so sure.  The two people who guided me when it mattered are gone.  As are some of the people who helped me along the way through school and early adulthood.  If not physically gone, then I just don’t know where they are now.  And I'm too old to follow anybody.  I must admit, it’s nice to recall those days and see there were people in the world who didn’t owe me a damn thing, yet made an effort to push me in good directions.  But the whole point of that is to find your own way.

Dylan’s Basement Tapes are coming out on Tuesday, something that fans have waited decades for.  Well, most fans didn’t – they bought the stuff on bootleg over the past few decades, but to get them officially and polished is a nice deal.  In his time, Dylan was like Moses, leading his tribe across the desert … to the promised land?  No promises kept in the desert.  Just a bunch of strange people with bad shit running through their heads.  Can’t help but feel sometimes that the world has turned into one big desert and all that entails mentally.

U Who?

I hadn’t intended to write about the recent U2/Apple manufactured controversy, but what the hell, it’s an interesting topic.

So, the day Apple stages its fall event to announce the release of the new iPhone, U2 makes a promotional appearance.  Afterwards, Tim Cook announces that U2’s new album will be available for free to all iTunes customers.

While I’ve been an iTunes user since buying my first 160 GB iPod more than a few years back, I’ve never used the iTunes store.  This goes ways back, to Apple’s initial practice of only selling DRM-protected files, which I shunned like the plague and never got over.  But that night, I logged into the iTunes store and saw that the U2 album was noted as already-purchased, so all I had to do was download the files, free of charge.

What a nice promotional gesture, I thought.  Even if U2 albums over the past two decades haven’t done all that much for me, usually a few tracks are keepers.  I downloaded them into my iTunes library, copied them to my laptop’s Desktop, then deleted the files from my library.  I’m this thorough since I have around 30,000 tracks in my library and have my own filing/tagging system to keep things in order.

As the week goes along, I become aware that there is a “massive outcry” over what Apple did, that some iTunes users immediately got onto Twitter and other social media, complaining about Apple violating their privacy and trust by forcing free music into their library.  I didn’t immediately understand, but later learned that some users have iTunes set-up so that purchased files drop straight into their iTunes library, and by extension their “cloud” and devices.  These people had about a dozen tracks dropped into their Apple devices from a band they either didn’t know or like.  But the only way to state that properly in the wonderfully literate syntax of internetese is to say they “hate U2.”

The “massive outcry” was the usual thing: overgrown babies turning a non-issue into their version of walking five miles in the snow to borrow a library book.    This is the kind of thing they will look back on as symbolic of the tribulations they suffered in the halcyon days of their youth, while lecturing grandchildren who have silicon chips that stream music and virtual-reality video embedded in their fucking skulls.  The grandkids will roll their eyes: “Man, grandpa’s going off again about the time Apple downloaded MP3 files onto his iPhone without his permission.  What’s an MP3 file?  What’s iTunes?  What’s an iPhone?”  They’ll vaguely remember Apple the same way I remember IBM Selectric typewriters.

Never mind that a vast majority of iTunes customers, hundreds of millions of them, either quietly downloaded or ignored the free tracks.  Massive outcry?  More like what happens these days: a few thousand people on Facebook and Twitter riling each other up about the same non-issue, and the media then picking up on this and turning it into a firestorm of bullshit.

Some of the utter nonsense I’ve been reading the past week has been unreal.  An internet buddy linked to a story on Salon calling U2 “America’s Most Hated Band” – not necessarily because of this recent situation with Apple, but that and a lot of issues concerning Bono’s pomposity over the years and the sort of myth-building that any massively successful rock band or artist cultivates.  (The article didn’t even mention one of their more glaring episodes, when U2’s record label sued the band Negativland for not getting permission to parody “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” in their song "The Letter U And The Numeral 2.”)

“Hate” is one of those internet words that has lost its meaning.  Hate much?  How many times have I seen some catty millennial mutter that passive aggressive bon mot when disagreeing with someone venting?  Like “epic.”  Like “awesome.”  Like “like.”  Words that have lost their meaning and only underline inferior language skills, where a Youtube video of a dog making friends with a billy goat becomes “awesome.”

It’s not awesome.  It’s not epic. It’s not even, like, epic.  Most people using the word “hate” don’t have enough heart and soul to hate.  You only develop that sort of emotional depth by being engaged in the real world, not spending all day in the world of devices and the internet.  “Hate” has come to mean that you think something is bullshit.  It bothers you.  Real hatred is a profoundly negative and violent emotion that goes far beyond feeling irritated. It’s something that burns in your soul and may very well destroy you.

I know we’re all being facetious when we use the word “hate” to describe bands, or types of music, or movies, or any form of art that elicits an opinion.  Most bands, music or movies that I don’t like don’t inspire the emotional effort required for genuine hatred.  I don’t like them, don’t have time to waste on them, don’t even have time to give the right amount of attention to things I love.  I don’t like hiphop in general, but, dude, I really should take the time to listen to the cool underground stuff to really get it, man?  No, thank you.  No time.  Would I listen to it if it was dropped in my iTunes library for free?  Sure, why not, but I would delete it immediately if there was nothing there for me.  It’s fine not to like U2, or any band, or any type of music.  So while I see through the faux hatred, I’m slightly befuddled by legitimate publications calling a band like U2 “the most hated band in America.”

That was the surface issue.  The real issue?  I’m going to go out on a limb here … the complainers could have taken two minutes to click open their iTunes library and delete the files.  Notice that a few thousand people instead took that two minutes to vent on Twitter, which tells you everything about their priorities.  Oh, but my trust has been violated!  How dare Apple and U2 pull this fascist bullshit on me, man!  On us!  They did it to us, man!

(Sidenote: I’ve never read those long-winded user terms of agreements that appear every time I download a piece of software, but I suspect Apple addresses this issue in the agreement for use of iTunes products.  If not, there would surely be a case here for a class-action lawsuit, right?)

Here’s an idea.  If you’re that genuinely offended by what Apple (not U2) did, boycott Apple products.  Trade in your iPhone for an Android.  Stop using Apple products.  If I was that offended, I would dump Apple from my life.  (As it is, new iPhones are selling like hot cakes, and U2’s back catalog sales on iTunes have picked up considerably since this whole “crisis” … no such thing as bad publicity.)

The gist of what happened here: the device is much more important to these people than the music on it.  Noticed this four years ago and is even more true now.  The emphasis in this scenario was placed on the importance of the device and unwarranted (i.e., free) files suddenly appearing on it.  The sanctity of the device had been violated.  “Sanctity” is the perfect word here.  The device is sanctified in the lives of many of these people: holy.  It’s not just a physical extension of who they are, but a spiritual one, too.  It’s their best friend.  Much more important than music.  More important than the Facebook friends and Twitter followers.  The other week, I read about a 50-year-old woman in NYC getting crushed by a bus when she tried to rescue her dropped phone.  That’s what we’re talking about here … that level of devotion.

What’s really baffling to me about all this is that the “controversy” was stirred up by Facebook and Twitter viral messages.  Facebook and Twitter are far more intrusive and in violation of their users’ personal privacy than Apple and/or U2 could ever be.  The way they track and catalog users’ personal preferences, likes/dislikes, types of friends, age group, gender, race, geographical location … all for marketing purposes.  And these people are worried about a company dumping free music on their sacrosanct devices?  There are social-media companies using you, the personal details of your life and your friends’ lives as financially valuable marketing data for corporate entities that see all of us solely as dollar signs!

The last thing I saw this week was on Bob Lefsetz’s website.  Lefsetz is a shithead.  Everyone knows this.  He knows this, too, which is why I can stomach his routine.  He blurts out stupid black/white takes on issues that he will usually reverse himself on in another week or month.  He believes in absolutes in a world that’s a patchwork of all sort of compromises and different ways to do things … but he feels he must dictate his extreme terms to an ailing recording industry.  And I’d gather most of the idiots in the recording industry who follow him lap up his nonsense.  If Bob Lefsetz says something is “dead” (like MP3 files or CD’s), I can assure you, there are millions of dollars of revenue generated weekly for these “corpses” that keep the recording industry alive, and will do so for years to come.

But he linked to this site as a legitimate response to the Apple/U2 situation, posting social-media responses by people who weren’t happy to get those U2 files.  Leave it to Lefsetz to use something this innocuous to, in his mind, damn U2 to cultural irrelevancy, despite the fact that they’re one of the most popular bands in the world.  I gather this is not the whole picture – I’ve seen some people take the sophomoric “Apple is Orwellian” route of complaining, I gather because they’ve been to college.  Most of the people responding on this site seem like kids – if they’re older than teenagers, they missed a few boats.  I’m probably being generous, as there are surely people in the 30’s still acting like teenagers, and let’s not forget that 50-year-old who gave her life for her phone.

But just read some of the responses:  I have no idea who U2 is but I’m pretty sure I hate them.  Who is U2 and why are they on my iPod?  Like who even is U2.  My dad know who U2 is … ok.

Shit like that.  Here’s an idea.  If you don’t know who U2 is … maybe you should keep it to yourself.  (It’s all about the device, not the music on the device.)  I’m a fan of U2, not a major fan, but nearly all of what they did in the 80’s and early 90’s still rings true to me.  I can see why people don’t like them.  The new album is marred by the sort of windy self-seriousness that they’re notorious for.

We’re talking kids here, so they weren’t raised in that era?  OK.  I wasn’t raised in the era of Frank Sinatra.  I knew who he was when I was a kid.  Yo, nigga, these kids, maybe they aint white?  (Sorry for the yo-yo-yo vernacular ... just mimicking some of the responses on the above link.) I knew who Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Chuck Berry, Nat King Cole, Ray Charles and a few dozen other non-white recording artists were, too.  I aint black.  I knew dozens of recording artists from previous generations and decades without really knowing much or any of their music.  I wasn’t raised by musicologists – I was raised by a factory worker and stay-at-home Mom.  I didn’t own any Frank Sinatra 45’s or albums.  Our idea of culture was that month’s copy of Readers Digest on the bathroom radiator.  But kids today have so many other distractions, etc.?

No.  They usually have one massive distraction: smartphone with its self-contained world of social media outlets, or in other (teenage male) cases, online video games.  Everything else exists in a gray void outside that world.  It’s not this insane barrage of media that clueless adults picture kids as being bombarded with today: it’s usually one device with a few social-media facets attached that take up massive amounts of kids’ time.  Kids are geniuses at wasting time, with the internet being the colossal, be-all-to-end-all waste of time ever invented.

We’re talking about kids here.  They’re either purposely lying to appear cool to their friends … or what I suspect, they’re just idiots.  I’d be real curious to know what’s on their iPods that a highly-visible band like U2 is totally unknown to them.  (Probably the current Top 40 suspects, nothing more or less.)  U2 just performed live at an event heralding the newest version of the device they’re thumbing their “who is U2” messages on … covered by thousands of media outlets … and they don’t know who U2 is.  U2 has appeared in numerous TV commercials for Apple products.  They had an iPod branded especially for them by Steve Jobs.  Again, they’re either playing stupid to the rest of the world or are just plain stupid.  The way kids are and always have been.  The way we all could be at times as kids.  I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, nor as dumb as adults thought I was.

I know … what’s cool to a 14-year-old will not be cool to me.  And vice-versa.  But here’s what you learn about life as it goes on: no one is cool.  There is no cultural center anymore at any age.  Everything is so sub-divided and micro-marketed that the few things we can agree on in terms of popularity tend to have profoundly short shelf lives.  The private worlds of Facebook and Twitter create these cocoons for people to feel cool in with their friends, and I like that about these entities, but that’s about all I like about them.  I don’t need to tell those kids they’re cool or dicks for not knowing or caring who U2 is.  It has nothing to do with U2.  These people are not cool, nor am I, but let them hold the illusion as long as they need.  For as a wise man once said, change will come around real soon, make them women and men.  Of course, by the time they’re adults, the age of reason will probably be 48 years old.