The Millennials Are Coming! The Millennials Are Coming!

On Sunday night, 60 Minutes ran a segment on “Millennials” in the workplace, i.e., Americans born after 1980. The concept being that this is the “never told no” generation of kids, who would be awarded just for showing up to play on a sports team, who were told that there were no winners or losers – the gist being that these kids are more spoiled than even their parents’ generation, if that’s possible. The larger meaning, of course, is that workers like this demand special needs that employers must meet, otherwise the worker walks in our flexible economy, as there’s always another job somewhere else.

I watch shit like this on TV, and I just throw my hands up. Not over “Millennials” – over the constantly recurring concept of younger people not knowing their ass from a hole in the ground, which is often true, but gets beaten to death by the media, and turned into bullshit trends that don’t really apply across the board. It happened with the Hippie/Me/Yuppie generation. It happened with mine, which was somewhere between “Me” and “Generation X” – although I recognize character traits of both in myself. Hell, I recognize a lot of myself in the way “Millennials” are described. (I’ve seen “Generation Y” as another catch-all phrase – this Wikipedia entry gets the point across nicely, as does this USA Today article.) If you google either slang phrase, you’ll come up with a bunch of entries about how to deal with these people in the workplace – this is some seriously strange shit.

Millennials look at their upper-middle-class parents, working 50-60 hours a week to maintain their suburban way of life, and they think, no, this is the wrong way to live, family is more important, you can’t say your family is important when you spend three hours with them on the weekend and think that makes up for everything.

I got news for you … hippies felt the same way in the 60s. The exact same way. There are countless songs and references in movies and television detailing this. Kids in the 70s felt the same way. So did kids in the 80s. Kids in the 90s had a whole negative spin put on that basic premise of lousy parentage with grunge rock. Basically, it’s the perfectly logical belief that the American way of life, as best exemplified by these Type A workaholics, is rotten.

It’s nothing new. It’s correct. And it’s one of those things that, unless you’re born outside that particular caste system (upper middle classdom), chances are no matter how horrified you are by that way of life as a teen and twentysomething, you yourself are going to start living that way, too, once you realize how much it costs to maintain that sick way of life: the mortgage payments, the insane school and property taxes, the bizarre need to have gigantic, gas-guzzling cars, all the other expensive toys we have in our lives. That shit costs money – serious money. And most people hooked into that way of life, sooner or later, want to maintain it after whatever pangs of anti-materialism they experience during or just after college.

It’s rampant materialism beyond reason: people in debt up to their necks just to maintain a lifestyle that, once the brief flashes of leisure are removed, is nothing but a grind that says more about feelings of self worth tied into status. Not tied into financial well being – that’s an important distinction to make. If that was true, you wouldn’t have so many millions of people desperately in debt, families with two parents working very well-paying jobs, and they’re still spending their entire lives behind the eight ball, because they want that appearance of status. And who are these people? They were the hippies in the 60s and the groovy kids in the 70s hanging in the high-school parking lot. Not all of us were geared to go through life with that same casual, common sense. Many of us became our parents. And many of our parents were assholes, ergo if A = B, and B = C, life goes on.

And when you get right down to it, it’s not a horrible way of life – it’s just one that I don’t respect for reasons noted above. The value system in it is fucked up, not right, dishonest beyond repair. What bothers me is this concept that the kids of these people are somehow going to rise above it, when it’s become clear to me that very few people rise above their ways of life, for better or worse. And I don’t know what “rising above” upper middle classdom implies. Moving to an ashram in Oregon? It’s been done, and I’m sure there are people out there living good lives in those ashrams, but that number is miniscule as compared to the millions of people who once were kids, would have looked at that way of life, put down the bong, exhaled, and said, “Yeah, man, freedom from this bullshit, prison way of life our parents are living, let’s do it.”

If these kids think they’re going to have typical 40-hour work weeks and maintain that foolish, forever-indebted way of life, they’re in for a rude awakening. And they’ll get it. All these articles and seminars about “Millennials” and “Generation Y” are going to seem like just what they are now to anyone with clear eyes: total bullshit. Another excuse for the polesmokers in HR to waste a few grand on catch-phrase seminars in the lunch room. I’m also pretty annoyed by the fact that these cultural trends, as they’ve gone in the past few decades, are defined entirely by the whims of upper-middle-class white people. No one else. If you think this “Millennial” horseshit applies to working-class people of any color, I suggest you watch C.O.P.S. one of these nights and recognize those folks didn’t get the memo about coddling their kids like temperamental royalty. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans in Iraq right now who, I can guarantee you, aren’t speed dialing their therapist because they didn’t get a trophy for not being blown up by a roadside bomb.

Besides which, when I’m in the work place, I haven’t noticed people in their 20s being any more or less fucked up than their older coworkers. Sure, I’ll run into the occasional arrogant prick or annoying hipster, people who don’t seem to give a shit about anything and exude a certain smugness that would be well remedied by a sound ass beating. But I can recognize people like this are a minority. And I can also recognize I knew people like that in college in the mid-80s. And when I first came to work in New York in the late 80s. There will always be snotty kids like this. They become snotty adults. And you avoid them.

What grated on me about the 60 Minutes story was it used a woman who worked at J. Walter Thompson, a large New York-based ad agency, to give her impressions on not just studying “Millennials” for market research, but actually working with them, and the baffling encounters she’s had with apparently dozens of them as they use the revolving door at her work place. Excuse me, but I worked in advertising for a few years, and that entire industry is filled with shitheads. The worst work ethic I’ve ever seen: people would routinely show up for work between 10 and 11, take a two-hour lunch, basically screw around all day, and then “get busy” around 4:00 in the afternoon, then “pull an all nighter” to get some project done, complaining about how hard they worked all the while. I’ve never seen such sloth and waste – and this was in a handful of places I worked, big and small agencies.

The turnover rate in advertising was phenomenal. If you came back to a company of 80 people after two years, you might see 20 of the same people (the top 10 paid employees, the guys in the mail room, and the receptionist), assuming the company hadn’t merged or folded. Most of the creative-side people were unhappy, “trapped” in a job where they had to deal with hopelessly uncreative clients who didn’t really understand the nature of their products. I got along better with the “business side” people. The “business side” at least had no qualms about what they were doing, and they liked getting paid truckloads of money to spend 60 hours a week there. Every “creative” industry I’ve ever done time in has been the same: shitty, soul-destroying work hours, filled with unhappy “creative” people who recognized they weren’t doing what they wanted to be doing, yet couldn’t pull away because the pay was pretty damn good, they were used to it, and the concept of working a lesser job while having more time to write, paint or make music was a concept they found laughable after awhile. That laugh would sound like someone with a three-pack-a-day habit forcing out that early-morning hack to clear their throats.

Advertising should be one of the last industries anyone ever uses to serve as a barometer of corporate America. I’m not sure which one you should use – they’re all different in some sense – but most places, thank Christ, are not run like ad agencies. The only other major industries I can think of that must be are the federal and state governments, save they’re faster, more efficient and have a happier work force. Think about that next time you go to the post office and deal with a clerk who probably has a birthday party clown chained to a wall in his mother’s basement.

“Millennials” are noted for their lack of commitment in the work place, i.e., when the going gets tough, they leave. Gee, and usually when I think “25 year old” … “commitment” is the first word that pops into my mind. Come on. On top of the concept of people in their 20s who really should be careful about what they commit to, you have a generation of kids raised in a society with divorce rates over 50%, and probably a healthy percentage of couples staying married because divorce would lead to financial ruin for everyone involved. They’ve seen their parents work themselves out of relationships any sane person would abandon, wreck families because work was far more important to them, wage bitter, demented divorce wars that come down to control and revenge … why people like this even start families in the first place is a mystery to me, save it’s just part of the deal with status.

And these kids are working in companies that don’t inspire any sense of commitment to a sane individual. They have no financial stake in the company beyond a pay check. Very few places have pension plans anymore, just shoddy 401Ks that can go up in smoke with a downturn in the stock market. They see upper management making obscene amounts of money (with bonuses for more than they make in a year), while they don’t get paid enough to live on their own. (Another “Millennial” hallmark: kids living at home through their 20s: a simple reality in most places as it’s kind of hard to buy a house for $300K when you’re making $35K a year, or even twice or three times that.) They see what’s happened in our work place in the past few decades, that upper management is keeping an enormous amount of money for itself and not sharing the wealth with the work force. They see successful, profit-making companies laying off dozens, sometimes hundreds of employees just so shareholders in the company can see larger returns on their investments.

They see this? Fuckin’ A. I see this. We all see this! Yet we have to pretend this blind, obsessive greed, the elephant in the room of America, isn’t there. What happens with most people is they want to get married and settle down, have a few kids. To do so requires having a more stable sense of employment. So people are a lot less prone to moving around once they reach this state. Doing so could amount to financial catastrophe, as you have millions of Americans walking tightropes of debt in which one slip could lead to a huge financial fall. So you better believe someone in that position is going to be wearing the “More Shit, Please” bib to work every day. They’re not going to rock any boat, they’re never going to quit, and in many ways, that’s honorable, because that’s the responsibility they’ve chosen for themselves.

But you’d have to be nuts to have that same level of commitment to an institution that doesn’t return the sense of dedication and, at best, offers you a fair trade of money for your work and time. If you yourself don’t have that financial need to maintain that pace, there’s no logical reason why you would stay with many of these companies more than a few years. I’ve found that corporate America works in “pockets” – meaning you can find pockets of stability and sanity in many places, even companies that aren’t well run. I’ve also found that there are pockets of insanity and rampant stupidity in otherwise well-run company. It usually comes down to the sanity level and intelligence of your immediate bosses and coworkers. If that situation is negative, you can have a dream job, and it will feel like hell. Conversely, you can have a job that really isn’t any great shakes, but if you have solid coworkers, and a good supervisor, you can feel comfortable there (with the understanding that something as basic as a good boss finding another job could mean a plunge from heaven to hell in work-place environment). Or, Door #3, you can have a shitty job with a shitty boss and shitty coworkers, in which case, there's some good country songs on the jukebox you might want to make yourself familiar with.

I’m not looking to paint too grim a picture of “Millennials” entering the work place. I’m hoping it’s a realistic one. Believe me, growing up with a father who worked decades in the same factory, had time for his kids every day, left a pension my Mom is still living on now that he’s gone, it came as a real shock to my system to enter the work force in the late 80s to see how most companies operated. I’m sure as hell not going to fault “Millennials” for their work habits. Sooner or later, you figure out what you will or won’t do for money, and what role money is going to play in your personal happiness. I’m just recognizing the fundamental difference between pundits and marketers trying to hype cataclysmic changes in the work place, when, really, there’s nothing all that new happening, and these kids will fall into line if they want to stay on that gravy train, which most of them will.

The Levy's Still Dry

While putting together this Mellow 70s Gold MP3 project, I came across the M’s, and Don McLean in particular: “American Pie” was his biggest hit, followed closely by “Vincent” – about Vincent Van Gogh. I can tell what “Ms. American Pie” was about: about four fucking minutes too long.

The early 70s were the time of the Folk Pop Troubadour. Always a white guy, always hairy, with a lot of chest hair he’d show in open leisure shirts and vests, often sporting a beard or handlebar mustache, too, prone to jeans, cowboy boots and gold chains, the kind of guy who portrayed himself as the gutsy, sensitive acolyte of Woody Guthrie, but if you listen to their music, it was just as much Tin Pan Alley as the Dust Bowl. A very odd mix, I’m starting to realize, as folk pop, save for brief flashes like Michelle Shocked, Suzanne Vega, Tracy Chapman (note: women), pretty much died after that burst of vaguely macho popularity in the early 70s.

With McLean, the really odd thing I’m remembering came years after the song was popular, and I recall liking the song a lot in the 70s. When it came on the radio, I’d think, “Jesus Christ, the guy was on fire to write a song like this.” An epic, the kind of things DJs would play when they really had to piss and needed a few minutes away from the studio.

By the time I was in college in the mid-80s, at Penn State, I was pretty much worn out on “American Pie.” The group of friends I had developed in my junior year at State College all congregated in Colin’s and Justin’ apartment downtown, which we’d call headquarters, a place of many strange nights, but a very healthy place, too, a bunch of like-minded, vaguely artsy individuals congregating to get drunk, discover Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan, have meaningless fights over personal philosophies, and occasionally get really bombed or even stoned on any given Friday night. The “meaningless fight” thing happened a lot – Colin and Justin would have philosophical differences over which way the wind was blowing. But they were two characters I fit in well with and managed to serve as some kind of buffer/peacemaker, although “motherfucking fence-sitter” would be how both would often describe it when I wouldn’t take either side in a meaningless debate.

Right around the corner was a typical college town bar called the Shandygaff (conveniently located in Pig Alley). I don’t know what in the hell that name implies: it sounds nautical. The bar’s still there – if you google the name and “Penn State,” it has its own website. Nothing against the Shandygaff. All the bars in State College were pretty much the same: crowded every night with a bunch of kids in their early 20s who didn’t know how to drink or pace themselves, so abuse was the order of the day and a badge of honor. I’m sure that’s as much of the college experience now as it was then.

The back of headquarters was right over Pig Alley, and we’d often sit in the living room on a Friday night, minding our own business, when Colin would hear some drunk shitting, pissing or vomiting in the alley. The vomiting was obvious – even I could hear that. But since Colin lived there, he’d developed an ear for even the lightest zipper sound, the tinkling, or the flop of shit on a sidewalk. And it drove him nuts. He’d rain down newspapers, magazines, candles, pillows, anything he could find, and yell down, “Do that somewhere else, you fucking animal!” Half the time the person would scamper away, half the time he’d get into a verbal sparring match. (I'm surprised no drunken idiot savante noted the obvious: "Dude! It's Pig Alley! Cut me some slack!") It never got physical. Colin was a monster at the time, working out like a fiend, a few years out of the army and still real salty. I learned a lot about just letting my balls hang out and not worrying about it from him.

We’d catch people fucking, too; it was an alley behind a college bar. Filled with twentysomethings. Blind drunk. It was to be expected. If we caught people fucking, we’d just hang our heads out the window and quietly watch, maybe applaud afterwards. Such was college life circa the mid-80s at Penn State. It was fun. It was temporary. I honestly have a hard time remembering a lot of it, which I guess is a good sign.

But the thing about the Shandygaff was every night, some time during the night, someone would play “American Pie” on the jukebox, and it always lead to a sing-a-long. I don’t know if this was tradition before my time there – it probably was – or how long it went on afterwards (or if it still goes on, which I doubt). The sing-along usually meant humming along to the voluminous verses and singing the signature chorus about driving one’s Chevy to levy, though the levy was dry, etc.

This happened every night. I don’t remember Justin really giving a shit, but I somehow remember it annoying the hell out of Colin. “They’re singing that song again! Fuck Don McLean! I want to hunt him down and beat his ass!” I was in the Shandygaff once or twice when it happened, and while it seemed spontaneous, how could it be, it happened every night. Believe me, sitting in that apartment with the windows open, you could clearly hear the song being sung en masse by a few dozen drunken college kids.

What struck me most, then and now, was this is a song that came out in 1971, when nearly all of us were a few years out of diapers. This whole thing about nostalgia being an old man’s game: the most nostalgic people on earth are in their 20s. They constantly recall moments from their teen and childhood years, and attach an aura of innocence to them that they sense or believe is no longer present in their lives. Mourning the loss of innocence, to be more hammy and inaccurate. (Delusional and not grasping how time works would be the more accurate descriptors here.) I recall that vibe being very much true of my time in college. The one night, Justin and I went cruising in my yellow Hornet station wagon. I was on a huge Van Morrison jag at the time, and “Brown Eyed Girl” came on the tape deck. “Shit, man, I remember hearing this song on the bus all the time back in Erie” (where he spent part of his teen years). I could tell this was a misty morning memory type deal for him, although the reality probably was masturbating in the green grass behind the stadium.

When I hear “Ms. American Pie” now, I don’t recall those thousands of times I heard it back in the 70s when I was a kid, or even the first time, which I’m certain was an awestruck moment. I remember drunk-ass kids in Izod and LaCoste short-sleeved knit shirts and painters hats, chicks who looked like they were in The Go-Go's, with symmetrical haircuts and parachute pants, all blotto on pitchers of cheap beer, drunkenly wailing words they couldn’t recall for the most part, and creating a sort of instant, baseless nostalgia that, I am certain, would find more than a few fortysomethings in their offices now, thinking, “Oh, for the days, when I’d sing ‘American Pie' in the Shandygaff back at dear old state.”

And I can’t knock that – better to have good memories than bad. Just strange how music, nostalgia and memory works together, and the weird, disjointed pieces it throws together to mark a time that’s long in the rear view mirror – which is really a good feeling!

**

In honor of all this shit, I’ll pick three songs I’ve pulled together thus far for Mellow 70s Gold as some kind of peace offering for making you read this far. Enjoy.

“Sweet Painted Lady” by Elton John. This is an album cut from his Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album: the legendary “first album I ever bought.” Bernie Taupin often wrote awful, maudlin lyrics, but this one starts, “I’m back on dry land once again/Opportunity awaits me like a rat in the drain” and stays on that level. A damn good song. Elton later re-tooled it as a nostalgic ballad called “This Train Don’t Stop There.” Go to Youtube to see the mind-blowing video (featuring Justin Timberlake as 70s Elton) for this song.

“Dialogue Part II” by Chicago. I was shocked by how many memorable hits Chicago has when I got into their stuff. I’m not sure this one was a hit. Why do I remember it? Because cheerleaders have a habit of taking popular songs of the day and changing the lyrics to suit their team. Instead of the repeating “We can change the world now/We can make it better, yeah” chant the members of Chicago sing, our cheerleaders came up with, “We’re the Spartans, we play tackle, we’re the best man, yeah.” It worked pretty well … well enough that I can remember it clearly 30 years later!

“Could We Start Again Please?” from the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack. That’s Yvonne Elliman, doing her thing as Mary Magdalene. This song was added for the motion picture soundtrack, as it hadn’t appeared in the stage version. I’m not sure why, but the song really gets to me, even now. I guess it’s that feeling of a situation – a relationship, or even somebody’s life – spinning out of your control and most likely ending. You could apply it to Christ dying on the cross, or breaking up, or someone dying. Definitely one of those “what the fuck” songs for me, where I should be somehow above it, yet it pulls me in, every time.

Just a small sampling of the ass-backwards journey I’ve been on the past few weeks!

The Darkest Door

Sorry to have been AWOL – been working on another MP3 project. For this one, I’m opening the darkest door. Most of these massive projects I pull together, the over-riding concept is to gather the best possible music I can find for a given genre. In some cases, particularly the 70s, nostalgia is surely a main ingredient. It’s a great pleasure for me, at this point in my life, to be able to gather hundreds of songs that I’ve known and loved most of my life, and have total access to them at any time. If you had told me back in the days of eight-tracks that one day I’d have this ability, I’d have considered that a very nice dream. Stunning, unbelievable stuff to my 70s mind.

But I decided it’s time to open the darkest door. This recent project has made me feel like one of the Roman centurions who nailed Christ to the cross: a nasty job, but somebody’s got to do it, and I’m the one. I’m going to my Waterloo, where Napoleon did surrender, oh yeah: Mellow 70s Gold. A massive collection of all those cheesy one-hit wonders and soft-rock classics that one is generally loathe to admit liking publicly, but secretly, like alone listening to a car radio, will listen along intently and think, “Jesus Christ, this really isn’t that bad a song.”

When I told a friend who was a teenager in the 60s of my intentions, he scoffed, told me to get out of this Yacht Rock state of mind, the 70s were a desert of creativity compared to the 60s. Of course, he’s right: being a teenage pop music fan in the 60s had to be one of the more pleasurable endeavors of the past 50 years. Music was firing in all directions, the great pop/rock bands of the 60s were making incredible music daily, and I can recognize, as a child of the 70s, that the 60s were a great time for music, case closed.

But that doesn’t concern what I’m doing with Mellow 70s Gold. Conversely, as my friend mildly chastised me for the project, he noted he was listening to a lot of Connie Francis lately. Connie “Stupid Cupid” Francis. Along with the culture altering classics of the 60s, there was plenty of stuff like this. And I don’t fault my friend for liking, or even developing an obsession for it. I hope to do the same with Mellow 70s Gold.

My main problem with music as I age, and since the advent of MP3s, is that if I don’t have the music on MP3, chances are I never or very rarely hear it again. This struck me about a year ago with all my 70s favorites, which I’d put aside for a very long time as I explored and developed stronger tastes in blues and country, along with simply keeping track of new alt country and indie music. There was a time, circa the mid-80s, when I was glad to bury anything from the 70s. I’m not sure what turned the tide. I think it was some time in the early 90s, I was killing time in a record store, when I came across my first Rhino “Have a Nice Day” collection in a Various Artists bin. And this particular one had “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum, one of the best pop songs of the early 70s. Hadn’t heard it years. Bought that CD, and realized I knew every song and wanted to hear this stuff again. I nailed down much of the “Have a Nice Day” series in the next few years. Backtracked more, fleshed out all the stuff I used to have on vinyl, many a hipster record store clerk snickering at me. (I'm OK with guys like this snickering at me, as they have so little to snicker about in life.)

I have to underline how crucial it was for me as an adult to come across that series: never before had there been such a comprehensive representation of a type of music – blatantly commercial 70s pop – that approached the decade honestly. These were the real Top 10 hits, the unspoken truth of the 70s. Not Bruce Springsteen. Or The Stones. Or Led Zeppelin. Those were album artists for the most part in the 70s, as were most respectable rock acts, with very few hit singles. This also marked the beginning of a trend that is now horribly over-bearing: mediocre music geared towards kids dominating the charts, while better music made by serious recording artists died on the vine. You look at charts from the 60s, much of the time, the best music being made was in the Top 10. That wasn’t true much of the time in the 70s, and it’s really not true now.

Still, that 70s Top 10 dreck is irreversibly tied into my child and teen years, and for that reason alone, I can stomach the stuff and make no apologies. I had been approaching the Mellow 70s Gold project with a kitchen sink attitude. Feelings by Morris Albert? England Dan and John Ford Coley? Fuck it – throw them in the mix!

But now that I’ve started pulling it together, I find myself holding back. The ultimate goal of any of these huge collections I put together is to have music I want to listen to – not so much to accurately document a musical period in time. The truth is, I don’t ever need to hear “Feelings” or “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight” again. They’re not horrible songs to me – they’re just bland pop songs that made it big in their time. I’m surely going to include dozens of songs like that, but for me, there will always be some sort of connection to the song, usually deeply personal, or something about the song will hit me the right way. I just threw in “65 Love Affair” by Paul Davis – certainly of a piece with the songs I mentioned – but something about the song hits me the right way.

I find myself veering away from ballads and towards more upbeat material. You can’t do a 70s pop collection without having huge ballads: “Without You” by Harry Nilsson, “All By Myself” by Eric Carmen, “Superstar” by The Carpenters. It was a great time for pop ballads, and I respect that. I just don’t want this thing to become plodding and ballad heavy. Lord knows, pop-music wise, the 70s were a very upbeat time. One of my favorite bands from then, Cheap Trick, was like a huge, rocking smile. The band emanated fun and happiness in their music.

And I like that – still do now, and thought the 90s were an insipidly dogshit time in rock music, that may have killed rock forever on a pop-cultural level, with its mewling “daddy doesn’t love me” lyrics and goat-boy brayings of all those fucking terrible, faux depressed grunge and rap rock bands. God, I hated that goateed, backward-baseball-hatted shit and what those whining slobs did to rock: they turned it into an ersatz therapy session for spoiled 15-year-olds. As opposed to the way I understood it as a kid: 15-year-olds saying fuck it, we’re going to be adults one day, that doesn’t look like fun, let’s rock, let’s have as much fun now as we can, instead of being mopey dickwads. About the only thing that allowed me to keep faith in teenagers in the 90s was the MTV series Jackass, which showed me there were still some real kids out there with the right attitude. Other than that, the 90s looked like a desperately bad decade to me for kids, where your options were pretend you’re ghetto and/or be depressed all the time. Later for that morbid shit (and I have to wonder how these kids are going to age ... what kind of values they'll internalize and carry forward from all this fake bullshit ...). The 00s haven’t looked recognizably different to me either.

But I digress. Mellow 70s Gold will be it for me and the 70s musically, as I’ve already fleshed out a massive pop/rock collection that covers a vast bulk of the rock acts I was raised on. 70s Soul, which gets that great last gasp of soul (Stevie Wonder, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield) and a fairly good cross section of disco that’s held up pretty well for me. And the Alt 70s collection which dealt with “alternative” 70s acts (like Captain Beefheart, Zappa, Iggy Pop, etc.) and also covered punk and new wave. I think most disco holds up better than most punk (despite punk having a handful of much better individual artists). I hated disco at the time – it makes much more sense to me now than punk does, most of which sounds like wildly over-rated garbage to me.

I’m not quite sure what a guy in his 40s is supposed to get from listening to “Please Mr. Please” by Olivia Newton-John. Or “Anticipation” by Carly Simon. Or “Lonely Night (Angel Face)” by the Captain & Tennille. Or “Crazy Horses” by The Osmonds. But I guess I’m going to find out. At worst, I’ll have created my own private soft-rock, office-friendly radio station. If there’s something more to be gained by listening to “Anarchy in the UK” by The Sex Pistols, I’m not quite grasping it anymore. Listening to music you already know by heart (but haven't listened to in ages) isn’t the same as discovery, but I gather it serves a purpose.

Mount Carmel Beat Us Again!

My old high school, North Schuylkill, had what it considered to be its annual football rivalry with Mount Carmel. I state it that way because I’m not sure if Mount Carmel viewed the match-up the same way, as they had won nearly every game in the series history. Mount Carmel has been a traditional powerhouse in northeast Pennsylvania football for decades, often going undefeated and occasionally making a run for the state championship. The week leading up to the Mount Carmel game at N.S. was always one of anticipation, will this be the magic year we win, big pep rally on Friday.

Inevitably, we’d lose. There were some years when the game was a shoot-out. I recall such a game from the early 70s, the highlight of which was Rick W., an all-star player who’d later go on to play a year or two in the pros, lying down on the sideline and having a team mate pop his dislocated shoulder back into place. The game inspired that level of intensity, almost always in vain.

If you drive through Mount Carmel, then or now, one question arises: where are all the football players? It’s just a small, quiet town, no larger than any of the towns that make up the North Schuylkill school district. In fact, N.S. is comprised of a few towns (Frackville, Ashland, Girardville) and surrounding rural areas that appear to be larger than the town of Mount Carmel itself. Yet, year after year, with or without legendary coaches, the football team tends to be dominant.

They have a good program, which means they start much earlier than high school, with solid Pee Wee football leagues leading into freshman and junior varsity teams. Many high schools have one sport like that which attracts younger kids and shapes them into great teams. At N.S., it was wrestling, with legendary coach Joe Cesari scouting out future talent in grade-school gym classes.

(The wrestling vibe at N.S. was also a bit over-powering, if you didn’t like wrestling. I never liked wrestling. It seemed gay to me. I don’t mean effeminate gay; I mean prison shower room gay. Way too much physical contact with another guy, in ways that looked like rough sex to me. Granted, wrestlers got themselves into phenomenal physical condition – the one thing I look back on and kick myself for missing. But beyond that, the sport itself held no appeal to me. Still doesn’t. N.S. has always had a great girls basketball team, too, but that never seems to get as much respect in the male-dominated world of rural high-school sports.)

But I always find myself mystified when driving through Mount Carmel, expecting to see hulking teenage guys roaming the streets in letterman jackets, and the place always looks like any other small town in the Coal Region: main street left a bit ragged from the advent of malls in the 70s, struggling small businesses, row houses, church steeples, bars, Turkey Hill Mini Marts. There’s really no enmity between the towns of N.S. and Mount Carmel; no one’s going to attack you there if they find out you went to North Schuylkill, or vice-versa.

To this day, roughly 25 years after graduating from high school, when I go on the home county’s newspaper and see that Mount Carmel whipped North Schuylkill in football again, it arouses that age-old “must beat them for reasons unknown” passion. The “rivalry” is a bit like life itself, from the N.S. perspective: you’re told you can’t have something, and it makes you want it more. And once you get it … then what?

I was around once when we got it. The year after I graduated, that team, which was a good team, but nothing special, did beat Mount Carmel, at home, and I was there. It was a dramatic win, too, the quarterback throwing a long bomb to an open receiver on the last play of the game of the game and completing a 70+ yard touchdown. The stadium went nuts; I can still recall that palpable sense of elation. Strangers hugging, jumping up and down in place, screaming. One of the few sports experiences of my life when I was there (as opposed to watching on TV), experiencing a milestone (even on a relatively small level like that), and grasping the appeal of sports, that fleeting sense of accomplishing a goal that had presented itself as unreachable.

A few years ago, I was having drinks back there in a local bar with old high-school friend, A.J., whose younger brother was the quarterback on that play. We saw Glenn, one of the guys from our high school, who was also on that team, across the bar. Glenn was part of a hard-assed sports family. His brother Rick was in our class, and they were both tough guys, going out for wrestling and football, known bad asses, like their two older brothers. You didn’t mess with this family. The insinuation if you did was they’d all beat the shit out of you, when the prospect of even one of them doing so was pretty terrifying.

Glenn saw us, came over, and we proceeded to have a good time talking about the old days. Glenn looked a lot thinner than he had in those tough-guy high-school days, but I still had that memory of his family of bad asses, so I didn’t make any jokes about this. We were buying each other rounds, hanging out, when I dropped the highlight: “You know what I remember most about you, Glenn? The night you guys beat Mount Carmel. I’m never going to forget that.”

Sometimes in conversation, you say something, and by the look that registers on the face of the person you’re speaking to, you know you’ve said something wonderful that will be remembered. And that was the look on Glenn’s face, because obviously he remembered that night, too, probably had a shrine built to it in his memory, and it made him feel great that other people, decades after the fact, remembered that night, too. Let’s just say I didn’t buy another round after that the rest of the night.

Glenn’s brother Rick is now the N.S. high-school coach. Actually, he was in the early-mid 90s, too, and at that time, built quite a legacy for himself, creating great teams that won district championships and making their way well into state finals. We all reasoned that the kids were probably scared to death of Rick and were in constant fear of him beating their asses. But who knows. The school board removed him from the coaching position after a controversial situation with a referee – I’m still not sure what happened that night – but it was enough for the board to vote out a coach who had built a legacy better than any other coach’s in the school’s football history.

So, Rick went off to Cardinal Brennan, the small Catholic school just up the road from North Schuylkill (which closed for good last year, a victim of the American Catholic-school money crunch; definite "end of an era" vibe for many folks back there). Cardinal Brennan, fielding teams with maybe 20 kids, if they were lucky, immediately became a good team, and a powerhouse in a few years, bringing about the odd realization that Cardinal Brennan was fielding a better football team than North Schuylkill, a concept previously considered preposterous. But there it was.

Rick left that coaching spot, not sure why, but earlier this year, North Schuylkill re-hired him, and I was figuring, here we go again, back to winning, after the school has gone through a decade or so of mediocre to awful teams. Well, Rick hasn’t won a game this year, and Mount Carmel just whipped his ass. A rough showing for a guy who’s obviously a great coach in some sense, but I’m hoping he can hang in there and turn the program around.

I keep track of this stuff, but obviously from a distance. Even when I’m back there, I no longer go to N.S.’s high-school football games, just feels weird now. If you get to be an older guy (and I’d go with brother J, too) and you don’t have a kid on the team, people look at you funny, like you're either a scout for a small college football team or a pedophile. Besides which, when a team hasn’t won a game all season, you’re getting down to the faithful in terms of fans, the true believers with season tickets, and of course all the high-school kids who treat the game as a social event, ignoring whatever’s going on in the game, wandering in circles the whole time, getting into shit behind the bleachers, eating bleenies and french fries in a dixie cup, acting like dicks, trying to get laid, making plans to drive around in circles while listening to heavy metal music, etc. About the only time you’re going to get folks like that one the same page with the true football fans in the seats are cataclysmic events like North Schuylkill beating Mount Carmel. And it aint happening this year. Another year of a vaguely troubling sense of doubt that has nothing to do with my personal reality. How will I survive?

Zevon: Asshole Reconsidered

At the wonderful NYC Public Library, I recently picked up a copy of the late Warren Zevon’s biography by his ex-wife, Crystal. A large book, an oral history, what I’m figuring is the best way to read rock bios anymore as you get so many different takes.

I suspect the editing of an oral history requires just as much of the author’s discretion as a regular bio would. Crystal refused to name the Philadelphia DJ Warren not only dated, but lived with for a year, Anita Gevinson, which suggests to me some bad blood between the two, as all of Warren’s other main squeezes are not only named but interviewed. Who knows. (For a more clear account of his time in Philly, this article delves into what’s portrayed as an alcoholic haze in the bio. A little unfair as the same description could easily apply to the decade before.)

But most of it seems brutally honest, underlining Zevon’s years of alcoholism, resulting in strained familial relations, spousal abuse, a blown marriage, dozens of affairs, etc. The usual rock-star stuff, only this time it’s presented in a “this is simply how the guy was” light as opposed to either glorifying or condemning his behavior. Even after he got sober, he could be assholic: self-centered, argumentative, problematic, etc. It was made clear that his goodness, which is also noted many times over in terms of his humor, intelligence and flashes of generosity, was counter-balanced with a very dark side.

What I felt reading the book was virtually no different from the vibe I get around many musicians, whether or not they’re anywhere near the level of success Zevon had. Danny Fields had a great quote in the Legs McNeill oral history of the punk scene, which boiled down to: “All musicians are assholes.”

While I wouldn’t go that far, I know what he’s saying. Some musicians I’ve met are just people who view music as their vocation, and put out the vibe that they work hard at it and otherwise appear to be normal, caring human beings. They’re nowhere near as prevalent as the stereotypical musician. Basically a guy who’s useless and/or a burden when not composing or playing music, often baked or stuck in a late-teenage emotional state of development, usually living off a wife or girlfriend (who gets him in some sense, and he should kiss her feet nightly for doing so), profoundly selfish, in short, someone who would have a very hard time supporting himself.

I hope that doesn’t sound too negative, because I’ve also come to understand a lot of these guys are great musicians, and I love their work. But I’d sure hate to be responsible for their well being. It seems to me Warren Zevon’s life was what happened to a stereotypical musician who hit “the big time” in some respect and spent the rest of his days leading a relatively pampered rock-star life. Good work if you can get it, but I suspect your average person with zero contact with musicians doesn’t understand what that implies, which is never as alluring as the image.

From what little I’ve seen, a successful recording artist or band functions in its own little snow-globe world, especially on the road. Since the artist tends to be the center of attention much of the time, he doesn’t fully develop an adult sense of the world. In Zevon’s case, he just took money out of the bank whenever he felt like it, had very little understanding of his finances, and assumed money would always be there for him. Luckily, it was, although it got tight from time to time as his success boiled down to a few 70s hits he either recorded on his own or wrote for others (like Linda Rondstadt, who was hugely successful back in the 70s). After 1978’s Excitable Boy, his albums were much more critical than commercial successes, and aside from “Werewolves of London,” he never had any huge hit singles. He often toured solo in theaters and small clubs, most likely to reduce costs and make as much money as possible.

The artist also tends to populate his world with people who either support or depend on his ongoing success. Imagine a large family where a father is encouraged to be both infantile and patriarchal, and you have your average rock star. Reading the book, that’s how Zevon came off to me. I suspect that’s how many famous entertainers conduct their private lives, save they’ll be lucky not to receive the same sober scrutiny Zevon’s life receives in this book. (And not to worry if you don’t like the concept of rock stars being ambiguous and hard to accept beneath the image: there won’t be too many more rock stars. And just about everyone I know comes with strings attached, sooner or later.)

That’s also how a lot of his songs come off to me. With this renewed interest in Zevon, I doubled back and listened to his songs (of which I have just about all thanks to a returned MP3 favor from a friend). The first few albums, I was struck by how rigid his work was – either a slow ballad or stomping rocker, with little in between. And most of the rock songs I can live without. For years I’ve noted how “Roland, the Headless Thompson Gunner” has got to be the most retarded song I’ve ever heard, from the clunky martial beat to the silly mercenary story line. (I recall cringing the first time I heard it on my brother’s basement stereo in 1978.) I’ve always favored his ballads, and those early ones, like “Mohammed’s Radio” and “Carmelita,” still sound great.

Even when he lost his way a bit production-wise in the 80s, he had roughly the same formula that worked for him. What struck me most was how much his later work loosened up, to the extent I found myself more drawn to that material. He experimented with different styles (even incorporated a few celtic numbers), and there was a sense of artistic freedom I picked up on that wasn’t in his earlier, more popular work. The harder-rocking songs, like “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead” and “Factory,” swung more than they stomped. In his case, I’d say the lack of pressure to write and record a Top 40 hit did him a world of good. I should also note sobriety agreed with him creatively, which is sometimes not the case for recording artists.

His lyrics? Always excellent, even on musically awful songs. Another reason I never warmed up to Zevon over the years was this odd effect his songs have on writers, and not just the famous ones he knew. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been around newspaper or magazine types in bars in New York, whom I know personally to have very little taste in music, but the one thing they can all agree on is a deep, abiding Warren Zevon appreciation. And while these guys are often great writers, they’re dicks when it comes to music, jam-band types who own about five CDs. Thus, I pictured Zevon concerts being a bunch of bespectacled guys in knit shirts and khakis, rocking out to that awful headless gunner song, and recalling their crazy nights copy editing while stoned after midnight at the campus newspaper.

As it turns out, I’m going to short-list about 40 songs for the MP3 player, which in old-world parlance would make a very full 2-CD set of his greatest hits. I wasn’t expecting that much, but then again, I had never fully listened to later work and thus didn’t know he somehow got better as a songwriter in general, despite never having another hit.

When I was back in Pennsylvania last week and mentioned the recent Zevon fest to brother J, he reminded me of the live version of “Werewolves of London” that Jackson Browne did for WMMR (Philly’s premier rock station) back in the mid-70s. He re-titled it “Werewolves of Bryn Mawr” as that was the town name of the Philly suburb he was performing in, at a club called The Main Point. It was such a good version that the station played it in heavy rotation well into the early 80s. I found myself wishing I had a copy of it, but hadn’t really searched for it.

So, when I got back to New York, went onto Soulseek, lo and behold, I found a copy, although as a humongous SHN file. Always a bad sign … means a tapehead’s file that’s supposed to be pristine fidelity because of the file type, but never is because, fuck’s sake, it’s a live recording, and all these dweebs insist on FLAC and SHN files as if they were recording engineers (when their source material wasn’t that well-recorded to begin with). But I pulled it down, converted it to a handy MP3, sure enough, it’s the same recording, although I’m not enthused about the quality.

Still, here it is, Werewolves of Bryn Mawr, if you want it.

Joy in Mudville Tonight

Well, there’s joy in Mudville tonight if you’re a Philadelphia Phillies fan. Last game of the season, they did what they had to do to make the playoffs: won, while the Mets got hammered by the lowly Marlins, the end of the worst September collapse in baseball history. While that collapse may be historic, it wouldn’t have mattered without the Phils catching fire in September and keeping the pressure on every step of the way.

That poem is a pretty solid take on emotion and sports: “no joy in Mudville tonight.” Implying there may have been the day before, and that lack of joy will fade tomorrow, or the next day, or next week. Of course, things have changed in baseball since then. These days, Mighty Casey will have enough injected testosterone and other undetectable substances coursing through his veins that his home run output would be doubled. He’d have a small jar of children’s urine attached to a rubber penis hidden in his McMansion, the one he uses for drug tests that he bought for $500 from a steroid dealer in his gyms’ parking lot . And his fatal strike-out, as each at-bat, would cost the team tens of thousands of dollars for his services.

Living in the New York area, I don’t get to see many Phillies games in the course of a season. Sure, when they play the Mets. Sometimes the Braves on TBS. Sometimes ESPN will have them on. I tend to frequent the team's website, checking in at night around 10 to see how they’ve done, or early the next morning. But as a rule, I don’t get to see the games until I go back to Pennsylvania, and I’ll try to see as many games as I can, usually up in my old bedroom, the place of dreams, where I once hung baseball gloves on bed posts and slept in Little League uniforms the night before opening day. I’ll cheat a lot, only watching the Phillies at-bat while channel surfing when they’re on the field.

While my fanhood is solid, it surely aint what it used to be, and the emotional connection is such that I’ll feel bad for a little while if they blow a game, but not to the extent of anyone noticing. I have to admit, over this playoff run for the past few weeks, I’ve been elated when the Mets kept losing and the Phils slowly closed ground. I was deflated yesterday when they dropped a key game to the lowly Nationals, thinking, what the fuck are these guys doing, how can they play so lackluster at a time like this?

But that’s the nature of the game. It’s momentum, not easy to predict and not easy to understand how or why it happens when it does. The Marlins came out today in Shea Stadium, after getting murdered the previous day, on the shit end of a very bad season, and laid a totally unexpected ass-bombing on aging ace Tom Glavine, tagging him for seven runs in the first inning. Tom sat in the dugout after being taken out, looking like the only things he wanted to do were go home, bronski that pin-up material wife of his and convert to Satanism. It didn’t get any better as the game progressed and the Mets never caught fire.

I’ve seen two games like that with the Mets in the past three days, the previous being the first game of the series the Mets lost to the Marlins. What was very odd, and somehow touching, was that when it became clear the Mets were going to lose (and that first loss represented the first time since mid-May that the Mets had not been in first place), the cameras started to show fans in the crowd as much as possible. You had people with dejected faces in rally caps (a baseball hat turned inside out), some people crying, a dejected couple, the woman rubbing the man’s back as he looked like someone just shot his dog, beefy guys with handlebar mustaches leaning on rails, the sort of faces you tend to see at wakes and funerals. The strangest thing was the silence: you could have heard someone fart in the upper decks. Shea Stadium was like a giant morgue filled with 30,000 corpses.

Same thing happened again, today, only worse, and a lot of fans didn’t leave the stadium after the game, just sat there, stunned, unwilling to let the season go. They weren’t looking for a curtain call, to have the players come out and give them one last blast of applause, as you’ll sometimes see with teams who’ve over-achieved the fans’ expectations, had a great year, but came up short. That’s a sweet thing to see, but this was more like an old woman clinging to the body of her husband of 50 years who had died two hours earlier. Just refusing to accept it on some basic level, all the while understanding that it’s over. The same way we’ve all clung to bad relationships long after we knew they should have been a memory.

But the thing about sports is you keep coming back, in a strange type of relationship that usually predates and lasts as long as any form of marriage. You fall in love again, every year, ride the season out, soak it in when it’s around, hope for the best, feel like shit when the team plays like shit, and feel great by extension when they excel. To an extent – like I’ve noted, this used to be a much more emotional experience for me when I was much younger.

What changed that? The Sugar Bowl, January 1, 1979, Penn State losing to Alabama 14-7 in the Superdome, New Orleans. I was 14 years old and watching Penn State playing for a national championship, totally in love with the team, with Paterno and his paternal style of coaching, his highwater pants and white socks, the cheap ties and windbreakers, the coke-bottle glasses, his team dressed in the most basic, faceless uniforms imaginable. I can’t pinpoint the exact year I started following Penn State, probably about 1972 or so, but seeing as how my dad’s generation all did time at the campus (although Dad dropped out on the G.I. Bill, just wasn’t his thing), it was an ongoing family thing. I fell right into line and am still there: of all the sports I follow, Penn State football is the one I tend to get the most emotional about.

But that one game blew me out on some higher spiritual level. The game came down to Penn State getting stopped on the Alabama 2-3 yard line and unable, on four running plays up the middle, to convert. Losing that game was absolutely devastating. I think I went down to the basement, wept, put on brother M’s Best of Bread eight track, and lifted my vinyl-covered cement weights for about two hours. I felt like dogshit for a good week or two after that, just pure depression.

And that was it. I pretty much decided that sports were a diversion, and that it didn’t make any sense to get that emotional over them. It made sense to follow them, to take pleasure in them, to let them help pass the time, but that’s where I drew the line. When I see people doing shit like painting their faces, getting abusive in a stadium, taking the game way too personally, I have to wonder what’s going on with that person. Why it means so much. Why the sense of ceremony, the thousands of dollars spent on tickets, alcohol and travel. No one has ever adequately explained that to me. Nick Hornby tried with is book about being an Arsenal soccer fan, but I honestly didn’t get his emotional connection to the game, it felt like bullshit to me. When I had my teenage heart broken by the Crimson Tide, I made a conscious choice to place sports in a more realistic context, must have been some type of demarcation point for me. I can see the tribal aspects of following a team, but I can also see through it. Much as I came to the same realization about Lou Reed fans, that many of them sucked and were no friends of mine, no matter how much pleasure I took from his music. I just don't get fans on some important level. The low point of this baseball season for me was some guy from Seattle with his son in Yankee Stadium, both excited to be there, and the man gets a broken neck and partial paralysis when some fat, drunken fuck, the kind of which you see in droves at any professional sporting event, fell on his back from a few seats up, was successfully spirited away by his asshole friends and never caught/held accountable for his actions. All this for a baseball game, I thought.

But in general, I still get much pleasure and pain from sports. Penn State went on to win the national title twice in the 10 years following that crushing loss, but they’ve had some rough times since then, and frankly kind of suck this year. The Phillies have sucked for a long time since the early 80s, going to the World Series in the early 90s with that freaky team of fat white guys with mullets, but I knew they were going to lose that one, they were just too strange to make it on that level. When I identify with the Phillies now, as with all sports, it goes back to the 70s, when I was a child, and I did things like collect baseball cards and worship some of these guys. Steve Carlton was my favorite player, because he was a great, no-nonsense pitcher, got up there and fired the ball without hesitation, like a machine, and never talked to the press, which I loved about him, the most intense, zero-bullshit player of my 70s fanhood. I later learned, when he finally started talking to the press years after his retirement, that he was hung up on jews in spaceships ruling the world, thus explaining his choice to live in one of those wilderness states out west, probably with a bunker stocked with ammo and canned soup. But even then, I still loved the guy, even with full knowledge of how totally nuts he was.

This season, for me, goes back to a moment in a supermarket parking lot in Frackville, PA, some time in April. When I go back there and Mom needs to grocery shop, I make it a habit of going along with her to help out. I was doing just that, only she had to stay in the store to renew her animal shelter key chain: it’s from a local shelter with a no-kill policy that she swipes with every purchase at the store to make a $1.00 donation. She was inside getting that taken care of, while I took the groceries out to load in the car.

As I was doing so, I noticed an old-timer a few cars over having trouble loading his groceries. Guy must have been in his late 70s. So I walked over and helped him, loading the bags into the backseat of his car. Thank you, young man, he said … I like that hat. I was wearing a throwback 70s Phillies hat, with the big fat “P” on it from that time period.

We got to talking about the Phillies, both of us bemoaning the lack of pitchers like Carlton, hoping this new kid Hamels would step up. It was a windy/cloudy day, chilly. I think the season was a week away from starting. Well, he said, whatever happens, life goes on.

So we bid goodbye and he drove off. It was such a nice, quiet moment to share with a fellow fan, one who obviously went back decades further than I did, and I often get the impression that I’m the old man by knowing my 70s baseball history. Both of us acknowledge that our team had been losers for a long time, would probably be losers again this year, yet somehow, we’d still go on wearing our hats, and having polite conversations in parking lots about the state of the team. I could tell he enjoyed speaking with me as much as I did with him.

And little did either of us know, until the last fucking day of the season, that what both of us suspected wasn’t going to happen this year, happened. And if I see him again in that same parking lot when I got back there again later this week, I’ll be sure to say, wasn’t that something. And he’ll probably respond, that it was, that it was. Wonder how long they’ll take to blow it in the playoffs. It's not so much the nature of the Phillies as it is of life itself: something you learn when your team loses as much or more than it wins.

City, Country, Privacy

Recently, I had a disagreement with a friend loosely based on the recurring “why don’t you have a girlfriend/wife” routine, although, gratefully, this time it didn’t branch off into the “you must be sucking cock” side theory. There’s something important I have to tell you: if a person appears to be sane, healthy and sufficient, stop wondering anything about the person and accept whatever he’s doing in his life. Anything else is conjecture, usually wrong, and it’s a good idea to keep that stuff to yourself, or only share it with other “concerned” individuals. It serves no purpose to lay these suspicions on the object of these theories. Rule of thumb, unless someone in your life is going off the rails or messing with you in some sense, let him be. It gets much worse than your expectations.

But I think underneath that was what I call the city/country conundrum. This situation may present itself in other geographical circumstances, but in mine it’s the difference between living in the city and country, which I’ve done both of for nearly the same amount of time. (Country has about three year lead.) While I present myself as a “normal” individual, that’s mainly my choice to see myself as a country person who moved to the city. I will always see myself that way and maintain that rural sense of calm. It’s just who I am. When people not from the city meet me and don’t know I’ve spent two decades in New York, they assume I’m some acceptable derivation of a redneck. Mainly because I don’t have all the stereotypical negative attributes of city folk: loud, too cool for the room, arrogant, pushy, brashly liberal, etc.

As noted, what’s really going on is someone choosing one set of values over another, despite the fact that I have a strong understanding of city life, having lived 20 years in the gritty 718s, 10 in what was basically a ghetto, and the past 10 in a predominately working-class white neighborhood (that’s now being over-run by moneyed vampires). I understand the city – in a lot of respects, I love it. I know how hard it can be, know how to carry myself, know when to defend myself and when to keep on walking, basically have that unspoken sense of how to get along here that a lot of people don’t.

This understanding that’s taken me 20 years to develop is pretty much lost on most rural folks. Most people I know from the country have always lived there, and for good reason: they like it, a lot. Can’t picture themselves living any other way. More than likely close to family roots. Surrounded by extended family. If not by lifelong friends, then around familiar faces they’ve always known. Country side. Open space. The feeling that not everyone is out to get you. Waving “hi” to everyone you meet.

You can call that a highly romanticized version of small-town life, but it isn’t. Sure, I’m leaving out small-town gossip, constricted social values, etc. I’d list “lack of diversity” … but honestly, you live in a place like the Bronx, all the black and hispanic kids all act the same and have that same constricted sense of social values. (Yet, you’ll rarely hear anyone stating any need to escape those places and values which, from what I’ve seen, are more negative than anything I came up against in a small town. I really don’t like people painting white rural areas as having a “lack of diversity” when I can personally guarantee you the black/hispanic urban version is no better, and sometimes much worse. “Lack of diversity” is shorthand for “I can’t stand working-class white people and have found this acceptable way to present my loathing.” You’ll never hear anyone harping on the Bronx for lacking diversity; it lacks just as much diversity as any economically-depressed rural area. And I suspect you’d find the same shit in depressed urban areas all over America.)

Please don’t misread me as damning these inner-city places – I’m just pointing out what I know from experience, that they’re just as constricting in their own strange way as any rural area. And usually a lot more dangerous. That’s the key difference for me between rural and urban life: the constant awareness of danger. It’s a given at night, and you’d be wise to watch yourself during the day, too. It goes without question that doors and windows stay locked here. Shit, when I go to they gym, I keep my valuables in a fanny pack, have it with me the whole time, and hang it on a hook in the shower. Why? My locker was robbed once a few years ago, and a few months after that, found my lock half-cracked open during rush hour at the gym. Why risk having my credit cards, driver’s license, MP3 player, cellphone and house keys stolen? I developed this habit after going to the locksmith after the second incident, asking him what I should do, and he recommended never leaving my valuables unguarded anywhere in a gym, because any lock can be cut in a matter of seconds. Some guys think I’m over-doing it – but I still occasionally see dazed-looking guys explaining to gym attendants that their lock is gone, along with their clothes and valuables, but how could this be, I had a lock … to which I say never under-estimate the can-do spirit of white-collar crackheads.

That’s one huge difference between rural and urban life for me. The other big one is simply how people live in the city, which is to say it’s hard as hell to get anyone on the same page in terms of hanging out. It just doesn’t happen unless you plan it, and even then, people constantly change their plans. I’m not that kind of person. You make a date with me a year from now and never mention it again, I’m going to be at that place in a year waiting for you. But that’s just not reality for most people in the city. And it usually takes much more time to get to a given place, say a bar or restaurant, and then get home from there. Could be minutes, could be two hours travel time all together in terms of walking and taking trains. It’s a time commitment, and the one constant I see in the city is people with very little spare time between work and the travel time to get there. When I lived in the country, you got a phone call, said yeah, hopped in a car and were there in five minutes. That rarely happens here!

Thus, unless you’re living with someone, you spend a lot of time alone, unless you get on a high horse about seeing people every night of the week, which is a job unto itself. Most people I know have their own apartments or have lived that way in the past, assuming they’re now married or living with someone. If you have an apartment to yourself, you have solitude. That is, if you’re geared to be alone. If you’re not, you have loneliness. Call it the glass being half empty or half full – it’s the same thing and is however you choose to define it. I have much more “alone” time in the city, and I like it. Always have, probably always will. It doesn’t bother me. I get shit done. I don’t answer to anyone but myself. I have time and space to think, which is key for any writer. It agrees with me.

And I do sense the difference whenever I go back home to Pennsylvania for a visit every six weeks or so. Because there will always be people in the house, be it my mother, brother or sister, cats and such. I like that, too, as it’s a change of pace for me. I tend to be a pretty easy person to get along with. Don’t bust balls. Don’t have that sort of negative charisma that puts everyone in my presence on guard. (Hard to explain what that is, but I feel it around certain folks in the city all the time.) Willing to roll with a lot of shit. Always glad to help out. Don’t pick fights. If a living environment in the city presented itself where I had to live with other people, so long as they were decent and sane, I’d have no problem with it. If I was fucking that other person, even better!

But I do like that feeling, when I get back to New York after a four-day trip back home and a long bus ride, of unpacking my stuff, sitting down with a sandwich, flipping open the Sunday Daily News, and thinking, ah, now I’m back in my space. I like having both, and I like the balance. Don’t sit around pining for Pennsylvania and cats and mom and siblings and old high-school friends and friendly neighbors. They’re back there, and I can go visit regularly – I’d like to visit more regularly, but I do so as time and work allow.

I have my privacy in the city, and you better believe I value it. Whenever I feel that privacy infringed upon – like with this recent situation with the friend – it annoys me. And I guess you can trace a lot of this back to my mother, and my father when he was alive. Because with them, it never seemed to matter what I did with my life: so long as I stayed alive, they were/are cool with me. I know a lot of parents aren’t like that, that they have high expectations and demands of their kids. Which is fine, but it wasn’t how I was raised. I was raised to understand the key thing was for us to be alive and in each other’s lives. Not warring constantly, or fretting about what we were or weren’t doing with our lives. This sort of understanding runs through me like life blood – it’s how I see the world, and how I treat people in my life. You will never catch me busting anyone's balls (or labia?) regarding how/what he or she should be doing. Sounds like hippie bullshit? It’s more like Depression Era bullshit, where my parents saw that just staying alive, having roof overhead and food on the table was what really mattered. I haven’t forgotten that lesson and will live it the rest of my days. You want to take over the world, have at it. I just want to live in it.

So, I have that sort of “live and let live” attitude about my own little world. On top of which, this is strange to admit, but I never had any privacy living in the country. When I go back to that house in Pennsylvania, I can’t believe that there were seven people living in it. My two brothers and I shared one small bedroom. I sit in that room now and think, “Christ, what kind of insanity was it to have three growing boys in this room?” But it was necessary – there was no other room. What was really chaotic were my father's siblings visiting with their similarly large broods of 5-8 people, in a house that comfortably holds four adults. As Charlton Heston said in Planet of the Apes, it was a madhouse. Many times, I pissed in the backyard because there was a 4-5 people deep line for the bathroom. You present me with that sort of situation now, I'd get a fucking hotel room until everyone left.

Even in the best of circumstances, I had zero privacy. There was none in the backyard either, where we were next to a schoolyard constantly buzzing with kids playing sports, and neighbors on all sides. And everyone knew each other’s business. Not in a friendly, supportive way either. In that cunty “need to know your business so I can feel superior to you” sort of way. I don’t want to paint a stifling picture here, but there is a flipside to having your neighbors know you and be aware of what goes on in your life. And usually that sort of knowledge is superfluous. When I find myself indulging in that sort of shit, I never feel good or sated in any sense afterwards. Whatever problems I have are still there, and whatever brief glimmer of happiness I took in getting some lowdown shit on someone else fades fast.

So it was a strange thing for me to move the city, where there are millions more people, and realize that I would have much more privacy here. I liked it! I still like it now. And I can tell you, there are millions of other people living here just like me, who came here from somewhere else, some with their hearts set on escape (mine wasn’t … there just wasn’t any good work back there for a college grad), and they have a comparably solitary life to the rural/suburban family way of life they left behind. And I’m also willing to bet many of them are as OK with this way of life as I am. There is very little pressure to conform here when you’re not from here. Conform to what?

I don’t like using the word “escape” with small-town life, because I’ve realized you can never escape who you are. You can change your name, run to the other end of the globe, but sooner or later, you’re going to catch yourself doing something and recognize, “Jesus Christ, that’s what Dad used to do” or sensing vestiges of where you came from in how you do things. I think I always wanted a little privacy. That’s why I started writing in that spiral notebook on my bed, because even if there were two guys in the room with me, watching TV or whatever, I could write in that notebook and have my own world. I don’t think I ever got the chance to stand or fall on my own merits until I got to New York City, and for that I’ll always be grateful. I’ve learned a ton of shit about human nature over the past two decades, most of it dark, but valuable knowledge nonetheless. I’d have never learned these things if I’d stayed back there.

And when I go back there, it reminds me that I can have this, too, if I want to move in that direction of creating a family and such. Hardly a “best of both worlds” scenario. Just the option to recognize the value of both worlds, while I firmly live in the city one. Bottom line, I like being alone in the city, have felt that way for a very long time now, and sometimes it’s hard to explain that to people in a small-town who don’t live that way, and find it freakish. It isn't. Which is why I’m happy my mother is who she is, and my father was the way he was, because they’ve quietly taught me the value of life itself, more than how you choose to live it. Can’t end this thing with that sentence, which sounds like something you’d find in the Readers Digest back on the bathroom radiator in Pennsylvania. Yet another city plus: my shithouse literature is much more interesting.

Born Again

I have a real checkered past in terms of dealing with Born Again Christians. Not necessarily referring to the “Born Again” movement that rose to prominence in the 80s. Most Christians will describe themselves as being born again, of having some sort of spiritual awakening where the message of Christ becomes clear to them and alters their paths.

Of course, I don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. I never did. Suspect I never will. But I respect it, because I have seen people make positive changes in their lives as a result. And I’ve known more than a few Christians who are just good people whom I’d gladly defend to anyone. I’ve pretty much come to terms with Christianity in my life, recognizing The Bible is packed with wisdom, and that for me at least, my respect for religion is based on the knowledge that many of the good things we take for granted in the way we live (wisdom, common sense, compassion, charity, etc.) may not have existed or thrived before the concepts of religion, and books like The Bible, came into being. For all the people who look at religion and see only a black hole of misunderstanding and hatred (believe me, in New York …), I can see the much larger picture, that religion is for the most part good, despite whatever qualms I may have about it and some practitioners of their chosen faith.

But going back to that 80s concept of Born Agains, I did have one rough experience with it. In my sophomore year at college, in one of my classes I sat behind a girl who caught my eye the moment I saw her. P was a real looker, probably still is, long brown hair, warm eyes, but what really caught me was how friendly she was, just a very sweet-natured, open individual. It didn’t take me long to go crazy for her, and in the process I found out she was the sister of a guy from my high-school class, who I liked just fine but wasn’t really friends with.

Unlike her brother, she had gone to the local Catholic school, and therefore inhabited that parallel universe in our small-town area. I noted in an earlier post that even within my town of 500 people there were some kids who once they went to Catholic school in the seventh grade, just did a slow fade from the public-school kid social circle.

With P, it was taken a step further. She was thinking about becoming a nun, much to my chagrin. I know most people look at teenagers and picture them having sex from the age of 14 onward, but that didn't happen for me and P, considering she was on the verge of forfeiting sex all together in the service of the lord. As we got to know each other, I also learned she was often depressed, seemed to have a real negative self image, which is a hallmark of so many women, attractive or not. I still remember her getting a little too far into the Pink Floyd album The Final Cut, the title track of which is the singer contemplating suicide all to a very attractive piano-laden ballad.

When I was at her house, her parents treated me like a boyfriend, or at least boyfriend material, when the reality was I was dealing with a young girl with a lot of shit going on, much of it tied in with her very strong sense of Catholicism; I suspect they were hoping I’d guide her into the boy/girl realm of things. But who knows. Like many homes in the Coal Region, the house was a shrine to Catholicism: Pope and Cardinal dolls, pictures of the pope all over the place, enough crosses to guarantee safety from even near-sighted vampires. Going to her house was like going to a church in a row house – all that was missing was the incense.

My mother met her when I brought her around and her immediate impression was, “Now that’s a beautiful girl.” She was really impressed with P, as was everyone I knew who met her. The idea was stick with this one, if you’re patient and things work out, you’ll have a great woman on your hands and might even end up getting married to her.

One big roadblock was that a few months into this, I was ready for my junior year, i.e., moving from our small branch campus to the main campus – a huge move for a 19-year-old kid who had never been away from home for more than a week at a time. That summer was busy, between working most of it in my dad’s factory on their great “joe college” program for children of factory employees, trying to find a place to live, getting mentally prepared to be on my own for the first time and trying to keep this strange situation together with P.

I can still recall one odd night, a few days before moving, late August, sitting by my grand parents’ graves in the cemetery on the hill, basically wondering what was going to happen with us. It sticks in my mind mostly because I also had the first hemorrhoid of my life, a tiny little knot just above my asshole that was causing me much consternation, as I had no idea what it was. (I still get one of these about once every two years, usually stress related, and my heart goes out to anyone who suffers the affliction on a far more regular basis.)

But I remember her assuring me that whatever strange, hard-to-define thing we had going on wasn’t going to stop, and that I could easily come home on weekends to see her. It was one of those nice little moments of life where another person reassures you that all is not lost due to a looming change. That it took a place on a clear late summer night, in a cemetery, only adds to the odd, touching quality of it in my memory.

And that first year at the main campus (actually both years) was a blast, found myself writing a weekly humor column for the newspaper, made a whole new stable of friends on the same wavelength, found a very tolerable part-time gig in the German Department, and still kept a pretty high GPA, despite much drinking and folly. No urge to screw around, as I was locked in on P in that way only love struck teenagers can be – and believe me, opportunity knocked more than a few times! All the while, staying in touch with P and seeing her most weekends. Towards the end of that school year, in May, she had to come up to the campus herself as it was her turn to transfer, which had me elated.

But I had noticed, especially when I got home that summer, that she was even more troubled before regarding religion. I think she may have dumped the idea of becoming a nun all together, and was now feeling some sense of void or guilt over it. Whatever it was, I could tell things were off in a way that had nothing to do with me. And that was a shitty summer in general. I guess the factory had an off year financially and dumped the summer college program, which had been a cash cow for me the past two years. I tried my hand at two separate jobs, doing sales help at a commercial lumberyard and working midnight shift at a local lumberyard, but quit both within a week, the second after the first night. I can look back now and see I should have told myself, “Just bite the bullet and do this shit for two months then go back to school.” But at the time, both jobs seemed unbearably awful, the commercial place being run by two guys who made clear their disdain for college kids, the second a weird night shift job where fellow employees told me recurring stories of guys sawing off various body parts, with the shining rainbow that if you put the parts in a plastic bag on ice, they could probably still get you to the local hospital on time to have them re-attached.

I spent most of that summer watching MTV and killing time, while I sensed this thing with P was petering out due to her increasingly cloudy mood. One day around my birthday in June, she showed up at my house elated, which was a shock. We went out walking, and she had told me she met a new friend, E, who was part of a new church that had a wonderful message to tell regarding our lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Immediately, I could feel something was off. It was as if a car had shifted from reverse to third in terms of her mood, no transition whatsoever, just an immediate decision to be overwhelmingly happy, which had me understandably suspicious.

P brought around her new friend E, and I knew things were going to be strange from that point on. E was a full-on stereotypical Born Again, not very smart, disdainful, judgmental in a very bad, condescending way, and someone who, I gathered, was on a pendulum swing in life, going from one extreme to the other. She had told me some story of Jesus saving her from drugs and that whole way of life, and right then, I figured she’d probably be better off on drugs. The pendulum swing seemed to be a hallmark of more than a few Born Agains I met in the 80s: people who were on the verge of flushing their lives down the toilet due to some type of self abuse, who suddenly had this magical transformation that made them full, whole, superior rays of light and happiness. I could tell P was overly impressed with E and her routine, when I could clearly see that E was a bullshit artist, not someone I would ever allow into my life, and very bad news for me. As it turned out, very bad news for everyone, as P’s parents, still staunch Catholics, weren’t having any of this Born Again nonsense.

I called bullshit the next day. P and I had always been very honest with each other, and I told her what I thought, that E didn’t strike me as someone I wanted to be associated with, and that I thought the whole Born Again thing was some form of mental illness – and I still believe the same to this day for that odd strain of Christianity. P got offended, said I better get used to it, because E was like a big sister to her now, and that if I couldn’t accept Jesus in the same way, there was no place for me in her life.

What a slap in the face that was on so many levels. One, I was being dumped from her life. Two, I was expected to shoehorn my personal beliefs along with hers, with a strain of Christianity I immediately recognized as counterfeit and wrong. Three, what kind of true Christian would offer that sort of ultimatum? Wasn’t Christianity supposed to open your heart, to allow you to accept others with total love, compassion and humility? My way or the highway wasn't the way of Christ; it was the way of fanatics.

I’ll give myself credit. Even with those odds against me, my immediate response was, “There’s no place for me in your life.” Not that I felt any sort of need to define and stand up for whatever form of spirituality I believed in. It was much more that I wholeheartedly rejected her form of spirituality and her new guide, who would have had a ball at the Salem witch trials burning innocent women at the stake.

When I got back from that meeting, I told Mom, well, you won’t be seeing P around here much anymore, and I told her why. She wasn’t heartbroken, but she was disappointed and angry. Being a Protestant who had married into a family of staunch Catholics, she knew well the sting of meaningless religious dogma and low-level persecution, and thus was just as skeptical as I was with any overt display of spirituality. But she said, all for the best, think how much worse this would be if you’d gotten more involved and something like this had happened.

Of course, these things never stop on a dime. While I distanced myself from P, we somehow stayed in touch, although I can’t remember how. The killer for me was that when she came up to the main campus, she immediately found a Born Again boyfriend and was hanging all over him the few times I saw her. Understand this was a woman who had previously been so uptight about issues like this that just to get her to hold hands was a major triumph. She finds Jesus, bam, next guy in line, provided he has the same beliefs, has this beautiful girl hanging all over him as if he was a rock star and she a groupie. Having spent a good year and a half scrapping for any display of physical affection, it was a real slap in the face.

But as those first few weeks at school moved on, I recognized I was lucky to have removed myself from the situation, because whatever Born Again road she had gone down, she wasn’t coming back any time soon. I think the first few weeks of that summer, I was sitting around waiting for her to come to her senses, to see through E’s smoke screen, but it just didn’t happen. I recall the last contact I had with her, late October my senior year of college, we sat on the main lawn of the campus, can’t recall what we’d even talk about at that point as I had moved as far from her as I possibly could. But at one point, she recognized a fellow Born Again walking by on the other side of the lawn, told me to watch her stuff and ran over to celebrate or something.

While she was gone, I noticed she had a writing tablet and had been jotting something down. I couldn’t help myself, and looked over to read it. It was a letter to E that read like something a cult member would write to the master. I can’t recall exactly what, but along the lines of, “My life since accepting Christ, and you as my guide, has been nothing but profound joy and happiness, oh, thank you for saving me from eternal damnation.” Again, I can’t recall the exact content, but I do recall the tone and word choice being very much along those lines.

It was then that I sort of heaved a spiritual sigh and said, “Thank you, Jesus, for taking me out of this situation before I got too far in to leave of my own free volition.” Because if I had become engaged or married to this woman, and something this bizarre and off putting had occurred, that would have been much worse than whatever pain I had already put myself through. She came back, found me in a noticeably brighter mood as I had realized she had gone totally off the deep end, bid farewell, and that’s the last time I remember seeing her.

Fast forward seven years, to my 10^th high-school reunion. I hadn’t planned on going, but a few of my friends convinced me it could be fun. And sure enough, it was – I had a great time, seeing old friends, getting along famously with people I hadn’t know all that well, and having an all-around fine night. P’s brother was there, and I had been avoiding him most of the night, not sure how he or her family would see me now, all these years later. I hadn’t seen P since that day on the lawn and had totally removed myself from her life, had no idea what has transpired with her and her new beliefs down the road from college.

At one point in the night, I found myself at the same table as P’s brother and his wife. It was later in the night, and we were both pretty hammered. Everyone was, with an open bar and many guys walking around with a beer in each hand. We got to talking, and I didn’t even think to bring up P. He did. And I can’t recall exactly what he said, or even if I have this right all these years later, but he may have insinuated to me that she tried to commit suicide. Again, I’m not sure if that’s true, as we were both drunk at the time, but I do remember sitting there with my mouth open, in shock of what he was saying, and not quite sure how to respond.

If that wasn’t the case, then my apologies to P for getting a very serious issue wrong. If it was true, maybe I shouldn’t have been so shocked. I could clearly see that whatever she was going through strongly resembled the sort of deranged behavior more often associated with dangerous cults where people have to be kidnapped and unbrainwashed. While she may not have been that bad, she was close, and it wasn’t reassuring that summer when I had said, “There’s no place for me in your life,” and she got up and walked away with a huge Jesus smile on her face and a “your loss, buddy” attitude. I suspect I wasn’t the only person who got the routine – she seemed to be making it clear to everyone around her that if you weren’t on the same wavelength, you were somehow on the outside looking in from that point forward.

Still, no one wants to hear that an old flame tried to do something like that, whatever the scenario. It still troubles me to this day, although not enough to find out for sure, because if I did make contact with her, only to find out she was still mired down in that regrettable form of Christianity, I’d find that even more depressing. I’d like to find a lucid, warm human being, the kind of person she was the day I met her and recognized someone who had a real spark about her, only now she’d be older and wiser. But I’d also rather not take that chance, as I’ve seen how life works out, and I know that would be a best-case scenario.

I’d rather just let that one be for the rest of my days. Even now, there’s a small picture of her back on the dresser in my old bedroom, usually turned face down, mainly to keep dust off the face, P looking just beautiful, think it may have been a high-school graduation photo, but it caught her essence. I’d rather leave that picture gathering dust. It’s as nice a memory now as it was that sunny October day on the lawn in 1985.