Dead Earth

I’ve never been much for music festivals or benefits: too much shit to deal with. I have a hard enough time spending three hours at a regular show. The thought of spending all day and/or night seeing multiple bands in a genuinely uncomfortable setting, being treated like cattle, and paying extortionate prices for basic food and services makes no sense to me. When those kids at Woodstock II rioted, pillaged and burned shit down, over issues like $6.00 bottles of water being sold on a 90+ degree day, I really didn’t think they were all that wrong. The general media consensus was “these kids are a bunch of amoral animals, as expressed in their mediocre music, so unlike their superior parents.” My consensus was these kids were smarter than their parents, which wasn’t saying much; I did agree that their music sucked for the most part.

The only big benefit from my youth was Live Aid, and I vaguely recall tuning in and out most of that day. Again, no urge to be there. If there’s a band you like, they’ll be on for 20 minutes. Most bands you won’t like, and all you do is sit or stand in the sun for upwards of 10 hours, unable to move around, and after five hours, that shit must get old. That’s all I could think watching snippets of this Live Earth concert yesterday. It depressed me for a number of reasons, which is why I would tune in for 30-second snippets here and there, then immediately tune out.

Above all, I couldn’t stand the sanctimonious pandering, a real bad trait too many “committed” people have. When some carbon-spewing star lectures me about global warming, all I can think is the isolation of stardom has got to be a horrible thing to create such a shameless hypocrite. Think about the amount of energy that went into putting on these shows: the lighting and sound systems, the cameras, the backstage areas, the thousands of cars that the fans drove to the shows, the TV cable systems showing the concerts, the computer cable systems broadcasting the show on the web, the satellite radio stations broadcasting the shows. The stars themselves, in terms of air travel, private or not, are regularly responsible for turning out much more globally destructive emissions than I could ever hope to by riding a subway train every day.

These pricks are lecturing me about “carbon footprints” when theirs are like Shaquille O’Neal’s sneakers compared to my baby boots? Sheryl Crow didn’t appear to be at any of the concerts yesterday (shockingly … the bitch hits every environmental PR opportunity), but she made the asinine (pun intended) statement a few months ago about only using one sheet of toilet paper to wipe her ass. No more annilingus fantasies involving Sheryl Crow!

I wouldn’t mind if these people would cop to the enormous amounts of energy they burn up in pursuit of their ambitions, and then have sense enough to not lecture regular people about such a topic. (The televised concert appeared to be a nonstop “green” propaganda event more than anything: a constant loop of awful, PBS-pledge style short films that were smarmy in the worst way. I have a hard time watching the Sundance Channel anymore as a result of the same partisan stumping Robert Redford uses his channel for, just as bad as Fox.)

I understand that in the course of running this economy on a daily basis, there will be tons of fuel used with accompanying emissions. Trucks and airplanes are still used en masse to transport goods and supplies, as they must be, unless we want a society in collapse. Public transportation is such, at least in New York where it’s actually very good, that it’s already crowded, and I’m not quite sure where all these people driving to work are supposed to go if they abandon their cars. Mayor Bloomberg is pushing real hard to impose an $8.00 fee for vehicles entering Manhattan (but only in the lucrative “white folk” areas south of 96^th Street); he’s doing so with some truly revolting ads suggesting that small black children living near bridges will have even worse asthma if we don’t stop cars from coming into Manhattan.

I got news for you: every neighborhood around these $8.00 zones will become a gigantic parking lot, including Astoria, where I live. Idling cars stuck in gridlock around these areas as they try to find parking spaces to avoid a Boston Tea Party-style $8.00 surcharge are going to create more asthma-inducing emissions than there are now. You better believe I think Bloomberg is a douche bag for employing this kind of propaganda. (Rhetorically, it also flies in the face of his previous push to build a sports stadium on the west side of Manhattan, which would have greatly increased vehicular traffic into the city. He was trying to woo the 2012 Olympic folks at that time … not sure who he’s trying to woo now with this foul travel tax bullshit. But he’s directly contradicting himself.)

I don’t have major problems with people who “go green.” Sure, they can be annoying at times, especially the ones who ride bikes everywhere and don’t use deodorant. You’ll find that plenty of educated folks in New York put themselves on a pedestal regarding green issues … because they can. Because you can live here without a car (I do), and find markets that sell over-priced organic produce, and ride your bike to and fro, and surround yourself with people who agree with you 100% on all these environmental and political issues. Best of all, you can have someone pick up your garbage every week on schedule and have them deposit it in holes in the ground in red states (or blue states with red-state areas) courtesy of shady local politicians and land owners in those places with no concern for their communities. (Sorry to employ the red state/blue state nonsense. But isn't it refreshing to read it in a way where "I despise working-class white people who aren't Democrats" isn't implied?)

But I do basically agree with these people, as much as I’d like to beat them like red-haired step children for their occasional arrogance. I can see that their intentions are good, that they’re committed to their way of life, that they recognize a larger world spinning outside their own little world. It’s only when this way of seeing the world is fed to me as doctrine that I chafe, and shit like this awful Live Earth concert is the usual celebrity-based bully pulpit. I don’t know how these people get so far into these issues. I understand actors and musicians have a lot of down time on sets and tour buses, so I’m guessing that after you’ve done your weight in blow, after you’ve fucked a thousand beautiful strangers who’ve offered their services for free, after you’ve spoiled yourself and turned so far away from the possibly nice person you were once upon a studio apartment in a bad neighborhood, you feel some burning need to be a good person. And this is how it comes out. Not quite realizing that the average person, give him credit, knows bullshit when he smells it, and doesn’t like being lectured by self-absorbed, pampered twats.

How did I feel catching snippets of Live Earth? I felt like buying an SUV, a vehicle I truly loathe for a number of very good reasons. One that gets about five miles per gallon, and runs on a hybrid of gasoline and blood. Putting a machine-gun turret on top of it. And riding that gas-guzzling piece of shit from here to the Arctic Circle, shooting every hippie, polar bear and baby seal along the way, using their blood to fuel my demonic SUV. I’d also want a gigantic selection of plastic shopping bags to throw out the window when not firing the machine gun. After reaching the Arctic Circle, I’d want to open up an oil pipeline, light it on fire, and find some way to melt the polar ice cap, as if I were The Joker in Batman gone totally berserk, with no Batman to stop me. When I’m done, build a gigantic floating Walmart that you’d need jet skis to shop at – sort of like the ones used in Kevin Costner’s hit movie Waterworld. Take a vacation afterwards, to the beach at Pittsburgh, and dip my toes in the Atlantic Ocean.

The overall message I always pull from these events: we aren’t the world, although we like to see ourselves as such. I was never much for pep rallies.

The Andrew McCarthy Blues

VH-1 Classic recently broadcast Pretty in Pink, the 1986 John Hughes teen flick featuring Molly Ringwald, Andrew McCarthy, and the always-fun James Spader as the evil yuppie, a role he typecast with great zest through the early 90s. Those John Hughes movies from the 80s have not aged well. They weren’t that hot to begin with, Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off being the best of the bunch because they were innocuous concepts to begin with, but stuff like Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club are just bad melodrama with a teen 80s sheen (that worked at the time). If you’re pining for a John Hughes flick these days, or buying the DVDs, chances are you were a child or early teen circa 1985.

Watching Pretty in Pink reminded me what a pussy Andrew McCarthy was often asked to portray in these 80s flicks. He played roughly the same role in St. Elmo’s Fire: an intelligent, good-looking young guy who was awkward with the ladies, and some may have surmised that he was in the nascent stages of sexual discovery that would lead him to the other side of the plate. He had the same role in Less than Zero, save this time he actually got laid, albeit the sex scene he shares with Jami Gertz has to be one of the most unerotic ever filmed. (Considering how hot Gertz looked at the time, this is the cinematic equivalent of whiffing with two outs and the bases loaded … then again, she must have had a “no nudity” clause in her contract which only added to the fake dry-hump quality of the scene.)

The problem with popular movies that are very much of their time: if you resemble one of the characters in the movie, not so much physically but as an archetype, people will often associate the traits of that character with you. In other words, back in the 80s, I had the Andrew McCarthy Blues. I was a smart kid, reasonably attractive, well kept, sincere and just as awkward as McCarthy was in these movies. McCarthy’s only saving grace in Pretty in Pink was that there was a character who was an even bigger pussy than he was: Jon Cryer as Molly Ringwald’s wacky, new-wave sidekick, who was madly in love with her while she treated him like a eunuch. I guess the Jon Cryer Blues would have been worse to have, save he only played that role once and didn’t get typecast as a potential polesmoker.

What happened to those blues? Well, two things. One, after the deplorable Weekend at Bernie’s flicks, McCarthy faded from A-level view. A quick perusal over at IMDB.com shows that he has worked steadily since then with bit roles on TV series and such, but the guy faded from the cultural limelight. Thus, it wouldn’t occur to anyone to identify a person in their life with a character he played in a movie.

Two, I grew up. That certain kind of “is he/isn’t he” dilemma that haunts so many guys in their teens and early 20s disappeared, save for those wondrous seers who claim to have “gadar” yet could be in a room full of gay guys and not know it. Understand that if you don’t get married, people are always going to waste too much time pondering your sexuality – I think that’s just the herd mentality of our culture.

I honestly think there are a lot of people out there who would have been much happier staying single and not forcing themselves into these machine-like reproductive roles that go along with their predictable game plans. Obviously, with divorce rates well over 50%, and plenty of the still-married minority percentage fucking around regularly, you’ll have to forgive me if I’m not sold on the concept of marriage. I think you should do it only if you want kids and are committed to the relationship. I also think if you want to have multiple sex partners, you should, and not make a mess of your family’s lives when the spouse you’ve made a vow to discovers this unfortunate penchant. Then again, after 20 years in New York offices, I can see that the money generated by some folks is such that a guy’s wandering dick is a delicate, tolerated and open secret, lest the financial empire a man and wife have built gets rocked.

People may be amoral, but that doesn’t make them stupid. We live in an age where people want everything and are spoiled enough to think they can have it. That’s the exact kind of thing Andrew McCarthy’s character would have said in one of those John Hughes flicks, muttering the line cynically in a soda shop, while a pretty girl with a symmetrical 80s hair cut and parachute pants nods knowingly and wonders why he hasn’t tried to tear off her blouse yet. The way the Rob Lowe character did at the beer blast last Saturday night.

For me, the Andrew McCarthy Blues have turned into the realization that I’m just in no hurry and feel no pressure in terms of forcing myself into relationships. I surely felt that way for a long time – well into my 30s – but after awhile, I can tell you, if you don’t play the game, you get used to and appreciate the freedom to live your life any way you choose. To the extent that it’s going to be harder for me now to start a relationship for the simple reason that I feel fine without one. (Maintaining one would be no problem – talking myself into one, there’s the rub.) I remember that gnawing suspicion that something had to happen, fast, before “it was too late” or something melodramatic like that. With women, I can see that there is a time factor in terms of fertility, but guys don’t have that biological clock, no matter what shitty articles in self-help and women’s magazines put forth. We have biological cocks that go off with alarming regularity.

According to that IMDB.com page on McCarthy, in 1999 he married his college sweetheart after 20 years (presumably apart and rediscovered?), and they’re still married and have one kid. That seems to be exactly the kind of thing his character in one of those 80s flicks would do.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about life, it’s that however fucked up you think you are, you are rarely that fucked up. Sure, some people are, but they’re usually so far gone that they’re not pausing to ponder their plight. If you’re pausing to ponder, that should be a sign to you that the time and sanity you’re spending to do so are an indication that you’re doing fine. Think you should be married? Or even getting laid more? Maybe you should. Maybe you shouldn’t. Ultimately, it’s not that burning an issue, unless you make it one. And to make it one is to go outside yourself and adopt the stance of a judgmental outsider looking to find fault as a sort of affirmation. People want to believe you’re as fucked up as they are as a form of solidarity: falling back with the Joneses.

Does that make any sense? I know it sounds a bit convoluted, but I’ll let it sit like that as indication of how tangled your thoughts can get when you waste your time on useless things. I guess the root of the Andrew McCarthy Blues, the worthwhile part of the blues, is an odd form of self assurance. You may be a bit of a pussy, but you’re a self-assured pussy. Whatever the world holds in store, you’ll deal with it, and still go on being a bit of a pussy. I recognize a sort of moral toughness in the Andrew McCarthy Blues, a refusal to act how people think you should act to avoid being thought of as somehow unusual. A toughness born of blue balls and Electric Light Orchestra albums, if such a thing is possible.

Hair and Boxing

I went to get my hair cut today, down near 30^th Avenue in Astoria. That long walk, through Little Egypt, always featuring the clumps of sullen Middle Eastern guys in front of the hookah cafes, some international soccer channel playing inside, a night game in Tunisia, that strong, sweet hookah tobacco smell all over the block.

The barbershop is run by an older Russian guy and his son, friendly people, I’ve gone there about six times now. The price is right, the cut is usually good enough. I always expect my back and sides to get buzzed or be shorter, because they grow in so fast. But I’ve gathered I’m never happy with the length and let it go. The older guy must be around 60, his son late 30s. His son has a big, wavy hair-metal mullet, a real head of hair, the kind of thing I expect to see on a non-balding Russian barber in the 718s. (I prefer getting him as he gives a better buzz cut on the back and sides. The last time, he had his eight-year-old son with him, and the kid kept grilling me on professional wrestling, which I knew nothing about.)

As I was sitting there getting my hair cut by the old man, I heard the son mutter, “Oh, shit, here comes the cry baby.” I couldn’t look out the window, but I could see in the mirror, a man and woman dragging a small boy down the sidewalk. Looked to be of same vague Eastern European descent, maybe Armenian – not dark enough to be Middle Eastern, but clearly somewhere in that hazy meeting ground between western and arabic cultures.

They burst through the door, and, christ, the kid was pitching a fit. The scene in The Omen where they try to take Damien to church? This was the same freak out. The kid was wailing like he was about to be circumcised with a butter knife. His hair wasn’t that long, straight and black, probably about halfway over his ear and down his neck. Tears, screaming, desperate pleading in whatever their native language is. Hippies getting forced crew cuts in some redneck jail circa 1968 after a routine traffic stop were probably less emphatic.

It’s been awhile since I’ve been around anyone that emotional. I mean, this kid was laying it all out there, no bullshit, a truly naked display of full-on emotion. Whether it was rage, fear, whatever, I don’t know. But the father stayed outside while the mother dragged him into the chair. Because the chair was next to mine, I was worried that this wired little prick would bump the old man while he was straight-blade razoring the back of my neck. They had another guy working there (which was unusual), and it was his job to corral the kid, get him to sit still and shear him. The younger son kept offering the kid a lollipop, which seemed like offering a cigarette to a prisoner about to be shot by a firing squad.

The mother picked out the cut: “Give-ah him, Number 3 onna the sides, and Number 2 on top. Short. Real short.” She started jabbering at the kid in their language, which only made him howl louder. Seeing this kid go apeshit brought back to me the one or two times I pulled the same stunt, a faraway memory, but I do recall cutting loose like that at least once.

The difference is, I had real reason to be scared. Leo the barber back home in Pennsylvania would buzz me so that all I’d have left on the top of my head would be a patch of stubble and burred sides. I don’t think he even bothered with scissors – just used that large buzz clipper and ran it up and down the sides of my skull, clipping off whatever overhang there was on top. Took about five minutes. (Later, as I mentioned in a previous post, he once shaved spots into the side of my head just like punk rockers at the time were getting, save Leo knew nothing about punk and was just giving me a deeply strange haircut.) I think I cried earlier because of two things: the sense of a change about to occur, and the act of something, even if it was only hair, being cut off my body. It scared me in some very real sense, enough to make me cry, hard.

Of course, the same thing would happen with me as did with this kid. Once the haircut got underway, I was reduced to sniffles and those odd crying hiccups, but I’d calm down so that when the barber was done, I’d be totally rational and ready for my lollipop. As with this kid, too, I remember my mom being there to calm me down. It made sense that the kid’s father waited outside – he needed his mother to soothe him in this troubled time. By the time I left, the kid was totally under control, and seemed to be reasonably happy with his cut. His mother made a motion to step outside, and the kid turned, cried mommy, but not as urgent. She said something in their language, probably to the effect of “I’m only going outside to talk to your father,” and he turned around, like a big boy, and gazed at himself in the mirror. It’s interesting to note that he never said a word to any of the barbers, who were constantly trying to talk to him, reassuring things like “that’s a good boy” and “there, now, you’re acting like a fine young man, good, good.”

The weird thing? Tie this in with my previous experience shopping at the supermarket – these guys were playing some crazy shit on their sound system. While I was there, I heard “Love Is Blue” by Paul Mauriat (a great 60s instrumental), “Bip Bop” by Wings (off the Wild Life album, a song I’ve never before heard played publicly), “Sound and Vision” by David Bowie, “Killer Queen” by Queen (the old barber knew the words … imagine some 60ish dude singing “Drop of a hat/she’s as willing as/playful as a pussycat” in heavily-accented Russian while he shaves your neck) and two euro-disco type songs in Russian I didn’t know, which sounded like “Johnny and Mary” by Robert Palmer. This is some seriously freaky shit for me to be hearing in a barbershop. Why am I hearing really cool music every time I step inside traditionally non-cool places like supermarkets and barbershops?

Apropos of nothing really, but I also wanted to note something that’s been happening in my boxing class lately, the one on Tuesday. Understand that with these classes, there’s a core group of regulars, of which I’m one. Some classes, like the one on Sunday, there’s a floating group of 10 or so people who show up on a regular basis, although rarely at the same time. The only constants are me and the instructor’s girlfriend, an Indian girl in top shape who really kicks ass. (She attends all of his classes, about six a week.) The Monday class, the regulars are about five or six of us. Tuesday, the same.

But the classes are rarely just the regulars – they’re the regulars, plus people who show up, either once and never again, or sporadically. Maybe attending for a few months straight and disappearing, or showing up as their schedule allows, here and there. By far, the bulk of attendees are in the “once and never again” camp. As stated earlier, you will be physically challenged in these classes, however tough or in-shape you are, and a lot of people don’t want to deal with that shit on a regular basis. And that’s fair enough – it’s not for everybody, and there’s certainly no shame in this. I’ve taken classes in the gym where I thought, “No. I’m never doing this again.”

Then there are the weirdoes. Every now and then, some person shows up who becomes semi-legendary to the regulars because he (always a he) is so strange that his presence stands out. On Sunday, there’s a guy I call Lee Harvey (as in Oswald) who’s become a regular. Lee Harvey’s a strange guy – looks to be of some military background and is in stupendous physical condition – probably as good as the instructor and his girlfriend. Thing is, he has that off-kilter, quiet military intensity about him, and he likes to kick-box every chance he gets. Thus, if you get placed on a heavy bag with him, you know at some point he’s going to start dropping very hard side and head kicks into the bag, which can be a little disorienting and frightening if you don’t know it’s coming. We’ve all come to accept Lee Harvey for who he is – it’s clear that he’s basically a good guy – but nobody wants to get on a bag with him because they know how weird he’s going to get.

On Tuesday, a guy I’ll call Julio has started showing up. Not his real name, but Julio is a Latino who could pass for white – I thought he was a Hasidic Jew the first time I saw him. Just has that look about him – dark brown, longish hair, pale skin, full beard, long straight nose, gangly demeanor. He’s got a weird body, too – very out of shape. Skinny, but with big love handles, a pot belly and puckish little man tits. No muscle at all in his legs. He also smokes, which he proudly admitted to the instructor the first class – he’s got yellow teeth. Throws off the vibe of somebody who’s either been homeless or in prison. A mildly unsettling presence about him, a sort of negative charisma.

To put it kindly, the guy has the attention span of a five-year-old on crack. Thus, he finds it impossible to follow along in the class. While the rest of us are doing those soul-sucking drop-down/push-up/jumping jack routines (20 of those will get anyone winded, assuming you can do 20 in a row), Julio will calmly retreat to the back of the class, or leave the gym, and pace around, returning when he can see that we’ve moved onto something else. When we’re doing combinations, he’ll be doing something else, usually just punching straight ahead, while we all do synchronized moves. The worst is running. The instructor has us running all the time now, sprints up and down the gym that remind me of high-school basketball practice, and Julio will just stand there pretending that he’s invisible when this is happening.

The instructor can’t fucking stand him – understandably so. As with any class, somebody doesn’t follow along, it disrupts the flow. I’m surprised he hasn’t demanded that Julio leave. I understand that Julio showed up at another of his classes, and the instructor demanded that he follow along. Julio went nuts, yelling about how much he’s paying to be in the gym, he doesn’t deserve this shit, why are you singling me out, etc. The guy’s clearly a bit nuts. And he physically threatened the instructor. Please understand, I outweigh the instructor by about 60 pounds. If he ever challenged me to a fight, I’d start running. The guy’s been a professional boxer, he can hit as hard as I can despite being much smaller, and he can hit much faster. He’s probably the best physically-conditioned person I’ve ever met – strong as an ox, compact, incredible endurance. You don’t threaten a guy like this, unless you have a death wish.

I think the instructor’s response was to give him a calm “you’re about to lose consciousness” stare, and state: “Don’t do it. Leave. Now.” Which Julio did. I think that showdown knocked a little sense into him, but the guy’s still wacked out and showing up to class, still blowing off the harder physical routines, still unable to execute even the most basic combinations because he’s just not paying attention. What he’s still doing there, I don’t fucking know. The other week, I got him on a heavy bag, the instructor thought pairing him with me would enlighten the guy a little as to how to act in a boxing class (i.e., pay attention and do everything you're asked to the best of your abilities). And Julio had a blast holding onto the bag while I destroyed it – I made it a point to really cut loose with him on it, and he was impressed. When it came his turn, he flailed on the bag like a high-school girl in a cat fight, started panting after 15 seconds, went out and got some water.

I could see he was basically a nice guy, despite his strangeness. Very friendly, talkative. The thing is, I’m not there to be talkative. Before and after class, sure, a lot of us will stand around and banter. But not during. There’s a girl who shows up sometimes on Tuesdays, too, actually her and a friend (they never show up alone). She has a lot of tattoos and a lip ring, real bad-girl material, but she knows she in a class with people who are physically tougher than she is. You can tell she’s a little intimidated, but holds her ground. Once, we were both paired on the same heavy bag, and the instructor was getting ready to start us on 30-second rounds, holding or hitting, trading places every 30 seconds. I’d never said anything to her, but as I was getting ready to unload on the bag, my right hand cocked back to land that first overhand hook, her eyes met mine, she could see I wasn’t fucking around, and that look we exchanged, a shared, knowing grin, I could tell she “got it” at that moment, why she was there. Have hardly said two words to each other, but I feel like I understand her in some quiet way, and I suspect the feeling’s mutual.

But Julio fucks around, to the extent that I can’t sand the sight of him, even though I know he’s not a truly bad person. People that weird generally don’t last more than a few classes, but he’s been hitting that Tuesday class every time the past month, and doing the same in each: not paying attention, blowing off conditioning, and not learning a damn thing about boxing. The instructor can’t wait for him to disappear. Both of us know he will. We’ve seen many freaks and weirdoes in his classes over the past decade, but Julio may take the cake in terms of lasting the longest.

Not sure what the connection is between Julio and that wailing Armenian kid. But for some reason, I felt like writing about both.

Pennies on the Tone Arm, MP3 Style

Back when vinyl records were king, there were plenty of problems with them. Not so much problems – it’s just that if you didn’t take meticulous care of your records, they often got scratched to shit and sounded awful. Guess what? I was a kid. I didn’t handle my records with special gloves (which I’ve seen vinyl enthusiasts do). I dropped the needle all over the record to skip certain songs. I accidentally dragged the needle across the record. I often left records out of the sleeve, thus exposing to them to dust and more chances to be scratched.

As a result, most of my records sounded like shit after a few months. (If it was a record that really grabbed me, I’d play it incessantly for a good few weeks.) Snap, crackle and pop were part of the soundscape. Some scratches were so prominent that I remember them as much as I remember musical passages in certain songs, and am surprised not to hear my memorized skip on a clean CD version. Skips were the worst, especially when they stopped a song cold. There was a way to get around skips: put pennies or other small coins on the tone arm to force the needle deeper into the vinyl grooves. It was a bad thing to do, wearing out the vinyl more quickly, but sometimes it was necessary. The only thing worse than a skip was a mis-shaped record. I once left a T. Rex greatest hits collection sit on the seat of a car in summer. In direct sunlight. The record looked like a big black contact lens after that, totally ruined.

As you gather, I’m not a “miss the warmth of vinyl” person. (I think the "warmth of vinyl" dudes would be much better served by the warmth of a bare tit.) I’m much more a music fan than an audio enthusiast. CDs, for the most part, sound fine to me. (You want a kick, go to a website run by Steve Hoffman, apparently a famous mastering engineer, and read some of the dozens of posts on there regarding CD sound quality. Guys arguing over the Japan mastering of Hotel California that costs $500 on E Bay, as opposed to the Dutch mastering that you can get for $25 on import. And another guy who found the rare DCC version that trumps them all in sound quality in a used bin at a record store in Pasadena for $4.99.)

MP3s, if they’re created at 192 kbps or higher, sound fine to me. (Even some that are recorded lower sound fine – the source material dictates the quality of an MP3 file.) MP3s, in my opinion, are the greatest thing to happen to music in my lifetime. (Of course, they’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to the music business in terms of lost sales and future audiences believing “music is free.” In short order, the music industry is going to have to figure out how to survive without physical product to sell, and millions of people openly pirating the un-physical product. I don’t envy them!)

The problem with MP3s? Really nothing, save that sometimes the players we store these things on malfunction, and when they do, christ, it is hell.

Nothing really went wrong with MP3 player (a Creative Nomad Zen 60 GB Jukebox) this past weekend. What went wrong was my Windows XP quietly upgraded the media player to version 11, which apparently has bugs in it that make not just the media player, but my entire computer, including the Creative software that allows me to transfer tracks to the MP3 player, not recognize the MP3 player. Doesn’t sound like a big deal? Without my computer’s ability to recognize the MP3 player, the player is frozen in time – can’t add music to it, can’t transfer that music anywhere else.

Understand this player holds 60 gigabytes of music – right now, I have about 40 gigabytes on there, roughly 8,500 songs. Of those songs, I have about 80% of the various folders (50s Rock, 60s Pop, 70s Rock, Blues, Country, etc.) backed-up on DVD discs. The remaining 20% or so falls into two folders: Pop and Country Rock. Pop is basically new pop music from the 90s onwards (all quirky, indie shit … no Britney Spears, I’m afraid). Country Rock is any sort of alt. country music from the 90s onwards. We’re talking roughly 2,000 songs that were in danger of disappearing for me. About 1/3^rd of them are backed-up on a previous MP3 player, another 1/3^rd I could painstakingly recreate from reloading songs from Emusic and my CD collection, and about 1/3^rd comes from other sources that would have just disappeared. A few hundred songs, gone just like that, and a few dozen hours spent re-loading and burning tracks.

That’s the main issue with MP3s now. You have the ability to create such large collections that it may not dawn on you, until you’re in a situation like this, just how much music you have on these players. We’re talking the musical equivalent of dozens of albums. If you had taken a few dozen of my albums back in 1979 and threw them on a fire, I’d have shit my pants in rage. In 2007, you can lose a few dozens albums worth of songs in the blink of an eye, or the momentary change in software on a computer that wipes the slate clean.

I was pissed.

I got even more pissed when I went on the Creative discussion boards to find that the company had done virtually nothing to address the problem, and that hundreds of other people had the same problem. Unfortunately, I started trying the various “home remedies” some of these people have come up with (all with varying levels of success) to correct the problem. After half an hour of trying various solutions, my MP3 player had switched into some strange safe mode, stayed frozen in that window and did not appear to be working. A condition which lasted all of Saturday night while I shit bricks in my shorts and exhaled steam from my ears.

A piece of advice on these internet discussion boards related to products you purchase: never listen to them. They’re always fucked up. The people on there are often snotty tech-heads who leave out key steps in the process that end up really fucking with you and your product. For instance, I had a previous player where the earphone jack wasn’t connecting properly. (If you take apart any audio device with an earphone, you realize that when you plug an earphone in, all you’re doing is forcing one piece of metal to touch another, thus tapping into the audio.) Various tech-heads on the discussion board laid out instructions on taking the machine apart and fixing the headphone jack yourself – one guy even laid out a picture diagram on how to do it. What his picture diagram missed: the small gasket-style casings, springs and other parts that immediately popped out of the player once you unscrewed the back. I went apeshit with that. Eventually sent the player back to Creative (it was two weeks old and the earphone jack was already malfunctioning) and demanded they fix it, which they did after weeks of hectoring and a warning from the Better Business Bureau.

In short, the guys on these boards … picture the arrogant prick in the I.T. Department who treats everyone like an asshole because their computer knowledge isn’t as broad as his. (Which, uh, is why they gave the job to the prick in the first place?) It’s guys like this, who really aren’t very smart. You want to know what true intelligence is? It’s the ability to share your knowledge with other people in a way that let’s them understand and do what you do. Many tech-heads aren’t capable of that deeper, empathetic level of logic. Like so many people, they either guard their knowledge so no one else can have it, or they’re incapable of demonstrating it to anyone else. In a word, no, make that two words, fucking useless. This is the kind of revelation that occurs to you when pop off the back of a $400 MP3 player, springs and other small metallic shit pop out, and you realize you’re in much deeper shit than you were before, thanks to some guy you used to beat up in high school.

Luckily, Sunday morning I found the right driver so that I could at least get my player working again. Still, the computer would not recognize it. What I eventually ended up doing was “rolling back” the version of Windows Media Player to 10, erasing all my Creative software, reloading it and new drivers from the Creative website … and it still didn’t work. I did notice on one of the message boards reference to a non-Creative piece of software that you could buy for $25 that would act as a Windows Explorer type program that would allow you to load up your player. Guess what? I bought it, and it worked. What’s even funnier is that after that software worked, it kicked off some internal (competitive?) switch in the Windows Media world and allowed the Creative software to work again … so now everything is working, although I’m not exactly sure why.

And as far as I’m concerned, the sooner I get those Pop and Country folders copied to my hard drive and burned onto DVD, the better, because I now trust this shit as far as I can throw it. (I can probably throw that player about 50 yards, the laptop about 20. And I may end up doing both before this saga concludes.) I feel like a mental patient in some type of remission, where everything is sane and clear now, but in a few days, I’ll descend back into the darkness of tangled synapses and dementia. Who knows, maybe everything really is all right and I have nothing to sweat. But still, all this week I’ll be getting those thousands of songs onto my machine and then onto DVD discs.

What have I learned? Nothing about Microsoft Windows, which has always been rife with these sort of aggravating blindsides. It’s just mindblowing that they allow this stuff to happen, and more accurately, probably do this sort of shit on purpose in some misguided attempt to thwart MP3 file copying. They’re like that king ordering back the ocean: good luck, assholes. Microsoft is bad, but fucking Creative, they know they have this enormous problem, and do absolutely nothing to address it. Next player I get, I’m not sure what to do. I don’t want to get an iPod; I just don’t like the clunkiness involved with converting everything to those Mac files for the machine. Although I do think their player design and ease-of-use are the best. Their price tag also sucks. But Creative has to have the worst customer service I’ve encountered with any product, much less one you spend hundreds of dollars on. Their actual product is good – my previous 30 MB player is like a tank that will outlast every player I’ll ever have. But their software, the issues with Windows Media Player 11, the total unresponsiveness of the company to address such a key problem: unbelievable. It’s like walking into a fast-food joint, and the pimply-faced kid behind the counter takes a cheeseburger, grinds it into your face and screams, “Fuck you!”.

What I’ve really learned is that music means more to me than I thought it did. It’s easy to take it for granted, quietly sitting in huge gigabyte folders on your player. But when you’re placed in a situation where you’re about to lose all of it in a moment, man, you fight like hell to keep it and take it personally. I want to keep this stuff the rest of my days and am kicking myself now for not backing up files on a regular basis. If you’re reading this and are in the same boat, do it, now, back this shit up, either on disc or external drive. You will be one sorry bastard if you don’t and find yourself behind the eight ball like I almost did this past weekend. If you need to register this in your mind properly, go back to your physical product of choice, be they CDs or records, and imagine a bonfire with Bill Gates in a red devil’s outfit pitchforking every album you own and chucking them into the flames.

The Quality of Supermarket Muzak

Something odd happens every time I go to the supermarket now. I should preface by saying I love going there anyway. It occurred to me last night while picking up a few items (coffee soy milk, peanut butter, a big bottle of this weird Greek grape drink “made with real aloe” although it’s pretty much high-fructose junk, but the aloe is real, and I lightly chew on the small bits as I drink this). But the air conditioning, the lighting, the small thrill of spending money, particularly on food that provides sustenance. Even in a bad supermarket, I enjoy myself.

I’m not sure if all supermarkets are like this, but there’s one by my place, part of the Best Yet chain (which I’d never heard of before it bought the old Waldbaums there previously), that has the best muzak I’ve ever heard. It’s not even muzak – it’s clearly either satellite radio geared towards an extremely tasteful oldies station, or some programmed music that really works. In short order, yesterday I heard: “Try a Little Tenderness” by Otis Redding, “Heaven” by The Talking Heads, “The Girl I Knew Somewhere” by The Monkees, “So Alive” by Love and Rockets, “The Wanderer” by Dion and the Belmonts, and “Nights on Broadway” by The Bee Gees. It’s like this every time I go in, a cross-section of hits spanning the 50s to the 80s. The muzak being played in my supermarket is vastly preferable to the predictable sounds that come spilling out of any jukebox in any bar.

Do kids today even know what muzak is? Until a few years ago, every time you walked into a supermarket, elevator or doctor’s office (or were put on hold), you heard muzak: orchestral versions of hit songs that were often schmaltzy or mind-bendingly bizarre in their arrangements. Sometimes, it wouldn’t even be hits – just casual, leisurely orchestral music designed to chill everyone out. Think Lawrence Welk.

But I guess those days are gone. Most public places now, I hear identifiable pop music being played on sound systems. My gym plays the worst fucking music: late 90s pop. I guess they figure the gym is populated mostly by people in their mid-to-late 20s, therefore they play this shitty music from these folks’ teen years. I can’t even identify the artists – if it’s not late 90s, then it’s current. I don’t ever need to hear “Hollaback Girl” again – the though of this woman in her mid-30s singing such a fucking infantile, bad song – it boggles the mind. (It’s “Micky” for today? I always thought “Micky” was a pretty generic new-wave song, made all the worse by its constant repetition over the years. Does anyone listen to that song seriously and enjoy it? Don’t answer that.) Or some band of post-Mickey Mouse Club wiggers in pajamas drawling “yeah, yeah, yo Dre, turn it up” while they croon some horrendous, generic “soul”/vaguely hiphop number. The only thing worse is the occasional emo/hard rock song with some goateed 19-year-old braying like a billy boat with his balls caught in a vice. It’s either that or generic Matchbox 20-style rock, which I’ve never been able to listen to.

That’s the reason I wear headphones when I get on a cardio machine or lift weights. My boxing classes, the instructor favors a mix of hiphop and caribbean soca-style stuff. Really not that awful, but it’s background noise to me. There’s a guy at the Tuesday class, another instructor, who boxes alone before our class begins, and he’s invariably blasting nothing but Eminem at ear-splitting volume while he goes apeshit on one of those long kickboxing bags. I can’t be in the same room – it’s literally uncomfortable to be in the room with the music that loud. Nice enough guy when you talk to him, but his taste in music, man, it blows. And I haven’t quite made the correlation to how loud music improves a workout.

I’m in mild shock that the supermarket is the one public place that “gets” it musically. Then again, I’ve thought about this and have to wonder. At my age, I’m fully aware music made from the 50s to the 80s is now considered “oldies” in some sense. Yes, even all those hip alt 80s bands – they’ve been around two decades now. And never mind that current “hip” bands are pale imitations of them (The Arctic Monkeys? Meh. I hear all these bands critics and hipsters carry on over and think one thing: been there, done that, next.) Music from the 50s and 60s is not “my” music. I wasn’t born in the 50s, and I was a small child in the 60s. “My” music was the 70s and 80s. I’ve gone on listening to pop music since then, have taken in country, blues, big band, soul, reggae, etc, along the way, but naturally the music of my youth is 70s and 80s. And only with the 70s do I allow myself to love some of the really bad popular stuff.

With the supermarket, I’m wondering, what does some kid make of this music? Like it? Recognize that it’s generally much better than the schlock that’s being vomited on him these days? Think it’s annoying? Think it’s bad? I ask these questions, because I cast myself back to the teenager I was in the late 70s, in a supermarket in Pennsylvania, and I can’t imagine anyone liking that music. The caveat is that canned muzak was playing on the system – probably a samba version of “Yellow Submarine.” I know the music has changed since then, but I’m wondering how much I’ve slipped into the role of an older person “digging the oldies” as he shops in a supermarket, as opposed to a lifelong music fan who appreciates the good shit the supermarket is now inexplicably playing on their sound system.

Whatever the case, it’s a strange feeling to realize the fucking supermarket is a much hipper place to hang than most bars these days. They played “Mama Mia” by ABBA last week. What a long, strange trip it’s been with that band. Of course, ABBA are now considered pop geniuses, despite or because of the cheese factor that accompanied their routine: two married Swedish couples singing in phonetic English. I surely recall the 80s and even early 90s, when you couldn’t find an ABBA CD anywhere, they were considered some lost, campy 70s band that rightfully faded away, and the first collection I finally found for them was a greatest hits import from the UK that made the hipster at the record store snicker when he bagged it.

Take it further back in time. Brother M, who had a good-sized collection of 70s pop singles, played records constantly in the basement, where he had a stereo, a chair and a small barrel to put his albums and singles on while he sat there, listened to music and smoked. That was it – his teenage domain. I’d eventually invade his domain by lifting weights down there, but there wasn’t much overlap as he’d head down there later in the evening. His tastes started out cheesy enough, but eventually he got high-faluting by 70s standards, getting into prog rock and Steely Dan, and the kicker, Todd Rundgren and Utopia stuff, some of which is stamped on my brain. (Todd's Hermit of Mink Hollow album is indelibly tied in with Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey as a result of him dogging the eight-track on one our summer shore visits to our uncle’s house there.)

Since Brother M got so heavily into “intelligent” rock (fucker stole my Alan Parsons Project I Robot album), he often found the stuff I was listening to laughable. Queen. ABBA. ELO. I remember him mimicking the idiotic chorus to “Telephone Line” at me (“Doo-wop/ Diddy-doo-do-wop/ Do-wah Do-Lang/ Blue Days/ Black Nights/ Do-Wah Do Lang”), as a not-so-subtle hint that the latest three-song (in outline format) Utopia album was way beyond that silly pop shit. Most of the kids in his graduating class chose Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine” as their favorite song. (A bunch of stoned idiots, really – that’s not even the best song on that album. And I can guarantee not one of those stoners puts on that song now and thinks, "Ah, the good old days." He thinks, "What the fuck was I smoking the day they passed around the "favorites" sheet for us to fill out?")

Well, one night, I clearly remember, there was a thunderstorm, and I couldn’t sleep, so I went downstairs and for whatever reason, tried to sleep on the sofa. It must have been past midnight, one of those hot/humid nights where sleeping is just not good, no matter what you do. To add to the insomnia, I could hear bass rumblings coming from the basement: Brother M was down there listening to music. Probably just back from various teen misadventures with various troubled youth from the neighborhood.

After about half an hour, a startling revelation occurred to me: he was playing ABBA’s song “Mama Mia” over and over, at top volume. He must have been high, that was my only explanation. If he thought ELO were a bunch of jackasses, ABBA was beneath contempt. (I had all their singles in the 70s … don’t think I ever bought an ABBA album … that only happened in the 90s when their material started being reissued.) I was afraid to go down there, and find some space alien sitting in front of the stereo instead of Brother M.

I’ve kept that secret for almost 30 years. Cat’s out the bag now! Not much of a secret, really, but when I heard “Mama Mia” in the supermarket the other week, I immediately pictured 17-year-old Brother M, in a tie-dye shirt with “Young Americans” on the front in home-made block letters, smoking, huddled in the darkness on a stormy summer night, listening to this great pop song alone in the middle of the night, lest he die of shame for publicly admitting he liked it.

Ended up buying a six-pack, mega-roll of Charmin, shit, almost $10, but closer to $8 with the coupon I had, while I traveled in time from Queens to a small town in northeast Pennsylvania.

The Dandees

I’m sitting here now watching the NCAA Women’s Softball World Series, as I’ve found myself doing the past few years come early June. Just one of those things that eases into my viewing schedule, and I enjoy watching. The games are usually competitive: a shorter field, more strategy, more singles and home runs, good pitching, and the girls have a strange cult-like way of cheering from the bench that resembles the inspired lunacy you see in Japanese baseball.

(I’ll be watching the Little League World Series later in the summer, although I’m mildly annoyed that they now refuse to show kids crying when they lose … about the most honest moment in any sport. They’ll show these kids spitting all over the field and grabbing their dicks, emulating their idiot idols in the major leagues, but they won’t show the kids crying. I often find myself rooting for the more well-mannered kids from the Far East.)

But I have to admit, the main attraction to softball is how attractive some of these women are. Those tawny, long-legged ones with great asses: good-looking tomboys. Last year, I was crazy over Cat Osterman, the legendary Texas pitcher who now plays professionally in Cheap Trick’s hometown, Rockford, Illinois. I could wax poetic over her talents, but the truth is I simply loved the way her ass gently quivered in her tight pants after releasing each pitch. And as softball games are televised just like baseball games (with the left/centerfield camera focusing from behind the pitcher’s back as she throws), that meant every pitch. Along with the unexpected eroticism of women’s olympic curling (again, it’s all in the camera angles), two of my favorite women’s sports to watch.

When I decided to write about this, a convergent thought occurred to me. When I go back home to visit Pennsylvania now, I make it a point to go out driving with my Mom as much as possible. Again, with Dad’s passing, I had the concept of time being finite driven home completely, and realized I should spend time with Mom whenever I can. I hadn’t made the connection earlier, but thinking about women’s softball, it opened a door to the memory of Mom and me driving to my sister’s softball games back in the 70’s. She was part of a pre-high school league (the equivalent of teener league), and her team was The Dandees.

If I wasn’t mowing lawns or playing baseball in the neighborhood, I’d pack up lawn chairs (and a few cans of A-Treat Cream and Root Beer sodas) with Mom and head out to watch the Dandees play. At the time, I must have been 10-12 years old, that quizzical age boys reach where they haven’t hardened into their adolescent stance – not as precocious as an eight-year-old, sort of a weird philosophical boy’s age. I think this picture was taken when I was 13, but there it is. What a total fucking dork I was – which I’m now vaguely proud of. That’s one of those 70s t-shirts, with red shoulders, and “Elton John” lettered over a severely-faded picture of his Captain Fantastic album cover. (I recall that album being my favorite for a good few years in the late 70s.) You’re not seeing my striped white tube socks pulled up to my knees and shitty Fayva sneakers. Or my John Denver wire-frame glasses.

These drives we take now remind me of both of us getting in the car on a summer’s evening and heading off to whatever field the girls were playing at. Since their league was unofficial, they had to take space wherever they could find it, which often meant cruising to remote farm fields or Little League practice fields – never the well-kept high-school fields. Thus, the need for lawn chairs, since there were no stands. It was usually just the mothers of these girls, a few fathers, and some kids like me who tagged along because there was nothing better to do.

The local high-school softball coach, Doug, ran the show, and he had that stoic, fatherly way about him all good male softball coaches (there aren’t many) have. The Dandees somehow got uniforms, light blue with orange lettering if I remember correctly, which was a miracle. There was zero money for their league – no admission and no concession stands. (Little Leagues often made a small fortune selling soda, pizza, french fries and ice cream at their games.) It was no frills. I don’t know if the situation has been remedied since then, or if these leagues still exist in the same way, or girls simply start playing softball in junior varsity without any previous leagues.

The Dandees kicked ass. They were a perennial powerhouse in the league, thanks to Doug’s tutelage, and as a result, our local high school was a softball powerhouse for years to come – still is, from what I understand. The key to kids at that age, maybe at any age, is solid, no-bullshit, fundamental coaching, and that’s all the guy did. Taught the basic skills, what to do in given situations, and the girls either bonded and played well, or didn’t.

Understand that they’d be playing on some truly shitty, remote fields, in shorts, so it was nothing for a girl to go home with a long cut up her league after sliding over a rock, or poison ivy after digging a foul ball out of a clump of bushes. Some girls went for cheerleading, or in the 70s getting stoned all the time, but you had those relatively rare girls who dug sports and wanted in on the action. With guys, there were dozens of guys in each class, like me, who played neighborhood sports of all kinds, but didn’t go out for high-school sports for various reasons. With girls, pretty much every one in a given class who was into sports was on the playing field or court.

We’d often make a big deal about “softball dykes” when we were kids, but with the Dandees, I don’t remember that being such a big deal, maybe because we’re talking girls in the 12-14 age range. Some of the girls were on the bigger side and leaning butch, but that didn’t necessarily translate itself into some bulldog image to be ridiculed. I suspect they were like that when they were eight, and are like that now, whatever their sexual preference.

The truth is, the girls seemed to have more fun, a better concept of team work and didn’t have that dickheadedness that so many guys in sports suffer from. I think the worst part of high-school/organized sports for me was the rah-rah bullshit, as opposed to the simple pleasure of just playing, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, and understanding that’s how the world works. There was rarely that sense that you had to lose your cool when you lost, or humiliate a fellow player who fucked up. (It happened sometimes, but that was just as often longstanding personal beefs that came out in a given situation like that.)

It’s interesting to note the issue of sexuality with sports, because I’d be willing to bet lesbianism is an open secret in sports like softball and women’s basketball. It’s sort of just there and accepted, not a big deal. Whereas a gay guy in men’s sports (save figure skating?) is considered a big deal, even now. I’m just not seeing the real relation between competence in sports and a person’s private sense of sexuality – beyond the stereotypes we’re fed growing up.

On Saturday, I was in the gym, hitting the weights as I’ll do a day or two a week when not boxing. As noted much earlier, I lift weights for the simple reason that as we get older, it makes perfect sense to keep our bodies in reasonable condition. Beneath the bluster and hyper-macho bullshit so many serious weightlifters attach to it, it’s just a basic form of exercise that makes sense.

As I was coming into the locker room, there were three blockheads sporting all the usual affectations that lead me to believe these guys are frightened and need to intimidate people with their looks: bad facial hair, lame tattoos (barbed wire around the biceps, dumb tribal tattoos, dragons and snakes on their shoulders, etc.), shaved heads (to cover receding hairlines), bloated, stuffy-looking bodies due to far too much weightlifting and no real physical conditioning. Guys like this over-populate every gym I’ve ever been in – which is fine. Most of them mind their own business, the same way I do.

But these guys were carrying on about “some fag” they just ran into onto the floor, mimicking a stereotypically gay accent and saying things, that implied to me, that this guy, whatever his orientation was, was actually pretty nice to them, but they thought it was a riot that this “fag” must have been “hitting on” them for approaching them and being friendly.

It was the dumbest conversation I’ve heard in awhile. If you haven’t seen the movie Idiocracy (now available on DVD), I’d recommend renting it … and then realizing that people are this dumb now, as the futuristic movie gets into the whole “you sound like a fag” rebuttal to anyone who speaks intelligently. These three guys were standing there, chuckling away, under the assumption that everyone around them was heterosexual and digging their cool verbal takedown of “this fag who hit on them.” There was also the implication of how they were carrying themselves, standing in the middle of the room in towels, trying to make eye contact with guys around them, that they saw themselves as the center of attention in the room, the truthsayers.

What do you say to guys this stupid? That a public display of something like this is just plain embarrassing, and leads me to believe each of these guys has a mental image buried deep in his sub-conscious of him sucking a great big cock? What’s the point? So I can get in a senseless tangle with three deeply insecure Queens juice heads?

I can't stand dealing with self-satisfied pricks like this, whatever the situation. And I really have no burning issue with their opinions – whatever they believe, it’s fine by me, wouldn't want to get into the hornet's nest of mixed signals their bodies and words imply. It’s just that false sense of security and the lack of recognition that they’re in a public place spouting this shit that should be done privately. Sort of like people spouting deeply racist shit publicly (and I’ve seen this go on in all directions) and not having the common decency to recognize they’re way out of line for doing so.

But it’s that lame attitude that drove home the concept to me of sexuality and male sports … and how we could learn a few things from women’s sports like softball. When I watch these softball games, this is one of the under-currents I sense, beneath whatever fleeting attraction I feel towards some of these beautiful women on the field, fully recognizing chances are good some of these girls aren’t batting on my side of the plate! Whatever. The Dandees seemed pretty cool to me back in the 70s, playing their asses off in farm fields for hardly anybody, and it’s a kick now to see something like a televised world series for softball on ESPN. I’d like to think Mom is watching back home, but knowing her TV viewing habits, she has one of those grotesque cop shows on as she works on a crossword puzzle.

Mowing Lawns

On my last trip back to Pennsylvania, I was worried when Mom told me my sister had mowed the lawn two days earlier. I’m never quite sure why people carp about mowing lawns – I love doing it, and do it every chance I get. The sound of the mower, the physical exertion, time spent in the sun, the visible sight of a finite job being completed – all these things make me enjoy the experience.

Luckily, my sister must have set the wheels way too high, because it became clear a few days later that the grass needed to be mowed again. So I did, and had a rough time as I had the wheels on their lowest setting and the grass was still a little wet from rain the day before. The mower kept conking out on huge chunks of wet grass stuck in the exhaust vent, but after awhile, it got done.

Ultimately, something like mowing a lawn is a direct connection to nature. The grass grows, with or without you, and if you want a nice clean field to walk on, you have to make it that way. With snow or leaves, you have to clean up after nature. Doing these seemingly minute things reminds you of the constant motion of the world – and your small place in it, and that you have to do something to exert control over it. But I think my true pleasure with mowing lawns is tied into the fact that I made a lot of money as a kid doing this.

I can’t remember how we got roped into mowing other people’s lawns, but I’m glad my brothers and I did. The first big client came with Dr. Heber, who lived out the road on a few acres of land – a humungous front and back lawn. Brother M. started doing this, but after awhile realized he was on an eight-hour slog every time he mowed, thus Brother .J and I were enlisted to help with old lawn mowers Dad had tinkered back into (sporadically) working order.

It would take the three of us about three hours to do the whole lawn, with Brother M. stuck with the literally shit job of mowing over the septic tank. The 70s were a weird time for septic tanks. When I visit Pennsylvania now, everyone has a septic tank, as the municipality switched over to this system a few years ago. (And that was pretty onerous and unfair. Every property owner had to pay out of his own pocket to have the tank and a well installed simultaneously – an unwelcome four-figure sum for most people.)

The only way you’d know everyone has a septic tank now is that you can see the pipe tops jutting a few inches out from the grass in each yard. Back in the 70s, the few people who had septic tanks all had the desperately cheap habit of letting the tank overflow, thus creating small shit swamps in their yards, and toxic run-off into near-by gutters. Our neighbors, the Hanlons, got on everybody’s bad side by pumping their septic tank one summer night. I’ll never forget that. We were all sitting around watching TV, probably Chico and the Man, when the most overpowering stench of fresh shit filled the air. This was like Dad, who took the most astoundingly “my god, what did he eat” dumps, taking 10 in a row and lighting them on fire.

We ran out in the streets – everyone on the block did – to realize that Mr. Hanlon had run a hose into his tank and was pumping into the street. A few of the neighbors, my dad included, called the cops, and that was the end of that. Mr. Hanlon alienated a lot of people with that stunt, as well he should have. After that, he still left the tank overflow on the lawn. It should be noted their house was next to a school where dozens of us played baseball all summer. Many of us had sneakers suctioned off our feet when we had to romp through their lawn to retrieve a rubber ball.

With the Heber’s lawn, Brother M. would find himself ankle-deep or worse in sewage sludge and clods of floating grass. It was virtually impossible to mow. All you could do was hack it down a few inches with scythe and sickle. (This was before weed eaters came into vogue.) He’d often find dead or dying copperhead snakes stuck in the sewage, craning their heads while the rest of their bodies baked in shit. He’d usually put them out of their misery with a whack of the scythe. If that sounds harsh, try picking up an agitated, shit-covered, poisonous snake by the tail and walking it a hundred yards to the nearest woods without getting bit.

I’d do this, too, eventually. In fact, I remember Brother J and I taking over the business and doing the Heber lawn ourselves, 4-5 hour mowing marathons that would find us drinking a gallon jug of water a piece and still dying of thirst by the end. The lawn was an easy mow; it’s just that doing a few acres with a push mower is a time-consuming ordeal. I looked at it as a strenuous vertical sun-bathing session that I got paid to do. The worst aspect, beyond the horrible metallic sound of a blade violently scraping on an unseen rock or chunk of wood, was the mowers running out of gas, which would entail at least 15 minutes of fruitless chord-pulling in extreme heat. Once those mowers got that hot, restarting them was a bitch. We learned the trick of unscrewing the carburetor cover and jamming a screwdriver into the gas-flow valve.

Many times, I’d be there in my skimpy 70s shorts, my balls nearly hanging out, white tube socks pulled up to my knees, pair of chlorophyll-stained sneakers, tan as any surfer, cursing over a dead mower that wouldn’t start. But you know what? To get through that, drive back home, unload the mowers, sit in the backyard in the cool of the evening, sipping Kool Aid, with $10 in my pocket (the job went for $20, which seemed like a lot of money to kids back then), and the knowledge that I’d be driving to the local mall in an hour or two to buy a few albums – a nice feeling.

There were other lawns. The next worse was a woman just up the road from the Hebers who had a pretty non-descript, shady lawn, save that it had a “rock garden.” This meant a bunch of decoratively-painted rocks placed into a ridge on her lawn – it was about 15 feet long, four feet wide. The problem we had with the rock garden was that we had to get down on our hands and knees to pick out grass and weeds from between the rocks, making sure to leave any colorful flowers or heather untouched. What a pain in this ass this was. It would take an hour to mow the lawn, then three more hours to clean out the rock garden. On our hands and knees, or leaning on rocks for leverage. Couldn’t use gloves either as they’d make our fingers too clumsy to grab the small weeds. Thus, we’d leave the place with sore knees and backs, small scrapes and cuts on our fingers. The rock garden only happened once a month, but we dreaded it.

Even our own lawn had its problems, namely dogshit. God bless cats for having that internal radar to know to shit in a box. I prefer dogs for their personalities, but if only they knew how to shit like cats. Running over dogshit with a lawnmower is not a sweet proposition. The terds are cut and flung over the lawn, leaving the mower, and maybe you, smelling like dogshit. So, before every mowing session at home, I’d have to shovel the numerous mounds of dogshit from the lawn, and, man, that was no fun. We kept the stuff in an old tar bucket, then once it was full, bury the contents in the backyard. It was sort of a dogshit stew in that tar bucket – the contents somehow liquefied over time. A real nightmare would have been one of my older brothers chasing me down with that bucket and dumping it on me.

What I remember most about lawn mowing is that deep-summer zen, the same feeling I’d get distance running. The heat would add to it. Anyone who’s done any prolonged cardio workout knows the feeling – your body is under duress, but it’s also working at peak form, pumping out sweat to cool down, the repetitive action lulling the mind into a sense of calm. People would never believe me when I’d tell them how relaxing it was to run seven miles in 85-degree heat, but it was. The same went for lawn-mowing, along with that sense of isolation the sound of the motor would bring. The outside world existed only in passing, a wave to a friend passing by on a 10-speed bike. Even now, if someone starts up a piece of equipment like a lawn mower, I can sleep straight through it, so long as the sound remains steady. You couldn’t hear anything outside it, you had to concern yourself only with what was directly in front of you, and that was a visible square that shrunk to a smaller box with every passing lap, until there was nothing but a freshly-mown lawn, and the smell of it mingled with hints of gasoline. A perfect little world.

And a pocket-full of dough afterwards. I can trace back my relationship to money and work to allowances (believe it or not, a quarter a week ... how in the hell I did anything with that amount of money is beyond me now), but it wasn't until lawn mowing that I got the first taste of comparatively big money. A strange thing about me, work and money -- maybe good, maybe bad. I've found that so long as I feel productive and useful, money's not a burning issue in my life. Sure, I could use more -- most of us could. But I'm not driven by money -- I'm driven by the concept of work. You better believe, when people work with me, they're pretty happy that there's one person around who is more interested in getting shit done than in fucking with them in some sense. I enjoy working, and it's surely a detriment to me that I don't insist on climbing a money ladder to ensure my self worth. That may not seem like much of a distinction, but from what I've seen, it's a huge one in terms of the difference between ambition and work itself. This all goes back to mowing lawns, and the simple pleasure I got, and still get, from being able to take stock in a job well done, and knowing the whole process will need to be done again, and again, and again.

The Riverside Shakespeare

The secret bane of college life, as I remember it, was having to buy over-priced text books for classes. It had to be the biggest racket on campus – books that should have gone for no more than $20 being sold for $120. And you had to buy them. Luckily, the campus had a pretty good used store, so I could buy these shit-bag, never-to-be-used-again books for $50. Of course, the worst aspect of used text books, and even worse for novels: passages highlighted in yellow that made no sense to highlight, and scribbled notes in the margins that suggested the previous owner was a complete moron on acid.

I now own only one book purchased for classes from that time: The Riverside Shakespeare. I’m not really sure why I still own it, as I haven’t read any Shakespeare in years. If you’re not familiar with this edition, the thing is twice the size of a New York City phone book. I’m trying to remember how I carried this thing to class – in a wheelbarrow? I think it’s a lot like the poetry books I bought so many of in my 20s; I can’t seem to part with them even though I rarely read them. (I just don’t have the time more than anything.) They’re status symbols of past ideals, so I can show people I really gave a shit about such things, once upon a time.

Hell, since discovering the joys of the New York City Public Library, I may never buy another book again. I’m looking at my life and recognizing time is an issue in terms of re-reading books … so why buy them? I say this knowing full well that if I had a few lucky breaks, I’d be begging people to buy my books. When the reality is I can’t be bothered to buy them myself. And I can’t stand the atmosphere at bookstores. I like the atmosphere in my boxing classes. I wish I could merge both and beat the shit out of various art snobs and such who make small indie bookstores such a stale experience.

But let’s get back to The Riverside Shakespeare. I was lucky enough to have two professors who worshipped him, so I actually pulled something from their classes, as opposed to the millions of kids who take similar classes and feel like they’re sleepwalking in hell. Charlie, my English professor/mentor at the branch campus I attended for two years, specialized in Shakespeare, to the extent that he’d insist when we read in class, we’d need to re-enact everything. Ergo, if there was a thundering storm, he’d enlist a few kids to bang the shit out of close-top desks and wail. It was great fun. And since Charlie was such a hip guy, at least as far as English professors went, he knew how to connect the writing to contemporary issues. Not in that shithead “let’s re-do Hamlet with helicopters and a hiphop soundtrack” way – just in making the emotional connection between those characters and how people are now.

My second professor, at the main Penn State campus, christ, I can’t remember his name, an older man, but this guy was excellent, as good as Charlie in terms of his knowledge and passion, and just as engaging. For the quality of instructors I had teaching me Shakespeare, I should be a lot more enamored of his writing than I am now. I guess the problem was/is I can’t stand stage acting and plays. I hate seeing actors act. I can handle movies, but when I see people on a stage, over-emoting and carrying on like mental patients, I just turn off. I’d rather watch American Gladiator reruns than any Sam Shephard play. One-man shows? Forget it. Hideously bad over-acting in my book. No one ever acts like that, unless they’re high and/or deranged – which is the case some of the times with the characters portrayed, but just as often not.

And directors have a way of mangling Shakespeare to “update” his style, which always comes off terribly. I know a lot of actors eat this shit up, a chance to tap into the classics, throw in Ibsen and such, but it’s just an art that I don’t appreciate, and lord knows, I tried. My response to "let's go see play"? It's "let's just fuck instead, and save $20 a piece and bad plastic cup of warm white wine at intermission, ok?".

But The Riverside Shakespeare, this haunting doorstop, goes on sitting in my apartment. I keep telling myself, “it’s good to have that as a reference,” but god-damn, the last time I referred to it was probably about 1991 or so. Why do I keep this fucking thing?

I guess it’s like the baseball glove I keep in one of my drawers, which dates all the way back to the late 70s when I bought it at the tail end of my Little League stint, to use in neighborhood ball, which went on a few years more. I used it, too, in the short-lived publishing/advertising softball league days of my mid-late 20s, which I enjoyed at the time, but more for the rambunctious bar scene afterwards, getting really hammered and flirting with those nutty/beautiful advertising chicks who never knew what they wanted. And I do have nice memories of being out on Ward’s Island as the sun set on a mid-summer evening, cool breezes coming off the East River, playing softball, catching a look at Manhattan between pitches, as our team usually lost 26-7 or so, but no one gave a shit. When the game ended, we’d take a yellow school bus back to a dive bar on the upper east side. I distinctly recall pissing on the streets of the Bronx like a dog marking his trail, because I just couldn’t make it home in time to unload about six pints of Guinness I’d had in the previous two hours.

The glove isn’t so much a reminder as a physical extension of a memory – something that seems so elemental and tied into who I was that it makes sense to keep it. I have baseball hats like this, too, that I’ll probably never wear again. Sentimental things, when you get down to it. Throw in The Riverside Shakespeare. With college stuff? There are damn few physical reminders of my time there – a few pictures, some yellowed newspaper columns (that make me cringe the few times I’ve looked at them), a diploma. Everything else is carried in emails and conversations I’ve had and continue to have with a handful of old college classmates over the years.

And none of us are nostalgic for those college days, even though most of us had a blast at Penn State. The Riverside Shakespeare makes me think of this girl Ann from South Dakota who was in my second class at the main campus. A beautiful girl with long black hair – looked a lot like the actress Jordana Brewster. I was dying to fuck her, but we never quite clicked. I’ll never forget the night I snuck into her dorm, so we could play Chuck Berry’s “Great 28” album I had just bought ("Bill, you bought the album? Get over here, now!"), and she went nuts doing the twist for about an hour – I should have went for it then, dude. But it didn’t happen, and we went on, carrying our gigantic copies of The Riverside Shakespeare to class three times a week. We both got A’s, and I guess she went back to the Badlands to live out her days.

Why is it that I think just as much about her, or Charlie, as I do anything I actually learned while reading The Riverside Shakespeare, when I look at that book on the shelf?