The Blog of Writes

Lost in the Atmosphere

2009-08-23T17:44:00.000-07:00

The night before my journey to Portland, my friend Lyn cooked a send off dinner for me. We ate and drank and watched “Son of Rambow” (great movie by the way). As is usual for us, the movie was paused many times for little vignettes of talking. We rarely get through a film, and if we do it is usually in the wee hours of morning. This evening was no exception. We didn’t finish the film and I passed out around 5 am. This was extremely foolish behavior as I had a lot to accomplish the next day for my trip to Portland.

I rose wearily at 10:30 am mildly but persistently hung over. I took my cat to my Mom’s house and jumped in her pool hoping that I could shake the mind fog to no avail. Getting back home and washed my dishes and cleaned the house up a little. I finally succumbed to the urge to catch a catnap before packing. I figured I would be ok when I got to Portland because I would just catch up on some sleep on the plane ride.

Sitting in front of me on the plane to Portland is a man in his sixties. His big melon noggin bald save for a small square soul patch on the back of his head; a small plot of soft short white hair. The kid next to me points it out. I joke that he probably doesn’t even know it’s there, but almost in answer to our query his wife’s hand slides up to the back of his neck and begins to stroke the small arid patch delectably.

The bald man also has two earrings in his left ear. One is the standard gold diamond stud. The second is a tribal black curly-q, like a sharp worm impaled in his fatty lobe. He wears glasses and has a generous goatee. He smells like an old-time barbershop.

The kid sitting next to me is named Kyle. I guess him at about 14. He is a friendly.

“Hey bra, what kind of music do you like?”

“I like lots of different music, how about you?”

“I like lots of different music too, you like Eminem?”

“Yeah some of it.”

“What about Green Day?”

“Yeah I like Green Day.”

He flips open his CD wallet and starts digging.

“Which album do you like best?”

“I don’t know…’Dookie’, ‘Insomniac’, whatever.”

He pulls out ‘Dookie’ and put it in his CD player. He messes around with his ear buds, stretching them out and straightening the wires. He hands me a bud.

“Here bra.”

“Oh no, that’s ok.”

“Come on bro, it’s better when you share music with someone.”

How can I refuse such and invitation? He isn’t making this offer the guy sitting on the other side of him. I put the bud in my ear and the volume is full blast, all the sounds distorted. I decide to endure it. I hadn’t listened to ‘Dookie’ in probably nine years. I don’t think this kid was born when it came out. Soon we are both nodding our heads and drumming on our tray tables.

After six songs I’m done. He is done too. I pull out my notebook and start writing about the bald guy in front of me. He pulls out a notebook and starts drawing. As I glance over at his picture I can see that he is completely engrossed in drawing this tribal design with a large eye as its centerpiece. After a few minutes he stops and admires his work for a moment.

“Awesome!”

He continues to draw, stopping occasionally to look and verify its coolness. When he is finally done he proudly shows it to me. The final product looks like a giant eye with wings and claws.

“What do you think?”

“Pretty cool, I wouldn’t want to meet it on the street.”

“It’s just a design dude.”

“Yeah well I still wouldn’t want to meet it.”

“Tell me a design you would like me to draw.”

That’s a tough one. How do you tell someone a design to draw? I sit and think on it for a while. His eyes are upon me and I can tell his patience is wearing thin.

“I don’t know man, why don’t you make a coat of arms for yourself”

“I had to do that one time in my history class, I hated that.”

“Well that was an assignment, this is just for fun.”

“That was supposed to be for fun too.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, my first suggestion and you hate it.”

“Ok.”

He goes back to drawing and I go back to writing. After about five minutes he pushes the picture my way. He has drawn a literal coat and put symbols on it. I recognize musical notes, a game controller, and a key.

“Tell me about this.”

“Ok so it’s a jacket, you know a jacket of arms, I thought that was funny.”

I smile encouragingly.

“So this is a key because every coat of arms has to have a key for some reason. This is game controller because I love to play video games, and these are musical notes, because I love to listen to music, play music and compose music. I compose music.”

“Really, what do you play?”

“Piano…want to hear one of my original compositions?”

“Sure that would be great.”

He shuffles through his CD wallet again and produces a CD with a picture of him playing the piano printed on it. I listen through one ear bud to a simple little song with a drum machine, cheesy strings and piano. He explains as we are listening that the strings and the piano are playing against each other to make it sound more realistic. I nod and smile and listen. The song is over in two minutes.

“That was good, I liked it.”

I never mention that I used to make music or that I ever played in a band. I figure I will let him be the man of the hour.

The stewardess comes by to get our drink orders. He orders a ‘Monster’ I order club soda. The stewardess tells him its $3 and then goes over payment options, cash not being one of them.

“Wow.”

“I’ll come back for the payment later.”

“I don’t have any money!”

“Ok then.”

Ten minutes later she comes back with our drinks. Sure enough she gives him a ‘Monster’.

“I bought it for you hon.”

“Thanks!”

The kid is a charmer and he doesn’t even know it. Thank goodness for that. I think it is his still child-like response to the world. We became friends in only about two minutes. Adults don’t do that. I usually smile at my travel mates, pull out my pillow and fall asleep. Even with my friendly companion I wanted to sleep. Something about plane engines makes me almost unnaturally sleepy. But that wasn’t going to happen on this flight.

“You wanna play a game?”

“Sure, what kind of game?”

“You pick a letter from the alphabet and then you pick a subject like ‘animals’ and then you try to think of the most ‘animals’ that start with that letter.”

I get out my notebook and pick the letter D randomly from pointing my finger in a book. We start with animals. After naming about 14 animals we are stuck.

“What about a dingbat?”

I laugh.

“I don’t think so.”

We move on to my specialty, band names, and we are really tearing it up. Do you know how many bands start with the word “death”? We get up to 24 band names and he tells me this is record number that he has never been a part of before.

The captain comes on to tell us that we are landing and I can’t believe how fast time has gone by.

Stay tuned for the next installment, “Fear and Sleep Deprived in Las Vegas”.

A little ditty

2009-07-27T18:48:00.001-07:00

Joplin has a little secret in May's Drug Warehouse on 7th Street. They have a lot of really cheap stuff, the greatest liquor deals in town and the best Muzac in Joplin. Seriously it is really wild. Not only are the tunes diverse but the volume is pumped up. Somebody really cares about music there. Now I'm told that sometimes it is country but I have yet to hear any. Today when I walked in Pete Shelley's "Homosapien" was playing! Pete Shelley in a Joplin retail business? That was followed by Terrence Trent D'Arby's "Wishing Well" which is surprisingly refreshing after all these years. Following that, Prince "Delirious" and The Fixx "Secret Seperation". Yes I was there for a while. The thing about Mays is that it has all this stuff kind of randomly placed everywhere and there is hardly ever more than two other customers. It reminds me of an old Ben Franklin or Skaggs store. Just a little of everything, everywhere. I find it strangely comforting.

I have this love/hate relationship with my house right now. I love my house, but sometimes I just want to put off coming home. Such is the lonely life I lead right now. I know what is going to happen when I get home because I'm in charge and that means I get my way, no surprises. Well no surprises is boring sometimes.

I do try to mix it up sometimes. I dance for my cat and she either approves or runs and hides. I read in the tub. I manically clean a part of the house. I sit outside and offer my flesh for the insects, which they greedily indulge in. I cook enough food for a family.

Last week I had my nephew Gabriel for four days. I was thinking it would cramp my style to have a seven year old around the house all the time, but to the contrary it was quite agreeable. We had a great time. I high-lighted his hair, which he was very patient with, and it looks awesome. I will post a pic soon. I taught him chess, which I'm not sure he is overly enthused about, but we did play four games of it. I read to him and he read to me. He built cool stuff with Legos, Lincoln Logs (their small, their awesome, their wood), and Tinker Toys (god I love all of those toys, I play with them when he isn't here) He made balsa wood dinosaurs. It was great. After he went to bed I still got a little me time and it was just enough.

So there is a blog of no real value but a little something. I have got to get back into the habit. It is good for me.

Please subscribe if you like reading. It puts pressure on me to continue.

Coming up soon:
The banality of modern communication.
Censorship examined.
A New Writer's Group
How You Can Change America
AND
How I grew up and quit worrying about the end of days.

Thanks for reading.

Poetry in Motion

2009-04-20T22:25:00.000-07:00

So in my never-ending desire for a degree I am slowly whittling away at it by taking night classes. I can't get money for college anymore so it is coming out of my pocket entirely without any assistance. So this semester I'm taking Creative Writing:Poetry. On the side I have been trying to get the university more involved with all things Spiva. I mentioned to my teacher that it would be a cool idea to use our current photography exhibit for an experiment. She jumped on the idea immediately. The students came to see the exhibit and based poems on the photos in the show. Then we had a reading of the poems in the gallery with each photo being displayed behind them on a screen as they read. It was a huge success beyond my greatest hopes! So here is one of the poems I wrote. If you all like it I will post the other two. I'm not sure if people respond to poetry on my space or not.

Inspired by Family of Origin: Skiers

Here they were:

Grandpa with a crew cut,
strong arms and a barrel chest,
the kind of physique you only see in old films
when men were still men.

Grandma thin but healthy,
legs tanned and tight,
wearing a full body swimsuit that shows off all her curves,
back when women were supposed to have curves.

The kodachrome color makes all these memories obscure;
world and past become unreal.
These can’t be my grandparents
they don’t belong to me
they don’t belong to my memory.

Sure they have told me stories of their life,
stories I knew were connected to them.
But it always seemed like they were relating a movie they had seen.
I could never place them in the stories.

Grandpa a puny boy with asthma,
the runt of the family,
the unloved and unfavored son.

When I was younger all the stories were of hardship
and personal glory at overcoming all obstacles of being underestimated.
Stories of outsmarting the smart guys with his sixth grade education.

He once showed me a picture of him as a boy with his brothers.
He pointed at his two older brothers and himself.
“Like stair steps” he said, “I’m the bottom”.

One day all the boys were dreaming of the future
A future away from the poverty and dirt roads.
Harvey was gonna be a doctor,
Warren was gonna be a lawyer,
Grandpa didn’t know what he was gonna be,
but what ever it was, he was gonna be a millionaire.
His brothers laughed and jeered at him.
Grandpa pauses in the telling, smiles slightly and says,
“Yep, they both ended up working for me”

It wasn’t always pride that was showing through,
it was vindication, not only had he survived,
he had shown graciousness in his triumph.

At the age of nine he was plowing a field
a boy, a plow and horse alone in the searing sun.
Having plowed from morning into the early heat of noon,
he took a break and went for a swim in a spring-fed pond.
His oldest brother came along and scolded him
jerking him out of the water and whipping his bare butt with
a blackberry briar.

That brother got a milking pail upside his head later that night.
That brother worked for him and they were close for life.

I have seen other pictures.
Pictures of parties,
everyone with a drink in one hand
and a cigarette in the other.
I recognize the sloppy smiles and half opened eyes
of the half lit.
They never told me stories about these times.
I recognize my Grandpa and Grandma in these cocktail parties.
The top shelf still has dozens of bottles even now
but I have never seen them ever once drink from any of them.

The kodachrome color makes all these memories look staged
from a Hollywood flash-back scene.
This can’t be my grandparents.

2009
Shaun Conroy

Art and Murder: The Musical

2009-04-20T20:55:00.000-07:00

A while back I foolishly said that I was going to regularly write about day-to-day events in my life. I wrote two entries and then didn’t write anymore. In fact, I haven’t written any blogs for months now. I feel really bad about this for some reason that I can’t quite understand. I guess I feel that I let myself down. I know that there aren’t a whole lot of people out there chomping at the bit for my next entry. Nevertheless it is a healthy thing for me to do. I have had some people say that they think blogging is somehow a narcissistic endeavor. I guess it can be, but I don’t think that is the case with me. In sharing thoughts and things with some kind of audience it encourages me to write. For me writing is a pleasure that I avoid like the plague. It is so weird that this is often the case with a lot of people I know. Why avoid something that brings you so much happiness? Go figure.

So onwards and upwards. I’m not going to make any promises that I will most likely break, but I am going to go at this again with a more regular schedule. I hope.

The other day I was going through a bunch of papers and files at Spiva. For those that don’t know what that means I will explain. I work at Spiva Center for the Arts, a non-profit. We have classes on making art. We have three galleries that display art of various mediums. We have seminars, talks, movies, and generally try to encourage culture in this fair city of Joplin. My official title is Gallery/Gift Shop Coordinator. I actually find a way to do a lot of maintenance as well as stick my nose into just about every aspect of the place. It is one of the best jobs I have ever had. I love the people I work with, I love what we do, and I feel that the people I come into contact with on a daily basis appreciate what I do as well. It is a good feeling.

So the other day I’m going through a bunch of papers and files at Spiva. Due to our non-profit status we have a tendency to never throw anything away. “Do we need this broken piece of tile?” “Sure we might use it for some class someday.” This is a typical conversation. We also keep all paperwork that we ever generate as well as signs and flyers. We never know when we might want it for some unforeseeable reason. So there are really a lot of resources that I have no clue we have. On down time I look around and see what I can find. I have found a lot of things that had I known we had I could have used to make my job easier. As I’m flipping through stuff I find a file of letters from third-graders from a couple of years back. Every year we have all the third-graders in Joplin come through for a week of “fun and exploration”. It is really pretty fun and very exhausting for everyone involved. All told we see about six hundred kids come through in a week. So these were letters from a bunch of kids saying thank you for letting them come and all that. I decided to sit and read through this stack of about eighty letters. As I did I smiled a lot and sometimes laughed out loud.

Many of the kids had actually addressed their thanks and kudos to some of the artists that were in the exhibition that they had seen. That year our exhibit was a showcase of “outsider” artists. Outsider artists are people who make art that have no training in the arts. They are usually outsiders in more than one-way actually. Most seem to be eccentric older men who just spontaneously started creating their own unique vision. One of the artists was this guy who was one of like thirteen kids and one of the five or so that survived. After his son was killed in Desert Storm and his health deteriorated, he started making pictures and 3-D art out of cardboard. But this isn’t what your thinking. He used the corrugated stuff that is in-between the top and bottom sheets. He used all these little curly-cues to make portraits, and freestanding sculpture. The work was amazing. It is the kind of art you enjoy aesthetically but also swoon over the obsessive tenacity that it would take to create. The kids by and large loved his stuff and there was a large stack of letters written specifically to him. I decided that the artist would get a real kick out of reading them himself. There was one small problem. In spite of all the stuff that we save, I couldn’t find any contact information for him.

I looked his name up on Google and found only a few reviews (remember he is an outsider, most of the art world will have nothing to do with these guys) and a gallery that carried some of his work. I called this gallery and the guy was real nice and spent about ten minutes digging through stuff looking for his address. Finally he gave me his “handler’s” phone number. Some guy in Garden City, Kansas named Dwayne West.

My boss Jo heard me as I was on the phone and came in after I finished.
“Did you find his address?”
“No but I got some other guys number that takes care of the artist’s affairs”
“Oh Dwayne West?”
“Yeah”
“Well you will enjoy talking to him. He is a really interesting guy. He was the prosecutor in the Cl…”
“No way, are you going to say the Clutter case?”
“Yeah”
“Hoollyyy Shit”

When I was eighteen my obsession with Southern Gothic novelists began. I read a few Faulkner short stories and landed for quite some time on the work of Truman Capote. I consumed everything that Capote wrote and saved “In Cold Blood” for last. I’m stubborn that way. “In Cold Blood” rocked my teenage world. It was the first book that actually scared me and made me aware of the random evil that exists in the world. For those that don’t know “In Cold Blood” was a true story written like a novel, a new form that Capote invented and perfected. The story was about a farm family named the Clutters that get brutally murdered for no real apparent reason.

Right after Jo told me this I called and got an answering machine. I left my information and hung up. I opened the Joplin Globe (our newspaper here) and on the second page was the headline “Clutter Prosecutor Affirms Capital Punishment”. Talk about synchronicity! Here is a case that is fifty years old and the same day that I get Dwayne’s number the Joplin Globe picks up an obscure AP story and puts it on the second page of the paper! I knew that destiny was in play and eagerly awaited a return call from Dwayne.

A couple of weeks went by and the wow and flutter that is Spiva pushed the whole thing to the back of my mind. But the moment finally came and the call was sent to me and there on the other end of the phone was Dwayne West, a piece of literary and personal history. We exchanged greetings and he gave me Jesse Monte’s address (yeah I intentionally saved that for later as a gift for those that are still reading). After all the real business was over I took in a breath.
“Mr. West let me say that it is particularly exciting to talk to you. When I was eighteen I read “In Cold Blood”
A slight grunt from Dwayne.
I continued.
“I was really stunned by that book and it is just a personally moving thing that I am talking to someone that is actually connected to that book”
“Yes, I was the state attorney and it was a big case so I prosecuted it. The Clutters went to my church”
I sudden lump developed in my throat. This wasn’t just a story in a book. This was real. It was very real for him and I felt stupid for bringing it up.
“Out pastor was against the death penalty and ahh…well I disagreed with him on that point. There was no doubt that they were guilty because they never claimed otherwise and we got them hanged pretty quickly, relatively speaking, after that. And I can tell you one thing, they haven’t killed anyone else since.”
I laughed in the way that I have learned to laugh from being around my grandfather and other older people. If you don’t know what I mean I can’t explain it.
“Yes sir I don’t imagine so.”
“If they couldn’t find anyone to do it I would have hung the bastards myself.”
That was the definitive end of that topic and I knew it.
Dwayne went on to ask me about my job and what my interests were and we began a very pleasant exchange that was just as natural as talking to farmer at the tailgate of his truck. Eventually I let out that I had been in a few bands over the years.
“Oh yeah? What do you play?”
“Well sir, I’m a singer and songwriter”
“Well that’s good, I have been trying my hand at writing songs myself”
Dwayne went on to tell me that he had in fact written a musical with fourteen songs and two acts. The subject was the founder of his town of Garden City, a fella by the name of Buffalo Jones. If that name doesn’t sound like the makings of a folk hero tall tale then I don’t know what is.

Turns out that Buffalo Jones was so named for being quite a skilled hunter of said beast and later its benefactor. Buffalo Jones saw that the buffalo (really a bison, but I won’t go down that road right now) was in danger of extinction. Having been a part of the extinction process he apparently felt the need to take the problem upon his own shoulders. Bringing calves from Texas to Kansas he was able to raise his own herd and exported the unique American breed to zoos all over the world. He also inspired Zane Grey to write his first book, “Last of the Plainsmen” about Buffalo Jones after going on a hunting expedition with him. Dwayne was using Zane Grey as the narrator of his tale.

The whole idea lit my torch! What a cool old guy! What a cool idea! It was like “Waiting for Guffman” but real and hopefully a lot better. I encouraged him and told him about my limited experience with play production and such.

“Well I’m pretty anxious to get this thing going, I’m 79 and well I would like to see it done before I’m gone.”

I bet the man lives to be a hundred.

Thoughts from the Farm of My Fertile Mind

2008-03-30T22:18:00.001-07:00

I finished reading Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier this last week. I brought to mind something that has been nagging me for the past three years. Before I moved back to Missouri from Oregon I had a real sense of impeding doom on the horizon. I was worried that something catastrophic was going to happen and leave me isolated from my family. I was also worried how I would survive in a big city with no way home. It came down to a realization about my lack of self- sufficiency in the modern world. The summer that I returned to Missouri my mind was consumed much of the day with thoughts of how inept I was at making my own way if I was ever forced into that situation. I thought on how one could do without any corporate held utilities. I thought on ways to feed myself without going to any markets. The only things that I kept banging up against were gasoline and property taxes. Given a certain level of economy and horse riding I figured a five hundred gallon tank of gas could last a pretty good while. But there was no way around property taxes. No land belongs to anybody when you get right down to it. We all have to pay and if we can’t we lose the land. There is no escape from money in the end.

Many of you may know why I have thoughts running along these lines in this day and age. If you don’t know why I suggest you think on it a while and it will probably come to you. If it doesn’t come to you then all I can say is that you are getting fat and the slaughter is coming.

I was talking to an old family friend about my apprehensions concerning my ability to make my own way competently. The recent winter storm and its accompanying power outages had set his mind along the same lines. He confided that it had actually been in the back of his mind for a couple of years as well. He told me that he wondered that there might be more to it than just a male desire to be independent.

“You know women start making arrangements for a baby sometimes before they even know that they are pregnant? Maybe we are living in pregnant times and we are feeling an urge to prepare ourselves for what is about to be birthed.”

That made a lot of sense to me. Like some distant call, we are straining to hear. I talked to my Mom about planting a bigger garden and doing some canning. She was all about the garden, a little less than enthusiastic about the notion of canning. She talked about all the trouble and I told her it would be better to get good at surviving before we are in a position where we have no choice. She demurred and I assured her of my dedication to be a part of the entire process. We also plan on getting a cow or two. I wanted to get a pig and chickens, but again the enthusiasm was very low.

The fact is I made a decision to try to make it outside of the box as soon as I got back here. I haven’t really succeeded at that yet, but I’m still trying. As I walked around the mall yesterday I had a feeling of nausea. I can’t stand this consumerist culture anymore. I want to be as little a part of it as I can. I keep wondering when people will value each other more than the goods that they buy. I keep wondering when people will finally realize the dissatisfaction that will never sate with more stuff. All the stores in the mall look the same as all the stores in all the malls. This isn’t ours. It isn’t our communities. It is mass produced, anonymous and tedious. I looked at all the different styles that the kids had. What I find the most annoying and amusing is the Hot Topic “individuals”. There has never been so much spoon- fed conformity in the subculture before now. In this part of the country originality is trumped by banality. I want none of it.

Portland Oregon and M. Gira circa 2003

2008-02-01T18:03:00.001-08:00

Journal Entry August 29 2003
So Friday.
On Friday M. Gira, the lead singer/visionary behind the Swans and Angels of Light, was playing an acoustic set at the Blackbird. I have been a big fan and admirer of Giras since 1989, when my friend Danen introduced me to their new album at that time "Children of God". (Thanks Danen) For those familiar with that album you know that there are few albums like that in any time. It truly is horror and beauty mixed. Gira has continued through the years. Up against commercial failure, private failure, financial failure, and critical indifference, he has persevered. {If you are unfamiliar with the Swans I really recommend: Children of God and Soundtracks for the Blind as a started point} The amount of music put out by different entities that Gira has been involved in number around thirty and counting. The appeal of Gira is his unabashed honesty. While so many bands wish to entertain and hope for inspiration, Gira delivers. He is not interested in entertaining in the least. His live shows are mutual purging. Fans come for an event, an exhibit. Following both Swans shows that I was lucky enough to see, I would always walk away somewhat dumbfounded my mind trying to absorb so many feelings and thoughts. I would be posed with the internal question; "What now?" It’s the same kind of feeling I have after reading a book, or seeing a Von Triers film. I am shell -shocked. At both shows of the Swans, clapping was rare. Everyone around me was in the same awe- struck stance. There just aren't many bands that can or want to do this. Gira is not rock and roll. Gira is trying to make art. True, he has a tendency towards dark themes, but there is a searching to it. It isn't all anger either like so many other bands that try for depth, but fall flat. The dark places of the soul are also the places that bring us to the light. A Christian must first admit he is a sinner before he can be saved or redeemed. An alcoholic can only be cured when he first realizes the destruction in his life. Simple anger will drive most of us to drink, fuck, destroy, but will unlikely bring us to any salvation or transcendence. Having said all of this, I'm not entirely sure that Gira has found any salvation in spite of his search. The search has taken on a life of it's own now. It seems that it has become an identity he is fearful of leaving behind. I believe he has come to a dead end and feels weary of turning back at this point. Instead, he pulls up a chair and stares at the wall, singing to it.

The week before the show I had begun reading a book my stepmother had given me. It is called, "The Sacred Romance" by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge. The book talks about a relationship between God (Jehovah, Jesus and the like, not a vague god) and man as a romance; that of two lovers. The book has been profoundly affected me. It seems to fill in a lot of gaps that for me were major obstacles in my soul. I certainly haven’t heard such honest discourse in church very often. For me, I have always believed in God, but there has always been a real crisis about the intentions of God. I have had an intellectual belief, with a major absence of faith. As I got near the end of the book, and closer to the date of the show, it occurred to me that Gira, if receptive, could really benefit from reading this book. The more I thought about it, the more convicted I felt. But how do you walk up to someone like him and give a religious book? I didn't want him to think that I was proselytizing or preaching. I didn't want it to be a symbolic act for me either; I wanted him to read the book. How do you tell someone that you only know through their work that you love them? True, by virtue of his integrity in his work, I did know him pretty well. But he doesn't know me. He doesn't know or trust my intentions. How many whackos approach this guy all the time? It didn't take me very long to talk myself out of it several times. Finally I decided that a failed attempt was better than none at all. Maybe I could be an instrument. Maybe my act would help an artist that had already given me so much. You must understand this isn't the cult of personality, I consider Gira my friend. As some may already know, Steve Martin is a good friend as well.

So I bought the book and wrote a simple inscription inside. Silly but true, I was giddy. Without really trying, I had, by this act, rekindled the adolescent anxiety I used to have before shows. The day dragged on. The clock refused to move. I had to ignore it. Take a bath, read, shave, write, clean house...check the clock..."damn". Finally I got to indifference about the show and was actually running a little later than I had planned. Of course, I was not really late at all. I found a great parking space across the street from the club. For those living in a big city you know what a precious and beautiful thing this is! As I walked up and paid, the first face I see is M. Gira. He is patiently trying to instruct some guy that he just met. He picks up each piece of merchandise and impresses on him the price and why some things are special and should be pushed. "This CD here is a limited pressing, there are only 750 in existence. The cover art is a drawing I made that a friend of mine made from a wood cut. We hand printed the covers and everyone signed it. Do you know what a woodcut is?" The guy nodded in some sort of stupefied trance. Not taking anything for granted Gira proceeds with a brief explanation. "I really need to sell this to fund the new Angels of Light album, so really push it. Tell everyone that I will sign it after the show". He then counted everything and told him the count. "Now count it yourself and make sure it's right, you are responsible for this stuff you know." Once again he got a zombie nod. "Go ahead, count it". The guy starts to count. At this point he turns to me and smiles. Strange that Gira has such a great and unguarded smile. He looks great, much better than when I met him some five or six years ago. I think to myself, "He must've quit drinking, and man, he sure looks happy". I introduce myself and tell him this isn't our first meeting. I know he won't remember me, in fact I'm hoping he won't.

The first time we met was not exactly my ideal meeting scenario. In Tulsa, in 1996 (I think), Danen was there to interview him. Danen was on cloud nine. He had been at the club all day trying to get some of Gira's time, during the marathon six-hour sound check (can anyone say anal?). I wanted Danen to introduce me. Finally I did get to meet him. Now I was proudly wearing a Swans' "Burning World" tour shirt. I hadn't seen that tour, I had found it in a bargain bin at a record store. As it was hard to find any Swans merchandise, I was content to wear a tour shirt of a tour I hadn't seen. Honestly very few people asked about it, as no one knew who they were. Not the case with Gira. As Danen introduced me, Gira's eyes immediately focused on my shirt. I thought he was amazed that someone in Tulsa had such a shirt. He asked me to turn around. I did and he read the dates on the back. At this point I confessed I hadn't seen the tour that the shirt promoted. He didn't seem to hear me. "I never made a shirt like that". He shook my hand and walked off. Danen shrugged his shoulders and I was left standing with my pirated shirt that had been money out of a struggling artist's pockets. I never felt really bad about that. I was innocent. Gira wasn't mad at me he was just frustrated. I was frustrated myself later as I stood with a crowd of only about forty people for one of the most important bands of the eighties. Two years later I would see them again to a larger audience in Lawrence. Once again I talked to Gira. This time it was better, but of no real substance. He was drunk and wishing only to shake hands and say thanks for coming.

This time the meeting is less hurried and, by god, he is smiling and really interested in talking. I immediately produce the book and hand it over. He takes it. I tell him I wrote something inside. He thanks me as he tucks it into his bag. "I just wanted to give you something in return for the music you have given me." He smiles again and thanks me. I tell him I will catch him later. He says sure and moves towards the bar. As I walk away I'm pissed off at myself. Why didn't I say more? He was being friendly.

I grab a beer and sit down next to one of the most unsatisfied looking persons I have seen in a long time. He looked about forty or so. His face was pockmarked, his hair, dirty blond. He was wearing a suit like Nick Cave might. He looked like an old worn out German soldier come back from the war. Out on the town with a head full of violence and loss. He just stared forward, trying hard not to look at me right across from him. "My name is Sean, what's yours?" He didn't look at me as he muttered, "Darrel". Unfazed I said, "Nice to meet you Darrel", still staring forward, he nodded absently. I could tell that there was not going to be a replay of the night before between Carlos and me. As I sat and resigned myself to paying an unusual amount of attention to my beer, I decided that I would be mad at myself if I didn't talk to Gira again. After finishing off my beer and saying an ignored goodbye to Darrell, I headed back to the bar, and back to Gira.
"I want you to know that I gave you that book because I thought it might be of some benefit to you"
"Yeah, I was wondering, I mean what is it about?"
I described the book in the same manner as I have earlier in this e-mail.
"Really? Are you a Christian?"
"Yes I am, and I know you have struggled with God too."
"So you must be an enlightened Christian"
"Yeah I would say that"
"I saw a play a few months back in New York about some trailer trash family. I mean it was a comedy based on people in a trailer park. So the main target seemed to make fun of Christians. It made me furious. I wanted to stop the play."
"Well a lot of Christians seem to beg for parody."
"Yeah, but Jesus isn't something that should be made fun of"
"Well I hope that book is something that will help your faith."
"I could use some faith. I don't know what I believe, but there is definitely some things in the Bible I believe."
Once again I wished him well and thanked him for his perseverance in the face of so much apathy. He thanked me for the book and for coming.

I was satisfied. The conversation is the actual conversation as I remember it. The order of things may be different, and I have cut out the small talk. Some of the small talk involved me telling him he looked a lot healthier than the other two times I saw him. I found he had been battling chronic bronchitis (sp?) in Tulsa. He told me he was forty-eight and that he wasn't as resilient as he once had been. I didn't show it at the time, but his age really floored me. How could a chronic alcoholic, touring musician look so young and healthy. He looked like he was maybe 35 at best. Later I started to do a little math and realized that Children of God had come out when he was my age now! Wow! There is still time for me to do this music thing. Shit his most productive years had been in his mid-thirties and early forties. Not only that, it was music that scared me, provoked me, and was always evolving. This may seem trivial to some, but it was a revelation for me. I don't feel old necessarily, but the voices are always trying to get me to give up on my dreams and become a living dead. The voices were pissed on this night.

Feeling invigorated, I sat down next to someone (other than the aforementioned tragic Darrel) and began a conversation. Funny, that out of all the people I could have struck up a conversation with, I happened to find someone from Kansas City! We were both surprised. We started to play that weird game people play when you find out that you are from the same area (this can apply to people from the same time, same jobs, etc). The game involves trying to find an even closer connection. Both people throw out names, places, bands, hoping to find an even tighter proximity. So we blabbed about bands and people and places. It turned out we had been at the same Seven Seconds show in 1987! Our happiness and joy was overflowing. We had a history together and never knew it. Needing more, we continued to talk about bands and such. I mentioned a band from Columbia Mo called East Ash. Sadly he was ignorant of them. On the other hand, a guy sitting behind him turned around. "Did someone say something about East Ash?" "Didn't you used to live in Columbia?" Stunned I said, "Yeah for about a year back in '91" "Yeah I knew it, I'm Jason I used to work at Salt of the Earth!" "Holy shit, I remember you, weren't you in Sex in Taboo Creek?" "Yeah I was, you remember that too?" "Yeah you guys played with my band Guilty Party a few times" "Wow, yeah now I remember how I knew you" Needless to say it continued like this for a while. I hadn't seen this guy in about ten years. We talked about all the people we used to know. He told me what happened to all the people I had lost through the years and I updated him on all the people he had lost touch with. Jason and I had been around each other a lot, but we had never been real close. He had been at all the same parties, and all the same circles as me. He also worked at the coolest record store in town, which has sadly folded, due to the new college kids who see no value in an independent record store. The guy I had distantly bonded with earlier left to find better conversations he could more actively participate in. I felt a little bad. But I was happy to have connected with Jason. It really is a smaller world than we can ever believe. It turns out that Jason has a fancy job at Intel and still plays music. Talking to Jason pretty much consumed the majority of the opening band. I did listen but not intently.

Finally the moment came. Gira sat down with two glasses of Whisky and a beer. He welcomed the audience and then told them to shut up. This was taken as a joke. "I'm really quite serious, shut UP!" The scolded audience quieted down a little. I made my way up and ended up sitting on the side of the stage; a nice intimacy for those brave enough. Throughout the show the back of the club got louder and louder, why anyone would pay $10 to talk is beyond me. Around the middle of the show Gira put his guitar down mid-song, and lit up a cigarette. "I'm not going to compete with the audience. Hell I would give $10 out of my pocket for you to leave. I mean it doesn't matter I get paid either way." The people up towards the front began screaming at the back to "Shut the Fuck UP!!!" Pretty soon it got tolerably quiet and he began again. Announcing that he would play "Goddamn the Sun" the audience enthusiastically clapped. He smiled bitterly, "You're happy about hearing this song huh, it's about a good friend of mine dying."

People just don't get what Gira is about; it's not a concert, it's performance art, it isn't entertainment, it's confession; one man on stage sharing his pain and suffering. This may sound pretentious to some; it may be pretentious. But for those tuning in, it is a rare pretension, one worth experiencing. How refreshing it is when someone takes their music seriously. Not to say there weren't moments of smiling. One fan expressed his love and thanked Gira for coming and apologized for the idiots at the back. Gira responded, "I would do anything for you, come to my house I will wash your feet...of course then I would have to eat you...then I would shit you out." One girl on stage asked how many loved ones he had lost, off microphone he replied to her, "everyone". Boy was I glad I gave this guy that book. For those that are fans he did two songs off of Burning World, the one I mentioned as well as "I Remember Who You Are" (sung by him instead of Jarboe, it really made it better). He also did "New Mind" from Children of God, stamping his foot and cutting his thumb open once again. Bleed for us Michael.

After the show I got all the names and numbers of Carlos and Jason. I decided I didn't really feel like hanging out after such a show. As I got to my car, I saw that the people in front of me were working with a coat hanger on their door. I asked if I could help. They asked if I was any good at getting into cars. I assured them that I had a lot of experience with it. In fact, I have maxed out my limit of car openings with AAA several times. I don’t know what my problem is.

The couple was a girl and a guy. The girl was as drunk as hell. After a few minutes of my trying, she took the hanger back in frustration and tried for about fifteen minutes while the guy and I debated the show. He enjoyed the show but thought Gira to be a little bit pretentious. He made the somewhat obvious comparison to Nick Cave. I gave my arguments and we decided we were close enough to our view on him to quit arguing and get back to getting into the car. He was wearing a Dead Milkmen shirt, so I asked him if he had seen them live. He said he had and left it at that; later he told me he was good friends with them. I guess he didn't want to drop names right away, so as not to seem like a fan-boy. He was actually in a band with Joe before the Milkmen formed. He told me it was funny because Rodney was a big homophobe and Joey was gay. Finding out Joey was gay was no big shock. But hearing that Rodney (who only rivals Jello Biafra on the liberal front) was a homophobe was a shock. Finally I was back in charge with the hanger, assuring all that although it may take some time that I would be victorious. The girl was drunk and miserable only wanting a bed soon. She was trying to think of a place close by to crash at. Eventually the street became her friend and she passed out. In about twenty minutes I was at last able to get in. She arose and praised the persistence of men as she threw up. The guy promised a night of joviality for all in exchange for my help. He gave me his number and they took off, leaving a pile of vomit in their wake.

It always feels good to help someone. I was feeling good all around. On my way home I was navigating around an island in the road, when a girl raced across the street for the island. I had to brake for her pursuer. Standing in my headlights, waving was a naked man, covered only with tattoos. The girl was laughing on the other side. I yelled an approving "woo hoo" and drove on. Wow people get naked in Oregon too. I think I can live here after all.

Consumed

2008-02-01T17:07:00.000-08:00

I felt the greatest craving for a specific yet general species of fruit today. It is true that this fruit is especially hard on the human body. In times of it’s greatest ecstasy it is working a dark splinter of future calamity in one’s own being. It is said that some of this certain variety can cause death. What variety causes death is quite unsure. It is only known that the more concentrated varieties bring the greatest satisfaction with the greatest risk. It is strange that the further I go up the strain of varieties that I find them to be of the most beautiful color and the most complex in texture, yet somehow lacking in flavor.

I have seen this as an anomaly.

I have even taken the more sickly looking varieties hoping to discover some correlation between greater apparent disease and better overall flavor. This has not proved to be the case however. Most of them all taste the same. Still it feels good to go against the conventional wisdom. I have a reputation for choosing the most unsightly of the most deadly. This makes me a strange rebel. But there is also the initial cost that comes to mind. If we are all courting possible death, I am getting the better deal. There are some that follow in my footsteps. I have heard rumors that some believe I have found a way to the ecstasy afforded by the deadly fruits without the inherent risk. They have come up with the idea that I have staved off some consequences of the ugliness by embracing ugliness in advance. I must say that I would be tempted to believe them, if it wasn’t for the fact that I have found little evidence to the contrary. I haven’t found any “newness” in ugliness. It is all the same. I have tried both.

Today I am craving it all again. I want to try the hybrid. I will pick the most unsightly again out of habit. The runt of the strain is likely to be the closest to what I have known before. I am confident that it will be a step up, without the higher possibilities for fatality.

There is a market that I know of. You can always find a few varieties there. I know the secret way to the market. Most people don’t go there. They find some variety in the regular market. Those have additives and wax to make them more appealing. I don’t need all the marketing. I’m sold already. I’m not playing any games with myself. I know the risks, but I also believe that the risks are part of the reward. This fruit is deadly, but that is the adventure. I go further; I will be rewarded.

There is always the more cavalier of the marketers. He guarantees nothing. He only guarantees that the fruit will satisfy in some new way. He doesn’t promise paradise, only another view or understanding of it. One has to be somewhat careful of these vendors. They sell fruits that can become instantly addictive. It is in no time you find yourself consuming large amounts of God knows what while slowly starving to death.

Somehow I can’t resist the notion of getting something new before anyone else. Hell, if it really is something amazing I will help the guy market it.

I buy what I can afford. Strangely the more expensive varieties look to be the same as what I’m buying. I know that this must be a false assumption. One day I will have enough to buy the good stuff. It will be better in spite of its apparent sameness. Still I am content in what I have. The more expensive may just be marketing. I know that I have something they will never buy. I might discover something they have missed in all their personal glory.

I grip the bag tightly as I go home. There is that ever persistent feeling in my inner being that this might be the last trip to the market. Inside this bag may be the last fruit I eat. I know that there is the possibility that I might die tonight. That is always a risk that one must take. No one looks at each other in the market place. How foolish one would look buying his own death. We even pretend at times as if this was just a normal farmer’s market. “Well, after all, a man has got to eat after all”. We are all just shopping for fruit. What did you say? Strange fruit? Nonsense. It is only strange in our knowledge of it. We are fortunate to know of this market when others aren’t. The conversation is brief and dishonest. We buy our wares and hurry on our way. We are all confident in our equal conviction. No will squeal you out. You are here, I am here; there is brotherhood in shared guilt.

My bag contains some safe standbys that have long ago gone bland. I continue to eat the safe disapointment of their substance. Though it may seem strange I still expect the sweetness that their first tasting promised even now. Maybe I will stop with this new variety. Somehow I feel I won’t be satisfied. Still it is worth the risk.

The Winter of My Discontent

2008-01-25T18:20:00.001-08:00

An update for the record I feel bad that haven't written in a long time. I have thought about all kinds of things to write. I have had entire blogs going through my head and in the end I just keep them to myself. Some were really funny, you should have been there, it was great! So on to the business at hand here.

The fact is my life has been kind of hectic and also emotionally draining for the last two months or so. It pretty much started with the winter ice storm that shut the city of Joplin down quite effectively for about a week. This was the second week of December and Christmas was looming over Wal-Mart shoppers everywhere. But people weren't shopping for loved ones, they were draining all stores of candles, flashlights, and generators. A lot of people that I know were enjoying the adventure of "camping out" in their homes. As for me I was extremely annoyed. I didn't like being without the internet and electricity. I didn't enjoy the adventure of emptying my fridge that I had just stocked up with food. I didn't enjoy being out of work and having nothing to do but shuffle from place to place to move food and bathe etc. I was a grump about the whole thing to be quite honest. It tested my meddle and I failed in a lot of ways. I found that I was a wuss about my creature comforts. I didn't like being inconvenienced. It really could have been a lot worse and it was for a lot of people. I was lucky that my friend Lyn had gas heat, hot water and a gas stove. I stayed with him and we tried to have some fun with it I suppose. We burned tons of candles and played Trivial Pursuit. Unfortunately the Trivial Pursuit was some anniversary edition and the questions were actually quite...well trivial. I mean this is stuff I didn't know and felt no better to learn it. At least a lot of the old versions questions were points of interest that I didn't know. This was pop culture stupidity. We played for three hours before someone won and by then we didn't care. The thing is the sun was setting at like 4:30 pm and then you were in complete darkness save for candles. There was no music, no tv, nothing to do. How did the Waltons manage? I'm such a wuss. When the end comes I won't be much of a survivalist and this knowledge is a shocker to me.

There was also a lot of family tension that came out of the storm that I don't want to get into right now as this forum is inappropiate. Suffice it to say that my family is not really ready for any hard times either. The gray days and emotional burden really took a toll after the third day. There were a few distractions as I helped my boss from Spiva move all of her and her husbands stuff out of their house. Talk about timing! How would you like to move all of your stuff when you have no power and there is ice everywhere and your new home is not ready to move in. I felt for them. There was also the wonders of Lyn's tub. I read "This Present Darkness" during this affair (I know there is irony here, but I was reading it before the storm) in Lyn's huge tub with the hottest water I could stand. I actually ruined a feature on my phone from all the steam in the room. Lyn would read on the couch with a flashlight while I sat in the tub for hours with a little camp lantern. That was nice, but you can only read and soak so long.

There is also the beauty of the devastation that the storm wrought on our little burg. There was two inches of clear ice on every single item that was outside when it came. It looked like a big glass kingdom. Standing outside when the sun was shining provided an amazing menagerie of beauty and impending danger. You could hear every tree creaking and about every minute you could hear the crack of release as another branch broke or tree came asunder, followed by the falling crashing that sounded like all hell was breaking loose. The grass was crunchy and each individual blade was visibly coated. Talk about walking on eggshells. All day long you could hear the creaking, cracking, and crashing, the only other sound; sirens. As I drove around town it looked like Joplin had been under mortar fire. My neighborhood was a complete disaster. If you had a tree you had a problem. Another thing that added to the seeming spanking that we had gotten from Providence was all the blow up lawn ornaments for Christmas. There was deflated and sad Santas and Snowmen everywhere. Some were hanging dead and loose from cables meant to stabilize them.

I will say this about Joplin people. They put their heads down and trudged ahead. It was not a good time for businesses to be closed for a week, just before Christmas. Most people tried to smile and be friendly. Things were tough all over and everyone knew it.

Now then (I know this is really long, but I can't help it), through all of this my sister was extremely pregnant and miserable. She was going between my Dad's house and her house. She didn't feel comfortable in any other bed but her own, but she had only the heat of lighting her gas burners on her stove. She also had no hot water or lights and she had kids about to drive her insane as cabin fever set in. My mom took Lilly full time and I had Gabriel during the days trying to find things to do and keep him from driving me and himself insane. My Dad did not suffer any loss of any services except the internet. He made a lot of this and I had to tell him that most people were a lot more inconvenienced than he. Being the only one in the family with power made his home a constant turnstile of bathers and people watching t.v. I could tell he was getting weary of the constant invasion of his home. He never said anything and was most hospitable in spite of it all of course. I only spent one night there. I felt like Lyn had his fill of me being in his home as well.

Finally I got my power back after a week. I spent the day getting my food back and getting my house back in some order. The cat was overjoyed to have me back and did a dance in my honor. I then called my Mom to tell her the good news. She told me that she was still without power and that as a result of so many cold nights sleeping in front of her fireplace her and Lilly had both got a vicious cold. She asked if I would mind if she came over with Lilly and stay the night. Ok, honesty here. I did mind! I hadn't had a space to myself with power for a week and now I was going to have my Mom and my seven-year-old niece in my house? And they both were sick as dogs! For those of you who don't know me very well, I'm a little weird about avoiding sickness at all costs. I never drink after someone (my niece and nephew don't understand why Uncle Shaun won't share his bottled water). I don't shake hands in the winter if I can avoid it and if I do I make a mental note to not touch my face until I wash that hand. I wash my hands about every thirty minutes in the winter and I have a vitamin regimen meant to ward off all evil. Inviting sickness into my small home was not my idea of a good time to say the least. Now let me tell you how much of a selfish bastard I am. The house I live in is owned by my Mom. She has been very generous about rent being negligible to help me afford going to college (more on that later). So here I am feeling put out! I was not only a wuss, I was also finding out that I'm a prick. Of course I had them over and prayed for God to change my selfish shriveled heart. I gave Mom my bed and slept on the blow up mattress and put Lilly in my computer room on another blow up mattress. We watched a lot of movies that I wouldn't watch on my own. Movies about princesses and horses and all the girly stuff you can imagine. Lilly threw up all night the first night much to my horror. I was sanitizing every surface that she touched. Fortunately i had to help the movers during the day. Poor Mom was couped up in my house all day with a sick kid. I tried to make them both feel better by making food and letting them stay put as much as possible. I introduced Lilly to the joys of "Oliver!" (1960's musical about Oliver Twist) to save my sanity and was surprised that she actually followed the film for the whole 2 1/2 hours. Finally Mom got power after two nights and two days with me.

So that is all I'm going to write as this is going on forever. The thing I was trying to get across is that my idea of myself and who I am was tested by fire or ice if you will. I came out of it humbled and prayerful. I have a long way to go to be the man that I think I am or wish I was.

Paper money, Paper Tigers

2007-10-08T13:33:00.001-07:00

A Political Rant

I have been spending a lot of my free time lately trying to wrap my mind around economics and trade policies. This isn’t as easy as economists make it sound. There is no empirical science to the process. In fact, that is the greatest lie that I have found about economics, it isn’t a black and white world. Now I know that most people understand that there are different theories about how an economy should work. The thing that I think eludes many of us is that within each theory is a theoretical framework that is itself based on even more theories.

For example: Many people are freaked out that we have a huge trade deficit with China. Being freaked out about the trade deficit is part of a theory of why that is something to freak out about. The thinking goes that America is losing manufacturing jobs and those are good jobs that we don’t want to lose. No one could argue that the loss of high paying jobs with benefits is a good thing. The reason that we have lost these jobs is because companies are going to places like China to produce goods at a cheaper cost. So those are the facts of the case. There is no disputing these as facts. Now we get to the theories on the matter; as a result of this, America will slowly devolve into a third world country as our dollar diminishes and our job market becomes more and more service and retail based (jobs that pay less with less benefits). Pat Buchanan points out in his book, “Where the Right Went Wrong” that this trade policy is tantamount to economic treason on the part of our government. He believes that America needs to manufacture it’s own goods and keep the jobs here as we did for two hundred years previously. This is all well and fine, but the fact is, Americans can’t afford stuff made by Americans anymore. The reason that companies went overseas is because they had to stay competitive with the stuff that was already coming in to our country from other countries. There is a belief that we can tariff those goods and force American companies to stay here. Ironically Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) had an idea about what this would accomplish over two hundred years ago, this would simply hurt the poorest of Americans by making the simple commodities of life even more expensive, combined with the taxes we already pay this seems hardly to be in the interest of Americans and more in the interest of our debtors.

There is also a belief that there is only so much money and wealth in the world and that if another country is getting wealthier that that means another country will be getting poorer. Now the thing is, this may or may not be true. There are more factors in the mix of why America may be in some kind of financial trouble than just our trade arrangements with China. In fact, I’m starting to believe that China is a big distraction to the real problem. I don’t think that China is a threat to us, financially or otherwise. We are in debt to China for the goods that they give us. Think about that. Can China make us poor by giving stuff to us? We can refuse to continue in this way, we are not obligated to continue to take things on credit and China could quit thinking that we are good for it as well. The fact is, it is mutually beneficial. Maybe we should look at who raises the most stink about this stuff and look at their motivations. The Federal Reserve makes a lot of stink about it. I wonder why?

But I can’t go on and on and expect anyone to care. I think that what I’m trying to get to is the nature of money. China is not buying gold from us for our debt to them, they are buying money that is capable of becoming merely paper. China holding dollars and securities based on those dollars means that they are in effect buying our debt. This should make us happy because it means that the dollar that everyone is freaking out about is good enough for the Chinese. They must have a lot of confidence in the American dollar. They must think that we are doing something right. And we are. We are doing a lot of things wrong on the flipside and that is what we should be focusing on, not China.

I have been going through PJ O’Rourke’s book “On The Wealth of Nations” which is an overview on Adam Smith’s economic polemic “The Wealth of Nations”. I have been falling in love with the founding fathers and the pioneers of governmental and economic theory as it relates to a free country. We really don’t need to read much of today’s hacks unless they are rooted in these amazingly brilliant men. These old guys were really into freedom. They were really not into government doing much of anything. You see, almost across the board they had this notion that was started by a man named John Locke. Locke believed that people, all people had the sense to know what was beneficial to them. This notion evolved into the idea of “self interest rightly understood”. If left alone, people would do what was good for them, and in turn this would be good for the people around them. Simply put it works like this. If I’m poor and I want to eat, I realize I need to produce something that someone will want and trade with me, or I need to find someone to work for, and that means I need to have something they need in skills or brute strength. Pretty simple isn’t it? And then there is the notion of division of labor. If I want a loaf of bread I can raise the wheat, grind it, make a loaf and there you go. The loaf only took me about four months to make. But if we have some that raise the wheat, some that grind it and some that bake it, I can simply go to the store and have a loaf in about five minutes. We all get something out of it. This is called a free market. But the problem comes when there are those who produce nothing. Of course a merchant and a waitress produce nothing, but they are part of the process of trade. But politicians, bankers, and others of this sort really produce nothing. Their existence is necessary, but it should be limited not dominant. When the merchants and bankers get too much power they become dangerous, they become people who would make the general populace their slaves. Our labor will benefit them and not ourselves. The less a government messes with our freedom to make a living and own our property and do with it what we shall the better off we are. Adam Smith was livid about property rights because he grew up in a feudalist state in Scotland. He was appalled that all the land was kept by the wishes of people who had been dead for hundreds of years. He would be equally livid over someone telling someone that they can’t farm their land because of the future generations that need wet- lands. Either way, it is a tyranny of those that aren’t in possession of life in the here and now.

I was thinking about all of this and I wondered why so many artists are communist or at the least socialist in their thinking. Where is art if there isn’t any disposable income? Where is art if there is no middle class? I think we need to abolish the National Endowment of the Arts so that artists can get more clarity about how economics and art are related.
Yeah, I said it was a rant didn’t I?

Support Ron Paul and make a noise about him. We need someone like this guy now. Watch “Freedom to Fascism”. Read some books about our Constitution and our Founding Fathers. There is good reason to have pride in our heritage. I’m not saying that there weren’t mistakes, but man there has been some really good successes too. If modern political theory, foreign policy, economic foolishness, and Constitutional buggery are getting you down, just go back and find common sense again in the simple institutions that we started with.

On a Hot August Night

2007-09-26T10:29:00.000-07:00

For some reason I haven't been in the mood to cook much lately. I think it's because it is hard to get my house cooled down after I cook. It's about 100 degrees all the time here this last two weeks. I almost died at least a dozen times. I walk around shirtless everywhere showing off my sweat slick barrel chest to all. Parents have asked me to put my shirt on as I was frightening their children. I just nod and show the top of my sweaty butt crack and they run away as well. Who needs to conceal a weapon in this heat? I actually almost died picking up a wall the other day. That's right, I said wall. I will put a picture of that up sometime. I have no time.
The other reason I might not be cooking is because I cook at a country club two nights a week. I don't think that is it though. I actually don't get to cook all that often. Usually I just stand around a sweat and watch the official certified and credentialed Chef cook. He talks a lot of B.S. and giggles to himself. But I don't really care. I don't like getting paid for doing nothing, but I am sweating so I figure there is some equity there.
So I'm not cooking at home a lot right now. I think it's the heat. I walk around my house in underwear and sometimes naked, I don't care what the neighbors think, it's hot damnit. Quit looking in my windows. Actually last night I saw a guy looking in my neighbor’s window at 2 am. He saw me sitting there in my undies staring at him and he ran away. I put on some shorts and knocked on my neighbor's door, his lights were still on. I don't really know this guy. In my hood, I keep to myself and ask the same of my neighbors. "Who is it!” He yelled. I could see through the screen that he was in his boxers, he ran to put on pants before answering the door. See it's that hot, no one wants to wear clothes, even the Goth kids are slimming down to black and white striped tights and leaving it at that. It's really disturbing.
So I'm not cooking, and I'm really not eating that much either. It's too hot to eat. It takes to much energy to process the food. I might die if I eat too much. When I do eat it's usually a cracker or a beer. Beer is food.
Last night I had Thai food. Hot food!! And it's true I felt cooler after my lips feel off.
Tonight I had Chinese take-out. Chinese take-out. We never say Bar-B-Que take-out we just get it to go. We never say Pizza Take-out. It's just one of those phrases like, "no little cinnamon gum" that just flows and we say it and that's that. So I'm eating my General chicken with my chopsticks and I've got my Crab Rangoon (there's no crab in this) and I squirt my duck sauce on the plate out of the clear pack with the cute panda on it. I'm looking at my meal and all the cool little boxes that the food comes in...And you know what? The Panda Bear with the Chinese characters coming out of his butt duck sauce and soy, the chopsticks with the red wrapper with the Chinese horoscope on it (I'm a cock, by the way), the cute little boxes that have the funky lettering that looks like someone wrote it with a stick and it says Thank You and Kari Out, all that stuff, get this, all of it, made in America. Not imported by some place in Jersey, nope, made in White Plains, NY. I mean we are importing Apple Juice from China, garlic from China (I think we are good at growing these things aren't we?) We import friggin' little stuffed Santas from China. But we make Chinese packaging and foodstuffs in White Plains? I bet the Chinese make a mean chopstick. I trust them with chopsticks. In fact, I want my chopsticks to come from China. Ok so that's the way I want it. Apple juice from Washington, and chopsticks from China. I guess I should be glad that we are still making something here. Maybe we should ship out chopsticks and little Panda packs to China. Take that! I want to visit White Plains, NY; I bet it is quite pastoral.

A Remembrance

2007-09-16T11:43:00.001-07:00

I watch the bicycles. From my front porch I see them zip and glide by. When was the last time I rode a bike? When I was a kid, above all things, I loved to ride my bike. My neighborhood was a big loop. Not a part of a loop or a part of a block; it was just a random loop planted by a river. It expanded at the rate of a house a year, and we were on the 23rd year. Beyond it's barriers, that were my barriers until about nine, lay three regions. The ever so dangerous road to the "Falls". It is called the "Grand Falls" and I lived at "Grand Falls Plaza". The Falls were about a 1/2 mile away (more likely a 1/4 mile, but I was a kid). The road was a favorite speedway for the muscle-car-boys. Teenagers were so scary in the seventies, and early eighties. They seem so comical and unreal now. But then they seemed as alien as anything I had experienced. True I wasn't an adult, but most adults were friendly, and my parents were adults. We existed in two different worlds, but our relationship was friendly and generally peaceful. Teenagers on the hand, were completely unpredictable. At one time you looked up to them and wanted to be accepted by these adults-in-between. At another time you knew that they were a kind of dangerous that we were not ready for yet. I mean I climbed cliff faces that would have turned my parents white if they had seen me. I built boats and ventured onto the river, and later sank. I was a fairly courageous venturer. But there were places that these older kids were going that I didn't want to go to... yet. It seeemed that a lot of their adventures involved an element of menace. Not just physically dangerous; but socially malevolent. I remember all these guys making molotov cocktails and throwing them all over the rocks at the falls. There were flames everywhere. It was quite a sight. They were yelling and hooping and hollerin'. "Whoo-haw, Whoo-Wee." There was also broken glass all over the place. Where people went swimming and sun bathed during the day. Broken glass all over the rocks, and in all of the pools. That was I all I could think. Why would they do that? They even lived here and came here to swim. What kind of insanity is in my future? My God, what kind of monster was I going to become? The other border was the river. There was the "Low Water Bridge". Not that it probably should be capitalized. But when it is your borders as a kid there is always the capital letter landmarks of the area. We had many places that sounded vague to the outsider, but were clear to us as the capital places. Sure there were tons of puddles in our stomping grounds. But everyone knew a certain one to be known as "The Puddle". There was "The Fort", "The Castle", "The Cave", and many others lost to me now. So our low water bridge, was "The Low Water Bridge". The Bridge straddled Shoal Creek. Shoal Creek sometimes swelled enough to make the Bridge uncrossable. There were times in my life that briefly we were either it's captive, or repulsed from our very home and into my Grandparents. This rare variable made living there a little more enjoyable for me. Shoal Creek was the city's sewer. There weren't a lot of fish to be caught in it's brown waters. No one told us that we shouldn't, but we didn't spend any time in the Creek. I probably only actually swam in Shoal Creek about ten times in the five years that I lived but 200 Feet from it's shore. Sure I played near it, and on it (homemade boats, and rafts), but not much in it. It was clearly not pure water. Kid's aren't really all that stupid. Of course at some point I heard it was the waste recepticle of all the area treatment plants. It was just not all that inviting, you might say. Across the bridge was the older river neighborhood. A bunch of cabins and refurbished shacks. And of course beyond that was a hill, that you had to have your energy up for. It wasn't "The Hill" by the way. "The Hill" was what the road beyond "The Falls" was. That was quite a hill!! When it was icy in winter, it was just for sledding. You came around the back or you just climbed it. If you had the stamina to really go all the way to the top, you had a true ten to fifteen minute ride. Almost a whole 1/2 mile of sledding! The last bit was a bit tricky. Many a kid had a tale about biting it in the last turn of "The Hill". Some went through barb wire fences. Some jumped immense ditches and ended face first in the opposite bank. The key was to get the most speed without losing complete controll. By the way, this is only possible in the traditional sled. Tubing and paning resulted in shorter and more stop and start reentries. With the sled, in control, you could ride the whole thing out, on your belly, till the end. Now it is true that you could steer with your feet, but that was really less control than being just inches above the road. The third border was the road that ran parallel to Shoal Creek. This road was almost entirely uphill for a mile or so. And a lot of blind hills at that. It was really too far. Parents were nervous enough about my occasional treks to the Falls. I assured them that I took the dirt paths along the way. Mostly I did take the dirt road. But the road in the other direction was a different story. On one side the shoulder disappeared entirely and the drop off was intense. Up this way lay "Mother Nature's Crack". I don't know who first coined the term, but it is not my term. It is the term of the area. At least two generations know of this location as "Mother Nature's Crack". Despite the vulgar subtleties of this name, it was an accepted term by one and all. "Mother Nature's Crack" was also applied to an area right across the creek as well. I still believe the true "Crack" is on the west side. It certainly is the biggest crack. Basically we are talking about a large bluff of rock with a crack in it that allows you to climb up or down. It is actually quite strange the first time you descend into the crack. As you descend the ground becomes level with your head, until you are simply swallowed up by the crack. It is also a tight squeeze at times, so it feels somewhat intimate. Beyond the Good Mother's Crack lay more uphill riding. There is also the orgasmic final drop off point. But it is so extreme that the trip back is even more difficult. Along this route, one comes to "The Castle". "The Castle" was actually a castle. It was built out of local rock. So it was really pretty ugly. Even so, it was a castle and it had the same omnious legends surrounding it. The story was that a old lady lived there by herself. Her husband had died many years ago and she had since become rather unfond of humanity. It was because of this misanthropy that she kept two large Dobermans on the premises to keep out all tresspassers. That is of course, if you got past the iron gate. I never went beyond the gate. Honestly I was nervous just going to the gate. Such were the adventures that I had on my bike. After living in Grand Falls Plaza for five years, my family moved to a more remote locale. Then it was the mini-bike. Everyday after school I was on that thing. Living out in the country made the bike less credible as a thing of enjoyment. A bike on a crappy farm road made from creek gravel was more like work than play. In fact, even on the mini bike it wasn't all that great either. I always had white knuckles after the tense five minute ride. Gravel is unpleasant all the way around. It is either a grinding dirt wave that makes you feel that you are somehow going against a current, or it is a moving balance beam that must be carefully navigated. Even so, the mini bike could take me quicker and farther. It was still a physical activity to ride a mini-bike. Hell, I walked mine many miles over the years. Compare the notion of walking a bike for a mile that weighs roughly 15 pounds, and lugging a mini bike that weighed about 75 pounds around. Up hills, and thankly, down hills. Man,... you talk about an early course in anger managment. One minute you are buzzing by, feeling like the coolest kid in the world. Peolple wave and you wave and gun the engine. You're off and then the engine floods. But I sometimes didn't zip off as planned. Sometimes, I would just flood it and choke. If there was a hill I could just pop the clutch and almost suavely regain composure. If there wasn't a hill...well it wasn't pretty. End of cool beginning of embarassment. Sometimes pushing a fast as I can to, jump on, and pop the clutch. Many times just walking it down the street, passing past glory; in retreat. After the mini bike years came the car. Of course with the car you could go to a lot more places. You could haul people around. You could haul stuff around. And, well, the car is just so cool. In Joplin you don't see a lot of bikes. Cars are where it's at. You quickly forget about the hidden treasures of biking. The connection you have to the area. The places and people you notice when you are not locked up in metal isolation. You are easily wooed by the power of quick distances. But with quick distances come quicker comings and goings. Life speeds up. It feels so good going at a faster pace that you hardly notice that you don't have time for much of anything. Cars cost money. Money means a job. Job means you need a car, or you waste a lot of time coming and going to work. It becomes a vicious cycle. I'm not down on cars by the way. But cars bring a blessing and a curse. Time starts to become a master in the modern world. I asked my roommate to lend me one of his many bikes. He did. I have been biking around Portland. I have discovered a different city than I had known before. I see houses that I somehow missed before. I can go places that are a hassle in a car. I can ride along the river front. I can say hi to people. I can stop and stare without getting honked at. I think I'm going to buy a bike. Also I would like to say that next Fourth of July I'm on the bike for sure. Screw cars. I can ride from one family or block fireworks display to the next. I can watch the big downtown explosion up close without worrying about parking. So if anyone wants to come here on the fourth, that is the plan. Most of this story was set in the place where I spent most of my childhood. The house behind me was the Tallman's house. the Tallman's were actually quite tall. They had a boy named Randy that was in my grade. Randy wasn't allowed to play as much as some of the other kids. Randy was a little strange as well. For Halloween our Fifth Grade year, Randy dressed as a geisha girl. He was the only boy that I knew that dressed as a girl for Halloween. When we were in third grade Randy and I played together occasionally. One of his favorite games involved us pulling down our pants and making butt impressions in his sandbox. I don't remember what kind of game it was.

The Small Moments that define eternity Part 2

2007-09-12T19:40:00.000-07:00

Today I had one of those moments that made me stop for a moment and enjoy the world in which I live. I said at one point that I was going to write about these kinds of events on a daily basis. I made a promise of a sort and broke it. Well my friend Robbie aka Rowboat called me on this so I’ve tried to make a mental note of things on a daily basis.
The fact is if you don’t write it down, these little things will simply disappear from your mind and your experience. I was once an ardent journal keeper and my journal was filled with this stuff. But laziness is a powerful foe in these matters. So I’m writing these little events to remember and hopefully to spark an interest in others doing so as well.

Which brings me to a little pet peeve I have been having lately. There is a lot of laziness out there. I know that people are reading and looking and so on and so forth. The question I have is why aren’t more people commenting? If we were sitting in a room together I think people would have a comment or two. It lends a lot to the “online community” building. It lends itself to discussion and people getting to know each other. Does it take a lot of time and effort to comment on a blog? Come on people; think how much time it takes me to write this dribble. It is also nice to know who is reading and what they think. Call it a writer’s need to hear from his audience. Ok, I’ve sounded off on that.

My friend Jerimy called and asked for some help moving a pool table that he had just got some great deal on. I will be honest; I didn’t want to help move a pool table. Pool tables are the heaviest thing in the world next to pianos and gold. I know I’m a big burly guy, but on the inside I’m really small. What I seem to be I’m not. I’m tough, I’m strong, but really I’m small. I will get in the grit with the best of men, but really I’m small. I also have developed this
obnoxious pulled shoulder that has been persistently painful for about four months now. Sometimes I just want to scream, I’m so tired of it. But men don’t talk about their aches and pains, men just “man up” and do the job.

I showed up a Jerimy’s house to find that the other help that had been enlisted was a guy in a back brace (he fell off of a roof drunk three months ago, being encased in plastic all summer long he had lost 35 pounds), a 14-year-old boy, some other guy and Jerimy. On the way to the house that had the pool table the other guy asked me how heavy I thought the thing might be. I said that I thought it depended on whether it was an antique or not. “Well if it is solid oak and really big I don’t know what we’re going to do” He nodded and seemed to care little about the details. “But you know I’ve seen pool tables that are pretty new being moved with professional equipment and a lot of effort at that”. He turned and looked at me with an expression of genuine dismay. “Pool table? He said it was an entertainment device, I thought he meant entertainment center or some shit”. “Man, he is going to owe me big time”. He turned up the country music and lit a cigarette. Turns out that this guy was Jerimy’s tenant. He was not happy at all. We get the house and some old guy lets us in and we go down to the basement. This guy’s basement is the coolest party pad ever. There is a bar, and a grill with an exhaust vent. We comment on how he must have had a lot of parties there. “No I never had a single party, not one time did I have friends over for a beer, in fact I’ve only played pool on that table a few times with my son”. There was sadness in his voice. “I was always too busy”.

We put the table on its side to take the legs off. Jerimy didn’t
bring a wrench or a ratchet. So we have to ask the old guy if he has one, fortunately he did. After we got the legs off we slid this monstrous thing to the door and then just stared at each other. The pissed off country guy says, “Fellas, I don’t think we have enough nuts here to do this thing”. I was in complete agreement. We were definitely undermanned and this thing was scary-heavy. The old guy stood and watched us and realized that our mutual resolve was fading; he suggested that we lay down some rugs on the threshold and slid the pool table as far as we could. I agreed with that and we did it. There was a lot of discussion going on about how to this and how to that. I finally decided that committee was not going to work and started telling people how it was going to be. Before I insisted otherwise, the consensus was to lift the table on its side, onto the tailgate and then lay it down. I saw true and pain and suffering in this option. It turned out that the pool table was exactly as wide as the bed, so I suggested we turn it back flat and have a guy on each corner and slide it in. Up to this point the old man just looked at us and shook his head. He was relieved, I think, that someone was willing to take charge and do something that wouldn’t kill us. I’m not trying to brag, that isn’t the point. The point is that after the votes are in, someone has to bang the gavel and pronounce judgment. I pronounced it and justice was served.

“What’s your name?” the old guy asked. I told him and he smiled and shook his head. “Spittin’ image of your dad”. I felt a sense of pride in that remark and hoped it ran deeper than my tell tale eyebrows. That is one cool thing about living back in Joplin I guess, you have some history. I asked him how he knew my Dad. He told me that he had gone to school with him and had actually been a year younger than my dad. What? This guy was an old man with white hair and everything. I mean he was spry but damn he was old. How can he be younger than my dad? My dad isn’t old, not that old. My mortality doesn’t really bother me as much as my parents. Being a single guy I think that I feel I need them more than most. They are my rock and anchor. But I will stop there.

So we had to turn the pool behemoth back to a flat position, which meant that two guys had to lift it from the ground while the other two just held it. The fourteen year old was full of beans and trying to prove his nuts so I let him and country guy do the lifting. I’m old enough to know that my nuts want to stay as intact as possible without a rupture. There was a lot of grunting and bursts of breath like in the Olympics when those guys almost blow out their innards picking up tons of weight. This thing was trying to kill us I swear. We got on the truck finally.

Back at Jerimy’s house there was more logistics in getting it off of the truck then I had foreseen, again lots of stupid lifting and grunting. We finally got it into Jerimy’s sunroom and set the damn thing up. Jerimy was grinning a lot and you could see that it was more than a pool table; it was the completion of the house. It is a major thing to have your own pool table! I would only mention in passing that you have to stick the end of your cue through the window if your shooting from the side, but hey that makes it more of a challenge right?

This is a public service?

2007-09-12T14:04:00.000-07:00

This is a public service?
There is a run of ads out that our tax dollars paid for to keep kids off of drugs. This run is called "Above the influence". I think that that is as clever as they get and that isn't very clever. I really want to make a lot of money doing this stuff. I get to make a lot of taxpayer money, feel good, and become a part of a culture. The culture that I get to become a part of is the long running line of terrible and incidentally funny anti-drug ads. Someday VH-1, or some other network that loves to fill time slots with meaningless pop culture drivel, will put all these ads together and let different burnt out rock stars and burnt out comedians lampoon them.

The first of these ads in this history is almost as famous as the "I've fallen and I can't get up" ads. The ad I speak of is none other than the "This is your brain, (flash to shot of a frying pan, man breaks egg on the edge and drops the egg into the pan, eerily, you can hear the egg sizzle, ooooo)this is your brain on drugs". Of course the comedian Bill Hicks (not burnt out, just dead) has already relentlessly made fun of this ad. The punch line being "How dare you send a middle age alcoholic to tell me to not do drugs". The guy in the ad did seem like some drunken trucker who is angry at whoever he's talking to. He says, "Ok, I'm not gonna tell you this again, this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs". So the point is of course that drugs fry your brain like an egg in a pan. Yeah we get it. The question is, did anyone at all who saw the ad think to themselves, "I don't want my brain to fry like an egg, I'm never going to do drugs, that scares the shit out of me" And did anyone else say "Man I need to stop doing drugs, that is really profound". I haven't done any research on the matter, but I would say that it didn't have that effect. I bet it had no effect but a lot of people making fun of it. By the way, as funny and infamous as the "I've fallen and I can't get up" ads are, I know that they actually sold the product. You see it is funny to most of us. But the ad was not trying to sell to us, it knew it's target audience, and for that target audience they addressed a real fear. Older people are not as cynical towards ads as our generation is either. They didn't need it to be clever to get the point.

Don't get me wrong. It's a good sentiment. Drugs screw a lot of kids up. It is a good thing to try to get them to not do them. But these guys are just pissing in the wind on this. They are trying to be clever and they are totally out of touch with the brain of users and the brains of teens.

I don't watch television much, so I'm out of the loop, but I saw this ad from "Above the Influence" the other day. This girl is in a middle class kitchen getting milk or orange juice or something, suddenly her dog jumps on a stool next to her. Then the dog speaks, "I miss the times we used to spend with each other, I miss you before you started doing drugs" The girl looks sad (not shocked mind you) and the ad ends. Now that is a paraphrase. I've only seen the ad once. I understand what the underlying theme is: the girl or me as the viewer is losing the precious years of childhood to drug use, I get that. But I don't think that is how most drug users would view the ad. Let's say that this girl is real, and that she is doing drugs, how might this ad look in the real world.

Scene: Girl walks into kitchen. She has dark circles under her eyes. She is frantically looking for something to eat. Her dog jumps on the stool next to her. The dog begins to speak.

Dog: I miss you Sarah, I miss the way we played together, I miss the way you were before you started doing drugs.

Sarah drops the glass she is drinking from and shrinks back from the dog in sheer terror.

Sarah: Holy shit! You just talked! Holy shit!

Dog: Yes Sarah, I did, I wish you would stop doing drugs.

Sarah stares at the dog, slowly her terror turns to wonder and even delight

Sarah: Whoa this is like Dr. Doolittle man. I can hear my dog speaking this is awesome!

Dog: That's great, but I'm trying to tell you something important here, drugs are taking away your childhood, they are ruining your life.

Sarah: Yeah but I never heard you speak to me before I did drugs, this is awesome.

Dog: Umm, you're missing the point.

Sarah: So tell me, do dogs really see in only black and white? Why do you like eating horse turds, what is up with that?

Dog: Sarah, listen to me, you need to stop doing drugs

Sarah: If I stop doing drugs then I won't hear you speak anymore right?

Dog: Umm, I don't know...I just think that you need to play more and be a little girl.

Sarah: I don't want to play with you anymore; I've got a boyfriend and stuff. Hey I wonder if he can hear you too, he's on drugs.

Dog: Oh to hell with it.

Dog leaps down and runs away. Sarah picks up the phone and calls her boyfriend.

Sarah: Seth you got to get over here, I've got some good shit going on right now, my dog just spoke to me!

Dog yells from the other room.

Dog: Leave me alone.

Sarah: Come on this is awesome, come on tell me why you like eating turds, come on....

Scene fades out.

So that is how I saw it at least.

You know it isn't that hard to get this point across, it really isn't. I was watching Freaks and Geeks last night. I have never watched it before. That show is awesome. It is grounded in some reality about the teen years. This episode about Halloween had an underlying theme about growing up and losing some of your childhood. Now it wasn't addressing drugs, but it could have been used to. The girl in the show is struggling to find herself. Her mom is looking forward to them handing out candy to the Trick or Treaters together. The whole thing is some kind of mother /daughter bonding thing. The daughter doesn't want to hurt her mom's feelings, but she is drawn by the desire to go out and hang with the "freaks". At the last moment she ditches her mom and goes out. Mom is sad, but she soldiers on trying to be cheery and handing out cookies. In the car the girl finds out that the "freaks" want to raise a little hell, first they smash pumpkins, then they clobber mailboxes with a bat, then the egging begins. Accidentally she eggs her own brother and her conscience finally can't take anymore. She goes home and sees that Halloween for her whole family is ruined for one reason or another. Some part of her knows that the person she was in the car with the "freaks" isn't really her. She puts on the costume that her mom got for her and hands out candy with her mom for the remainder of the night. She hasn't found who she is, but at least she is around love. Now my synopsis may make it sound cornball, but it really wasn't it seemed like so many events that most of us can relate to. So make an ad with that same feel; the idea that you are leaving behind a childhood for something that doesn't fit. I can imagine the ad starting off with pictures of a little girl progressing into her teen years, maybe home movies. Then you cut to showing her in a park with her friends and she looks at the camera. No dialogue, just one sentence at the end. "Who are you becoming"? It is haunting and daunting. It won't affect all the kids, but I guarantee it will get few. Not all drug users are motivated by the same thing anyway. As a substitute I see so many girls that just want an identity. If they aren't smart, athletic, rich, naturally attractive, etc, they try to find something that brands them. The bad girl image is available to many as a result. But being a bad girl comes with a heavy price, you have to be bad and the ante is always going up.

My whole point is this. You can't hire ad wizards to get this message out. You have to have people who have been there, or who actually give a shit. I believe that love is the most important quality an artist must possess. You have to love your audience. Our culture is losing this. Most bands, writers, and creative people in general engage in lots of self-love, but they rarely project it out. If you can't cry for these kids that you want to help, you can't help them. Clever just won't cut it.

The Death of the Mix Tape

2007-09-09T11:12:00.000-07:00

I still think of Meri Haynes every time I hear the Chameleons. She gave me something precious that I will never forget. In 1985 Meri gave me a mix tape called “Enos Rocks” (in loving tribute to the Dukes of Hazzard Deputy) Among all the great songs on the tape there was this song by a band I had never heard of before. At first the song didn’t really resonate with me. Over time the two songs on the tape by the Chameleons got their permanent hooks into me. I became a fanatic. For years I included the Chameleons on almost every mix tape that I made. Almost all of my friends love the Chameleons, a relatively obscure band from Manchester. And it all started with a lovingly made mix tape. The giver comes to mind every time that present is listened to.

With mix tapes, even if I wasn’t being introduced to a new band, it was likely I was hearing something from an album I didn’t have. I couldn’t afford to throw all my eggs in one basket and go out and buy every album by a band I liked. And what if the album sucked, my investment was gone. We were more cautious in our selection. I couldn’t just download a band’s entire career and pick and choose. There is also the other side of this. It wasn’t my pick; it was someone else’s pick. I was introduced to an album on their terms. I submitted to their version of things. I listened through their ears. Anyone will tell you it’s better to listen to new record with someone else. It’s like going to the movie or a concert with a friend; it’s always a lot more fun with someone else there.

Mix tapes were a form of communicating. The tapes that spoke to you were like letters. The truly fearless mix maker exposed himself to ridicule. It was less about appearing cool and more about being real. Using other people’s music to express something personal. You’re “essential” songs were not based on a genre, a demographic, it’s hipness, it’s hip- unhipness, or even hook appeal. They were essential because they spoke to you. They were essential to share. I rarely thought of merely trying to turn people on to new songs, that would lack some kind of reality to it. It would only be a better version of radio. Radio at its best still lacks the personal touch. Now I will admit that at times some mixes ended up in more than one hand. Sometimes you made something classic and the mix itself went beyond your personal vision at the time. You realized you had made a universally good mix just by its perfect ebb and flow. Of course you didn’t really try for these, but when they happened you found it hard to part with. But in most cases you did part with it. Like a letter it is of you, but imparted to someone else’s care. Thus a mix tape by a real person was a treasure, a one of a kind. People were actually very excited to hear a mix tape; they took a lot of time and effort. I still have dozens of mix tapes from my various friends. I occasionally pull them out and I am transported in a way that no single album can accomplish. Sometimes a friend will call me and tell me that they found a tape I made for them. They couldn’t resist calling and telling me this as soon as they could, a connection was reestablished. I usually ask for them to tell me the listing. Hearing the songs listed on a tape I made twenty years ago, takes me to another place in my life like a journal entry.

These things have died to another thing. I don’t know what it is, maybe Pod-casting. But the digital age interrupts the flow, increases the choices, and is easily made and copied. The fact is, sometimes I would hunt for months to obtain the records that I felt I needed. Loving music required patience and perseverance. Mix tapes could help you through the dry times. There was no source to hear many bands without the mix tape. We shared our collections in this way. It was the most ardent recommendation you could get. The mix tape gave voice to the articles we read. I can read an article about a band now and go and download and listen to them in the same hour. There is something very disposable about that. In the land of mythos, music has lost its treasured luster. More and more it becomes a product as readily visible as water. Every show on television is a potential hit-maker. Products are advertised with another product behind that. I am not trying to be too cynical. It isn’t as if there isn’t any good music coming out these days. It is just harder for me to get excited about it. We don’t rely on each other as much for discovery. It is just one more form of communication that we have lost in this modern age. We have lost mix tapes and drive-in movies. Hand written letters seem the next thing to go extinct. The things that bind us to another individual are fading.

Some might say that I’m being backward and need to progress and blindly embrace the new opportunity, simply because there is one. Some might say that going from live performance to records and records to tape has been reduction and a revelation equally. I would agree, but there is something very special about the tape. It made things readily available, if someone put forth the effort to make it available. It was as working class as you could get. My first “mix” tapes were just me recording my favorite songs off the radio. I made my own radio show. Power to the people y’all. I wasn’t to be excluded from concerts that a small town boy couldn’t see in any era. I wasn’t limited by the poor selection at local chain record stores. My friends and I could exchange the things that touched us. No one had hundreds of albums to choose from, just the ones that mattered enough to drop money on. You had an investment in the music. People shared their investments with each other.

I changed with the times because I value communication. Why make mix tapes for people that don’t have tape players? Still for some reason love e-mail just doesn’t have the same ring to it as love letters. If we completely abandon the personal for the impersonal and don’t balance it I fear there will be dire consequences. Could we possibly become a people who all have something to say with no one actually doing the listening anymore? Is there so much communication that it is ceasing to have as much value? Are we so intent on communicating that we communicate less in the end? Are we moving towards our own narcissistic Tower of Babel? I know I draw out the accusation of hypocrisy. I am using these same tools I’m criticizing. But maybe recognizing potential abuse is the key to respecting the options we have before us. There seems a line that we should draw internally so as not the prostitute the one we love. True communication requires effort no matter the format. If we cheapen our language and quality of what we say we are in grave danger of having nothing worth saying.

We become more accelerated as a culture by the year. There may be something on the horizon that I can’t see. There are new things that join groups together. I also like the opportunity to meet people that I might not meet. Communicate with people who wouldn’t write a letter, but can write at least three sentences now and then. I must admit it is still less intrusive than the telephone. I’m not saying there aren’t positive aspects. It seems a shame one must die for the other to survive. My biggest fear is that I somehow believe that constant instant gratification on any level is bad. I can see how much I am already addicted. I’m addicted to getting new music more than ever and it doesn’t require effort or even much expenditure. I don’t need someone to introduce me to anything. I can burn off all my friend’s CDs and pick out what I like. I can go online and sample everything in my own personal vacuum. Easy access to too many things makes us junkies. But a junkie no longer enjoys the original feeling of the drug. An alcoholic no longer appreciates wine. Restraint is needed to enjoy something for a long time. You see I value communication as something that is part of me being a person. Being personal is what makes us unique. If we reduce our greatest forms of communication to impersonal we will become enslaved or diminished.