Walk On Your Lips Through Busted Glass

Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude—and destroy if possible—those who, by the simple face of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.

My brother's voice slices through the fermented air with muted authority. He always did love deploying the righteous wisdom.

"Hoo boy," I chuckle. "Be careful with that shit. It'll rip your soul in half."

"That's Zafón for you, bro," he smiles. "No idle ball-busting from that man. He'll separate the sheep from the goats every time."

He downs the rest of the Blue Moon in front of him and looks for the waitress. "Where'd she get to? I'm still unacceptably sober."

"Probably fluffing some, like, Affliction-wearing ape-man with multiple Jager shots."

My brother raises an eyebrow, undoubtedly realizing that I'm getting wasted. It's ten-thirty on a Saturday night in South Orange County, and we'd spent the day moving his stuff into a new apartment only a block away from this bar. Hey, one night playing Andy Capp wouldn't hurt, right? A trustafarian jam band is due to start playing any minute now, so we can hang out for a few hours before staggering home with impunity. Surely.

"Ey, so can I get you another one?"

An insidious, sultry voice yanks me back to myself. Our frighteningly attractive Colombian cocktail waitress has returned, continuing that crass yet perfectly acceptable liquid dance of superficial concern for her customers' welfare. She leans right into our faces with a devastating smile and flagrant cleavage, so we really have no choice but to play along.

"Luna azúl, por favor," says my brother in passable Spanish, and the waitress smiles. She'd humored my own stumblefuck attempts last round, when I'd compared her voice to Elizabeth Peña's, but my brother can actually speak the language, so they talk a little longer. I flit in and out of their conversation, eyeing the band's gear, before another accented hook snags me by the throat.

"Oye, pelón!" She rubs my fuzzy bald head with a laugh. "What about you, babyface?"

I blush and murmur something about another Bass. She slithers away and my brother laughs at me.

"You're hopeless, man. I mean, you know she's only fishing for fat tips, right? "

I shrug. "Dude, I would walk on my lips through busted glass just to get next to that."

He rolls his eyes as the band begins tuning up. "Jesus God, she's really put the claws in you if you're dragging out those old boomer yuppie lyrics."

"Hey, there are worse ways to defile oneself than the...like, mutual…um, flattery of cocktail waitresses."

"You fool," he sneers. "Tiger Woods will go to hell for what he did with a cocktail waitress."

"Shut up." My lame reply is drowned out by the band as they kick into an expert set of vintage hippie-rock, and South American sin soon takes a back seat to some of the sweetest surf-reverbed Strat tones we've ever heard. We sit back, drinking it in, and eventually a surprising revelation punches through my drunken psyche.

"This is, uh, really weird, bro."

"Huh? How so?"

"I don't…I'm not…I can totally get into their music without, like, being jealous."

"What?" He leans in to hear me as the band delivers a country-fried take on "Wish You Were Here."

"I..uh, well you know, back when we were gigging more, I would…like, get really jealous if I went to see other bands playing. Cause, um, we shoulda been doing it, you know? I mean, I felt like we didn't get any respect, like we should have had better gigs, or more of them, or…"

Thought processes are derailing slowly, and my brother just shakes his head. "That's bogus, bro. We had plenty of friends who came to see us. Hell, half the time we didn't know what we were doing anyway."

"I know, dude—I realized that later, after we'd stopped playing regularly. But now, I…well, I don't care about it like that. I can listen to these guys do their thing and just, just enjoy the moment, enjoy the tunes."

I can't explain myself properly, but I have to make him understand. I go through another three or four tangents while the band shuffles through a bad Marley cover and some good originals. I try to, like, talk about how I'd ditched the hard-core envy binges just in time to back into the marketing business, where hypersensitive souls get chewed up and spit out every ten minutes. I try to get across the no-longer depressing revelations about nobody ever giving two shits about the real things I'd wanted to do, but had been impressed by the garbage that I'd tossed off here and there without a second thought.

It becomes a long purge of vomit about tight-assed gatekeepers in every industry—music, publishing, journalism—consumed by their meaningless self-importance, inflated like bloated puffer fish in evaporating puddles. I go on and on, oblivious to Colombian curves that periodically wrap around our table with liquid confidence in tow. I'm about to start in on politics when the band rips into a disco-infernalicious take on the Stones' "Miss You" and my brother cuts me off.

"Dude, listen to that! The bass player's on fire!"

That he is. All my dumb hang-ups and pet theories get rolled beneath a thick, creamy low end that nearly re-arranges my heartbeat.

"Man, that's what I'm talking about!"

I forget about everything else and ride the groove for as long as it lasts, and get desperate to play my Fender J again. Not in the old envious way—I’m just itchy to make noise—and after that it gets way too easy to work up some drunken plotting for our own band's reunion. We rant and rave and trade lyric ideas and flatter the waitress again and generally keep approaching middle age at arms' length for another twenty-four hours, and it feels glorious.

It may be impermanent, it may be totally delusional, but it works right now and that's all I need. Yeah, someone else can curdle their heart with envy. Someone else can slum with the mean girls. I'm not interested in that revenge-and-guilt trip anymore. It's time to cook up another serious fireball and jolt everyone out of their twenty-first century stupor.

Cross-posted: dkos, dd

We Move Like We're Suspended in Amber

He wondered again at the bewildering gullibility of people. How baffling it was that even the most cunning and clever people would frequently see only what they wanted to see, and would rarely look beyond the thinnest of facades. Or they would ignore reality, dismissing it as the facade. And then, when their whole world fell to pieces and they were on their knees slitting their bellies or cutting their throats, or cast out into the freezing world, they would tear their topknots or rend their clothes and bewail their karma, blaming gods or luck or their lords or husbands or vassals—anything or anyone—but never themselves.

"Say what?" My brother looks up from his computer, a Warcraft raid frozen on its monitor. "I didn't catch that, dude."

I shift my ass on the living room couch in my brother's San Clemente apartment. His fiancée clanks some dishes in the kitchen, preparing for her own birthday party.

"Just a quote that jumped out at random. It's from that book you bought for me."

"The samurai one?"

"Yep." I close the novel and put it away before trudging down the hall to the bathroom. It's time to get pretty before all the beautiful young people show up.

"How are you liking that?"

"Oh, it's epic, of course." I switch on the bathroom light and try not to be surprised at what I know will be looking at me in the mirror, but there it is, waiting for me.

"Ugh." I can't contain myself. The vision is definitely strange; it looks like I've lost fifteen pounds and grown two inches. That can't be right. I'd hit a plateau of somewhere between 220 and 225, holding steady there for months. I should be looking at a fat man.

"Hey bro?"

"Yeah?" I hear him get up and mosey over.

"Is this, like, some kind of skinny mirror? I know I don't usually look this good."

"God, I hope not," he replies, patting his own belly. "I'd hate to find out I was chubbier than I'd thought."

"Totally." I turn around, checking out my own flabby profile. "Dude, I think it is a skinny mirror."

"Well, don't tell her that," he says, jerking his head toward the kitchen. "I don't think that's a revelation worth sharing on a day like this." He claps me on the shoulder with a smirk and leaves to play more video games.

"I see," I say to my reflection. I give it another grimace before going through the manly beautification rituals a SoCal birthday party demands, but without the usual exuberant vigor, because I sense a deep treachery growing within my soul.

Yeah, I'm not really looking forward to my next doctor's appointment. My torso jiggles with flab, strange growths are coagulating on my right forearm, my feet are crusted with fungi, and my chronic halitosis is acting up again. I know there will be massive hell to pay—in many corporeal, financial, and shame-ridden guilt-tripping ways—once I finally slouch into some low-rent Kaiser affiliate for my bi-decade physical, but I haven't even thought about finding a doctor in these wretched days of health care reform.

Going to the dentist for the first time in nine years was bad enough; the ditzy blonde hygenist was shocked at my resting-rate blood pressure, and another office assistant transparently batted her eyes at me while trying to upsell a tooth-whitening session. It was a halfway decent attempt, so I humored her with a polite smile before letting them shoot my mouth full of narcotics and wheel out the hardware. I don't remember much after that, but it's not important right now.

Anyway—yeah, it takes a lot to look at my own reflection without involuntary eruptions of self-loathing, but body issues are not the problem. No, I've been bald for ten years now (Rogaine manufacturers can go fuck themselves for all the horrible shit they foist on less-confident men), and I bike enough to keep the blood pumping and ward off heart attacks until I'm at least forty. Theoretically.

So as you might imagine, a five-day respite from the SoCal body-nazi ethos was absolutely welcome when it hit. The beautiful people had all hid inside their boxes last week while a relentless shit-rain of precipitation pounded Paradise, letting up just enough for me to drive like a fiend through all of Los Angeles without hitting any traffic, just to get to that party.

And what a scene it is when things get going. Beautiful women of all races stomp around the apartment in ecstatic glee, their boyfriends and husbands smiling smugly and trying to not get too drunk. I end up preternaturally engrossed in conversation with a guy who used to play in a band with me—about the history of his family chemical company—and in between leering at women who aren't our wives, it occurs to me that this old buddy of mine is an extremely fit man.

"Dude," I ask him, interrupting his story of gainful employment, "you gotta see this mirror that they have here. It's, like, a total skinny mirror, you know?"

He agrees and we go check it out, but my old friend is slightly surprised at his reflection.

"Damn, I look gooood," he purrs, pouting and frugging at his own reflection. "We gotta get the others in to see this shit, yo."

So we do—packing the tiny bathroom like clowns in a punch-buggy—and inevitably the parade of people have a wide range of opinions about said mirror. It never changes, but everyone sees something different.

"Eww, it makes me have a giraffe neck," says one girl.

"Like totally," says her friend. "My arms are so not this long."

"I kinda like it," says another guy with a thick surfer-afro. "Makes my hair even more righteous than before, you know?"

"I guess," says my brother, arriving at the end of the line. "Hey, why is everyone so, like, into this all of a sudden?"

"Come on, bro," I say, smiling at my own moderately-prettier self, "it's showing us what we want to see. What's not to love?"

He shrugs. "You know what the funniest thing is, man? There wasn't even supposed to be a mirror here. It was, like, originally set up to be a window."

I look around and, sure enough, the bathroom has no windows.

"Must get pretty rank and steamy, then," says my old band buddy, elbowing my brother in the gut. They laugh like they're eleven again, and soon everyone gets bored with the new shiny object and goes back to the party.

Except me. I sit there for hours into the night, gazing into the mirror and only rarely surrendering the bathroom to desperate girls wanting to pee their hangovers away. Eventually everyone goes home, and my hosts crash into bed, but I remain awake, fascinated by the devilishly skinny mirror and its false promises of truth and beauty.

I stay there hoping desperately that it will show me the truth. I stay there a long, long time.

cross-posted: dkos, dd, mlw

This Was Not My Decade From Hell, Part 2

Just cleaning up some loose ends before the 2000s slip into the black hole of history. This is a sequel to my previous post about personal creative high points from a mad decade. Without further ado, then:

2005: I play two memorable gigs with Honey White: Ventura and Hollywood.


This was a banner year for HW: the album we recorded in San Francisco was finally released in April, accompanied by a Nicholby's show in Ventura that was memorable for me because of how easy it was. We played on bonus time, basically, and I was so into it that if it were not for the recording I made that night, I wouldn't remember anything about the show at all. The good ones are like that, you know? Anyway, we played a handful of other shows supporting the new CD, and of those, the most notable was when we invaded the old Derby Club in Hollywood (pictured above) to play a quick and deadly 8-song set. Lots of people showed up—we called in every favor and pulled in fans from, like, four SoCal counties—but I only had about 30 seconds each to speak with them since the show's logistics were so regimented. It was a definite zenith in my amateur rock posturings, but to date, it was Honey White's penultimate live gig.

2006: I help make certain domestic-stability arrangements official.


Since 1998, Emily has been helping me keep free of that contagious, spastic melodrama that I am so susceptible to. Getting married is obviously a personal high point, but it's also a creative one—when someone gives you the gift of relative emotional stability, it frees your mind and soul up to do all kinds of different thinking. All that stuff about creativity going slack when one is happy is total bullshit; the creative impulse just takes a different, alternately focused form. For me, well, I need a rock, a base of operations, a fortress of solitude—and other such anchors—and thankfully someone else needed that from me as well. As for scoring a mortgage on top of this (later in 2007) tethering us to Ventura for a while, it would become strikingly apparent that the old cliché of "settling down" was anything but, what with all the traveling we ended up doing to simply see each others' families. New places, new people, new inspiration—that was my '06.

2007: I step up my designer/wordsmith/rockstar cred. Sort of.


It only took me about two and a half years to figure out two things about the design biz: 1) how it works, print-wise, and 2) how out of my league I was, web-wise. Good news first: in 2007, I took on full production responsibility for one of the print projects in-house—the Gifted Education Communicator research journal. I got to build on the redesign my friend Mia began in late 2006, and by the end of the year I had some award-worthy material. It got even better in 2008 (the bottom row of that image above), but the grunt work happened in '07. Web development work was another story—I attended a conference in March '07 that showed me just how much I had to learn, and fast—and it would take me until summer of 2009 (and two more Web Design World conferences) to claw my way into something resembling professional credibility. Five years to achieve basic design biz competence? Guess I wasn't such a gifted child after all.

2008: I blog like crazy, begin writing a novel, and record & release its soundtrack.


Or as I described it at year's end, "the year of staring at screens and typing furiously." I'd screwed around with blogging since 2003, but being a late blooming web geek, I didn't get around to doing anything useful with the medium until late 2007, when a Honey White hiatus prompted me to reconfigure this blog to be an online compilation of all the written stuff I'd spewed out into the world (published or otherwise) from 1997-2007. The other big accomplishment was finally writing (and blogging) The Weapon of Young Gods, a novel I'd been developing since late 2006. In '08 I busted out about 2/3 of its first draft—but perhaps most importantly, I recorded a soundtrack album for it, which was released under the old Low Tide side project moniker.

2009: I blog some more, finish the novel, document some nostalgia, and write songs again.


2009 wasn't much different from '08, except that, sadly, my creativity began to taper off writing-wise. I still slothfully sat on my ass and blogged enough to compile plenty of stuff for 2008-2009, and even wrapped up the novel in June, but there was a palpable drop-off in quality stuff. I found other ways to be weird, though—making the Creeping Nostalgia photo project go mega in April for one—but ended up clinging to an old standby: song lyrics. Yep, I dashed off two of 'em in November and December—no tunes, just lyrics—but with only 3 songs written since Honey White's trip to the studio in 2004, that was kind of a big deal.

So that's that—my big creative blips from the 2000s. As for 2010 and beyond, well…I chose to make resolutions on my birthday instead of New Year's, whatever that's worth.

This Was Not My Decade From Hell, Part 1

In case you hadn't seen it yet, Time called the 2000s "the decade from hell." I guess the '30s and '40s don't count anymore, but whatever. Anyway, on a personal scale, that doesn't apply to me at all—between the ages of 23 and 33, I got married, bought a house, scored a nice creative career, wrote lots of crazy things, made plenty of loud rock noise, and generally amused myself while the rest of the world burned.

Yeah, well, you call me Nero now, because I've decided to throw another list of listyness on the decade-ending pile of crap that everyone's making. However, I'm making it personal. And creative. And in chronological order. Groovy, right? That's right, buddy. So, in the interests of rampant egomania and untrammeled personal growth, here are some of the past decade's bigger blips from my creative continuum, year by year.

2000: I shave my own head for the first time, all the way down to the skull.


Whappo! Bet you weren't expecting something that randomly dumb, were you? Well, as anyone who knew the hairier version of me would tell you, it counts on an almost uber-makeover scale. Why? Hell, I don't know the reason why—but I do know that it was a skin-shedding kind of thing, and not at all like the touristy buzzcut I got in 1997 or the half-assed #2 clips I tried in 1999. No, in July 2000 I went total bumfuzz on top, in the interests of entering the 8-5 workforce (I finished school in Dec. '99) as a "new" person. Not a kid, not an adult—just a chubby bald geek whose head reflected any light source. Plenty of figurative creativity in there if you think about it—do we not become different people when we age? Should we therefore look different? I think so.

2001: I play a wild Giovanni's gig with the Mojo Wire, briefly write for the Santa Barbara Independent, and write the best song lyric of my career.


After ditching my first full-time UCSB job, I was free to be an ignored, degenerate rock star with the other 3 bozos in the Mojo Wire. That band actually came to an end in 2001, but not before we played a fun show at an Isla Vista pizzeria on April 12. Naturally I recorded it, and now have to live with it. The other big creative thing I did that year was to write some Positively State St. columns for the Indy, which you can read more about here. Finally, in December I completed the four-year tooth-pull otherwise known as "The Lightning Rod." It's the pivot, the fulcrum, the turning point of all my song lyrics. Everything afterward was good, but not as good. I would later record it with Honey White in 2002.

2002: I help start another band, which ends up being even better than the first one.


March 8, 2002 was the first time Bryn, Brian, Billy and I got together at Earl's Table Salt studio to make music as Honey White. Everything clicked instantly, and we all jammed happily ever after. Or at least until Brian went to Washington DC for grad school in 2007. But still. Anyway, I'm trying to think of other big creative things that happened to me in '02, but nothing comes to mind. I was still living in Isla Vista and working at a second UCSB job (which I also quit that year), so making loud guitar noise two nights a week, plus a monthly gig somewhere in the greater S.B. area, was quite enough. It was, as the kids say, "good times."

2003: I get rejected from grad school, remain unemployed for 18 months, and go to night school.


My future creative class yuppiness starts here, gang. I needed an excuse to quit my UCSB HR job, so I invented "graduate school"—in this case, the creative writing MFA programs at UCI and SFSU—and broke free of the 40-hour zombie death march. However, my written fiction submissions were so poor that I was immediately rejected by both schools, as I kind of figured I would be. So, I had to lick my prose wounds and wait for king-hell fame and fortune, and by mid-year, with my girlfriend in grad school, my brother in Europe, and my band on hiatus, I had no choice but to submit to a night school graphic design program. It mostly sucked big donkey balls, but near the end would prove to be much better. Oh, the other thing I learned in 2003 was that making websites is fun, and authoring DVDs is an awful, wretched thing that I never want to do again. Ever.

2004: I get a real job as a graphic designer, and make a real album with Honey White in a real studio.


Like I said, night school eventually paid off, what with scoring an internship with a company in Ventura whose president was the teacher of the final course in that night school graphic design program. Within a week, Emily got her teaching gig in Fillmore, and we landed a lease on a Ventura apartment. The universe told us to live in the VC, so that's exactly what we did. Also during the summer, I joined the Honey White guys in a trip to San Francisco's Take Root studio, where we had a fantastic experience recording the album that would become "How Far is the Fall," with ace engineer Jonathan Mayer. We released the CD in 2005, but all the tracking happened between August and December '04, and I still consider it one of the best experiences of my life.

Okay, so since the title says "Part 1," I'll leave it at that and be back with more later. Maybe this weekend.

O.C. School District to Its Teachers: Go F**k Yourselves

Those damnable, pesky public employee unions! If it weren't for them and their cushy, decadent benefits packages, California's sterling government would surely be nowhere near the level of crushing idiocy that currently pervades the hallowed halls of Sacramento. And now, now those ungrateful teachers and their annoying elitist union have the temerity to continue to take no shit from a district beset by its own rampant corrupt stupidity, and have chosen to express their collective feelings via three hundred middle fingers:

Teachers angry at the Capistrano Unified School District's proposal to cut their pay by 10% held a rally Saturday to protest the move. The demonstration, which took place near the Mission Viejo Mall, drew more than 300 people, according to organizers of the event. It marked the latest in a series of actions highlighting teachers' dissatisfaction with contract negotiations and the school board.

Profaning the sanctity of a refurbished mall, fer crissakes! What in blazes is the world coming to? I mean, don't those whiny punks realize that the district needs to slash $25 million from its 2010/11 budget, to offset such essential expenses as palatial office complexes and ongoing legal fees from an Iran-Iraq war of a recall election?

Not to mention the known costs associated with an irritating parent-teacher initiative that would clobber the budget to the tune of another $500K. The nerve! Where will it end? Isn't it enough to be mocked in both print and pixel, and slandered to disturbing degrees by long-disgruntled students brimming over with impotent revenge?

Oh yes, regime change had finally come back to Capistrano—just like those pestilential swallows—in the form of an overblown auto de fe by ex-Superintendent James Fleming and his faithful right hand, Associate Superintendent Susan McGill. Theirs was a sordid story of supposed sin that I'd managed to remain completely ignorant of, despite repeated hints dropped by various well-meaning friends and relatives who have worked or currently work for CUSD. It had everything, though—arrogance, intimidation, entitlement, corruption, decadence—including a certain secret ingredient that made it irresistible to me.

What the hell, indeed. Don't these fools know that you go to class with the pennies you have, and not the millions you wish you had? Tell 'em, Anna:

"These are difficult times for all institutions, not just school districts," said trustee Anna Bryson. "We have to work with the money that we have, and that keeps getting smaller."

Like, totally, baby. Don't take any guff from these overeducated babies. Stomp the buggers. Hire scabs if you have to—hell, you could rescind some of those 6-months-delayed rejection letters we sent out to all those qualified bright young people who grovel at our feet whenever UCI or whatever other school graduates a new class of fresh-faced, credentialed teachers. Yeah, hire those kids at a fraction of the contracted salary. They'll take it, won't they?

And for God's sake, show no mercy on those 300 uppities in Mission Viejo. This is the twenty-first century, hon—unions are dead, and no one gives a shit about their selfish, coddled members anyway. It's high time that they were cut down to size, just like back in the good old days. What are those Pinkerton gentlemen up to, anyway? Give them a call. We simply cannot have this level of disturbance in a district of this size.

It's not about us covering our own asses for decades of congenital stupidity. It's really all about the kids. The teachers have never ever considered their pupils in all this, have they? of course not. It's all about them:

Vicki Soderberg, president of the Capistrano Unified Education Assn., which represents some 2,200 teachers, said the proposed salary decrease would be dire. "Asking for a 10% pay cut would throw a lot of our teachers out of their homes and onto the streets," she said.

Vicki, you cold-hearted snake. Won't someone please think of the children?

Cross-posted: dkos, cal

Pompous Pontifications for Two Thousand Ten

It's that time again, folks: we're all about to be inundated with not only year-ending, but decade-ending "best-of" and "coming soon" lists, so I thought I'd do as the Romans do and pile on like gangbusters. Since I got the impetus from David Garland's marketing predictions on Rise Underground, I'll do the professional thing and pretend to be knowledgeable about these things too. See, unlike Garland, I have no resources to back myself up, but that's never really stopped me before, now has it? So this is more what I'd like to see happen, instead of what will happen. Let's get to it, then:

ONE: Blind, Dumb Panic Will Continue to Drive Sales
Because you can never go wrong betting on herd behavior when it comes to business, right? Depending on nebulous ideas and tenuous concepts has been the name of the game for years, but scratching and clawing for better deals will never go out of style. Hurry, or someone else will get the shit that is rightfully yours!

TWO: Keeping Up With Everything Will Be Passé
Appearing current and with it, and actually being that, are obviously two very different things. I predict people will have less and less patience for doing so—except when they're in the throes of blind, dumb panic.

THREE: Taking Everything Seriously Will Be Boring
Happily, the onslaught of earnest, do-goody impulses has not overwhelmed the national psyche since the inauguration of Barack Obama. I do like the guy, and he knows how to market himself, but humorless idealism makes me snore. Why? I am an unapologetic child of the ironic '90s, that's why, and I don't have any patience for other self-important "experts in their field." Even though I'm behaving like one right now.

FOUR: Positive Thinkers Will Be Harshly Discredited
Having self-confidence and setting goals is one thing, but clinging desperately to bogus what-if scenarios and other empty self-help denialist bullshit like that will fall out of favor in lieu of steely-eyed, ruthless pragmatism. Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?

FIVE: Professional Arrogance Will Be Rightly Crucified
This can't happen fast enough. I am so, so tired of the clubby, exclusionary snobbery of so-called professionals, in any field—and I am one. Look, it's one thing to be good at something and love doing it and getting paid for that—and it's quite another to sneak into the closing door and slam it shut behind you just to cover your own ass and keep the riffraff out. I saw enough of that crap when I was in struggling indie bands, and I see it all the time in marketing. It's wretched, fearful behavior—until I do it. Then it's just good business.

Okay, more on all this silly stuff later. I've got a dinner date, so toodles.

We're Not So Different, You and I

I am not a good person. I've known this for a long time now, but for some reason people insist on disbelieving me. It's true, though—I'm a bad man, and I work in an evil business, full of bitchy little plastic people with humorless agendas and fearful, envious hearts. It absolutely sucks, and yet conversely I feel right at home being a judgmental jerk among my peers and colleagues. Admitting that took a little while, but I've always felt inherently bad—or at least "not good"—and I think that is one of the reasons why I've lasted so long in this wretched industry. I've dispensed with the illusion that I'm a well-intentioned, vaguely friendly person full of good will toward all humanity.

All my best, most creative schemes are foiled by humanity, you see. My creative energy has always been negative, and for some reason this makes people uncomfortable. They keep insisting that I have patience for their wide variety of hang-ups, and they gripe bitterly when I don't—throwing around meaningless words like "empathy" and "trust" and "feelings" as if those concepts still carried currency with anyone over the age of five. I guess just don't really care what other people think, but I am in the hilarious position of working in a business where that is the central (perhaps even the only) commandment in this self-obsessed age: Thou Shalt Give A Shit About Everything.

Except I don't—the pathetic, insecure projections of positively-thinking people; the knee-jerk, reactionary humorlessness of self-gratifyingly serious people; the willful, fantasyland ignorance of delusional people; the smug sneering of hopelessly righteous people—I'm bored with it all. Humanity's emotional convulsions perennially fail to affect me. Or at least it all would affect me, if I bothered to take any of it personally, See, that's the key: I refuse to take any of it personally. Everyone always takes life, the universe, and everything too personally, and that's where the trouble starts. They are unnerved by the universe's inherent absurdity, and vehemently deny that any creation so awesome could be based on such a simple, contradictory concept. I mean, if God accidentally sneezes, are Her boogers not divine? Is Her snot-rag not a receptacle of genius? If I believed in God, that would be worth pursuing, but I don't really care either way, so fuck it.

Simple apathy isn't a viable engine of evil, though—no matter how many times people cite that "bad shit happens when good men do nothing" idea. That's flogging a wretched undead nag for sure. No, active badness is definitely where it's at. Nice guys not only finish last—they finish forgotten, if they even finish at all—and I do not intend to be forgotten, dude. Not for a few generations, at least. The best way to accomplish that, of course, is to selfishly inflict my DNA on the future via procreation, but the ensuing eighteen years of dedicated, loving parental care would be wholly unattractive to my egomaniacal sensibilities, even if beholding my new-born progeny would induce a flood of sympathetic brain chemistry. I am a creative thinker, though, and I do get that feeling from the things I create—be they for business or personal or mucus-expelling reasons—and since divinity complexes can be central traits of evil people, that's another check-swing, foul-tip strike against me.

A further failing is simple: I am a liar, and I've learned to accept that I will continue to lie, just like Henry Rollins. Indeed, I'm not really concerned with the morality of lying anymore—I don't mind lying to people, as long as the lie has a solid foundation beneath it and I won't be hurting anyone by doing so. So yes, I am a liar, but I am a very bad liar. Not a big liar—I've never brought down corporations or ruined marriages or cheated the IRS—but I couldn't be a successful big, sociopathic liar even if I wanted to, because I am lazy. Yes, I am a slave to sloth—as I've previously stated ad nauseam—and getting away with whopping lies is not a job for slackers. No, skillful prevarication is not the province of chronically tardy people with poor attitudes, and my attitude is very poor indeed—or rather it would be if it showed up on time. Now, that is not the way to claw your way up the ladder of service-oriented, self-affirming corporate culture, my friends, but it has long been my chosen path.

But that path is also no way to politely disengage oneself from political discourse at any level, and I have been hopelessly mired in American politics since the age of eleven. As one great contemporary philosopher describes it, "people who follow politics closely cannot comprehend people who aren't partially lying. They are intellectually paralyzed by literal messages." Yeah, as if "there's always got to be something else going on, man!" But there isn't. There's no light at the end of the tunnel and there's no secret cabal pulling the strings, let alone a capriciously benevolent divine being. Just the continual dull roar of humanity—boring, but to me, true. Whereas people who casually follow politics—or who are only beginning to follow politics—are singularly incapable of accepting figuratively-based thought. Face value is the only currency, and deliberative debate for its own sake is as suspicious and evil as black magic.

And that's absurd—a universal virtue if ever there was one—but since the most interesting place to be is always right in the middle of a contradiction, I'm okay with that, too. I am not a Christian, and hopefully I never will be, but I recognize a central fallacy of their belief system: "we are all sinners." Indeed we are, but only because the idea of "sin" and "evil" is a reality of our existence. Whether or not that even matters is another question entirely, but I refuse to get bummed out by that. Life in general is much better than the alternative, especially if it's spiced with the occasional spasms of self-indulgent behavior. And I am almost totally fueled by that, dude. After all, I currently enjoy a comfortable happy existence, in a pretty place, full of nice people—and I am supposed to feel guilty about this? I'm gonna be judged because of that? Really? Really? Now that, that is absurd. That's skipping the decline and going straight to the fall, man.

Since I want to accept chaotic absurdity, however, I'll deal. I'm not so anxious to push the reset button yet. I'm not so preoccupied with wasting my time and love and energy on the accomplishments of people I'll never meet, or with martyring myself for their immutable, pristine, and lifeless principles. I'll let that which does not matter truly slide, because the posturing bores are not worth engaging. Someone else can grapple with illogical contradictions and try to curve the sharp corners of the surrounding, resolutely square reality.

Cross-posted: dkos, dd

How Can You Have Any Pudding if You Don't Eat Your Meat?

Ye gods, the damn ungrateful brats just never stop screaming, do they? You work all day to bring home the bacon and they just turn up their noses at it. The very idea of it all, indeed! Why can't they just eat their sausages like good little children, huh? Why won't they just swallow, grin and bear it, and beg for more? Don't they understand how hard Dad busted his own ass all day to pay for this? Don't they appreciate how Mom slaved over a hot stove all night to put it on the table? I mean, really—who in their right mind would have the sheer nerve to push it away and demand their pudding? What the hell, son?

Listen you whiny little shits, I don't care how much pudding Bobby and Suzy's parents give them; hell, they could eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for all we know—they're hideously obese enough, aren't they? Do you want to turn out like that? Huh? Do you? No, listen to me when I'm talking to you! I will not have you insult my hard work and your mother's righteous skills with your selfish, puritanical pouting, young man. I will not allow you to treat us that way, young lady. You're going to eat that fucking sausage on your plate, and you're going to like it, or so help me I'll take off my belt right now.

I don't care what you've read in school—what the hell do your teachers know, after all? They're probably all pinko commie vegans anyway. Who does that Mr. Sinclair think he is? Who died and made him Secretary of Agriculture? Jesus, it's not like any of them have had to slog through the killing floor day after day after day, is it? No, their lives aren't awash in polluted effluvia, and they never will be, up in those shiny ivory towers. They have no idea what it takes to work for a living, raise a family, endure an office full of morons and a planet full of fools. Look at all those idiots! Look at all those boobs! Why, I'd wager they wouldn't even know ham form haggis, the smug, sneering elitists!

Dennis? Hey, are you listening to me, son? Look what you did! Look what you did! You've made your mother cry, goddamnit! You've ruined dinner all because you can't take a single solitary bite of sausage! Don't you realize that there are starving people in Africa? Hell, there are even starving people in West Virginia! People who would walk on their lips through busted glass to even get next to that sausage. People who would never in their wildest dreams believe they could sit at a table like this; live in a house on a cul-de-sac like this; leach a cushy existence in an exurb like this!

I mean, go ask any of your snotty little friends in Cub Scouts, son. I'm sure all of them eat their meat with gusto; they're all nice plump little boys, aren't they? Hell yes, just like Marcy's catty cheer camp sisterhood. They don't tolerate any of that binge and purge behavior, no sir! Come to think of it, Marcy, you look like you've lost weight, baby. How 'bout you put away some of that sausage? Put some motion in those moves, girl. Jesus, you wouldn't want those skinny chicken legs showing at halftime tomorrow night, would you? Your mother and I will be at the game, just like we promised, and if you know what's good for you you'll swallow that entire sausage whole, honey.

Look here, I'll show you—it's simple. See, you take the relish and mustard and ketchup and all those other condiments that God has seen fit to provide us, and slather them all over that big ol' kielbasa. Damn right, just like that. See, that's not so bad, is it? Is it? Good, now all you have to do is take that first bite…Go ahead, honey, we'll wait, and…and—hey, Dennis, where the hell do you think you're going? What? What's on TV? Oh Jesus, that's right! Quick, quick everyone—inhale that sausage and get your asses into the den—Top Chef is on!

Ah…now that's better, isn't it? No no, you're not green at all, darling—what, do you think we'd poison you? Never in hell—where do you think we'd be without that tax write-off? Ha! How we get our meat doesn't matter as much as us getting it in the end, does it? This is still America, kids—the Law of the Jungle is still the Law of the Land, after all. Kill or be killed. Is this a great country, or what?

Cross-posted: dkos

Birthday Cake is the Breakfast of Kings

AKA "It's That Glorious Time of Year Again, Part III." Getting up at 6 a.m. to eat birthday cake is the only reason to get up this early, but since I have now entered my Jesus Year (for the Christians out there) or my Alexander Year (for the rest of you), I've decided that the coming 12 months between #33 and #34 shall be Momentous Indeed.

Let's just say that since I don't really do New Year's Resolutions, today will have to do: by this time next year I hope to have finished my first novel in some form, complete enough to self-publish and then ignore in favor of new work with the band, which we will be knee-deep in. If that time period also includes travel to someplace I've never been before, I'll also be happy.

So if you feel the earth shake at all between now and 11/2/2010, it'll just be me walking tall and kicking ass. You're welcome.

Obligatory Thoughts on Monsters and Wild Things

Nothing complicated for this one; since it's Halloween, I thought I'd cough up one of my reheated metaphorical theories about monsters and horror and stuff. I actually hate horror movies and monster stories, but I appreciate the symbolism that many of them have. Since I've studied too much Dante and Milton, my own tendency is to attach all kinds of western Judeo-Christian stuff to monster narratives, and so I glommed on to the idea that each type of monster is a metaphor for one of the seven deadly sins. It's not a very original idea, but none of them ever really are, so I'll just list 'em:

Vampires = Lust, Zombies = Sloth, Werewolves = Wrath, Ghosts = Envy, Skeletons = Gluttony, and...and that's about as far as I get. I can't think of any undead-ish monsters that apply to Pride or Greed. Devils work well for Pride—that was Satan's original problem, after all—but they're not human/corporeal like the others are. Witches aren't really monsters either, and there are plenty of Wiccans who'd be offended by that idea anyway, so I don't include them.

That's that, except to note that these things have popped up everywhere in western literature (and every other culture, too) for thousands of years. Some interesting twists have always been involved—Victorian classics like Frankenstein's monster alluded to the hubris of science creating life (hey, there's a good one for Pride: a golem), and Dracula and vampires have always symbolized uncontrollable carnal desire—but the most interesting ones for me have been modern-ish takes: the bored, diva-tastic bloodsuckers of Anne Rice; the zombified shoppers of 1950's horror films, etc.


One problem is by creating these outsized metaphors for the most disturbing human behavior, we sort of gloss over the fact that mere humans tend to do more monstrous things than any fictional nightmare. In spite of that, I do have a few favorite monster metaphors. One of them is the werewolf character Lupin from the Harry Potter books, who has always struck me as a stand-in for an HIV-positive person. Not full-blown AIDS, but something with enough of a stigma and sting to make the simple allusion to lycanthropy work for a kids' book.


My other favorite is the Bret Easton Ellis short story collection "The Informers." Ellis, of course, famously gave us "American Psycho," but I went back to re-read "Informers" after it came out on film earlier this year to a chorus of pans. The movie had no vampires—and for a collection that was, literally, sold in Japan under the translation "Vampires and Zombies" (as an allusion to the hyperbolically active and passive freaks of 1980s Los Angeles), that was supposedly a major fatal flaw. Since I haven't actually seen the film yet, I'll refrain from judgment.


Speaking of movies, though, Em and I did belatedly catch "Where the Wild Things Are" today and, well… I don't really have anything meaningful to say about it, because I didn't really feel anything about the film one way or another. I don't know how else to describe it except by quoting the baseball writer Roger Angell, who once said something like "Whenever I went to a Yankees game, I felt like [megalomaniacal team owner] George Steinbrenner was in the way. I wanted to see Catfish Hunter and Reggie Jackson, but all I saw was Steinbrenner."

That's sort of how I feel about this movie: I wanted to see Wild Things, but all I saw was (director) Spike Jonze and (writer) Dave Eggers and their achingly hip neuroses. Now, maybe I'm too used to being manipulated and told how to feel by movies (I did just cite Harry Potter, didn't I?), but to me this "Wild Things" seemed emotionally cold and almost dead (with the exception of actress Catherine Keener). That self-consciously arch, Wes Anderson-type ennui that pollutes so many movies of the past decade had its tendrils in this one too—and it made the thing so desperate to be Meaningful and Important that it kinda turned me off. But who knows—maybe I'm not getting something, which is very likely.

Anyway, on that ugly note, happy Halloween, kiddies. Eat lots of candy and don't worry about us grumpy old people and our silly griping—it's only a metaphor for the bitter ravages of age, after all. Did I mention it's my birthday in two days?