Monday, October 31, 2011

Many Thanks

I'm grateful for a lot of things.









Saturday, October 29, 2011

Simple Pleasures









Friday, October 28, 2011

Muzak For The Elevator To The Nice Part Of Hell


Hell is a half-filled auditorium. --Robert Frost

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.  --Victor Hugo

Every man is his own hell.  --H.L. Mencken

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.  --Aldous Huxley

Hell is full of musical amateurs. --George Bernard Shaw

Hell is empty and all the devils are here. --Bill Shakespeare

Thursday, October 27, 2011


Old Skool, yo.








Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Boston Museum

The wands from the buses grind and spark on the electric nets like a welder gone mad running down the street. There's a screech as the wheels attempt to negotiate the turn. It is the shriek of a negotiator losing an argument. I can smell only metal in the air. I don't know if it's possible; it just is, like praying to Jesus. The faint tang of electricity, of power, of life and death on the wind. One man's trolley is another man's electric chair. The city is an idea held together with dirt. Leaves of newspaper crabwalk across the cobbles and spidered asphalt, looking for rest, like the people in the ink on their pages. Neither seems to find a place to stick and so wander endlessly and fitfully up and down the streets. There is no rest in a city; only the grave. The stalls were full of flowers ready for last rites, and consumptive vegetables. The cold kept the heaps from warning the unwary with a whiff of truth in the nose. What good is a nose in the winter in the city anyway? We stood on the platform and the wrong trains rushed by and everyone has the expression of a dog hard by a stain on a carpet. We rocked with the wind of the cars going by, while you decided whether you were inhaling or exhaling just then, because neither suits just now. Your lungs start up again like a tug on a rope to pull a flywheel. The city has a kind of cold I don't know how to describe. It is a robber. It takes the warmth out of your pocket when you're not paying attention. It's gone and you pat yourself looking for it on your person somewhere. Like a fool. My father's hand was cold, but warmer than mine. He's warm enough for us both.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Give The Real World A Pass

I ain't ashamed. A fella's gotta make up his mind what he's tryin' to do, and do it. Save the hangdog expression for confession and the judge. I put mine on like an off-the rack suit that one time. The weepy frown kept ridin' up in the back, and I put it back in the closet forever. Man's gotta order his affairs better'n that.

Who do you gotta kill to get a drink in this bucket of blood, anyway? Bad enough you hafta park your own car. The hatcheck girl looked like she should be ringin' a bell in a tower. You can always tell when the owner of one of these joints is a schlub. You can't give them your money.

We're supposed to have made this deal already. I know the amateurs think a loud place is how it's done, but this is ridiculous. They never learn that if the cops are even interested in listening, you're already doing it wrong. Man should be able to stand up in a dump like this here and grab the mike from the greasy emcee and tell everyone in the joint what you're doing, so what. Half are pisspant civilians and the other half are in on it somehow in any place you oughta show your face. Smart man gives the real world a pass.

Friday, October 21, 2011

Up For Anything

Bestest guitar solo ever.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Back When Driving And Drinking Was An Activity

The Flying Burrito Brothers. I could write all sorts of tidbits from Wikipedia and my foggy memory about them, but all you really need to know is that there's a chain of Mexican restaurants in New Zealand named after them. Do you have a chain of Mexican restaurants in New Zealand named after you?

I didn't think so.

Six Days On The Road

Well, I pulled out of Pittsburgh,
Rollin' down the Eastern Seaboard.
I've got my diesel wound up,
And she's running like never before.
There's a speed zone ahead, all right,
I don't see a cop in sight.

I got ten forward gears,
And a Georgia overdrive.
I'm taking little white pills,
And my eyes are open wide.
I've been passin' everything in sight.

Well, it seems like a month,
Since I kissed my baby good-bye.
I could have a lot of women,
But I'm not like some other guys.
I could find one to hold me tight,
But I could never believe that it's right.

I.C.C. is checking on down the line.
I'm a little overweight and my log's three days behind.
But nothing bothers me tonight.
I can dodge all the scales all right,

Well my rig's a little old,
But that don't mean she's slow.
There's a flame from her stack,
And the smoke's rolling black as coal.
My hometown's coming in sight,
If you think I'm happy your right.

(Dave Dudley)

Sunday, October 16, 2011

The Spot On The Calendar When A Nation Of Can-Do Morphed In A Nation Of Co-Pay

Off our rockers, actin' crazy
With the right medication we won't be lazy
Doin' the old folks boogie
Down on the farm
Wheelchairs, they was locked arm in arm
Paired off pacemakers with matchin' alarms
Gives us jus' one more chance
To spin one more yarn
And you know that you're over the hill
When your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill
Doin' the old folks boogie
And boogie we will
'Cause to us the thought's as good as a thrill
Back at the home,
No time is your own,
Facillities there, they're all out on loan
The bank foreclose, and your bankruptcy shows
And your credit creeps to an all-time low
So you know, that you're over the hill
When your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill
Try and get a rise from an atrophied muscle,
And the nerves in your thigh just quivers and fizzles
So you know, that you're over the hill
When your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill

Saturday, October 15, 2011


My wrists and ankles were always on display. That was the tell. The current kid's legs tapered down to a kind of wide stump. There was enough sleeve for five noses. They had hair for three sisters. We had Sears jeans.

The city was our Roanoke. We went back after a long, hungry hejira and looked for signs of a lost life. The wardheeler Powhatans had finished their work. There is a look to a brick building with no windows. An accusation in it. Why did you rake the clay from its slumber in the river in the first place? Force it into a heartless mould and fire it, to sit one on top of another, chained together, to reach for the wan sunshine, now just a monument to entropy. For what? For this?

The women decorating the doorways slouched like squid but looked hard as hydrants somehow. Their eyes competed for attention with the empty windowholes in the triple-deckers. I was certain if I looked right at them I'd lose my soul. I had a soul. They gave it to me on Sunday. I wasn't using it just then and so it was ripe for the taking. I looked at my shoes and walked on.

The staircases all canted into the well. The railings all had ideas of their own about how much you should depend on them, so you hugged the spidered walls. The wallpaper was entirely made from the scrolls of a dead civilization, glued to the wall with hope and held on now by sheer stubbornness. Just like the people.

Friday, October 14, 2011

One Doesn't Read "The Social Evil And The Social Good." One Reads Lord Byron

HERE be none of Beauty's daughters
With a magic like Thee;
And like music on the waters
Is thy sweet voice to me:
When, as if its sound were causing
The charméd ocean's pausing,
The waves lie still and gleaming,
And the lull'd winds seem dreaming:
And the midnight moon is weaving
Her bright chain o'er the deep,
Whose breast is gently heaving
As an infant's asleep:
So the spirit bows before thee
To listen and adore thee;
With a full but soft emotion,
Like the swell of Summer's ocean.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

The Kids Are Playing Rock Band Right Now, And The Bigger One Is Using A Real Guitar

My wife and I go out for a walk at lunchtime sometimes. First I eat at the computer while working a little on emails and such, then I give my young son a drum lesson as part of his schooling, and if it's not raining we walk around the neighborhood for fifteen minutes. The time together is one of those precious mundane things you don't appreciate until they're gone, I imagine.

We homeschool our two children. Mostly my wife does, I mean. I give them music lessons. I'm having trouble with the drum lessons for the little fellow. It sometimes takes me longer to demonstrate the sticking in the first place than it does for him to execute it. He has a tendency to look all around the room while I'm trying to figure it out, and I scold him for not paying attention but then he sits down and plays it, first time, to make me feel silly.

Our computers are a joke. The little one's runs Windows 98 and isn't Intertunnel connected. Mine's an ancient Pentium running XP. It can't run a YouTube video on hi-def without the video card seizing up like a defendant with a light pointed at them. But it has Intertunnel so he's always keen to get a crack at it. All the children in the public school are given an expensive Apple laptop that is completely useless for any sort of real work, and simply use it to update their Facebook pages and play games while they're in class. We'd kill for a laptop, but since we save the town around twenty-two large by keeping our kids home we get nothing.

When we returned from our walk yesterday, this was on my screen, drawn in MS Paint:

I didn't know what it was for a good while, then I figured it out. It's a neon atom. He forgot to put the lower-case "e" after the N. But there are ten protons, ten neutrons, and ten electrons. He's even got the isotope number appended on there. I looked it up. I had to look it up:

I went and asked him about it. He was building a model of it with K'Nex plastic dross, and explained it to me. Ten protons gives it its atomic number, dad.

I'd bookmarked a Khan Academy website, thinking my older son might be able to use it. But my younger son sneaks into my office when I'm out or at the tablesaw, and he's watched at least four of the chemistry lectures. They're college courses. He's eight.

Little boys like to know things about the way the world works. They like lists. They like dinosaurs and atoms and planets and Lego sets and army men, and man do six-year-olds like lists of presidents.
There are lots of videos on YouTube of people who think their kids are geniuses because they've memorized something. The education and rearing of children has become so degraded and mysterious that people don't even recognize what comes naturally to children, especially male children, anymore. You have to beat the love of learning out of children. This has been totally accomplished, at least as far as boys are concerned in the public schools.

I couldn't sleep the other night, and went back to the desk at 1:30AM to write a little. I heard my older son murmuring, through the floor, up in his room. His friend had Skyped him for help with his Physics homework. Our son had already finished all his schoolwork for the next morning -- he does it at night the day before it's assigned almost without exception -- but his friend will be rousted out of bed like a vagrant and put on a bus a few hours after I heard them. He's just as bright as my son, but his teacher has dyslexia and can't explain anything properly to him. Nothing can trump social engineering in public school.

Mark my words. There is a day coming. It is not on the horizon yet, but it is not far over it. Prospective employers are going to look at your children's resume, and if it refers to any sort of "public school" on it, they're going to roundfile it without hesitation, and they're going to call HR and ask them to find another homeschooled kid. Maybe they'll settle for an expensive privately schooled kid if there's no "non-socialized" kids available.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

How Can A Man Explain The Phlorescent Leech And Eddie To His Son? I'd Rather Have The Sex Talk. There's Less Perversion In It

Turtles! 1968. You try working "et cetera" into a pop song.

You got a thing about you
I just can't live without you
I really want you, Elenore, near me
Your looks intoxicate me
Even though your folks hate me
There's no one like you, Elenore, really

Elenore, gee I think you're swell
And you really do me well
You're my pride and joy, et cetera
Elenore, can I take the time
To ask you to speak your mind
Tell me that you love me better

I really think you're groovy
Let's go out to a movie
What do you say, now, Elenore, can we?
They'll turn the lights way down low
Maybe we won't watch the show
I think I love you, Elenore, love me

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

I Doubt The Blanket Has Smallpox On It

Every once in a great while, something comes into your line of sight that renews your faith in humanity, at least a little, for a little while.

I'm forced to read the local newspapers. They are uniformly and intensely stupid and useless, written by illiterates, edited by dullards, and read by... well, me, now. Yikes. I'm constantly amazed that my fellow citizens read the newspaper or watch the television and think it's hard information. It has no more fellowship with information than a ransom note assembled out of words clipped from a magazine resembles a novel, and has much the same purpose: A demand for money by lowbrow losers for holding a hostage for a short period. The hostage in this case is a siamese twin consisting of you and whatever they're writing about.

When I read a newspaper, I don't believe the writers would tell the truth if they knew it, wouldn't recognize the truth if it bit them on the leg, and don't know how to read and write well enough to accurately portray facts in a useful format anyway. But other than that, you can find out all sorts of things from the newspapers. I found out there are still people in this world that are kind to one another, even at some risk and inconvenience to themselves, and despite the fact that the object of their kindness might need kindness a lot more than they deserve it.

FARMINGTON — A resident of Spruce Lane called police early Sunday to report a man sleeping in the foyer of their house, police officer Wayne Drake said.
The resident was concerned for his safety and covered him with a blanket as he slept, Drake said.
Drake added that when he arrived the man was still intoxicated. The man had also been in a fight the night before and had a black-eye and a ripped T-shirt. He didn't remember entering the residents' house or the fight, Drake said. (Farmington Homeowner Issues Blanket Pardon To Intruder from The Rumford Meteor)

The homeowner didn't want the police to arrest the fellow, and they didn't. They drove him home.

The tedious imbeciles that put out the Lewiston Sun Urinal, the original home of the story, don't know how to connect any dots but imaginary ones, so I will; in the not-too-distant past an elderly woman was murdered in a home invasion in Farmington. It was in their own paper so they probably didn't read it. I know by the spelling and homonym warts I regularly see sprinkled about their paper the editors don't read it. Or more amusingly, maybe they do, and it starts out even worse than it ends up.

For the most part, there isn't much in the way of crime in Maine. The murder of a stranger is a very rare item around here. An unsolved one is even rarer. But someone in Farmington saw a very disreputable-looking person asleep in their foyer in the middle of the night and was kind to them, because they looked like they needed it.

Maine is not like Massachusetts, where I moved from. I am trying to get the hang of living around here still. You can walk into the Wal-Mart here with nothing but a little cash and buy a shotgun, for instance, something I couldn't do in Massachusetts. One aisle over is blankets. People here have both, and use both, as the situation warrants.

I think I like it here.

(Read The Meteor, or you won't know what it says)

Monday, October 10, 2011

Colon Day 2011


The end.

Saturday, October 08, 2011

Rape! Murder! It's Just A Shot (And A Beer) Away

Reader Charles Schneider sent me a link with a handful of "Worst Band Performances Ever."

I hate to disagree with my readers. I'm constantly doing it, though, and it brings me nothing but grief. But how can I sit still, and allow the South Bay Surfers (on MySpace, natch) to be lumped in there with all that execrable stuff? This aggression must not stand, man. They're not "bad." They're not "the worst." They are sublime. We must take a minute to consider the sublime when we encounter it.

There's plenty of bad stuff on that webpage, don't get me wrong. But YouTube is a cornucopia of bad stuff. It is the Miss America Pageant of Meh and the Nobel Prize Committee of STFU. You're going to have to be a lot worse than that to get a rise out of me. But even YouTube isn't big enough to hold every abominable noise, every obnoxious attitude, every atrocious waste of time, every repellent theme, every nauseating worldview -- each and every aspect of the self-absorbed caterwauling that the American garage, filled with the fetid and festering innards of a disemboweled Guitar Center and engorged with wannabe rock stars, can produce. It exceeds the Gross National Product of Perdition. It's too vast to get a handle on, although you'd like to get a shovel handle on it, wouldn't you?

Out of that morass, out of that septic tank of pre-adolescent hopes and dreams, washed up like dead things on the shore of no talent, hard by the smoldering caldera of suck, a champion can appear. One that has bathed so fully in the fetid essence of insipid rock music that they have become immune to it; they ride it like a hobbled stallion, a gelded centaur with emphysema; surfing it like a slow roller in a sewage treatment plant.

Beelzebub shat a Faberge egg. Attention must be paid. 

Friday, October 07, 2011

Need To Update My Out Paradin' Music




Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Mrs. Mamet Captures The Essence Of The Thing

Show, don't tell. Dem's the rules. Alone in the big city, with a happy, somewhat wistful hope to be together soon. The song will do the work for you if you let it.

Always hated the Beach Men. I was forced to play "Surfin' USA" about eleventy hundred times. No matter.

Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Captain Tammany H. Plutocrat Real Estate And Bill Collection, Inc.

(Author's Note: There is no editor. Maybe I'll hire one if you buy a goddamn book

That rapscallion Bird Dog over to Maggie's Farm linked to one of those titanic bits of news that apparently only warrants a mention on the last page of the Internet, while a few dozen well-to-do hipster doofuses have a hissy fit on the first fifty pages of all the newspapers.




Hmmm. The government is giving away all those practically free foreclosed houses you've been waiting and saving to purchase, to rapacious investors. Who'da thunkit? I mean, besides me, a year ago:

A “foreclosed house” is not a house. The jots and tittles have to be filled in by the lawyers and clerks –who owes and owns what, what’s required to call the house complete and safe for habitation -- just like you do before you dig the cellar hole. It is only a potential house. Think of them as housing starts for future years, because the vast majority of them won’t be ready to be sold for years. And since practically no one is building any new houses, and household creation plugs along, unspectacular but inexorable, those foreclosed houses are not going to be sold for peanuts in the future, because they’re going to represent the only game in town. Buy them or rent them, they’re going to cost you real money.

The people who are currently living in the foreclosed houses “rent-free” while the bank’s lawyer scratches his head in front of a judge saying: “I know that deed is around here somewhere” are actually doing the bank a favor. They are of no use to the bank as paying customers anymore, and the bank has already written them off, but they will serve as a kind of disreputable housesitter for a year, maybe two, saving the bank from paying someone to mow the lawn or otherwise look after the place. By then the banks will have their foreclosure ducks in a row, and out in the street they’ll go, and into the now nascent, but soon to be gigantic foreclosure machine the house will go.
I'll tell you something else. All those people who thought they were going to walk away from those houses and give them back to the banks? The banks are going to figure out the difference between the mortgage and what the house is sold for, which will be huge, sell those debts to lawyers --who'll make the mafia or a first wife look reasonable -- and they'll use the court system as their own private strong-arm collectors, and hound those people to kingdom come. 

Barring a sea change in governance, five years from now there will be nothing left to do but piss in the hole where the American housing industry once stood. It'll still be smouldering from a subsidized public/private arson fire initiative, so even that might seem like a blessing when they're done with it.

Monday, October 03, 2011


It is not my fault I notice things.

I've felt compelled to say that a great deal in my life. I had a sort of knack for ruining amusements for my acquaintances. I'd offer a mordant observation about something --offhandedly, usually -- and somehow I was the bad guy because it rang true to the hearer's ear and ruined their enjoyment of some pop song or TV show or whatever. They'd get mad at me for speaking the truth without malice. I found it very curious. It's not my fault that Bruce Springsteen can't sing or play his instrument, even after four decades of trying, and is a lame lamebrain in the bargain. It's not my fault for noticing that, either.

People don't like to consider, never mind admit, that they're susceptible to conditioning and appeals to their cupidity and herd instincts. That's why they bristle if you don't like what they like. Their affection for things assigns an importance to them that cannot be challenged. It doesn't matter to them that their affection for things was likely manipulated in the first place. They'll get mad if you even broach the subject, and tellingly call you a sheeple on a good day, or much, much worse if they think you're gaining traction. They think they like Apple computers because they're smart and smart people like Apple computers and not simply because a rapacious creep got every school in the country to use the useless things to the exclusion of all else and now having the close button in the wrong place is all they know. Me? I've more important things to care about. Like what you like.

"Like what you like," is likewise a common thing for me to say. I made money playing a comic version of a Bruce Springsteen song, and smiled while I did it. I try not to assign ponderous importance to trivial things. But most people aren't like that. A vicious narcissism rules the age. People will fight with fists over the primacy of Katy Perry over Lady Gaga. People want to write their condiment preferences into the Constitution. They believe that their love for things, however acquired, places the imprimatur of importance and goodness and intelligence on the objects of their affections. You can get shot for wearing the wrong laundry at a football stadium. People have OPINIONS now, not the lower-case kind.

Personality cults abound in a world of unbridled, crabby partiality of course. Politicians and businessmen are made into messiahs, not functionaries. If you oppose them, or are even ambivalent about them, you're evil. Of course anti-personality cults appear, to associate odd, cookie duster moustaches and stiff-armed salutes to innocuous, if venal, persons. Everyone's both a bohemian corporal and John the Baptist at the same time, depending who you ask.

It's getting especially tiresome here in no-man's land between those trenches. One side adores people and things you find tiresome or useless, and there's no rest from it, either, as the other side does nothing but talk about the same persons and things all day long. One cannot notice that both opinions are held by persons who are immune from the results of both their own and the competing worldviews. You all count coup in an effeminate set-piece, while a loaded pistol is in the nose of the rest of us.

You can both claim it's friendly fire, but the mortar shells all fall in the same place -- nearby, thanks. It's not my fault I notice that.

Saturday, October 01, 2011

Put Your Back Into It

I don't know what tomorrow brings,
But I made just eight cents today;
Shouldered wheels at many things,
And danced and sang a cabaret.

Thousands looked upon my wares,
And sat upon their lumps of gelt;
They mimicked all they couldn't steal
To plop on their conveyor belts.

Electrocution is my fate;
Before, they sound a little tone.
But I don't dare recriminate
In hopes they'll throw a little bone.

There's little left for me to hope,
I will not steal, I cannot borrow,
But if I feed my zoetrope,
Perhaps I'll earn nine cents tomorrow.