"You mean I'm sturdy?" I asked.

"Well, yes," he said.

I stabbed myself in the heart 16-18 times.

None of the wounds turned out to be fatal, however, in fact, after my botched attempt to off myself I did some research and surprisingly I could not find documented proof of even one successful suicide carried out with an imaginary knife. So, since I didn't manage to end it all afterall, here I am, sturdily recounting this story to you.

If I had been successful at putting an end to it all you would have had to read about it on Fatso's blog and I'm sure his memory of the fateful events leading up to the tragedy would be similar yet greatly different than mine. I imagine he'd pull the old "This was a terrible misunderstanding! In my country Angelina Jolie is often referred to as sturdy" routine. He'd probably look shocked as he wrote about it, but you wouldn't know - you know, because all our photos are minus our heads and stuff.

You know I have more than once been referred to as "strong." You're a strong woman. You show great strength. Whoo that's a tad bit strong - when's the last time you bathed? It's all been said to me at least once, if not daily. And it's never really bothered me. In fact, these comments are generally meant as compliments, except perhaps the last example.

But sturdy? NEVER sturdy. Sturdy woman wear sensible shoes. (Pumps would make them wobbly and I do believe that wobbly qualifies as an antonym for sturdy, therefore I'm thinking that people in Fatso's country have no business called Angelina Jolie sturdy. That chick lives in 6" heels.) Sturdy women own ski jackets and hiking boots. At least a pair of Nikes. They hoist all 10 bags of groceries from the car to the house in one trip. They don't own a Wonder Wheeler. Sturdy women do not get pedicures - they use the heels of their feet to sharpen their carving knives and their hatchets - the ones they use to chop wood for the winter. They wear flannel. Drink beer. Drive a pick-up truck. Assembly things

I am so not sturdy.

I do however have wrist cancer. I noticed the tumor this morning after Fatso pointed it out. He had just completed his complete body scan/cavity search and was just about to hand me a clean bill of health when I heard him say..."hmmmm."

"What is it doc?" I asked.

"You have something here. Something on your wrist."

I suggested that it might be a pimple or maybe some food that got stuck to my hand last night at dinner. But to both suggestions he shook his head solemnly. That's when I began my own intensive probing and squeezing and after a very long two minutes broke the news to him as gently as I could.

"It's wrist cancer,"I said. I nodded and made direct eye contact just like the guys on ER do.

But I do suspect that wrist cancer is one of those slow moving cancers. It could be years before it actually kills me. If it ever does. It looks pretty contained so if I get it whacked off pretty darn soon it may not have had time to spread to my brain yet. So really, this doesn't necessarily mean the end of my blog. If it is, then feel free to comment about the irony of my blog title and speculate that on some level I must have known my days were numbered.

If I don't write as regularly as usual though - don't worry - it's not that I'm feeling ill but more the location of the tumor itself. It's on the left side of my wrist (palm up) right at the spot where my wrist hits my laptop as I type and so it makes it very diffic - oh.

Yeah.

never mind.

-LM

I Guess this is it, Then Archives

Rod Beck was an atypical closer, all location and precision, not heat and bluster. The mustache was really the only typical "closer" part of his look but a solid low 90s heater mixed with a nasty forkball allowed him to be dominant when healthy. He was a vital part of three postseason teams (Giants, Cubs and Red Sox) and also managed to return from Tommy John surgery late in his career to have a Comeback Player of the Year season (2003) with the San Diego Padres. Lord, was he fun to watch. The sport needs more people like Rod Beck . . .

Cal Ripken, God's Own Baseball Player if you believe the PR flacks, has expressed displeasure with the merry-go-round that is the Orioles' management. He is on record as saying that the constant shuffle of personnel is distracting to the team . . . well, no shit, Cal. Captain Obvious notes his respect for Andy Macphail, who drank the kool-aid and was named President of Baseball Operations this past week . . . "white night, white night". Welcome to AngelosTown - there will be self-criticism meetings and ritual worship of the Godhead that is Big Pete. Christ . . .

Random baseball babblings: the Cards are promoting Troy Percival, hoping he can settle a pen that is in shambles; the Red Sox are a lock and the real action is gonna be on the wild-card slot with Cleveland, Seattle and maybe Oakland hooking up in some serious deathmatch-style shootouts; 'Bye, Ozzie - enjoy anonymity, you zero; the Brewers will have to go over the cliff to miss out on the NL Central title and the NL West will be gory; the Bravos have two problems: they need another veteran starter BAD and Tim Hudson is schizophrenic, with Good Tim being dominant and Bad Tim being essentially league-average. He is also getting hammered at Turner Field (.272 BAA and .681 OPS). God help . . . Joe Torre will be enjoying dark chocolate and Italian dessert wines this time next year. You can make book on that.

The Band No One Here Gives A Damn About this week is the Manic Street Preachers who emerged in '86 from Wales with the following manifesto: release one album that would outsell "Appetite For Destruction"; tour the world; play Wembley Stadium for three nights; and subsequently break up. Their first LP, "Generation Terrorists", is all bluster and energy with "Motorcycle Emptiness" leading the way. The band carried on quite well in the 90s (except for here, of course) and then the sky fell in. Richey James, the troubled heart and soul of the band, disappeared in February of '95. The band debated whether to continue or not and returned with a sonic blast equal to "The Holy Bible" (the last album with Richey James) - "Everything Must Go", which contained "A Design For Life" which may be the most powerful statement of melancholy purpose I have ever heard . . . I could go on and on about these guys - they're THAT good. Listen to the music and, for once, read the bios. It's worth the effort.

I gotta go and read some more Nicky Wire interviews.

Later taters (Go Braves/Go Tribe!)

Never Liked the Beatles, Never Loved Elvis Archives

This week everyone is talking about their hometowns: why it sucks, why it rocks, why they still insist on calling it 'home'. It's not just where you went to high school, it's not just where you kicked around on that vacant lot and got tetanus that one time, it's not just that place where your parents hang out (except for Ernie), it's The FTTW Home Town Trainwreck!

Dave in Texas - Farmers' Branch, Texas
Where I grew up we had a very nice municipal jail.

First rate. Really.

Timmer - Boise, Idaho
Boise Idaho. Not Iowa. And it's pronounced Boycee. There's no "Z" in Boise. Actually, if you want the proper French pronunciation it would be Bwah, but no one here much remembers the French much less wants to call it Bwah. I mean really, Bwah? Sounds like you're blowing a kiss with peanut butter in your mouth.

Le Bois is French for The Trees. Back before it was settled, the folks who first explored this area looked down into the valley and pointed toward the river and said, "Le Bois." The trees. Since there were no other trees anywhere near here at the time...other than in the mountains to the North, it was kind of a big deal.

Boise is a nice, relatively small town. People like the small town feel. Lots of people have moved here from Southern California over the past 15 year because they wanted to get away from L.A. and the huge city feel. Then they went and built strip malls and everything they missed about L.A. and sort of mucked it up. You really don't want to keep your California license plates much longer than you have to here. It might get your ass kicked in the wrong places.

Boise is famous for its potatoes. We like that. People think Boise and they think potatoes. They don't think about shopping, or art, or culture or small shops that sell cool stuff, or good coffee shops, or river rafting or camping close buy or small towns in the mountains close by. They just think potatoes and mostly write us off. This is a good thing.

Now...if we can just get the Californians to get tired of what they've done to the place and make them move a bit further East, say to Wyoming, then it would be even better.

Courtney Rau - The 'Wood, Massachusetts.
My town, the one I'm from and still live in, is FREAK MECCA OF THE UNIVERSE, due to the high percentage of townies, and group homes for developmentally delayed adults. Who all live in a strange sort of harmony.
Oh, and the Lewis Burger.

You know you want it...

Mr. Knowsomeofit - Oakland, California
I live in Oakland. Do I really need to say more? I mostly like it because white people are afraid of it.

Here's one of the reasons I love Oakland: ------>

I took that picture less than a half a mile from my house, in the middle of a city that has a reputation for being a blighted urban nightmare. I love my town for its secret, hidden beauty.

Deb - Burlington, Ontario, Canada
Home to... Ummm- a festival called "The Sound of Music Festival" AND it has nothing to do with the musical! It's actually North America's biggest FREE Music Festival.

No one who lives in Burlington actually goes.

There are also two malls and at least 200,000 residents who commute to Toronto every day for work.

Slogan?!? "We're not Hamilton or Toronto!"

Jo - Rutland, Vermont
I was born and came back to a wonderful little town called Rutland, Vermont. If you grew up and never left Rutland – it’s the place everyone wants to escape from because you run out of things to do living here. If you've moved away and come back, like I have, Rutland is the best place to live. It’s beautiful scenery (God's country) all year 'round. The people are generally nice and friendly. Always willing to help if you ask.

There is always something going on to attract tourists, from the Rutland Farmer's Market in the downtown park every Saturday and Tuesday to the free concerts in the Uptown park every Sunday and Wednesday. To me, Rutland is one of the few places in the world that one can look at and, within a month, say "I love this place. Its amazingly beautiful and I never want to leave."

Jim Sells - Cleveland Tennessee
Cleveland, Tennessee, the home of the Church of God(Cleveland) and the Church of God of Prophecy, which was formed by one of the founding fathers of the Church of God after he was impeached from the church. Both have gone on to grow into large denominations with members worldwide.

It also was featured in a "60 Minutes" segment in the Seventies that referred to it as the "Odometer Rollback Capital of the World". A cousin of mine was involved in that and went to Brushy Mountain State Prison (home of James Earl Ray) for a stretch. He was released and pressured to talk by the IRS which threatened to seize virtually all he owned. He was killed in broad daylight next to one of the busiest roads in Polk County, Tennessee, shot in the head multiple times with a hunting rifle. End of story.

Where I come from is growing into a metro area but it is fucking weird, no matter how large it becomes.

Ernie - Webster, Massachusetts
I grew up in the fabulous town of Webster MA, also known as the place where they still think mullets are in style, also known as the place I go only to visit my parents.

Webster is famous for its lake which has a very, very long name, supposedly the longest place name in the US. Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. (Ed. Note: Yes, that lake name is spelled correctly. We checked.)

Wow that's exciting.

Webster is also famous for, at one time, having more bars and liquor stores per capita than any other town in Massachusetts. They also have an abundant number of pizza shops and gas stations as well as two Dunkins and a bowling alley, though it should be noted that most towns
in Mass have at least two Dunkins at the minimum.

At one time Webster used to have a mini-golf but they tore it down and made it into a parking lot because everybody knows that parking lots are way more fun than mini-golf. Plus, it gave the bored townie cops something to do (continually kicking kids out of the parking lot).
Loitering / skate-boarding / bmx-ing / sitting in your car listening to the radio - only trouble can come from these insidious activities...

When asked about the dearth of recreational outlets for kids in Webster, one town official was famously quoted as saying, 'There's lots of things for kids to do in Webster. They can go bowling or go out of town.'

Awesome.

Johnny St. Clair - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
my city is the only one my family has known since they got off the boats
my city doesn't have as much pollution as it used to
my city has the best weed spots
my city has the most number of non-ironic mustaches per capita in the fucking world
my city has career prostitutes
my city has prime catfishing
my city has the friendly neighborhood transvestite who pushes a shopping cart around the block
my city has hills - alot of them
my city has the Ice Cream Man who still sells his shit out of the back of a pickup truck
my city has Dirty Larry and he'll buy the socks you're wearing for $20
my city has its own brew made from local river water
my city has its own cornball lingo
my city will kick your ass, steal your best girl, and eat the last muffin
my city got it for cheap
my city is fucking sweaty right now

I ain't got no plans to leave. Just ask my P.O.

Turtle - Sacramento, California
I guess really the town I did spend most of my time in was Sacramento, CA. Sacramento was cool. It's the kind of town that everyone ended up in. People from all over Californina, for some god knows reason, ended up in Sacramento when they:

A) Wanted to quit drugs

B) Wanted to start doing new drugs

It was like the musical detox of Northern California. When you are in a band and you either quit or got thrown out for doing too many drugs, you came to Sacramento. So you had all these AA's filled with people from bands you knew who "just didn't want to talk about what happened."

We also had all these dive bars with dollar drafts and cheap methamphetamine which really didn't help the situation much.

We also had "Lil Joe's".

You had some balls if you ate there. If the food didn't kill you, a stray bullet from the crips fighting over drug turf would.

Michele - East Meadow, Long Island, New York
I call it Hotel California. People never leave here. It's like there's a force shield around the town. My kids go to school with the kids of my childhood friends. Everyone lives two blocks from their parents. People TRY to leave, but keep coming back.

It's a nice place. Good schools, nice lawns, low crime.

What are we famous for? Hmmm.

Part of the movie the Hot Rock was filmed here. You might not remember that stellar Paul Newman movie about a diamond heist.

We do boast a serial killer, Joel Rifkin - the man who made putting hookers in your trunk famous.

We are also the hometown of Criss Angel, that magician I want to drop kick. When he was younger, he lived a few houses down from my ex brother in law. He used to come over and entertain our kids with magic tricks.

That's about it. We're a town of strip malls. There are THREE Dunkin Donuts in East Meadow. THREE! We also have the county jail here. Located directly across the street from the high school. There's some suburban planning gone wrong for you.

Josh - Heath, Ohio
I grew up in Heath, Ohio. There is absolutely nothing of note about my town. Couple of failed NFL players, buncha meth, and my high school is on a road that used to be called Lover's Lane.

However, the county that Heath is in can claim John Holmes as an alumnus. Which county is that, you ask? You won't even believe me, but it's ... Licking County. Hand to God.

Joel Caris - Portland, Oregon
I was born in Redding, California, but left there when I was four. So not there. The town I spent the most time growing up in is Vancouver, Washington. But not that interesting. Screw that.

Let's go for Portland, Oregon, which is where I live now.

What's Portland known for? Well, everyone thinks rain. And it does rain, but it's way overblown. For those of you who don't live in a place where it rains a lot, though, I guess it is weird to show up here and listen to people debate what kind of raining is going on today. Is it misting, sprinkling, is it a light rain, a heavy rain, a shower? We're like the eskimos here with all our different terms.

What else? I believe Portland has the highest number of strip clubs per capita of any city in the country. Yep, we love our strip clubs here. You can't walk down the street without seeing one. Hell, it's hard not to walk down the street without finding yourself in one, purposefully or not.


Also, full nudity with alcohol.

If you're a basketball fan, we have the number one pick and the opportunity to choose between Oden and Durant. So suck on that, Boston.

Oh, and it's just a damn cool city. It's small, but it still has a whole lot of culture. We've got Forest Park, which is the biggest park within city limits in the country (or maybe world.) In general, there are tons of trees, lots of green spaces. The city's liberal as all shit, which is certainly nice from my perspective. It's quite easy to get around without owning a car, especially if you have a bike. Certainly not up to the level of New York, but I'm thinking of dumping my car and just saving the money next year when I start attending PSU and don't have to leave the city for work.

We're littered with $3 theaters that have fair-priced concessions, pizza, beer, burgers, couches, old and comfy and real chairs, and 21 and older only. There are even a couple places you can catch first-run movies for $6.

Finally, probably the best thing about this town is the beer. So much beer. But much more importantly, it's quality beer. There is so much great quality beer being brewed in this town, it's ridiculous. It's a borderline alcoholic's nightmare and dream all twisted together in night after night of spending too much goddamn money at the local pub. And there are great bars and pubs and taverns and classy joints with good food and dives with even better food EVERYWHERE and it's fucking great. And I've had to seriously cut my regular monthly expenses since moving here just so I could afford all the beer I've been drinking and good food I've been eating. Which reminds me, there's a lot of great fucking food here, and a lot of great ethnic food all over the place. Thai abounds, Ethiopian is well-represented (and delicious), and for every strip club, there's a Lebanese place, as well.

FUCK, I love this city.

A few months back someone I knew died of an overdose. I know his cousin Isabel and his Mom, but Victor and I were passing acquaintances at best. He was a groomsman in two weddings that I attended, and I used to see him around occasionally, but the only actual conversation we ever had that I can remember started with him explaining some scam he knew how to work trading cheap new videos at the movie store and ended with him showing me a bag of weed he had. He was particularly proud of it, and I sniffed it, and eyed it, and had to agree it was indeed a fine bag of weed. As time went on every time I saw Victor he looked worse than the last. I would hear about 'hereditary stomach ailment' this, and 'partying too much' that, and I was inclined to believe the latter although there really would be no way to tell. If you keep waking up vomiting because of some affliction; basic survival instinct would prompt you to stop ingesting strange and wonderful recreational pharmaceuticals long enough to find out what was wrong with you. Maybe that's just me, but that is all the advice I could offer Isabel when she mentioned that his doctor could not figure out how to help him. "Tell him to stop getting high long enough that they can find out what is wrong with him."

"Yeah, right", she would answer back, I assumed that meant everyone had already tried the obvious approach.

Now is a good time to mention that Victor's Mother and Father were quite fond of prescription meds, some with their names on them and some probably not. His Father Wesley had the mysterious stomach ailment along with degenerate arthritis and some persistent injury that he received disability for, although this weakened, handicapped condition didn't keep him from smacking his wife around from time to time. Nor did it inhibit his desire for weed, crack, and all manner of unprescribed uses of prescription meds. Nick's Mom Layla was on tranqs and I don't know what else, I believe she started on them innocently enough with the "battered wife syndrome" and all; she just happened to get one of those overly accommodating doctors. I can honestly say that in the years that I have known her I don't think I've ever seen her completely sober. Sometimes manic and loud, sometimes bleary-eyed and nearly falling over, sometimes reeeeally close to normal acting, but just not, y'know?

So Victor came by his pill-popping proclivity honestly, as they say here in the country; he learned it at home. People tell me that he was a good student, with scholarship offers and all that jazz -- until his senior year in high school. No alcohol, no weed, nothing. Then, well then he started doing a little escaping on the side. I don't know how much of the violence he witnessed, but I do know that he, his sister, and his Mother were constantly moving in and out of his Father's place. Nobody could get along with Wesley for long. However his partying habit started, Victor slid out of contention for any paid university attendance, but he did graduate from high school. He moved out, back in, out, in, and was planning to move in with his Grandmother to get his life together (or at least get some peace and quiet) when he died.

Like I said, nobody could get along with Wesley for long, Victor's younger sister had moved in with relatives some time before and his Mom moved in and out almost weekly, but Victor found a way to get along with him: They started getting high together. They had access to a stockpile of meds, and weed, coke, crack, and alcohol are never hard to come by, so they bonded. I'm not sure how sad it is for a 40-something-year-old man to be hanging out with 20-year-olds, but that is what went on. That particular February Sunday they were at a friend of Victor's house, listening to music, playing video games, smoking, drinking, eating and snorting pills. The two of them headed home, (God knows which was driving), and when they got home Victor crashed. For some reason, around 4 a.m. Layla checked on him and he wasn't breathing right, so she woke him and called 911. Being 20 years old allows you a lot of things, one of them is the right to refuse the services of your friendly neighborhood paramedics, and all the responsibility that goes with exercising that right. Whether he thought he was going to get into legal trouble if he went to the hospital, or he was belligerent and disagreeable as severely intoxicated people usually are,or if he had intentionally taken lethal amounts of painkillers; Victor killed himself that night when he refused to take that ride to the hospital.

Around 8 a.m. Layla found Victor not breathing, and this time he was in no condition to refuse the paramedics that carried him out of his family home. But he was gone. They tubed and wired him up, and for three days people prayed and cried and hoped and misquoted what doctors had said, and on Friday they signed off on donating what organs weren't too polluted and/or destroyed to be used, and Layla fell to pieces. I found a picture of Victor from the last wedding, and I superimposed it with one from another occasion and had it printed, got a frame and had someone take it to her for me. It was all I could do, I couldn't attend the funeral, I expected a lot of drama that I was not willing to be a part of, stuff involving Wesley the piece of human garbage and the likelihood of his making a scene. Not just that, there were people that I couldn't face seeing, I'm a wimp but I just didn't think I could take that much guilt on parade.

I related this story because I sincerely think that Victor was in very bad shape emotionally, and it makes no difference to me whether he was consciously suicidal at the time. This was debated often over the days that he was physically still alive, and probably still is amongst the family, but I don't see that there is any line there. He was unhappy enough being himself that he spent every waking moment looking for a change of head, so even if he wasn't looking to stop living he was definitely looking to be somewhere else, someone else.

If you want to kill yourself, you will, I can't stop you. But if you have the slightest inkling that life might be worth living, I agree with you 100%; it really is. My life swerves from near-bliss to an ocean of shit and back but I will never deny that it has been a real adventure, and as hacked-up as the saying is, the journey is the reward. Just try doing something else. Get a puppy, get a divorce, get a new job, get a tutor or quit the class. The worst that could happen is better than not being around to see what happens. Don't think you have to settle for anything you've gotten yourself into, there are plenty of people with less going for them that have dug their way out, trust me.


Nothing is that bad.


Sudden Valley Ranch Archives

Last week I think I was whining about relocating to an office in a different building. For the past 15 years I’ve worked in an office that it located out in some beautiful rolling Texas hills.

For 10 of those years I was in a corner cubicle that had open window space on two sides… beautiful view. I’d sit there and look at the window and try to have a serious work-like expression on my face. You’d see critters from time to time, the occasional skunk, or even a wild turkey wandering around looking for a date (they do this thing with their voice and their wings and stuff, imagine Gregory Hines putting some moves on).

But I moved.

It was a trade-off. I have an office now, with a door and everything. New furniture. It’s nice. I have a place to hang pictures. Here’s the first one I put up. It’s puppies.

Everybody loves puppies. People will sit in my office and think “awwww, what a nice guy he must be. Puppies”. And then I will negotiate them out of their ridiculous position on indemnification of intellectual property ownership and that will be that.

I have a window too. Not as big a window, but a window. Here’s what it looks like outside my window.

Nice dumpster.

Meh. The crepe myrtles help.

This office used to belong to the guy who was president of my Division when I started here 15 years ago. Another guy, who has worked here longer than that, was offered this office a year ago, but he passed on it. “Too many ghosts in there” he said. “Bad ju-ju”.

I don’t have any bad memories to associate with it, so no big for me. But that big dark stain in the carpet has me kinda curious. Explosive gastric distress, induced by fear? Or excessive blood loss from a severe ass-chewing? I’m not sure. Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been a good thing.

It’s funny how we get used to places, and how unsettled we feel when those places change. Packing is a chore. I’m sure unpacking is too, but I’ve been putting that off for a bit. I unpack when I need something, like a stapler.

I don’t really have a complaint, and where I sit and do my job is a nicer place than most people have. I know we have some cube-dwellers here and there (or pirates out on ships at sea doing, I don’t know, pirate things). So I should be gracious about it (although those of you who are getting to know me know I will rub it in if you tell me where you work sucks).

I got four walls. A desk, a phone.

And puppies.

It ain’t a bad gig, not at all.


The dumpster is a good reminder to Dave that he's come a long way.


Roughing It Archives

And that is why, my friends, with heavy heart I am here to report that The Weirdness (Virgin Records), the first Stooges album in over 30 years…is pretty lame. All the pieces were in place, except for James Williamson, the shit-hot guitarist from the latter days of Raw Power. The lineup from the first two albums had reconvened in 2003 to play some sporadic gigs. Frontman Iggy, Ron Asheton on guitar, brother Scott “Rock Action” Asheton on drums and punk rock journeyman Mike Watt on bass to fill in for the late Dave Alexander. (“Thunderbroom”…fuck yeah! If I need to talk up Watt’s contributions with the Minutemen or fIREHOSE, you’re reading the wrong freakin’ spiel.) All reports were positive, and for those of us not lucky enough to catch one of these rare shows, the Live in Detroit DVD left no doubt that a few guys old enough to be your grandpa can still kick it out as easily as flipping you the bird.

So what happened? Age? Maturity? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I point my accusing finger at what I perceive to be the two biggest problems The Weirdness presents us with…exhibit A: Iggy’s supremely stoopid lyrics. Not that anyone ever mistook him for Bob Dylan, but back on the original triptych of Stooges majesty the simplicity and bluntness of his words had a certain kind of street poetry that complemented the thuggish force of the players backing said words. And I know, I know…a 60 year old wine connoisseur living in Miami is gonna have a different outlook than a 23 year old drug-fueled miscreant hanging on the fringes of Detroit in 1970. But to these ears it just seems like the man’s been drawing on his status as legendary “elder statesman” as lyrical inspiration since way before the Stooges reunion. Don’t get me wrong…I truly don’t think it’s an ego thing, and he genuinely seems to be a pretty cool guy, and he sure as shit runs circles around men one third his age when he’s on the stage. (Seriously…I don’t have that kind of energy now, and if I have half of it at that age, I’ll realize I’m a goddam superhero and it’ll take 30 federal marshals to bring me down as I storm the gates of Skywalker Ranch to piss on George Lucas’ grave screaming, “Jar-Jar Binks? Jar-Jar fucking Binks?!?”) It just seems forced now, like he’s trying too hard.

Was it really necessary to print a hand-scrawled note on the CD of 1993’s American Caesar to let us know that it’s “no formula shit” and “individual expression”? Am I wrong in thinking that “Free & Freaky” on The Weirdness, extolling living life as such, Iggy-style, was expressed so much more directly (and more effectively) in 1970 on “Loose”? Are songs like “ATM” and “Mexican Guy” (who stole his lady) supposed to mean something to us, or maybe resonate with the youth of today? When he lets us know “My Idea of Fun” “is killing everyone” are we supposed to believe that? The Stooges were a nihilistic pack of button-pushers with a gutter’s-eye view of the world, and you could believe they’d push back if pushed into a corner, but killing for fun? Call me reasonable and all, but it seems a juvenile subject to me without a more Misfits-style creativity behind it. Maybe it’s got something to do with Iggy’s professed love of Slipknot, who I’ve had limited exposure to, but I still don’t give a shit about them seeing as how I’m not 14. Maybe I’ve misinterpreted the song. Only heard it a few times, as well as the rest of the album. I’ve tried to give it a chance, I really wanted to like the goddam thing, after all.

On “Trollin’” Iggy sees a hot chick and tells us, “my dick is turning into a tree”…great and all, I mean, hooray for boners. (Really…if the time comes where I have to rely on a little blue pill, so be it, but three cheers for waking up with wood almost every day.) I’ll say it again while reiterating that I still have a certain respect for the dude: it comes off as forced, like he’s trying too hard to prove Mr. Free & Freaky doesn’t give a shit. Get a grip, man, we already admire you. Spice it up some, dream up a story about a bum you see from your window and how he came to be in that cardboard box. Something. Anything other than constantly reminding us what an individual you are in unimaginative ways.

Ugh. Big disappointments take a lot out of me. We’ll have to continue this next week with exhibit B and Part 2…

Maxwell is accepting paypal donations to ease his pain and shock

Anyway, as if it isn’t hard enough to find smokers in this Godforsaken land of health freaks, everyone out there wants to travel. I have personally seen enough of this large ball of dirt to know that I don’t like most of it, and that’s why I stay in one place. Why on earth would anyone want to leave a sunny coastal strip in California to go and visit exotic places and see exotic people? Hell, if you really want to see that kind of thing just drive to L.A. There’s all sorts of exotic down there, and it won’t even cost you plane fare to go. I can name several places where one can even get some really exotic food poisoning right here in town from some of our really exotic restaurants.

That’s not enough, though, for the modern sophisticate. I read through the goofy profiles and it seems like everyone is all ready at any moment’s notice to pack up all their junk and jet off to some hellhole or another. They list all the wild and crazy places they’ve been or would like to see, which I assume is supposed to be impressive but really just gives me a damn headache. I can only imagine loafing around one day doing my favorite thing (meaning nothing) when potential girlfriend destroys my precious tranquility with the idea of flying to Papua New Guinea for two weeks, dragging me away from my house and my stuff. Folks, there’s a reason why I live where I live. I chose it. I like it. Seeing it every day doesn’t bother me a bit, any more than eating a medium rare steak with a baked potato every night for a year would not grow tiresome. I know what I like and I stick to it. Is that boring? Yes, but I am rarely in for any unpleasant surprises.

I find the travel destinations even more odd. I can understand London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, or any old major city in a post-industrial nation. Those places have cool buildings and museums and stuff. If I had a teleporter I’d go check them out, but sitting in a metal tube for a twelve hour nic fit is not my idea of a good time. The four hours it took to get to Chicago were pretty uncomfortable, but I managed. Tripling that sounds like a very bad time. But I digress, as always. Since Western Europe now has a “been there, done that” air about it, everyone wants to go somewhere new, at least if we define new as a rare vacation spot. So I constantly see things like “I would love to go to West Africa” or “I’m about to go to Guatemala for a week!”

Eh, no thanks.

What is there to see in those places? Nature and poor people. As far as nature goes, there is
plenty of it right here in the States. We have big trees and a huge coast in California. If you like mountains, we have Colorado. If you’re looking for something more interesting, there’s this little place called Yellowstone. Ever heard of it? I hear it’s quite nice.

As for poor people, I’m just going to be un-p.c. and say that there is nothing cool about them. When I say poor people, I don’t mean those neighbors of mine who stack six people into a two bedroom apartment. They at least have electricity and television like civilized people, and every few weeks I even see them grilling burgers by the pool. The poor people I’m talking about are the ones who live in houses made out of old tires and dung, no teeth in the family and a life expectancy of thirty. That’s not interesting. It’s depressing. The fact that they might worship rocks and hold ceremonies presided over by a sacred goat does not reveal some mystical relation with nature, it just means that they’ve never seen the inside of a classroom or even a book. When wealthy Americans go over to places like that and pay the locals a few sheets of funny money, it isn’t honoring them or helping them out as much as it is rubbing their noses in their own poverty. The only time that poor people are really interesting is when they’re stealing your wallet.

I like to keep my ugly Americanism right here at home, where I can be unpleasant to my fellow Americans. They seem to understand it and return the favor in kind. Now that I think about it, I guess it’s no wonder I don’t have a girlfriend.

Philbrick just got his money back from Harmony.com

Secular Monk Archives

Back in 2002, I got a wild hair about doing some home recording. There is and was a lot of information on the Web about how to do it right and economically. Well, I had issues with them.

First, I couldn’t afford to buy any of the equipment they suggested. I couldn’t afford a new sound card, an external input device or really nice recording software like Acid or Pro Tools. Secondly, not only could I not afford to set up a real cheap home studio, I didn’t really want to either. I wanted to see if I could overcome the obstacles given the equipment I had on hand.

What did I have: A computer with the regular accoutrements (a Celeron 400MHz, so no barn burner, though this was 2002), an Ibanez Gi0 guitar, a Dean Playmate bass, a Fender Bullet Reverb practice amp, and Cool Edit Pro multi-track recording software (I also have a Rogue bass amp, but didn’t use it).

So, I had tools. Not great tools, but enough to accomplish the task. For those who are interested in playing around with multi-track recording and don’t have any real experience, Cool Edit is a neat program to use. It’s very user friendly and easy to learn. Cool Edit is now Adobe Audition, but the old 2.1 version is still readily available. There are lots of free audio editing programs out there though. Audigy is great and is something I use now because CE 2.1 won’t install on XP.

Before I tackled the problem of getting sound into the computer, I decided I needed to find a way to lay down a drum track. It was important to me to get the most realistic sounding drums I could without paying any money for software. I wound up running across a program called DRUMS. I used the demo version (linked at the bottom of the article). It’s a VERY time consuming process to lay down a drum track. BUT, I did discover the ability to copy and paste bars, which sped up the process a bit. If you’re doing a pretty simple song, it’s not that hard. I couldn’t imagine doing something really complex though.

(Editor’s note: I have searched for the DRUMS program again recently and found it. But the newer version is sub-par compared to the version I used 5 years ago. The drums sound far more sampled and not full. Sucks.)

So, I had a drum program, the ability to record the drums (if you have the demo version, you have to play the drum track and record it using an audio recorder on your computer; with the full version you can export directly to WAV), so I decided to play around with the program a bit. I found some neat sample drum beats and quickly laid down a simple pattern with repetitive fills. I used it as a click track to play guitar along with it, and decided I should attempt to lay down guitar and bass tracks.

This created a completely new dilemma. The little Fender has an export port. And I tried to run a line from the “External Speakers” jack into the computer’s Aux. Input and Microphone input. However, I can only assume that the amp’s line must act like a pre-amp or something, because I could never get a usable guitar sound going this route. There was either too much feedback or the signal was not loud enough to be usable.

I had to think around this problem. How could I get a signal that sounds as good as the amp (and that little Fender amp does sound good) into the computer? Then I started looking at the computer’s microphone (the standard one that came with the computer). And I had a moment of inspiration. “What if I mic’d the amp?” I thought.

Having a little bit of an idea of acoustics (not much though), I wound up taking a large box and putting the amp into it. I further put two pillows and a quilt in the box to absorb any echo and put the mic barely in the box at a corner opposite the amp. This setup, as white-trash fabulous as it may be, worked quite well. I was able to lay down guitar and bass tracks this way and synch it all up in Cool Edit. Took about an hour to do all this (after the drum track was already done). I am not linking to this experiment because it sucks donkey balls. But it proved to me the process was sound.

Now I was cooking. I might have been cooking with an MRE heater, but it was still a form of cooking. I was at a point where I had to decide what I wanted to record. It had to be something simple (because I can play nothing but), but something I liked also. After a few different ideas, I decided on Some Kind of Hate by The Misfits. I chose the song primarily because the drum track was very easy.

Regardless of ease on the drums, it was still a time-consuming process. The demo version of DRUMS does not allow you to save, so if you commit to it, you have to do the whole song at once. I believe it took me two or three hours to get it down. But once I did, the rest of the process was pretty easy.

I did this all at night, after the wife and kids went to bed … this is an important note for later.

After setting all the equipment up (pretty quick when you leave everything prepped, it took maybe 10 minutes) I recorded the guitar track. It’s important to note that you have to keep track of your input and outputs (via your computer’s audio control panel). ‘Cause if you want to use the drum track as a click track, you cannot have to mute the record portion of that input, which I think would be wave. The mic would be Line In or microphone, depending on what all inputs you have.

Amazingly, I got the bass done in one take and it only took two or three takes to get the guitar down. Simple songs are lovely.

I mixed down the guitars and drums and came up with a good sounding instrumental track. I normalized everything and that was a mistake. The short little solo in the middle lost it’s punch and I had to play around with crap for a while to get it right. I finally got it punched up enough, but it never sounded quite right after that. I also added some Chorus and a little more distortion to the track via Cool Edit’s effects. CE’s chorus effects are awesome. I can think of very little music that can’t benefit from Chorus.

Now came a new problem … vocals. I have a real Nady mic I was going to try to use, but because of the bad sound card, I could get nothing useable. What I did not think of, and, in retrospect I wish I had, was to run the vox through my practice amp. But, I wound up singing dry directly into the computer mic. This didn’t work out very well. Singing through the amp I could have “heard” myself better, not so this way. Plus, it was about 2 or 3 in the morning and I was trying to keep my voice down. So the vox turned out like crap.

I tried a lot of things to punch up the vox, but regardless of what I did, I couldn’t fix the fact that I was flat and lacked dynamic range because I wasn’t singing at my normal volume. So I turned down the vox in the mix and let it ride.

Here is the finished product.

The sad thing is, I did this to prove that I could get a decent-sounding recording given pretty standard equipment that any musician would have. After proving that to myself, I haven’t done any more recording and I wish I would.

Cullen is working hard on a new cover of The Final Countdown.

In 1987, I met Andrew. Well, I formally met Andrew. We went to the same schools all our lives, and he was just a year ahead of me in school. Andrew was the youngest of eight children, and he commanded your attention as only the youngest of eight could—vibrantly, loudly, a whirlwind running through your life. We met at a moment where I needed something to sweep the past away, and he did. “Come on, let’s go,” he’d say, and off we went. Canoing, hiking the Audubon sanctuary, serving dinner to homeless people at the Pine Street Inn, where he was a volunteer. Sometimes, he’d fight with his parents and walk to my house, and he’d smoke a joint on the way. Although my parents knew, they didn’t judge, and we’d sit on my porch for hours and talk and talk and talk. We watched movies on the couch. He promised to buy my sister a nursery school when she grew up. And we listened to dozens of albums. But the one we always came back to was his favorite album, Tea For the Tillerman, by Cat Stevens.

It is entirely possible that Andrew sang “On the Road to Find Out” to me the night we met. He certainly sang it enough. I do know that he felt the need to handcuff me to his couch the first time I heard the album straight through. We went back to this album time and time again, first because he refused to believe I’d never heard it before, and later because it made us all so happy. People often say they listened to an album everyday, but we did. We listened to this album, or parts of this album every.single.day. It defined our friendship, our path in the world. It organized our memories into three minute sound bites and a jangling guitar. And it wasn’t just the two of us in this adventure; we had a gaggle of people always hanging around talking, going for rides in the car for ice cream or mozzarella sticks. We were like our own little society, with its own rules and cultural touchstones. I swear, Andrew likened himself to Valentine Michael Smith sometimes, and I swear, sometimes, we believed it, too. The purple Pied Piper of Norwood. Everyone who knew him loved him. And loving him meant loving Cat Stevens with him.
Then, school starts. More influences around. Like all summers, this one ended, too. He graduated, got into heavier drugs and weirder philosophies. I remember having a terrible conversation with a friend after a particularly erratic spell, and telling him, “we’re going to be at his funeral if he keeps this up.” Then he moved away. But, some people just become permanent fixtures in your heart, as much for their imperfections as their good qualities.

In 2003, I lost Andrew. He committed suicide in his San Francisco apartment. My friend reminded me of my premonition, and I collapsed at the thought that I had been right all those years ago, and he was gone. Really, really gone. Since 2003, there has been one fewer star in the sky, and it has only been just recently that I could listen to Cat Steven’s again without crying. But, it’s June again, and it wouldn’t be the same without these songs.

Courtney is listening to the robins' song, saying not to worry

Let Me Make You A Mix Tape Archives

Issue Three: Into the Sun

After the landing lesson, Fence and I race through the streets of the city in a Thunderbird he got from god knows where. Every day, he picks me up in a different car, and most nights, he takes me home in a different one as well. We'll be at the end of a lesson, or the Sun will start peaking over the tops of the buildings, and he'll say, “Wait here. I'll be back,” and in moments the city streets are filled with the roar of an engine, the squeal of tires, and there's Fence, careening through a tight corner to pick me up in the automobile du-jour.

“Nice one tonight,” he says as he pulls up in the black convertible, top down. I hop over the door and into the passenger seat.

“Red leather?” I ask proddingly. He just smiles.

“You know, you're the kind of guy my mother told me to look out for.” It's not the first time I've alerted him to that fact.

“S'okay. I'm the kind of guy every mother tells her children to look out for.” It wasn't the first time he'd said that.

Now, with gravity back in control, the wind through my hair is more of a nuisance than a novelty. I try to grab all the loose strands I can and hold them together, but at least a few invariably get away, and I finally give up the whole mess, letting it whip wildly as we go faster, faster down the highway.

“Slow down Fence. Got somewhere to be?”

“It's almost seven.”

“What?” I look down at my watch. Six forty-five. “Motherfucker! I had no clue...”

He points toward the foothills looming in front of us, black silhouettes against the night sky. “Sun's going to be creeping over any minute now. You just haven't seen it. It won't matter if we're a couple of minutes late.”

“Dammit Fence!” I scream, trying to amplify my voice against the roar of the engine and the enraged wind. “You know I owe everything I have—my entire life—to Walter Ponchus. If he gets caught doing this—we're fucked. All of it's fucked. Can't you understand that?”

“I understand, I just don't think you're being realistic. So what if you get in a little late? So what if Ponchus gets caught? He's gotten out of worse jams—you know that from experience. That man can lie his way out of any difficult situation, and he'd have no problem with this.”

“That doesn't mean we should act like what he's doing for us isn't a big deal!”

“Dana, listen. All this training, you have to remember it was sanctioned—don't even start, you know I won't tell you by whom—but what that means is that, for the most part, you and I have carte blanche. I could take you and leave the country and the first guard who decided to tell someone about it would end up either crazy or dead or both, and nobody else would say a word.”

“And I have a problem with that. Just because you and I can do this, just because we have some kind of power, doesn't mean that innocent people need to get hurt to preserve it. Isn't that what you were telling me just a few minutes ago?”

“So,” he chuckles, “is that the lesson you learned from the accident that landed you in the slammer?”

“Fuck you.”

He slows down as we near a hairpin turn; now the Sun is beginning to peek over the tops of the hills, casting an iridescent glow on the dew of the morning world.

“I think you missed the point. I didn't want you to hurt people because I didn't want you causing a scene, not because I believe you have some moral obligation to not to harm to others. I couldn't give two shits about who would have been crushed under the two tons of granite you liberated from the side of that building. What I do care about is having to answer questions.”

“Taking responsibility?”

“Exactly. Dana, we can't risk it. There are already too many people out there who know about the creatures of the All-line. The Hunters—they even want to kill us. You saw that first hand.”

“Yeah, and I also saw what you did to him,” she said, thinking of the night Fence pulled her from the bushes, his jacket and hands slick with blood, an unidentifiable lump no more than five feet from him, thick, red blood spreading like a universe into the grass it sat on.

“He was young. And alone. We aren't invincible Dana. We may be immortal, but we aren't invincible. We can be crippled.”

“I know, I know,” I say flippantly, knowing it. “ 'There are some things worse than death.' “

He looks over from the driver's seat with disgust. “You don't know shit. If you knew what a life worse than death felt like, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. But some day—and I promise you this—you will find out.”

“Sounds like a threat.”

“It isn't, it's a...”

“A promise, yeah yeah, I know. Look, can we just be quiet the rest of the way? I guess part of me is still too human to understand how you could look at people as so expendable, as such...such a liability.”

He nods, cranes his neck to pop it, and concentrates on the road. I lay my head back, and for the first time in a long time, wish I could have a drink. I close my eyes and put my fingers to the left side of my neck, feeling for the two indentions. Perfectly healed, just slightly concave. You couldn't see them at all. You would only notice them if you felt my neck. My reminder. My kiss from Fence.

That first night, when he asked if I wanted to live forever, I told him, “Hell no.” I told him I wasn't even sure if I wanted to live through tomorrow. And his face, his mouth, drew down into a deep frown, an expression of sadness that looked so feigned it was laughable. He couldn't care less about whether I lived or died. And I found it kind of funny. Almost a turn on.

No, Fence was more disappointed that I hadn't said yes because me saying no made me a harder sell. And Fence was not at all interested in playing the salesman this time around, even though vampires are good salesmen. The fucking best. Some of the richest people in the world—vampires. Their cunning, their skill, their love for power—that's what makes these people such good salesmen. Some of them are better than others, of course. Most vampire men work for car dealerships. The really good ones work for used car dealerships. The women—retail. The vampire's curse—the one you inherit once bitten? It's not that you're allergic to sunlight. It isn't that wooden stakes or crosses can end your life. It isn't a lust for love. The vampire's curse is buyer's remorse. Anytime anyone's ever sold you something you didn't want, anytime you've ever regretted buying something from the Home Shopping Network the day after seeing a midnight infomercial—that was probably a vampire selling you that. You've always heard the saying, “It takes a special kind of person to be a” and enter any occupation there. Well, it takes a special kind of person to be a truly gifted salesman. And that kind of person is a vampire.

So when Fence saw that I wasn't just going to come along peacefully, he knew he had work to do. Normally the kind of thing that turns a vampire on, unless that work gets in the way of a much much bigger job. Not really a question I've answered yet.

That first night, Fence asked if I had a place for him to wash off. And when he picked me up with one arm out of that bush and smiled that smile of his, I couldn't wait for him to get back to my place for a wash.

He tells me later, because I don't remember (the last of the vodka had kicked in), that the second I stood up, I collapsed to the ground again and tore a hole in my jeans. My knee bled pretty bad, he said. He said it was all he could do, waiting until getting me back home.

The next morning, I woke up with little knowledge of the night before and a headache that seemed to get less painful by the moment. Hell, I didn't even notice the stains until later that night, when I went to sit on the couch for coffee.

But there on the couch was a large, circular bloodstain. Right where my neck was laying when I woke up, not remembering how I got home or even who I was with the night before. I checked the apartment, but it was...

“Empty,” Fence says, jolting me out of my reminiscence. We've arrived at the warehouse, but Ponchus didn't greet us. And now, Fence is worried. Which is bad. Because Fence never gets worried.

Fence has just come out of the warehouse. He insisted I stay in the car, even though anyone seeing either one of us would spell disaster. “There's no one in there,” he says as he jumps from the ramp to the ground with a 'thud.'

“What? Where's Walter?”

Fence just looks off into the east, watching the rising Sun grow larger by the second.

“If he's not here, something's wrong.”

I open the door to the car, close it gently, and get out to go stand next to Fence. “Hell, I know the way. Can you get me in the door?”

Fence takes off his sunglasses and looks me in the eye. “Honey, if Walter isn't here, it's not because he caught the flu, or had to call in sick because he put his dog to sleep. If Walter ain't here, it's because some shit has gone down.”

And then he says something I'll never forget.

“You think too much. I assume you always have. Stop that shit. It's not worth anything where we're going.”

Then he grabs my hand and leads me up the ramp.

Our footsteps echo in the great, shadowy expanse of the warehouse as he leads me quickly across the concrete floor toward the wall at the other end. We walk for at least thirty seconds before we reach an inconspicuous sheet of the corrugated steel that makes up the wall of this place. Fence takes a few steps back and regards it with what looks like feigned curiosity.

“Fence, what the...”

But before I can finish the thought, I'm in his arms, then in the air, and as I hurtle toward the steel wall, my eyes closed, I wonder what I've gotten myself into, but before my head can hit anything harder than the space around it, I crash onto a slick metal floor.

I keep my eyes closed until I hear Fence say, “Get up honey. Smells like Death in here. And that's never a good thing.”

***

Jake McAllister sat at the desk in his fifth-floor loft with his head in his hands. The place was dark, save the lamp on his desk. The vast concrete home was sparsely furnished—a table that would fit four, an old leather couch Jake found on the side of the road one day on the way home from work, a TV with a split down the screen. Jake's bookshelves and his stereo were the only things he was really concerned with. That and his work.

Sitting on the desk were all manner of records—crumpled papers, napkins with wild, drunken chickenscratch on them, cardboard coasters from bars with a couple of names, maybe a phone number.

“It doesn't make sense Cassie.”

Jake's golden retriever looked at him curiously from her large, plush floor bed.

“Recruitment—it's through the roof. New ones every day. And they're actively recruiting—it's the first time since 1865 that they've done that.”

Cassie laid her head down on the floor, as if in thought.

“Fence Ranier—more active than ever. Hunters have sighted him all over the place, but they won't touch him after the...incident.”

Flashes of the police photographs shot through Jake's mind. A young hunter, didn't know what he was getting into, went up against Fence Ranier. The hunter—there were probably still parts of him fertilizing the park soil.

“So is this the way it begins? The final war? Can't be—not enough fireworks. But somethings going on...”

The dog lifted up its head, panted for a second, and then jumped up to lick its master in the face.

“Christ Cassie,” sighed Jake McAllister as he communed with his friend. “Why the hell did Dad leave me this inheritance?”

I first wrote about Foer toward the beginning of the year, when I labeled his second novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, one of the best books I read in 2006. Well, I just finished his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, and found myself nearly as impressed.

Extremely Loud takes place post-9/11 and uses that event as a backdrop for the story of Oscar, a nine year old who lost his father in the attacks. I wrote at the time that the novel was "a brutal, emotional, exhausting book." Meanwhile, Everything Is Illuminated uses the Holocaust as its backdrop, interweaving three narratives which slowly tie together throughout the book, with the atrocities of genocide asserting themselves as the reader moves deeper into the novel.

In other words, Foer's two novels have used two of history's most well-known events as their backgrounds, which is pretty damn ambitious, to say the least. What's particularly impressive about this, though, is that Foer manages to use both of these events to exquisite effect, wringing small and personal stories out of them that help to illustrate why these two historical events were so horrifying. He manages to boil them down so they no longer loom over us, imposing, casting their too-long shadows, and instead become stories about humans—small, fragile, individuals whose lives have been irrevocably altered by these massive events. He takes these historical happenings—which, for those of us (like myself) who were not directly affected by the events, often become so massive, so terrible, so legendary that the true horror of what happened is lost, or becomes nothing more than a numb, almost surrealistic memory—and he distills them down into brutal, haunting stories that encapsulate the broader narrative. His two novels have taken these incredible events and shrunk them from murals on the sides of buildings to Polaroids that we can hold in our hands, that we can see in one long, lingering glance, whose detail we can study.

For the Holocaust, no longer are we talking about millions of Jews murdered, but we are talking about one man witnessing the cruel, efficient killing of his family and his choice to instigate his own murder rather than continue to bear that pain. Rather than trying to wrap our minds around 3,000 people murdered in the collapsing World Trade Center towers, we instead witness one nine year old frantically scouring New York City in an attempt to better understand his murdered father, and we watch as his family crumbles and as he suffocates under the hidden knowledge of his father's last words, his last messages to his family as he faced death.

In the end, I think this is the only true way to understand these events. The scale is too immense. It's too much pain, too much horror, to truly understand and absorb, to calculate and to file, to make sense of, to categorize and then continue on with life. You have to discard the sheer size of it and then, to really understand, take out that one Polaroid, that small snapshot that discards 99% of the image but ultimately allows you to focus on the 1% that contains all the important details—all the truths and pains and devastations—and stare at it, study and learn it, memorize it and slowly, slowly, begin to comprehend. Begin to absorb. Begin to grasp, through that small scale representation, the true size of what happened—the true horror, the true incomprehensibility.

I don't think we're made to truly understand large scale events and concepts. We need them small, manageable. In this, art can give so much. Art can create those small pictures, it can take impossibly complex emotions and boil them down to their most elemental truth, allowing them to be grasped and studied. Ultimately, all these large-scale horrors are nothing more than a collection of small-scale tragedies, of personal horrors, of small, individual, heartbreaking stories. By understanding one, we can understand them all—perhaps with many of the details lost or obscured, but with the emotional truth stark and bright, bared. With his two novels, this is what Jonathan Safran Foer has done, and they are monumental achievements. They're something to be read, experienced, absorbed.

His two books are two Polaroids—there, waiting, ready to be picked up and examined if you want to know, if you really want to see the picture.
They're not pretty or beautiful, they're certainly not comforting, but from where I stand, they're crucial.


Sounds better than another book about Woodstock.


Lo-Fi Archives

Dad was never very talkative. He tended to marry women who were instead. All he really had to say about the dissolution of his marriage to my mother was that he loved her, and he loved my brother and me, and it wasn't our fault, but he just couldn't live with her any more. My brother could drive and had his own car, and had his own priorities. Wandering up the coast and free diving for abalone was something Dad and I did together, on those alternating weekends when I was his responsibility.

One of our favorite places to go was a little cove a bit north of Año Nuevo. We'd park the van and dig out our wetsuits. Hiding ourselves from the passing traffic on Highway One, we'd scrunch, pull, tug and yank them on up to our waists. We'd put on wetsuit booties, gather up our fins, masks, snorkels, mesh bags and dive knives, and start the long trudge through the dunes and out to the sea.

Within a few yards of the highway, the dirt and gravel gave way to a pebbly, tan sand. Ice plant grew on either side of the narrow, then thorny brush and thin green grasses, all ruffled by the wind coming from the Pacific. In summer, the marine layer would push wet, cold fog up against the coast like a sopping blanket. Even when the surfers were in springsuits, the water was cold enough to make your feet numb in minutes.

We'd walk in about three-quarters of a mile to start, out through the tall dunes. Where the dunes opened up to the ocean, we'd occasionally run into a fisherman or two casting their lines into the surf for sunfish and perch. The path led back up the dunes, to a high bluff where we'd have to climb down to the cove. At the base of the cliff, we would finish gearing up and back into the ocean in our fins. We'd spend the next several hours bobbing around in the water, attempting to pry those wily but tasty mollusks away from the rocky bottom. Invariably, we would fail, and walk away with empty mesh bags.

After one fruitless trip, exhausted, cold, and wet, we were coming back up over the bluff when Dad stopped and put down his gear.

"Hmm," he said, "That's odd. That looks like bone."

Entwined in the roots, the wind had revealed a long, red-orange bone. Dad bent down and brushed away a little more sand, revealing the bone's end.

"Yep, that's a human femur," he said, straightening up. "We're going to need to call the police when we get back."

"Should we take it with us?" I asked, hoping that he'd say yes.

"No, let's not disturb anything. We'll let the cops sort it out."

The hike back went quickly. I usually complained about walking in the soft sand, wet, cold, and without a single abalone to show for our efforts, but not that day. We got back to the van and Dad retrieved his keys from the hide-a-key under the rear bumper. We headed down the coast to the nearest payphone, all the way back in Davenport.

I sat in the front seat of the van and played around with Dad's mascot, a Mr. T action figure Dad kept hanging on a cord on the dashboard, while he and the policeman stood next to the policeman's patrol car and talked. While they talked, the officer took a few notes on a clipboard sitting on the hood of his car with one hand, while he idly unsnapped and snapped the flap holding his service revolver in its holster.

Dad shook hands with the cop and headed back towards the van. I heard the officer say "Thanks for calling us, doc. Like you said, better safe than sorry."

Dad looked a little bemused. I asked him, "So what? What did the cop say?"

"Apparently, that was Mr. Sozinho."

"Who?"

"Portuguese fisherman. His family got permission to bury him there, about forty years ago," Dad said. He turned the key to turn on the van's glow plugs, then fired up the diesel. We sat there for a few minutes as the engine warmed up. "He said they get called out every couple of years, whenever the winter storms have been bad. Wind blows off enough sand for the bones to surface."

The next weekend I was at Dad's, we headed back up the coast to our favorite dive spot. This time we didn't take our dive gear. Dad had dug a couple of shovels out of his garage, and we hiked out with those on our shoulders.

Up on the bluff we stopped, and Dad looked around a bit until he found Mr. Sozinho again. A few feet up there was a patch of dune grass and wild buckwheat. We carefully cut away a section of the plants and put them aside, and started digging in the loose sand of the dune.

For the next hour and a half, the only sounds were the surf, the wind, and our shovels. When Dad thought the hole was deep enough, he said, "Okay, that's enough digging. Let's go get Mr. Sozinho."

Dad assessed the bones we could see. "Okay, that's his left leg there. His feet should be towards the beach and his head should be towards the path." We cleared away the sand, starting at the bones we could see, like archeologists, on our hands and knees, exposing Mr. Sozinho's weathered bones. As we found them, Dad would name the bones; femur, tibia, fibula, a few metatarsals, "Hmm, looks like he had arthritis. That must have hurt. We're definitely missing some though." Moving up, pelvis, vertebrae, ribs, radius, ulna, humerus. Finally to the mandible and skull, all completely defleshed, bare, without a recognizable personhood, but still and utterly what is at the core of all of us.

Once we were satisfied that we'd found all there was to find, we arranged Mr. Sozinho in his new home. Dad put his skull in last, empty eye sockets facing out over the sea. "There, that ought to do it, for a few more decades at least."

Again, all was quiet, except for the wind, the sea, and our shovels. Once the hole was filled, we did our best to replace the plants . With luck the sand would be anchored, and Mr. Sozinho might get a longer slumber this time before curious hikers or industrious beachcombers disturbed him again.

Dad and I went out to the cove at least once, sometimes twice a month for the next three years. When the mood struck us, we stopped and spent a few silent minutes together with Mr. Sozinho, out on his bluff. And even though we never in all that time managed to catch any abalone, I didn't complain.

C. Charman was never really fishing for abalone, anyway

You May Feel A Slight Sting Archives

Having returned from Texas last week with a buttload of BBQed brisket, I've been trying lots of things with it and last night, just on a lark, I tried some stuff and I came up with something awesome.

BBQed Brisket Stew
1 quart tomato sauce (might I suggest this?)
1 lb BBQed brisket, shredded with 2 forks
3 Tbsp brown sugar
2 Tbsp rooster sauce
1 1/2 tsp black pepper
1 tsp salt

Put everything in a sauce pot, and ... heat it up. Everything's already cooked. The brown sugar and rooster sauce is gonna make that tomato sauce taste like the best bbq sauce you've ever had. Now, theoretically you could serve this as a sandwich (and it'd be really good) or just as a stew, but serve it over a big plate of cheese grits, my friends, and you will transcend.

I don't have a good BBQ brisket recipe -- I'm strictly NC pork -- but maybe our good friend Uberchief will be able to enlighten us.

As for the metal, I don't have anything this week, because ... Cullen gave me a good idea. Starting next week, I'm going to post my top 25 albums of all time, not to show him up, but because I think it'll show the breadth of metal today.

So suck on that.

Dishful of Metal Archives

Why do we Americans think the world/our government/oil companies owe us cheaper petroleum? I would rather have cheaper milk, beer, wine and water.

Why does the coffee smell like feet tonight?

Our country is doomed because even I know who Paris Hilton is. Rock stars, actors, athletes and spoiled, rich kids are not heroes and role models-they really contribute little, or nothing to society and we should treat them, accordingly.

Computers make nothing easier in the end, but I want to mount a web cam on my dog when I’m away at sea. I think I’d like to give him his own website, but he follows my wife around everywhere and she’d shut that shit down the first time she opened the bathroom door after a shower to find him staring at her. Come to think of it, he licks his balls entirely too much, anyway.

I’ve never met my boss and probably never will. Does anyone else out there have a boss they’ve never met, or am I just a freak of corporate nature? I talked to him on the phone once before I was hired, but that really doesn’t count, does it? The same goes for my peers. Out of the 120, or so people in my department, I’ve only met about 15 of them. Most of them, I will never see, or even speak to. Worse, I spend my half my life working and living with only 7-10 other people. It really sucks when we run out of stories with 3 weeks left in the hitch.

I would go absolutely mad without the Internets. Suicide-resistant (not proof) toilets are manufactured and sold to prisons-look it up…not that I’m contemplating the “Big Flush”, or anything.

Hurricanes-
Looking out the nearest porthole, I can’t see any, but I know they’re out there, coming. Over the years, I’ve been hammered by 8 of the nasty bitches. Which brings up the point that hurricanes should always be named after women, from my personal perspective. It seems more fitting, especially if you consider my ex-wife.

Finally, there can be no greater buzzkill for me as a writer than to realize, Oh shit! My deadline approaches, which is why you get random 4am thoughts, surreptitiously written while on shift, hoping nobody notices me scratching my head and swearing under my breath about writer’s block. Come to think of it, I’m always scratching my head and swearing under my breath at work, so I’m probably in the clear.

Time to feed the mermaids…

Any Port in the Storm Archives

Somewhere out there is someone who hasn't read the series, who looks down their nose at such adults as I who get excited over a "children's book". To those who have opinions on this series but have yet to ever pick a book up, I implore you, please give it a try. Just a tiny taste. Go ahead, you'll like it. There's still time for you to start with the first book and make it to six before Deathly Hallows releases next month.

But today we are here to talk about The Half-Blood Prince. Book six in the seven book series that began with a boy finding out he was a wizard. The day I picked up that first book I was transfixed and transformed. JK Rowling tapped in to a well of creativity that is based on mythology and language and a marriage of a thousand years of imagination. Taking the best pieces of everything we might have known in a fairy tale and reworked it into an innovative and exciting set of characters and adventures that turned out to be the key to grabbing a whole new generation of kids and addicting them to reading.

Years anticipating this book and it didn't disappoint. Such hype surrounds the release of Harry Potter books, but it delivers. Progressively, with each book, the subject matter becomes darker and more adult. There is a war now, between good and evil. People are dying, there is blood, there is hatred. This isn't some happy little goodnight moon kid's book.

Rowling serves up a platter of twists and turns, new characters, and takes us on a path which leads to shock and disbelief. She has no problems continuing her flow from book 5 to here. All of the Harry Potter books have been page turners. Even at 652 pages, I was able to read this book in one weekend—would have been less if I hadn't slept.

If you recall, The Historian was of similar length and it took me decades (not really) to get through it. The difference between this and that is like the difference between Rosie O'Donnell and Kate Beckinsale.

In Half-Blood Prince Harry is finally taking on the role of the adult who knows he must face the ultimate evil, and he may just die. No more games, no more candy. Throughout this evolving darkness in Harry, the growing man, there also lies his strongest weapon: Love. As hokey as that is. And yeah, that's pretty hokey. Even Harry recognizes that. He has the love of friends and the love of a girl that's been waiting years for him to wake up and catch a clue. I liked the bits of romance. Between Ron and Hermione, their sweet tension and frustration. Between Harry and Ginny, their awakening and innocence.

Another change from previous books is Dumbledore. He is no longer an omniscient being, he has flaws and uncertainties. He might be wrong. That's something Harry has to cope with a well. Understanding his heroes don't know everything and he would have to learn some things on his own.

What it comes down to is this book finally dials it up a notch. Takes us, and the entire Hogwarts gang, to a new level of intensity. Everyone is forced to grow up when faced with such a tragedy that leaves the reader in tears, stunned, disbelieving.

Even now, I wonder if what I read is the truth of the matter. I have hope that there is a ruse, a hitch, a plan. It couldn't have happened like it seems, I'm sure.

Or maybe it did all happen exactly like it appeared. Any book that can keep me wondering for two years, anticipating what comes next with such baited breath, is a book of such wonderfulness that I just want to marry it.

This is the best book in the series. I fell in love with the first, was bored with the third, but an absolute junkie by book five.

I will be getting book seven at midnight when it releases and I will sit with coffee and read it through the night and bring you the review. I can't put into words my excitement over this FINALLY arriving.

Have I mentioned that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is coming out in theaters? In IMAX?? This is the summer of Potter and you need to get on board. Cross over to the dark side. You can do it. Really.


Everything's better in IMAX.


The Last Word Archives