THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMMMM

Have you ever woken up some morning humming a melody in your head that you can’t place? To make it worse you can remember the hook line and closing line but not all of the lyrics? I did this the other morning and went through every resource I could think of (and a few I hadn’t thought of before) and couldn’t find ONE reference for it. I found an odd word or two but not the whole phrase much less a similar tune. It seems, for the moment, the song has yet to be written and this disturbs me on a number of levels. It’s a little too sappy and “touchy-feely” to have come from my heretic brain. Am I doomed to show up on the talk show circuit blubbering about how I “found” myself one morning because of this stupid melody? (Hang on I have Oprah and Dr. Phil holding on both lines…) Anyone who knows me is painfully aware that I am no musician of any kind. I have been prevented by law from singing in several states, counties and cities or doing anything else remotely “musical”. Karaoke bars in the places without such a legal obstacle have been known to duct tape my mouth shut save a small slit for a straw so I can drink myself under the table with the rest of them. I have close friends who are professional musicians, songwriters and instrument makers who won’t let me anywhere near their equipment fearing I may dispatch irreparable harm to those things and render them useless junk…so where the hell did this song come from?! I have no unrequited love or relationships I wish had happened differently to lament. I tell my wife several times a day I love her and mean it without getting poetic about it. She’d think I’d been replaced by an alien for doing something that romantic even though I do love her that much. Besides, if I did it would be about as short and as caustic a poem as “Howl” was for Allen Ginsburg. If I wrote a song about her she’d either die laughing or finally get me that monogrammed straight jacket I’ve had my eye on for a while…either way it would somehow be a fitting gesture. I’m too old to be a rapper. I have no anarchistic agenda to promote or scream incoherently about at the top of my lungs, clubs have no stages big enough to hold a band anymore and the few who do have a pole in the middle of it these days…yet I can’t seem to get this song out of my head. My only fear about the tune is that I find out somewhere along the way that it isn’t original at all it was written by David Cassidy or someone like him of that period of time. That would suck in ways one could not imagine…no matter how medicated one got. What a world.

TRAVELS WITH YODA PART VII

Did you ever see that movie, more than a few years back, called Disney’s “The Kid” with Bruce Willis? For those of you who didn’t the brief summary is this. Willis plays a guy who is an “image consultant” who helps celebrities and other famous people repair their damaged images and he’s very good at it and made the big bucks for doing it. Over the course of a couple of evenings he sees some kid lurking about his house. When he tries to approach the kid one evening the boy runs away leaving behind a toy plane like Willis used to have when he was a boy about that age. The next morning Willis finds the boy inside his house rummaging around looking for his plane. It doesn’t take the two long to figure out that Willis is looking at himself at the age of eight or nine and both become dejected. The “boy” was everything Willis had spent his life trying to distance himself from. The boy was HUGELY disappointed to discover what he will become when he reaches Willis’ age and to top it off Willis didn’t become a pilot like the kid had hoped he would when he was an adult. This leads the two of them on a time warp/odyssey adventure to figure out how and why the “kid” suddenly appeared on his doorstep NOW and during which Willis has to re-live some of his less than pleasant moments growing up none of which seem to be the “key” for why all of this is happening (or are they?). In typical Disney fashion though it all ties together neatly at the end but I won’t tell you how it all plays out in case you actually want to watch it. Yesterday I had a similar moment and it sent a small shiver up my spine (proof I actually have a spine for all those doubters out there… and it’s bulletproof). Wendi, Yoda (actually Mr. Messenger Bag this time….I had a busy schedule) and I made various stops around the valley in search of confirmation that YES, I am still alive and NO, I am not certifiably crazy…yet. I’ve gotten to where I find perverse humor in listening to my doctor’s bicker amongst themselves about what I do and don’t actually have. It’s sort of a more expensive version of the “my dog’s bigger than your dog” we used to play as kids but instead of dogs its degrees. In any event…I found us all sitting in the lobby of my shrinks office waiting to get my meds twisted sideways for the month. We were sitting and having a fun conversation with a group of people about the wonders of “soul food” (one of my favorite types of food) and the grief they were giving to a relative who had just gotten here from Cuba and had yet to experience those delicacies when out of nowhere an office manager appears and lectured us all about having too much fun and being too loud and we needed to knock it off…apparently humor in a shrinks office is not allowed…it might lead to something healthy I guess. But that’s not where I was headed in this little rant anyways so... I had my back facing the “Magic Door” people go in and out of for their appointments to be cured of whatever mental midgetry they have been diagnosed as having. During all of the culinary good times conversation we were having a young boy of about eight or so came out from his appointment with his mother in tow and headed towards the door. I only caught him from behind and didn’t see his face. From the back he looked a lot like me at that age but, what caught my eye were his braces on his legs and the way he walked and I found myself going back in time myself. I don’t really remember how long I wore braces but I don’t think it was a terribly long time. I’m pretty sure I was out of them before Kindergarten or, at least, during that time. I remember mine were wood and leather with sheepskin padding. This kid’s were fiberglass with a camouflage print and nylon straps…very cool. I don’t know how long he’s been wearing them but it seems longer than I had to wear mine. He walked with a slight limp like I do and held one arm in a, somewhat, effeminate way in order to feel balanced when he walks (no doubt more so when he’s tired or physically fatigued). A trait that will cause many people to mistakenly assume he’s gay most or all of his life regardless of whether he really is or isn’t. Times have most definitely changed. When I was young my parents and our doctors were obsessed with having their children be as “normal” as possible to the public at large as quickly as possible. We were raised under the same expectations as everyone else was in the “real world” …just at an unnecessarily accelerated speed. In many ways we were driven harder to excel and be the best at whatever we did as well. Mediocrity or “average” was unacceptable and looked at with disgust. You couldn’t really hide my brother’s deafness but everyone did as best they could to ignore it. Many thought he just talked funny. My sister and I had our own crosses to bear in much more subtle ways it would seem to the outside world but the expectations were there none the less. “Normal” these days seems to come in a shiny new package with a see-through window for the whole world to look at what’s inside. “Transparency” is the new buzzword. Disabilities are now a fashion accessory to be displayed proudly in designer colors and patterns. Have a hangnail? Get a “Disabled” thingy for your car, I have one…and it embarrasses the hell out of me I need it! I saw that boy walking out that door into the heat and I couldn’t help but wonder why he was there. Was he there to learn how to cope with his disability and the cards dealt to him or was he there so they could make him feel better about having to try and lead a “normal” life after being told he couldn’t do this, that and the other thing from pretty much the day he was born when he kept falling down a lot? Are they medicating him into being normal or simply trying to dull his pain? Part of me wanted to walk out after him and say “Hey kid…I’ve been there and it’s going to be OK. Trust yourself NOW and you’ll be amazed at how well things come out for you by the time you get to my age.” But I’m not sure he’d really believe me nor would he have any reason to…no plane. I’m not even allowed to drive much less fly a plane, but I do have a collection of cool canes.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A JOURNAL AND A DIARY I find it interesting what people have to say or ask about some of the things I write in my postings. Some are genuine and some…not so much. Regardless of that the responses generally come in the form of a private e-mail these days rather than a public statement or question and some simply wait until they see me personally, either way it’s all good for me. There is very little in the way of a common connection for all of the statements and questions except for possibly one or two things. Many start out with something like “I’ve known you since DIRT was invented but I didn’t know (FILL IN THE BLANK HERE) about you…” which is only partly true. Very few still living have known me all of my life and even members of my own family haven’t really known me well (more on that later) during that period of time. The vast majority of you never even set eyes on me until 1968 or after that. I often get some version of “I knew you painted, drew, took pictures (whatever) but didn’t know you wrote” or “had Cerebral Palsy” etc. Similarly to the AMEX Black Card…anonymity has its privileges. Sometimes the things people don’t know about you allow you to stay under the radar and lead a normal life without someone feeling sorry for you unnecessarily and the writing can be judged on its own merits not because I would incorrectly be perceived as a “handicapped” person, which leads me to the title of this little trip down memory lane (or what there is left of it.) Someone has recently asked me (more than once) when did I start writing. The simple quick answer is…as soon as I learned how to write. I won the first of many writing contests in the second grade when I took State. I have since written articles and stories for more than two dozen publications and spoken or lectured at more places than I can imagine at one point or another in my life and I have two books still battling to get published as we speak. Like so many of us I started out with one of those spiral bound notebooks we always bought a bunch of at “Back to School” time or those black and white speckled “Composition” notebooks and kept them in the back of my binder to make notes about things that interested me and I didn’t want to forget or just wanted to find out more about. I would doodle from time to time about things that may or may not become a full on drawing or painting later and so on. Every now and then I would jot down the germ of an idea for a class project I was (more or less) supposed to be working on. I’ll confess right here and now…I seldom wrote anything to completion until no more than forty-eight hours before it was due, I liked the pressure…I know, I’m a sick fuck. (The fact that I never got anything less than a B is more embarrassing than ego boost…believe me) I continued on that way until college where, for some unknown reason, I felt the need to minimize what I carried around. So I went to an 8.5 X 5.5 version of the notebooks I had been using but still filled them with the random shit I always wrote. They were then (and still are), by definition, journals. I wouldn’t write a “diary” until several years later when I was going through my divorce with my first wife and there are major differences between “journals” and “Diaries”. Let me explain: A Diary is little more than a Stone Age Facebook . You’re likely to record such Earth shattering experiences as “Had a Chef Salad at Village Inn for lunch today…Yummy!” or fill it with teenage angst (regardless of our age) or outrage, not to mention semi-humorous social commentary. Something like “I saw Johnny kissing Sissy under the bleachers today, what a laugh!” or “I wasn’t allowed to go to the movies with Tommy because Mom & Dad said I was too young ”. As we grow older you write about how you weren’t allowed into the VIP section of some bar or nightclub last night even though you were the best looking person in the place, bought all the trendy drinks to the point you puked your guts out the next morning or…well…you get the picture In a Journal you’re more likely to record things like “I was driving down PCH through Big Sur yesterday and I stopped along the east side of the road where a great restaurant called Christina Mulevey’s used to be years ago. It’s, literally, just a stone’s throw down the hill from Henry Miller’s property up there on Partington Ridge Rd. I remember having a Chef Salad there a century ago with my parents on our way to…I don’t remember now where we were headed.” Or “I saw John kissing his secretary Sissy in the stairwell today again. I was amazed at how far down her pants his hands were this time.” The rest you can figure out for yourself. Journals help you remember whatever it is you want to remember. Diaries help you vent and discard certain thoughts, deeds and actions then forget them. Blogs, these days, can be a little of both with the boundaries severely blurred and not necessarily by intent. In so many ways we have blurred the edges of every aspect of our life. People do things like humorously refer to some quote they heard in life out of context and not give it a second thought. Things like “Banned in Boston” and yet if you ask them if you liked William S. Burroughs writing they wouldn’t know who you were talking about much less why his book “Naked Lunch” was banned in Boston in 1959 that lead to several obscenity trials for a variety of writers (including Henry Miller) who’s books had been published all over the world for years but couldn’t be published or read in the U.S. until the early sixties when they fought the laws that limited their freedom of speech (gee…where have I heard that recently?). Many of us can’t spell anymore we mis-quote, plagiarize and pontificate about things very few really have a handle on to begin with. Our perception of beauty is based on how much plastic is installed yet we demand people be “real”. We watch reality TV to laugh at how pathetic other people’s lives are and then are the first to raise our hands when they want to do a show about the life you yourself lead thinking no one will laugh at you because you’re different. Trust me I know…riding the short bus doesn’t make you special or different and ego doesn’t compensate for any of that either. In the “Indiana Jones” series of movies Indy was always pulling out his Journal to refer to something or add to it. It was weathered, beaten and had little snippets of things stuffed into it. No matter where he was in the world he had his Journal. I have such journals. I have a shelf or two of them and sometimes, when the opportunity presents itself, I still utilize the information they contain. I also have some diaries as well, almost all of which are still packed away in the deepest confines of a storage shed right now. One day when I have the chance (finally) I will burn the diaries up in a “Bonfire of the Vanities” moment. No one needs to read them anymore…even me. The journals I will keep. The majority of the ones from my youth have long ago been deposited in a landfill somewhere but the ones that do exist still I will keep. Someday there may be a great story to tell from them all but probably not by me. Now I’ve filled in some of the blanks you’ve had good, bad or indifferent. Anything else?

TRUISMS FOR THE 21st CENTURY…SO FAR

TRUISMS FOR THE 21st CENTURY…SO FAR No one is going to offer you a recording contract when you’re singing karaoke so you might as well stop looking for them to show up and buy you a drink when you’re done. (Along the same vein…the more you drink the worse you sound but…the audience starts to look better.) Ripping off of or sampling part or all of someone else’s music is not original or creative thinking. You shouldn’t be paid millions of dollars and get product endorsements for doing so instead you should be made to go back to school and learn how to do it for yourself. That favorite pair of shoes you think you look amazing in…don’t exactly go with everything you own or wear nor are they appropriate for every occasion. We’ve been called “Ugly Americans” worldwide for decades for a reason and believe me…it isn’t because they’re jealous of us. The same can be said for art too. That “Warholesque” screen print of the Mona Lisa still won’t be worth the paper it was printed on ten years from now. Art galleries will still be filled with discarded garbage from the street at obscene prices because “After all Dahling…it is New York garbage!”, “Terminator 28, The Rise of the Flesh Eating Microchip” won’t be a blockbuster and recycled TV shows won’t be watched because no one really cares “Who gave J.R. the enema?” this time around. Aspiring to advance in the ranks of any political party or association can only be accomplished in one way now…pressing the “Down” button to prove how low you’d be willing to compromise yourself to get “up” there. “Outsourcing” has already had a few unexpected benefits (If you want to call it that). The North Koreans now print OUR money faster, better and cheaper than we do here in the states and spend it in ways we can’t even imagine yet. And in typical government fashion the U.S. feigns shock and surprise but do little else. I wouldn’t be surprised that secret negotiations are underway to buy our own money from them and close the Mints and lay off more people. The “War on Drugs” will take on a decided turn nobody will expect in this century. With all of the apathy in the United States and elsewhere in the world China will become the dominant country so everyone will be learning Chinese. Before long and as we learn time and time again the Chinese don’t play fair and don’t like competition. The Central and South American Drug Cartels are unlikely to be willing to become subservient to an new intolerant Master after decades of buying off their current one so the Hispanic race will become the “New Jew” of this century and be eradicated from the face of this planet regardless of how remotely many might have been involved in that trade, leaving large chunks of the earth uninhabited once again. Guilt by association will once again be your death sentence. Just think…every environmentalists dream, the rainforests to return to what they once were…and genocide as the fertilizer. Hardly worth the price is it? These are the things I see becoming all too true all too soon. I have no doubt you can easily see other things if you stop and think about it for a moment. What say you friend?

THE OLD MAN AND THE “ME”

First let me tell you right up front this is not a rant on the dynamics between my father and I while I was growing up so don’t expect any juicy tidbits about anything like that. In fact my father doesn’t factor in to this subject at all. Nor is it some sort of analogous nod to Hemingway and his book or the fact that from time to time I have looked (and acted) similarly to him at various stages in my life. When I stay at the El Tovar hotel on the south rim of the Grand Canyon I don’t stay in his old suite and park myself on the balcony and shout drunken obscenities to the tourists below while I bang away on my laptop instead of a typewriter when I’m there. Freud is barely a part of the conversation too even though the “Father of Psychoanalysis” was, by profession, a neurologist and renowned researcher in Cerebral Palsy and probably knew more about me then than I do right now. Unfortunately I don’t have any significant “Oedipal” issues worthy of bringing him to the party for. Somehow though all of these people and issues mean nothing on their own but collectively…they’ve started me to wonder more than a little bit lately about a vast library of things that have hit me in the face over the past few months. I’m too young to be old and too lucid to be feeble but many would like to treat me that way in spite of those facts. I’m old enough to know that wisdom is not necessarily knowledge but knowledge is needed to create wisdom. Looking and acting younger in order to be considered “relevant” has never been a dance I’ve felt compelled to learn. It’s not that I can’t, don’t or won’t embrace new things it’s just that I’m at that point in life where I feel I’ve earned the right to be extremely selective about who and what I allow into my life. I have no need to gain favor with anyone…they need to gain mine and that includes lovers as well. Unfortunately for all concerned I have probably forgotten more sexual techniques and etiquette than most have or will ever have learned and along with that some bridges I wish I hadn’t burned when I had the opportunity to do so. In many ways this probably makes me a social antique…so be it. A typical night out for “adults” these days is to go out to a futuristic train wreck of a nightclub or “retro” bar and drink Red Bull and Vodka with frozen “tapas” while they smoke their electronic cigarettes. They sit there in their uncomfortable chairs in their uncomfortable circus clothes and text each other because the music is so loud they can’t talk to one another about how much they PAID to get VIP treatment and where they’re going for their next “Exclusive” trip. Please…you’re kidding right? That isn’t being social that’s pathetic posturing with make-believe food and drink at the Mad Hatter’s table. The “Old Man” you see smiles knowingly while the “ME” inside laughs hysterically at all of the bad acting. Speaking of acting…thanks to the education world our children no longer know how to be creative. Kids have been taught to do little more than text (an antiquated method of communication) while they’re driving and die much sooner on their way to the only job they’re qualified to do these days…working in the drive-thru window at a fast food place or being a pseudo-computer geek wearing a red or blue polo shirt. The few that survive major in “Communications” in college and take jobs in the Media Industry through their Fraternity and Sorority brother’s and sister’s who aren’t really qualified but have great ideas. They want to resurrect all of the really bad movies they grew up with and see if they can make them even worse with “hot” new actors their own age. They don’t know how to write so that’s all they can think of to do. Life needs to stop imitating art…or art needs to stop imitating life…whichever the case may be. People used to read to learn and/or escape from real life for a while and connect with a different point of view. These days it’s unnecessary expose’s on somebody or war, murder and deceit masquerading as a medieval theme park. Movies try and outdo each other on how violent they can be compared to the world outside the theater until some dumb fuck who fails a test and decides to make the inside of the theater all too real as a way to get their fifteen minutes of fame. The sad part is that I can say with some certainty there are at least a dozen idiots out there planning to one up the carnage because they’re not smart enough to come up with anything original yet they want their moment in the spotlight. The “Old Man” you see on the outside cries knowingly because he’s seen it happen before. The “ME” inside cries even harder because he knows this will all come true yet again. When people in my generation came around we were the “Us” generation, an all inclusive “change the World” generation that quietly morphed into the “Us…Against Them” generation when yuppiedom sang its siren call, it didn’t take long for us to abandon our principles. Our children were the “Me” generation with a giant sense of entitlement and a self-absorbed, lazy sense of importance. When you asked them to clean something they looked around for their imaginary maid and regardless of whether they graduated or not from college they expected to be paid more than we were paid at that moment from the get-go. What makes it worse is we condoned it and blew “happy smoke” up their asses. Then along came the Gen-X,Y and Z slackers who can’t keep their clothes up, have no money or ambition but they do have thousands of dollars of tattoo’s and body piercings on them (I wonder how that happened and who paid for it?). What’s next…the “aMoEba” generation? Admittedly the gene pool needs cleaning but… Our parents didn’t fuck up everything that’s happening today…we did. Between our greed and apathy we let all of this happen while hoping someone else will pick up the pieces. Then we dropped the ball by not teaching them to pick up anything or giving them the tools to do so and those generations are teaching our grandchildren (and possibly great-grandchildren) to give it all away without a second thought…it might interfere with their video game playing. The “Old Man” everyone sees is tired, upset and disgusted with everything around him. The “ME” inside is finally mad enough to make a change. The question is where to start.

PLAYING DEAD

At some point in everyone’s childhood (at least in mine) we found ourselves wondering what it must feel like to be dead. Sometimes it was brought on by an unexpected death in the family or a close friend. Sometimes it was just kids being curious about the universe around us. We’d lie down (if we weren’t in bed already), close our eyes and hold our breath and take note of the sensations. Depending on the person we’d startle ourselves back to reality or simply open our eyes with a “that was interesting” thought. If you’re male within a certain age you probably grew up playing some sort of “War” game outside where you had to count to ten or twenty if you got “killed” before you could come back to life and begin playing again. We couldn’t “reboot” the video game and begin anew back then. As we grew older we may have had to do something similar during our military training or paintball games. In any event we all got pretty good at “playing dead” by the time we got to adulthood. So much so that parts of us were dead (or at least incapable of living). By that time we no longer knew who we were, what we were doing or where we were going. We were young enough and arrogant enough to try and convince ourselves and the world at large we were smarter than anyone else on the planet and had a better idea of what to do and when, where and how to do it. I have yet to meet someone who would stand there and say “Yep…I’m as dumb as a fence post but I plan on continuing to learn what I don’t know the rest of my life.” More often than not it is always “You’re telling me something I already know. Why are you wasting my time?” and more often than not…it’s from someone younger than I am who comes from one of those generations where nothing useful was taught because it was all cut out of the budget and fewer than any other generations before or after them graduated from high school…much less college. This in no way suggests older is better or smarter. When Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Paul Allen were in their teens and early twenties they were well on their way to changing the world as we knew it. Coincidentally they happen to be my age now (RIP Steve). The difference between them and the vast majority of young people today is they remain curious and are always looking for that next new innovation, the BIG PICTURE and the small details. Young people today are content to let someone else come up with it, stand in line to buy it first and then proclaim they’ve known all about it “forever” and how they can do even more things faster without having to get up off of the couch. All of this stuff designed to make life quicker and easier has enabled them, and the rest of the world at large, to be supersonic multi-taskers. What used to take a person a forty hour week to do can now be done in ten minutes. Rather than have more time to live and enjoy life we’re working twice as long and hard to keep up with the information flow…never mind the fact they need fewer of us to do this these days. Vacation days and weekends are scrutinized and used as a reason for getting rid of you if the opportunity presents itself because “you’re just not giving it your all anymore”. It’s no wonder that “Zombies” are a cult phenomenon these days. The entire workforce of the world is inhabited by the walking dead. They don’t think, they don’t feel and it doesn’t matter if a limb falls off…you don’t have health coverage for it anymore anyhow. We’ve all been programmed to “Play Dead” until you actually do die because there’s no retirement benefits either. Nobody is going to fix any of this for us either. The “Government” is broken at all levels and incapable of fixing itself much less us, they can’t even provide us with an honest accounting of where the money comes from and goes to. Neither political party is in any position either…that would require them to give things up that are near and dear to them like money and power. This in no way suggests we revolt and attempt to overthrow everything. There’s enough stupidity going on in this country without adding to it and we’ve become our own worst problem in this respect and others. We’ve played dead for so long we wouldn’t know where to start without hurting ourselves more than we already have by our years of complacency. Maybe we should instead sue the Governments and make them give back all of the money we’ve given them over the years (with interest) and gotten little in return for it except for more demands for more money because a few people are expecting seven figure bonuses at the end of this year for mishandling our money once again. This game is over and I think it’s time for me to come back to life again… sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen…