Hoop Dreams

When I Can Afford to Lose - Will Hoge (mp3)
Down on a Bender - .357 String Band (mp3)

If last night were about “hoop dreams,” it was because most of the public had fallen asleep by the time the game was over.

The NCAA National Championship game between the University of Connecticut and the Butler University Bulldogs was, without question, the most torpidly boring spectacle to grace national television in a long, long time. At one point, I was praying to God that the 1968 made-for-TV version of HEIDI would commandeer the station and put us all out of our misery.

If there’s anything worse than watching a team scratch and claw their way into a national championship only to be literally incapable of hitting the ocean from a canoe, I can’t think of it. The story of David and Goliath only makes for good drama if David can hit something, anything, with that damn stone. But if the story of David and Goliath involves David picking up 200 stones and missing everything -- missing Goliath, Goliath’s friends, the bystanders, the animals, everything -- then it becomes just Gawd-awful.

It was THE WORST SHOOTING NIGHT EVERRRRRR. (No seriously. The second-worst was 1941.)

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite SHOWGIRLS bad. It wasn’t Lindsay Lohan or Charlie Sheen bad. Because Butler was pitiful. I don’t pity Showgirls or LiLo or Mr. Adonis Blood. I pitied Butler. They were the little engine that sucked.

By the time the game ended, however, my pity had become seething hatred. I hated them for embarrassing my sport, for making millions of people feel like they’d wasted their time, for making golf look exciting. No no, this Butler made cross-country skiing look exciting.

It was the perfect cap to the season everyone who loves college basketball begrudgingly acknowledged was, from Day One, “the Weakest Collection of College Basketball Teams in the Modern Era.”

Yes, I’m biased because I’m a rabid fan of the UNC Tar Heels. I’m also a true and sincere fan of college basketball. I love that it’s not as much about the star as it is about the school. The coach is often the star, because other than the mascot, a coach is the most consistent thing a school team has going for it.

It’s got plenty of flaws, most of which were painfully visible in last night’s debacle. Bad shooting. More bad shooting. Bad off-the-ball movement. Defense that swallows offense. The desperate hope that a team might score 50 points before the final buzzer.

You remember that scene in CASTAWAY when Wilson drifts away, and Tom Hanks can't get him back, and he sits on his boat and cries like a baby for hours? That was Butler coach Brad Stevens, and Wilson was every basketball manufacturing company in the world, and they were all doing their damnedest to get the hell away from him before he ruined their reputation forever.

Brad Stevens pulled off the greatest coaching accomplishment in college basketball since John Wooden. And I absolutely despise him for it. He stole away a chance for us to see a really good game. He and his non-major conference players who were worse at layups than most D-II girls’ teams.

Brad, dude, I respect you, but please go away forever. Or go to a D-I school and give me a chance to believe you won’t do anything like this again. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a great coach, but your contribution to the game has been gifting a title to Dook and UConn, wrapping the Naismith Trophy in a big red bow and just handing it over to two teams I completely despise.

On the bright side, somehow I still love the sport, and when November comes around, I’ll be full of anticipation and excitement for hoops.

But for now, I don’t want to see a round orange ball for a good long while. And for all those coaches of all those teams seeded 1-5 who somehow managed to screw up badly enough to let VCU and Butler make the Final Four? You should all be put on probation for a year, because all of you have culpability here. You are all accomplices to the crime of stealing my three hours. I want you to pay restitution. You'll be receiving my class action lawsuit very soon, so buckle up.

What's Tragic

"O Gertrude, Gertrude,
When sorrows come, they come not single spies
But in battalions."

--Shakespeare


Vic Chestnutt--"Sponge" (mp3)
Vic Chestnutt--"Where Were You" (mp3)

Sometimes the tragedies of the world become so overwhelming that I don't know what to do, don't what to think, don't know how to process. I mean, I'm just looking around right now, at photographs and videos, at maps, at a smattering of news stories, at email exchanges, even at distasteful jokes that are already surfacing, and I really cannot conceive of a single action that I should take. Checking in in that American, Internet way in Japan, in the Middle East, in South America, in Mexico, I am frozen.

It feels to me like the entire world is frozen. Okay, maybe not frozen, just wading through jello. Countries, even. Countries like ours know how to throw money, troops, resources, food, or pretty much anything else at a problem, but that's just it--we throw it. Much of the time, we throw whatever it is away. We seem to mobilize too slowly, too late. It doesn't get where it should go. It doesn't accomplish what it is supposed to.
Our country reminds me of the communication system that is much of the problem in the book (and film) Black Hawk Down. In trying to steer a convoy through Mogadishu to a helicopter crash site, an airplane flying overhead relays directions to a command helicopter flying beneath who then tells the lead vehicle in the convoy which way to turn. By the time the convoy gets the message, they have missed the turn they were supposed to make, make a later turn on command, and then get even more lost.

We are so wrapped up in the political ramifications of what we do that we cannot mobilize efficiently anywhere. You may think that I am referring to a particular, unnamed situation. I am not. I am merely staring on screens and phones at the latest round of tragedies.

A friend and I were sitting at lunch today, trying to work through our job frustrations and he asked me what we should do. I gave him the same answer that I gave a different friend at lunch yesterday: "We should do the best job that we can and then go home."

I know that is not particularly insightful or brilliant. I don't even know if I believe it.

But in this mini-society that we work in here, even if we could fix the problems that enter or affect our respective realms, there would still be so many beyond our grasp that I doubt that we would find much satisfaction from our small victories. We would either see each solution opening a new set of problems or we might look past the ones that affect us the most to the ones are even larger, even more systemic. Maybe I'm wrong. I also suspect it's pretty much the same everywhere. Maybe I'm wrong about that, too.

After two lunches like this, as kind of a half-joke, I sent my two lunch friends "The Serenity Prayer." You know how it goes:

The Serenity Prayer

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

--Reinhold Niebuhr

It offers sound, if generalized, advice. Its opening statement is as powerful as it gets, were it only possible to know how to figure out the difference between those two parts of our lives. Certainly, wisdom worth asking for. That prayer, with its fixed gaze toward the next life, was to have been a nod to Billy's post yesterday as well.

But it got blocked from delivery by the school's firewall. "The Serenity Prayer." Blocked as spam.

I know that should be funny and ironic. But it hit me differently. It felt more like this layer of cyber-protection was yet another way that we are being controlled into inactivity, that the efforts to maintain what we have make us feel secure enough that we don't have to look outward. What was it about this innocuous poem that suggested to our technology that it was a threat?

Telling someone to do a good job and then go home is either wonderful, wise, if obvious, counsel or it is an extension of a kind of self-serving helplessness, a narcissistic defense. Tonight, I'm not sure which. Yes, I look around, locally and globally, and I don't know what to do. I go online and look at lists of what I can do, and they say nothing to me. Sending money, collecting t-shirts, offering prayers, wishing for regime change, begging for the disappearance of invisible, toxic clouds, all of that carries the same weightless futility. Tonight, I can only say to the world and its various peoples, I'm sorry for what is happening to you right now. I hope it gets better. That isn't much, I know.

Can Conservatives Rock?

"Out on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac,

A little voice inside my head said, 'Don't look back, you can never look back.'"

I hate to be petty and exclusive about something as important as music, but my answer to the question of my title is a clear "No." The reality is that the primary voices in music for the last 50 years are all liberal voices. They are the voices of many races, many countries, many perspectives. They are the voices of poor neighborhoods and desperation, drug experimentation and sexuality, challenge and change. If Walt Whitman were around in the late 20th century, he would have been a rock musician.

Of course, that is the grand sweep I am talking about, not the counter-argument of a tired, drugged-out Elvis embracing Richard Nixon or a whacked-out Ted Nugent who would like to hunt all of us with his bow and arrow. Certainly there are rockers who tend toward the dark side of the Force. But they lose their authenticity when that happens.

The voices of rock music, blues, folk music, rap and hip-hip are the voices that represent the grand America that exists out there beyond the white, wealthy, church-controlled status quo Americans who have always gotten mad about anything that challenges their exclusive control of our country. In the 60's they'd have been threatened, in the 70's they'd have been outraged.

But at some point past the '70s, as their corporations got more and more control of popular music, they thought it was finally safe to embrace it.

The drift from the disco of the late '70s to the synth-pop that followed made the varieties of "rock" accessible to all the conservatives who had been shut out. That is the failure of the 80's as a decade of music. It had no rebellion attached to it, and so all the little Reaganites joined our party. Now, three decades later, any little Neo-Con thinks he and she can crank tunes in his and her car that run counter to every fiber of his and her political being and, in doing so, share in the culture he and she so abhor.

If you have right-wing friends who think that they can tap into the vibes of rock 'n roll or rap, Dylan or Dido, they are simply lying to themselves. It makes me sad. And it scares me.

See, whether or not you think music is in decline (I don't, I just think it has changed), the players have not changed a bit. The people who are singing the songs today are the same outcasts, gays, fornicators, drug users, bi-racial, tri-racial people that have always done the singing. In short, everyday Americans like you and me.

To join in that, you have to join in the many, many Americas that are out there. You have no choice. If you can't do that, you have no business listening. Not in my book.

Oh, yeah, and, pissed off as I am at the conservatives in America right now, I won't even concede country music to them. Nothing except the corporate-bullshit country music that either a) tries to create a past that never existed or b) tries to tap into some bland, patriotic values. The real country music of then or now has nothing to do with either of those themes. It has always been about lost love, the road, the plight of people trying to get by and doing what they have to do.

It's kind of obvious, really. A conservative outlook and music do not mix. A conservative outlook and art do not mix. A conservative outlook and a popular culture of food, film, television, and style do not mix. If they did, we'd all be listening to Perry Como, hanging Thomas Kincaid paintings in our homes, eating casseroles, and still watching Andy Griffith.

I fear, when people are willing to travel to hear a far right-wing television personality speak at the Washington Monument, that the liberal voices are facing a setback in this country. I fear the backlash against having a black president that seems to be coming to fruition. I fear the ignorance.

But then I remember the music, and I remember that conservatives don't rock. They don't rap, they don't protest in song, and they don't move us with a sexy rhythm or tell the truth about what it takes to try to live a life. And then I think, maybe, just maybe, it will be okay.

How My Bed-Roaming Tendencies Saved My Family (or why you should lock the door to your deck after you finish grilling for the night)

Adrian Lux--"Teenage Crime" (mp3)

I have a hard time sleeping in one place, especially in the summer. If I get too hot, I'm outta there. If I get uncomfortable, my half-asleep mind lingers over the various aspects of my discomfort until I get up and do something about it. My family knows this. They know that any bed is fair game, especially if they're out of town or at college.

So, last night, I'm in the den. I rarely sleep in the den. Not that the couch there isn't comfortable. It is. It's top notch. But I just usually tend toward either the top floor or the basement. But last night it was the den. I've been having some allergy issues and I just kind of camped out there. Got up about 2:20AM for some water.

Around 3AM, I could tell that someone else was up , too. My wife, the lawyer, has restless nights as well, so she may end up on the computer in the kitchen reading The New York Times at 4AM some nights. I could hear her creaking around in the dining room, but I couldn't figure out why I didn't hear her come down the stairs. I blamed that on the Benadryl.

Then she creaked towards the den. I saw a hand come in from behind the door and feel for the light switch. The hand kept feeling for the light switch that we had taken out. Everyone knows that light switch has been gone for years. But wait. Then a head appeared. A male.

"Help!" I yelled, as I rolled off the couch.

"You better not say anything," he said.

"Help!" I yelled, by the point at the door of the den. I could see him retreating into the dining room, where another man was coming toward him. I couldn't hear what they said because I was running up the stairs and my wife was yelling "What's wrong?" and I was yelling "Intruders in the house! Get in the bedroom and lock the door!"

The two men disappeared into the kitchen. At the top of the stairs, I saw my two children emerging groggily from their rooms and running into the master bedroom. The door closed and locked, leaving me and Taco, the wonder chihuahua, in the hallway. He had not been the effective watchdog I had expected, and seemed to take it as a personal affront that he had not been allowed into the locked room.

I could hear my family in there talking, worrying, calling 911. I stood at the landing, waiting to see if the men were going to come up. I did not want the four of us trapped in that bedroom without knowing what's outside unless we had to. Taco continued to whimper and claw at the bedroom door.

I stood silently, no pants, no glasses, no weapon, listening to the sounds of the house, not sure if they were coming from the bedroom, the kitchen, the basement. I stood for several minutes. I thought I could hear police sirens eventually, but wasn't sure, and then they stopped.

Then I was sure I could hear noises downstairs and prepared to make a beeline for the bedroom. Then I saw the flashlights in the hallway below me and yelled, "Who is it?"

"East Ridge police," came the answer. They had been fast. I was grateful. When I got downstairs, their guns were drawn as they searched the house, and then the barrage of questions began.

My description was useless: young African-American men, maybe one wearing something orange, maybe one with his face partially covered, about my height, short hair, no visible weapons. I had seen only a flash of each one without my glasses on.

Still, the police continued their questioning and searching. They thought they had found a viable fingerprint or two, so we waited for the detective to come dust those spots. We all engaged in fractured conversations involving guns, break-ins, dogs, our lack of cash, things we thought had been stolen that weren't, which way the men came in, which way they left, weak doors, unlocked doors, security systems, my use of the word "intruders" (what do you say? Robbers? Thieves? Burglars? Crooks?), the safety of the neighborhood.

Though it only happened nine hours ago, I have replayed it all many times, especially the "what ifs." Had I been sleeping upstairs, we never would have heard them until they came up. Had I been sleeping in the basement, I would have assumed the noises were a family member and never given them another thought, rolled over and gone back to bed. But, for some reason, last night I choose the red couch in the den. Only the surprise that created stands between us and the things we'd rather not ponder.

But about 5AM, we triple-bolted the door to the deck, I moved the refrigerator in front of the back door in the basement, I bolted the front door and took up residence on the couch in the living room, and we tried to go to sleep.

"I'd like to go on record as saying that........."

Nada Surf--"Enjoy The Silence" (mp3)

No, you wouldn't.

You actually would rather not say anything at all. You would actually rather not get involved. You might figure out something that you might have said, but only in your brain, and it's not going to go much farther than that. Why is that?

Whether we're talking about something as grand as participating in a real public protest or as insignificant as posting on this blog, you really would prefer not to go on record. You don't want to be held accountable for what you believe, especially if it is to be recorded or written down for posterity. Then someone might hold you to it or might judge you for it or just plain pin you down.

Whether we're talking about what you do or don't like about your job or your circumstances, whether we're looking at the country or the government, you don't want to be seen as an irritant or a troublemaker or a rabblerouser or a flat-out pain in the ass.

Although, apparently, if someone called you on the phone, someone who sounded official and anonymous and who needed your response in order to tally up the statistics for a poll, then you would probably say what you thought. You wouldn't volunteer it exactly, but if given a series of options, some choices, some prefab answers to a generic question, you would pick one. And no one would know that it was you, hidden as you would be among the percentages that make this country great, that establish patterns and create trends with no one really having to risk anything.

If you could get out on the street beneath the cameras that are everywhere, where no one could see you, would you write what you believe on walls and bathroom stalls? Do big words on bigger walls give you enough space to say?

Or you might join a group that has a batch of values that you can jump into and swim around in some kind of collective rage about some selfish cause like your own supposedly-miserable circumstances? Believe me, it's been done, is being done right now, by people who think it's important to protest about money. As a great man once said, "I look out, and I see a crowd of people waving placards with dollar signs on them, and they are all invisible to me."

John's post from yesterday used one of the favorite quotations we like to utter from time to time: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Thoreau was onto something there, wasn't he? But what I never thought about until now is, why? Why do the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation? Why is their desperation quiet? The answer, as you well know and I am just figuring out, is contained within the quotation itself: because they are in a mass, and because they are quiet.

The mass of men (and women, for sure) lead lives of timid rage. The mass of men lead lives of unspoken realities. The mass of men lead lives of ridiculous subservience. The mass of men lead lives of detached democracy. The mass of men lead lives of alcohol-curbed disgust. The mass of men lead lives of impotent inaction. The mass of men lead lives of...........Thoreau said it best...........quiet desperation.

We like to utter it because it is phrased in such a way that it allows all of us to say it aloud and, therefore, be a part of the "we," and not a part of the "them," that quiet, desperate mass. We can look out of our windows and see them, in our minds, shuffling past, while we, heads held high, live lives of boisterous satisfaction!

But the population explodes, the world shrinks, and that mass of men out there threatens to subsume us all like the monster in The Thing. And while you pretend to progress meaningfully in your cliquish mini-societies, even there you will hardly speak a meaningful word, for fear of offending or confronting or facing down a bully or questioning a friend's ethics, and so, slowly, ever so slowly, you becomes we, we becomes me.

The third photo, by the way, is there to reflect my admiration for Mr. Danny Glover's willingness to be arrested as part of a protest against Sodexho.

Cheating

Glasvegas--"It's My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry" (mp3)
George Harrison--"My Sweet Lord" (mp3)

I met the brother of a cheater the other night. It was very awkward. He had gone through his entire school career and had never had any contact with me whatsoever. I had seen him all night at a social function, hanging out with a bunch of guys I knew, and I had no idea who he was, so when I went up to say goodby to all of them, I was introduced to him.

"Oh,"I said, suddenly understanding, and I looked at all of the other guys and said, "I've never met _____, but _____ and I have a history." He nodded. He knew. His parents, with whom I had several conversations while I was teaching his brother and had gotten to know and to like, had never spoken to me again. All because I had caught his brother cheating, and his brother had been kicked out of school as a result.

His brother had stolen an essay off of the Internet. That's the cheating part. Now, here's the stupid part: the essay he had stolen did not even begin to fit the assignment I had given to my students. It was on the same book; it was on the wrong topic.

Today's teacher, or even a teacher from eight years ago when the infraction occured, is pretty savvy. We all know that basic essay topics on popular school novels are fairly easy to locate and purchase, and so we try to change up the topics, to create some new approach to a novel that can't be easily borrowed from an essay-selling website. The book in question? Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neal Hurston.

The student I caused to get kicked out went to Sewanee. He is now in law school. He seems to have gotten past it, weathered the storm, overcome his mistake, learned his lesson, etc.

But cheating is not a victimless crime. In the wonderful world of cheating, the person who catches the cheater is, arguably, the one who suffers the most, especially if you are of my generation, when there is little that is more reprehensible than being a "narc." And even if your school has an Honor Code, as ours does, when it comes down to a student actually getting kicked out, when all of the dust settles, even though the entire administration and faculty support you, you are the one who caused the student to get kicked out. Because you turned him in.

It's pretty clear to you, I suppose, that just seeing the brother of the boy who got kicked out has stirred up all kinds of guilt and pain, even though I did the right thing. It is not easy to act in such a way that causes a student to no longer attend the school where you teach and where he attends (or attended).

What we're really talking about here, of course, is a very specific kind of cheating--plagiarism. It is the stealing of someone else's ideas. Vice-president Joe Biden has apparently done it. So have respected historians like Stephen Ambrose and Barbara Tuchman. But those have been passed off as a careless handling of sources, a rush to get a book to press.

But then countless numbers of other students since the Internet have also made such an act a relatively easy matter of cutting and pasting. Which is certainly not to blame the Internet. Ease of accessibility cannot be considered the primary cause of crime, I hope. More likely, it is simply human nature being human nature, in this case, a boy who didn't read the book or who didn't think he had time to write the paper taking the easiest way out.

And it must be said that most teachers do not go looking for cheaters. The student practically has to hoist the large fish of his infraction and slap us in the face with it in order to get us to act. His mistake must be egregious. He must do something that is so out of character that it sends us looking. In the case of this school, it must be his 2nd, or even 3rd, offense, depending on the timing.

But when you were the teacher, none of that is any consolation. You are doomed to face an eternal awkwardness anytime the situation comes up. Should the student in question come back to visit, every other teacher is free to welcome him and to ask how he is doing and to help him reconnect with his old school, but you, you must hang back, perhaps get nothing more than a nod, or perhaps less, just a look of recogntion, because you're the one who pulled the trigger.

Every teacher, perhaps every employer, if he or she works long enough, carries this scar.

George Harrison, of course, was mightily sued when his "My Sweet Lord" was prosecuted as an obvious rip-off of the Shirelles' "He's So Fine."

P-rivate O-bservations of R-eproductive N-uances

The Who--"Pictures Of Lily" (mp3)

I've been thinking about porn lately. Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking, but not like that. I've never been much of a porn guy, really. Maybe a few glances back before the school had a firewall and all that. But, no, I've been thinking about porn more as a sociologist than as a practicioner. And not pornography. Porn.

Just think about the term for a second. "Pornography" calls to mind the Supreme Court ("I can't define it, but I know what it is when I see it"), guys with mustaches peering through peepholes, federal agents raiding warehouses, Larry Flynt instead of Hugh Hefner, Ted Bundy. Yep, pornography= serial killers. Remember? Ted Bundy telling James Dobson that pornography was the reason he became a serial killer? Bullshit, I say. But the Conservative Christians bought Bundy's pre-execution joke hook, line, and sinker.

But back to "porn." You shorten the term and render it almost harmless. Imagine saying "Honey, I'll be right back. I'm just going to run out for some pornography." It sounds sordid. It would be a tough sell. But when my wife comes home and says, "There's a guy in my office who looks at porn all the time," well, I might think he's a creeper, but somehow it falls within the boundaries. I'm guessing we all know someone where we work who looks at porn all the time. But we don't think of him as looking at "pornographic materials."

In its own strange way, porn has become acceptable. I found this out when talking with a teacher friend who was relaying a conversation he'd had with students about porn. "Porn," they said, "is a social activity in the dorm. A bunch of us will get together and watch porn on somebody's computer. I mean, Mr. ________ , we don't get erections or anything."

Like it was no big deal.

And maybe it isn't to our younger generations. They have such easy accessibility to porn through the Internet, sites that are free (though that doesn't seem to be a factor), movies that are easy to download. Some of them have portable hard drives that are full of it. There aren't many guys in a high school dorm who don't know who Ron Jeremy is; there aren't many courses I teaches where a movie called Pirates doesn't come up. And the boys are unembarassed, unapologetic, unfazed.

There's a funny scene in the old Woody Allen movie, Bananas, made back in the 70's, where Woody's character wants to buy a pornographic magazine, so in order to do so, at the store he also grabs six or seven other legitimate, intellectual magazines to cover his sordid purchase. He hides the mag in the middle of the others. But the checkout clerk, unable to find a price, yells across the store as Woody stands at the register with an old woman customer next to him, "Hey, Joe! How much for a copy of Orgasm?"

I'm not sure that scene would even be funny today. I was watching a TV series about a couple of detectives the other night, and one of the characters discovers a major secret about another character simply because he entered his room looking for porn. No big deal.

My own thoughts of porn take me back to college, when some fraternity had a bunch of us over during rush for hot dogs, beer, and two movies called Pig Love and Woman's Best Friend. And, yes, the titles do give away the plot in both cases: woman with pig and woman with German Shepherd.

I'm hoping that movies like this would still be considered objectionable today, but I'm pretty confident that the general concept of porn is not. While we might like to make some enlightened argument about the objectification of women or to demonstrate an awareness that many, if not all women, appearing in porn films have likely been sexually abused, my guess is that today's young (or old) viewers don't put a whole lot of stock in that. It isn't that they would argue that it isn't true; it's just that they don't care. Porn in name and concept is no longer to be taken that seriously, and if you try to push for that, you'll get a lot of rolled eyes or blank stares.

It may be that in today's world, porn takes the place of that talk that your father was supposed to have with you about the birds and the bees. That would certainly be a whole lot easier for him, wouldn't it? But there is at least one drawback to that approach: he has no control over what is said or learned.

When I was getting to know my new class last week, one of my students said that his favorite actor was Ron Jeremy. I teased him about that, suggesting (in a homophobic boys' school) that most guys would identify their favorite actress, not actor. But, that's part of what porn is about--the super appendages or mammaries of those in the films and an amazement at what they can do.

Like it or not, porn has become something of a mainstay in our society. I'm not one to be too critical of our society and the way things are going because even if I see a rut I think we'll find a way out of it, and so I'm not willing to point at the accessibility of porn as a negative benchmark. But I do wonder about what porn does to one's understanding of sexuality. I mean, it does come from Hollywood, after all, just a different kind of Hollywood, maybe not even located there in Burbank, but still an outlook that advocates a kind of behavior and performance that many mere mortals can only aspire to, even though they probably shouldn't. And it separates that sexual performance from all the other aspects of a relationship.

Porn, like so many things in modern America, is simply too easy, too immediate, too superficial to be taken very seriously. But that is probably its greatest danger as well. It just sits out there, waiting for us, and we no longer have the inclination to evaluate it. We just take it in.

The Who's Thirty Years of Maximum R&B is available at Itunes.

Neutral Years

The Bottle Rockets--"Brand New Year" (mp3)
The Bottle Rockets--"Another Brand New Year" (mp3)

There is talk right now about what a bad decade this has been, this first decade of the new century--9/11, economic woes, War on Terror, Rwanda, waterboarding, Wall Street, global warming, you name it. Those social observers claim that we are off to a rough start and that things can only get better.

Better, you say? I am reminded of Szymborska's poem written for the end of the last century:

THE CENTURY'S DECLINE
by Wislawa Szymborska

Our twentieth century was going to improve on the others.
It will never prove it now,
now that its years are numbered,
its gait is shaky,
its breath is short.

Too many things have happened
that weren’t supposed to happen,
and what was supposed to come about
has not.

Happiness and spring, among other things,
were supposed to be getting closer.

Fear was expected to leave the mountains and the valleys.
Truth was supposed to hit home
before a lie.

A couple of problems weren’t going
to come up anymore:
humger, for example,
and war, and so forth.

There was going to be respect
for helpless people’s helplessness,
trust, that kind of stuff.

Anyone who planned to enjoy the world
is now faced
with a hopeless task.

Stupidity isn’t funny.
Wisdom isn’t gay.
Hope
isn’t that young girl anymore,
et cetera, alas.

God was finally going to believe
in a man both good and strong,
but good and strong
are still two different men.

“How should we live?” someone asked me in a letter.
I had meant to ask him
the same question.

Again, and as ever,
as may be seen above,
the most pressing questions
are naïve ones.

Sorry, gang, but we can't blame it on the decade. Years, tens of years, hundreds of years, they're all neutral. They're just time passing.

Nope, we've got to blame it on us. I don't know that things are going to get better. They certainly haven't gotten better so far. Oh, I know, the economy maybe improving, the surges may ultimately help the Arabs to kill each other instead of us, and my family has been recycling on and off for the past year, but real improvement anywhere for a long time is pretty hard to see. A few steps up, a few steps back, here and there. That's about it.

I don't say that as a pessimist. It hasn't gotten me down. Nor am I enjoying the wallow in some kind of "told you so" penchant for pointing out bad things.

I don't say that as a realist. I'm not so shrewd an observer that I'm able to fully understand either the trends or the patterns or the how what we once did is not coming back to haunt us or the how what we will do is too little, too late.

I don't say that as a scientist, though I can see what a giant, unwieldy organism we have become, not unlike a slug that can't react until the salt is already falling in its direction, until the first few sprinkled crystals of trouble have already started to pelt our flanks.

No, I say it as the optimist that I am. No, things haven't gotten better. But it doesn't feel to me like we've given up, either.

"How should we live?" the poem asks. I don't think the answers are that difficult: with love, with caring, with sacrifice, with awareness, with understanding, with faith. But those are always going to be places we're going to have to work to get to, as has always been the case. Naive, to be sure, but what optimism isn't?

Both songs come from the Bottle Rocket's Brand New Year, which may or may not still be available. The photo of the guy is somewhat random, though his picture did come up in a search for "bad decade" images.

I'm a Shameless Shill

Note: as this post went to press, my music file-storing site was down. Sorry, I will try to put up the songs that go with this post when it comes back online.

I fell in love with Bose products about 5 years ago for a very simple reason--they will let you buy their products on time over 12 months with no interest charges.

That means that you can get high quality stereo/tv accesories and players in such a way that you hardly know that the cost of them is being sucked out of your paycheck. Now, it probably says something about me and the state of my finances over the last 20 years that I am so excited that a corporation will allow me to buy an overpriced stereo system and not have to be worried about paying for it.

Boys, as you know, like their toys. I am no different. Until I bought the Bose Wave System 2 years, I hadn't bought stereo equipment in about 20 years, children, cars, a house, private school expense, and all of the other expenses of family life in the modern world, and so I had a large congomeration of receivers, graphic equalizers, satellite speakers, subwoofers, cd burners (a gift), and wires everywhere and counterspace filled with a large stack of black electronics. Twenty years ago, it looked sleek and stylish. Today, it looks like big and bulky.

So the Bose concept is genius.

In a world where if you miss a credit card payment, your interest rate can skyrocket to nearly 30%, here is a "benevolent" corporation who will ship you expensive merchandise quickly and efficiently and trust that they will be able to deduct the balance from your credit card over the next 12 months.

But, what Bose has done even better, is to figure out the future of music listening. There is no room for the component stereo system in the modern living room or den. Plus, the kind of person who buys a Bose is the kind who's going to spend a lot of time in the kitchen cooking upscale food, who will then realize the benefits of having such a comfortable little sound system in the bedroom, etc.

And so, my family has a Bose in the kitchen (which also does double duty by going to our daughter's dorm room when she's at college), one in the bedroom for NPR wake-up calls and Sunday afternoons, a Wave System in the living room for parties and Christmas. The children have Bose noise-cancelling headphones for long car trips and plane flights. And, now, Bob has added the Bose Soundlink to the fleet.

While all of these products are well-crafted and well-used, this new Soundlink is probably the most versatile. As its primary use, it allows you to plug an antenna into the USB port of your laptop and broadcast music (or whatever you are listening to) to a portable, wireless speaker. The speaker has a rechargeable battery which gives you a minimum of 3 hours of sound; it also picks up the sound within 60 feet of the computer. If you like, with a cable, you can plug your Ipod or Iphone or other device into the speaker as well.

Big deal, you say? Think about it for a minute. First of all, it's a hell of a speaker, two speakers really and maybe even a subwoofer packed into a speaker unit about the size of a loaf of bread. But beyond that, consider the possibilities: we live in a portable world, and if you love music as much as I do, great sound has always been the sacrifice that one had to make in favor of portability. No longer.

Now, as I sit in the dining room writing this, the Soundlink sits atop the hutch, about 4 feet above my head, but it is putting out crisp highs, mid-range, and clean deep bass in its reproduction of the Avett Brothers' "If It's The Beaches." If I wanted to go out and sit on the deck, I'd just take the speaker with me. If I wanted to have good sound while tailgating, I'd just take it with me. If I wanted to listen to music in a hotel room, the front yard while gardening, the driveway while changing a flat tire, the basement while folding laundry, I'd just take it with me. If you are like to listen to various things on YouTube, all of a sudden they sound really, really good.

Yes, Bose products probably cost too much. I'll acknowledge that. But they are very well-made, and I can't help but think that the money it's costing me is money that I would have pissed away in my relentless trek from paycheck to paycheck. I suppose if I looked at it too hard, it wouldn't be that different from that electric guitar I got for a few weeks from Rent To Own back in the 80's, except that there isn't any interest at all. Plus, what Bose does is they get what you buy from them to you damn quickly. If they say it will be 7-10 days, it will be there in 3. So once you open that box, you never feel like it's anything but yours.

Yours truly, reeled in by another capitalistic trick, signing off.

Tailgatin' and such

Stevie Ray Vaughn and Double Trouble--"Scuttle Buttin'" (mp3)
Lou Reed--"Coney Island Baby" (mp3)

"Y'all tailgatin' this week?"

I don't have much experience as a tailgater, just a few Vols games here and there with varying degrees of sophistication, but since I am now a season ticket holder for our local college team, we have already tailgated for the first two games and expect to continue that streak this weekend. Your basic fallback tailgate is to get some kind of fire going and cook some hot dogs on it. Check that. The real fallback tailgate is to get a bunch of chicken strips and fries from Sawyer's or some such and eat those off the back of your car, sharing a quickly-warming six-pack of beer because you don't even have a cooler. Done those, yes, but moved beyond 'em, too.

First game of the season this year, we did it right: actual grill (though small, it had feet), three different kinds of hot dogs, including Nathan's, homemade cole slaw, pickled shrimp, homemade dip and vegetables, chips, homemade cheese spread and crackers, artichoke dip, homemade chow chow, all the requisite toppings for a Chicago hot dog (chopped tomato, diced onions, sport peppers, mustard, no ketchup, etc.), chocolate cake, iced-down coolers of beer and water.

Still, it only took one tailgate (or watching a lot of TV on Sunday) for me to realize that I am a tailgating amateur, a mere pretender. For starters, I have no team-specific tailgating gear. Heck, one of my folding chairs is aquamarine! Maybe it could work at a Dolphins game, but nowhere in the red-blooded South.

I remember one outing in particular where we were very much in a makeshift mode, using a disposable aluminum pan, self-lighting charcoal, and a cookie rack stolen from the kitchen as our alleged grill. Around us were the behemoth grills of real tailgaters, team color-coordinated beasts that needed to be pulled on trailers behind team color-coordinated cars. As I knelt, trying to get the charcoal to light, a team color-coordinated boy, about 5 years old, wandered over to watch. He didn't say a word. He just stared, probably glancing back at his dad's grill and then again at ours. A staring child requires a response, so I looked at him and said, "I know." Then added, "Your dad probably tailgates all the time." He walked away.

'At least,' I was thinking in my head, 'we're the ones with the kicking tunes. Your dad is listening to the pre-game show. Yawn.' However, it was not long after that that however I was playing music (probably left the air-conditioning on) completely sapped the power in the car, which then died. It was the little guy's dad who gave us the jump start.

The unspoken mystery of tailgating, which veterans have no doubt solved to their own satisfaction, is where are you supposed to pee? I mean, you are drinking beer like a madman trying to preload some kind of a buzz that will carry you through the first half of an alcohol-less collegiate football game, when all of a sudden you realize that your bladder feels like you are carrying a watermelon in your abdomen and there is no bathroom anywhere in sight. It's at that moment that it dawns on you: wait a minute, I'm having a party in and around my car. I'm like camping. In an urban setting. But not staying the night. And without a forest. Or a tent. Or any kind of privacy for bodily functions.

Before you get too philosophical about what tailgating really means, the need-to-pee pain becomes so intense that all rational thought dissipates and is replaced with William Shatner-style thoughts: 'Must urinate. Getting dizzy. Blacking out. Must get control of pain. Need release.' At that point, all rules of civilization go out the window. The first one is, if there is a Port-O-Potty nearby that exists only for the exclusive use of particular customers who are parked in a parking garage, you are getting in that line, no matter what. And when the guard comes around, you will tell a lie, any lie, to hold your place in that line. If that fails, you will beg.

The second rule that becomes suddenly meaningless is this concept of public urination. Is that really so bad? I mean, if you're discreet, if you're polite about it? I guess I'm talking about a continuum--there is private, sweet-smelling bathroom private urination at one end and there is piss in somebody's gas tank in broad daylight at the other end. But what about the middle? What about "only kind of public" urination. It's a shade of gray, I know. But the tailgater in need will get down on his knees between cars in the corner of a parking lot and let loose secure that any vantage point of naked wangs and thangs is pretty much blocked, the only telltale sign a frothy, perhaps steaming if the weather is cold enough, yellow puddle running and spreading along the wall towards the entrance.

It's then that you remember when you got caught drinking by your parents in high school and, to scare you, your mother told you that you were going to end up someday on the floor of a concrete parking garage, wallowing in your own urine. Maybe that isn't exactly what she said, but you still think of it, especially when you put your hand on the cold concrete to push yourself up, the cold and dry concrete that was once wet with fluids from other bodies.

Which takes me to my final point: tailgating is, or should be, a coed activity. A bunch of guys are going to burn a rack of weiners and pee in the corners of parking garages and watch other guys get into fights or near fights with fans from the other team. They'll be in their element, to be sure. They'll be having a blast, no doubt. But add women and you get a vegetable tray with dip, a tablecloth, garbage bags. You get civilization. And there is something civilized about the tailgate. It descends, with a slight detour through the backyard barbecue, from the picnic far out in the country, a journey taken with horse and buggy on a sunny day.

Invite women to tailgate with you often enough, and you'll get all of the team-themed gear you can handle, from the pom-poms on down. And, I promise you, women will solve the mystery of peeing at a tailgate. Not only do they have a sense of dignity, but it probably only involves asking someone.

Lou and Stevie Ray are at Itunes.

In A Girl's Bathroom

Steve Earle--"Sparkle and Shine" (mp3)
Chris Kirby--"Come Clean" (mp3)

You may have heard this before: I had a mentor once, an older faculty member with three daughters, who counseled me after a night when his family of three daughters had been babysitting my oldest daughter that is would become essential for me to have a bathroom of my own. He called his "The Coach's Room." There was a sign on the door. And all of his family respected the fact that it was his room. The Coach's Room.

I am not a coach; I get no such respect. In a week during which I lost my basement mancave to my daughter, I also found myself, as a result, in addition to having no place to land, without a place to shower on a Saturday morning. Normally, I shower in the basement, in a bathroom off the mancave, where my things are. But come Saturday morning, there were four girls sleeping down there and no chance of my connecting with my favorite, and the best, shower in the house.

No big deal, I thought, I'll just shower on the first floor, where my daughters shower. I knew going in that the water pressure wouldn't be as good as downstairs, but there were adjustments I could make to help with that. So, taking my clothes off while I waited for the water to warm up, I pulled back the curtain and stepped in. Not bad, not bad at all. It would take a little longer, but it would work.

But there was no soap. I looked everywhere for the soap.

My daughters have a huge basket of supplies that sits right on the floor of the shower, with plastic mesh sides so most of the water can flow out. I rooted around in there a bit without success. I peeked out of the curtain, to see if someone had left the bar of soap by the sink. No. I looked down below the pile of towels to get a fresh bar to unwrap. No. Surely, I thought, these women are not showering without soap. All of my daughters' friends had just showered in here just the night before.

I could do what I've been known to do, which is to hustle out of the shower wet and grab a bar of soap wherever I could find one and hurry back in before anyone sees me, but my daughter's three friends somewhere in the house, that didn't seem like a good idea.

Something told me I had better check in the basket of supplies again. After looking through the products again, I realized that if I wanted to wash my body, my only option was Nivea Touch of Sparkle Cream Oil Body Wash. Now, I'm a Dial soap guy; I don't get much more sophisticated than that. So the prospect of of a "diamond powder & white calla blossom scent" which promised to be both "illuminating and nourishing" offered an embarassment of hygiene riches that I didn't fully understand. But when I smelled it, I suddenly knew why my daughters smelled the way they did. And now I was going to smell just like them. Working quickly, I washed only the areas and parts that seemed essential, hoping that if I washed rapidly and selectively, a scented aura would not surround me.

And I still had to wash my hair. Now, having inherited my father's fine hair, I like shampoo that is the equivalent of paint stripper--take even the slightest bit of any kind of nutrient from my remaining hair to give it the greatest chance of having a little volume, however flyaway that might be. Imagine how my heart sank when the shampoo I picked up read "Totally twisted 2 in 1 curls and waves shampoo and conditioner with a fusion of french lavender twist and jade extracts." I've got nothing against the lavender and jade; it's the conditioner which becomes the equivalent of spraying olive oil on my hair.

The combo shampoo even had a message for me: "I'm totally bent and wonderfully hydrated," the bottle read. It's a come-on, isn't it? A seduction? Imagine if a woman said that to you in a bar. You'd let her rub herself all over your hair and everywhere else.

But me, I was doomed. Or, my hair was. Because hydrated hair is flat hair.

Out of desperation and because there were so many products in the basket, I thought I'd just check and see if there was anything else in there that I might use. And there, in a blue-tinted bottle, it was: degunkify. This "tingling deep cleaning shampoo," in spite of its " fusion of icy pineapply and cotton leaf," was going to strip my hair of any kind of oil that it had picked up over the previous day and night. I was saved.

Now, I'm no genius of hair or anything else, but while I was lathering up and massaging my scalp, since this shampoo promised "cleaning so deep it makes you tingly all over," I started to put two and two together. Wait a second, I thought, as this hair Viagra did its work, if someboy is using this shampoo to "degunkify," then isn't what they are degunkifying from the stuff that the other shampoo does to their hair? Isn't it some kind of vicious circle? And then, in a moment of even greater epiphany, I suddenly understood America's drug companies and how they had convinced doctors to prescribe drugs to us that would undo what other drugs were doing to us and then I realized that I'd better rinse even the degunk out of my hair, dry off, and walk out of the room with stripped hair and a confusing smell of pineapple, white calla blossom, and cotton leaf.

I had been in the girls' bathroom and, like Clint Eastwood says in Heartbreak Ridge, I had "improvised, adapted, and overcome." I was clean and I smelled herbal and floral and perfumey and God knows what else those scent factories in New Jersey had come up with.

All that remained was to locate my wife's deodorant up in her bathroom, and then I could get dressed.

Steve Earle and Chris Kirby are available at Itunes.

It's not a road trip if something doesn't go wrong, part 2

Due to the underwhelming response to the first half of this post, let me summarize quickly:


Aimee Mann--"Freeway" (mp3)

While climbing Monteagle Mountain, the car overheated, so I pulled over, waited awhile, then made the mistake of opening the hood and twisting off the radiator cap, which they tell you never to do, but I did, and the sudden blast of steam blinded me instantly (though not permanently because of my glasses), and I stumbled in the painful darkness, probably a little too close to the highway, because something passing must have clipped me (I heard the horn and reached toward it and as best I can tell, I went

sailing

through

the

air

into some bushes, where I lay for awhile trying to get my bearings and figure out what sharp-edged were underneath me and on me and causing considerable pain and I thought I could hear the hiss of my radiator, but before I knew what was what, I felt hands kind of brushing me off and grabbing my ankles and dragging me into the heavier foliage, the person or persons doing it completely ignoring my cries of "What's going on?" and "Who are you?" and "Could you scratch that itch I have just below my right knee?", as I said, all to no avail and, with my eyes stinging and useless, the only thing I knew for sure was that I was being moved (dragged!) away from the interstate, though my thoughts also turned to my car, and especially the Ipod in the passenger seat, which, as it shuffled through what must have been the finest collection of songs in Tennessee, made me philosophical for a moment, even with all that was happening, and caused me to wonder:

'if an Ipod was playing in a car and there was no one around, if someone came upon it, would they turn it off to save precious battery life, having possibly been in that same situation before and then being really disappointed that they didn't have enough battery life to play a game of Bubble Bash while they sat on the toilet?'

but I was not optimistic, and, frankly, I had other concerns, since by now I was scraping along what seemed to be a dirt road and my right wrist was flapping like plastic glove, probably from the smack of the side mirror that sent me

spinning

into

space

but I guess you already got that picture, so I'll go on to say that soon the dragging stopped and while no one spoke, I could hear footsteps all around me and metal clanging against metal, but indistinctly so I couldn't really tell what they were doing and I was starting to hurt anyway, my flappy wrist beginning to puff up and my backside sore and a pain in my crotch that I really couldn't account for (yet!) and then a bunch of hands were on me again, this time, pulling my shirt off, unbuckling my pants, and yanking them and everything else off and I didn't know which way to move or what was happening or what they were deciding, but then a soft hand kind of fondled me and kind of jerked things around and I heard a woman's voice say, "You've been bit by a snake, son, and I'm gonna have to get that venom out" and she went to work on getting that venom out and about all I could think about was her getting that venom out and I guess there must have been a bunch in there since she kept working at it and I started to feel a whole lot better, too, and all of a sudden I could tell my blurry vision was beginning to clear and then I

shouted

"Oh

my

God!"

because in front of me was my Camry, somehow, rescued, like me, by a benevolent race of backwoods, car loving women who said, "We've serviced your car and we've serviced you and now you'd best be on your way 'cause we don't want folks knowin' about us and messin' with us tryin' to live the way we want to live..."

And of course there's more to the story, but all's well that ends well. Here I am settled in Chicago. Sorry for the delay with this post; I had to type it one handed (you know, because of the smacking the other wrist into the side mirror and all).


This version of Aimee Mann's "Freeway" is available at daytrotters.com; the original cd $%@#Smilers can be had at Itunes.

Grass

Wayne Brennan--"Green, Green Grass" (mp3)
Ben Folds--"Rockin' The Suburbs" (mp3)

Grass, when you think about it, doesn't make a lot of sense.

Let's see, how about we plant a bunch of tiny, expensive, cultivated seeds over half an acre and worry over those seedlings endlessly and feed them and try to keep the weeds away and jack up our water bills to try to keep them green and then the water makes them grow faster and then we have to do more work to keep them looking good. So good, of course, that we would never dare walk or drive or practice golf on them because that would mess them up.

Left to fend for themselves, these blades would not last 5 years before they were crowded out completely by stronger, tougher weeds. They can only survive with constant oversight from human beings. Like me.

It would be smarter to plant a lawn of chives.

Same tall, firm stalks, slower growth rate. And, anytime I wanted an herb for a recipe or a garnish for a massive baked potato party, I'd have plenty, and after a fresh mowing, the whole yard would give off a gentle, oniony smell. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm........

A year or so ago, I got the crazy notion that I wanted to have a nice lawn. Years and years of living in a nice neighborhood have battered at my sensibilities and convinced me that it is important to care what the neighbors might think. I got the even crazier notion that I had a little disposable income and that it would be worth it to pay someone else to create that nice lawn.

All I can say is what has been said many, many times, though still we never learn: careful what you wish for.

In my old world, a drought was the best thing that could possibly happen. Dead grass don't grow. Get outside every week or so and mow down the weeds, commiserate with the neighbors about how dry everything is, and then go on your deck and crack a beer and celebrate the Sahara-like nature of July, August, and September in Tennessee.

In my new world, which began last spring, my lawn care professional, the father of one of my daughter's friends, is very, very good at what he does. His business is called The Grass Is Greener for a reason. He knows what needs to be done to my lawn each month of the year in order to maximize its potential. When he seeded the bare spots of my lawn in late July, with orders to keep those areas evenly moist, I got into the game, too. But the drought started the next day. Each night, I stalked my yard with a hose at half mast (you don't want to blast those seeds away), searching for seeded areas looking for nourishemnt. For as long as I could, I tried to keep those bare spots damp with fertile possibility. I failed. The heat won. Or did it? My grass looks better than ever right now.

In my new world this spring, as part of his evil master plan, my lawn care professional puts some stuff on my grass every month and now it is growing like a bastard. I can't stop it, I can't slow it, and I can't keep up with it. And the local weather has gotten into the act, spacing out its rain so that it always rains the day after I cut the grass every time I cut the grass.

A year or so into it, I have one of the thickest, healthiest lawns in the neighborhood. I've even had a few neighbors ask me about who maintains my lawn. I want to scream, "I do! I'm the poor sucker you see out here every 4 or 5 days trying to hack away at this giant field of grass on steroids!"

Grass, when you think about it, doesn't make a lot of sense, and when you're cutting it all the time, you spend a lot of time thinking about how little sense it makes. I live in a nice neighborhood with plenty of other nice lawns (though few as nice as mine this year!) and almost none of us can ever be seen setting foot on our canvases, our masterpieces, except for that day when our grass has passed that nearly imperceptible point where it's longer than the other showpiece lawns in the neighborhood and we drag ourselves out, tired as dogs, to get our lawns back on top in between the rains.

Global warming, you have let me down!

Wayne Brennan and Ben Folds are both available at Itunes.

A Retro Summer Mix for Memorial Day

I don't have much to say, except that the boys are starting exams, the grass is green, the pool is open, the coals are burning in the grill!

Here's a little list of songs that may take you back to previous summers, as they do for me. What could be better than the Monkees and Husker Du, or a little redone Graham Parson classic, or a Trey Anastasio-fueled trip to the Misty Mountain Hop, a gin and juice sipped in the suburbs?

While all of the songs are "old school," I tried to freshen the list a little with newer covers of classic songs or alternate versions. Just plug your computer into some speakers, press play, and let 'er rip. Enjoy!




The Ramones--"Sheena Is A Punk Rocker" (mp3)

Husker Du--"Could You Be The One?" (mp3)

Jay Z--"Izzo (H.O.V.A.) unplugged" (mp3)

Ryan Adams and Gillian Welch--"The Return Of The Grievous Angel (live)" (mp3)

The Monkees--"Last Train To Clarksville" (mp3)

Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs--"Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" (mp3)

R.E.M.--"Don't Go Back To Rockville" (mp3)

Paul Westerberg--"Daydream Believer (live)" (mp3)

Neil Young with Booker T. and the MGs--"Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay (live)" (mp3)

Phish (with Warren Haynes)--"Misty Mountain Hop (live) (mp3)

Scott McKenzie--"San Francisco (If You're Going)" (mp3)

The Moody Blues--"Legend Of A Mind" (mp3)

Liz Phair--"Mother's Little Helper" (mp3)

"Gin and Juice (White Man Remix)" (mp3)

Slugs On A Porch

Shortwave Set--"Glitches and Bugs" (mp3)
The Happy Planets--"The Summer Slime" (mp3)


I had seen slugs before.

No, check that. I had seen a slug before, never more than one, usually creeping up the Andy Warhol shower curtain in the basement bathroom. A quick blast of hot water from the shower head and he would have to let go and swirl around for a while before half-sticking in the drain.

But never slugs like these.

My wife had come in from the outside and commented casually, "There are a bunch of slugs on the porch."

Not something I would usually have responded to, but I had just finished the 7th and final episode of Generation Kill on DVD, and I was jacked up. Slugs on the perimeter? Trying to compromise our position? No, sir, not on my watch. I dashed to the kitchen to find the salt, my daughter trailing behind me, ready to take on the role of halogen flashlight holder.

"You're going to put salt on them?" my wife asked disinterestedly.

"Kosher salt," my daughter retorted, noticing that I was reaching for the good stuff, as if Kosher salt was like Holy Water, its rabinnical blessing giving it extra power for wet work.

No, never slugs like these had I seen. I could tell that as I soon as I opened the front door and saw their vague gray shapes in the darkness. There were way too many of them.

When my daughter stood almost over them and clicked on her flashlight, it was as if we had discovered, by plane, the Japanese fleet at Midway. Several large slugs with dozens of smaller ones surrounding them were charging toward my front door at a cruising speed of over 6 inches/minute (or .00568 miles per hour). These slugs were smart, organized, disciplined--and, even more clever, they all looked the same, but for the variations in size. It was virtually impossible to tell who the leader was. And with no hesitation, they were coming towards us.

It was quick decision time, either get out of the way of the onslaught or fight back. I chose the latter, guided by my daughter's steady hand on the flashlight and her even firmer resolve. She looked at me and she whispered angrily, "Enough is enough! I have had it with these muthafuckin' slugs on this muthafuckin' porch!"

And my salt rained from the sky.

I don't know if you've ever seen a slug run. Or the slug equivalent. All of the sudden the wet trail thickens and you can detect, if you get close, a veritable burst of speed that is detectable. I couldn't see it, of course; my vision was obscured by the saline blizzard I was unleashing as hard as I could, not only bombarding the main armada, but trying to take out some of the craftier ones that were on the brick walls. By now, they more than knew we were there, and each slug "ship" tried to scatter in a haphazard pattern, hoping to avoid the relentless assault. To no avail, I might add. We had them. Fish in a barrel.

Or so I thought.

It was then that the light caught the other side of the porch, where three slugs had taken a roundabout path, but were closer to the front door. So, the main armada was just a feint, a suicide mission designed to distract me, those slimy dozens willing to sacrifice themselves so that their brethren could get through. I saluted their sneaky valor, and then I salted them with extreme prejudice.

We stepped off the porch to survey our night's work. Just before we breathed a sigh of satisfaction, my daughter's precise light revealed that we had only compromised the front of that flesh-colored flotilla. They were coming out of the garden. The straight "hell from above" approach that I had employed so far would not work here. Our work was not yet complete! The most insidious remained. They were camouflaged among the mulch or creeping along the brick under the precipice. Having studied Midway, I knew that my only hope was to mimic the torpedo bombers and put horizontal fire onto these corsairs. At great expense of salt, I launched wave after wave of sideways attack, eventually lodging enough crystals along the top ledge of the slugs until eventually, the salt broke their hold on the brick and they fell.

It was over. The dead shriveled and the dying writhed, and I took grim satisfaction with the work we had done. But it was over.

What is to be learned? Only this: stay off my muthafuckin' porch...if you want to live.