So Long 2006…

Sweet baby Cheeses, did you suck dirty donkey dong.
Deaths, diseases, heartbreak, a president who appears to be insane at worst and a sociopath at best. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see the receding back of a year, getting smaller as it walks away.

Back 2 The Base

…goin’ home…

Vacations are made for napping.

I don’t generally feel anything until noon; then it’s time for my nap.
-Bob Hope

Discuss.

RIP

Damn damn damn.
James Brown, the ‘Godfather of Soul,’ dies at 73

Joyeaux Noel, y’all

Feliz Navidad, Baby – as my friend Esquivel would say.

The Redemptive Power Of The Journey

(North Olmsted, OH)
Ah, a uneventful seven-hour drive and I’m with the in-laws for Xmas.
I’ve always loved the long drive, to the point where I have gladly volunteered to assist in no less than SIX cross-country or long distance moves for friends and acquaintances.
I wrote this once about me and the drive:

“I am forever going on long drives through the country. First with my original unrequited college love, Ursa, now with anyone I can rope in. My roommate once wrote a short story about one such drive in which I looked like a beat hero to him, spouting great ideas and playing wild music.
Maybe it was like that to him. I don’t know. I used to harbor the dream of being the Neal Cassady of my generation but I always thought that I would end up tangled in a horrible car wreck instead and be forced to piss my own pants while I waited to die or to be extricated by the jaws of life. But the thing was, when I drove, I didn’t have the same worries that paralyzed me in my apartment. I could look around at the hills and the cows and the clouds and the old Chevy Nova that was once the pride of some farmer’s youth but now was rusting on blocks by the edge of his barn. I made up little stories for myself, like about how the farmer kept looking at the car and feeling a tugging inside until one day he went to the auto parts store and bought the things he needed to gussy the old girl up and moved her into the barn and fixed her up at night and one day set the cows free and drove off in the car. I never wrote down any of these stories, and I didn’t really share them with anyone. They just happened.
In the car, I sang along with the songs on the radio, and made up my own songs and sometimes just repeated words or phrases over and over again in counterpoint to the tires of the car hitting the expansion joints in the highway. I stopped at truck stops and sat at the counter and had huge heart-clogging meals of biscuits and gravy and acrid coffee while I listened to the truckers sass the waitresses and waitresses sass the truckers back and I thought I was experiencing some great American moment. But then I thought that every college-educated wannabe writer had probably felt the same thing and I paid my bill and left, because the same thoughts that would make me crazy in my apartment would catch up with me whenever I stood still long enough.”

Although I’m away from hy home (and therefore, my library), so I can’t find the exact quote from John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley I want to add here, I found this one:

“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognised can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this, a journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it.”

And that’s the way I feel. The long open highway is as close as this ersatz Buddhist gets to pure meditation. Although I don’t get to the point where I think of a pure big nothing (I still have to keep some part of my brain alert to the actions of my driving brethren), my thoughts acheive something close to the Nebraska drives I’ve taken: long, straight and supremely uneventful.
I feel ready for Xmas and the new year.

This Just Sucks, Part 2

I’m tellin’ you, I’ve spent a hell of a lot more time and energy thinking about and writing these last two entries than it will take anybody to read them.
Tucker’s death was totally unexpected; even though everyone who knew him seems to be aware he was not – physically or mentoemotionally – 100 percent since the lingering terminal illness of his father, I don’t think anyone saw this coming so abruptly.
Guy and I never personally met. He was pointed to my blog by our mutual friend Jon (the third character in that personal essay I mentioned in the previous post), left some comments which led to a lively e-mail correspondence and a peripatetic telephone relationship. Lately, his e-mailing capabilities had been on the fritz and I really barely have time to use the phone for actual grown-up stuff (doctors appointments and freelance work and stuff like that…) so we hadn’t really chatted each other up for quite a while, but through those mutual pals, we kept our antennae out for each other.
By accident, while I was fiddling with trying to recover the older entries from this here joint, I stumbled across a comment he’d left. Of course, I’ve lost it now, but it said something along the lines of “Now I’m waiting for your book. I did it. So can you!”
He did that; he’s disappear for a while, then pop up to compliment me on some offhanded throwaway entry I had made, discovering some magical deep meaning that I could never have seen until he pointed it out, then could never believe I hadn’t intended that all the time. I’m really sad now that I never stopped to explicity thank him for that.
A big part of the reason this is/has taken such a long time to compose is this:
Part of me is tortured to try and write something just right, something that will elicit that kind of singing kudos from, well, from Guy.
So there’s some weird-ass kind of magical thinking going on here. I’m procrastinating not so much because I’m just plain lazy but because I’m afraid in the back of my mind that if I don’t write this well enough, then that will be it, and Guy will still be dead.
How’s that for some fucked-up thinking?
Oh well, whatever, never mind. So long, Prince.

This Just Sucks

Among the millions of people who have shuffled off their mortal coil in the last few months were two people who I knew: Marissa Irwin and Guy Mariner Tucker.
I spent a lot of time working with the above sentence. It seems so inadequate to just say ‘I knew them’ when their passing has been – and is – profoundly disturbing to me.
I went to college with Marissa, back in the day. We hadn’t really been in touch since, though I kept up with news of her – and, apparently, she with me – through a mutual friend. I even wrote a long personal essay in which she appeared, but I never showed it to her, though I did finally see her again at our twentieth college reunion. We promised to get back in touch.
Then I read the notice in our alumni magazine that she had died.
Guess I’ll never get to show her that essay.
(More about Tucker shortly)

Not My President

Pachacutec at FireDogLake about says it for me:

“Let me say this slowly. It’s something I’ve never said before.
Bush is unfit for office. He’s not my president.
Now, I’ve called him nuts, crazy, dangerous, said he should be censured over warrantless wiretapping, and so on. I’ve said he’s paranoid and craven and callow and cowardly. I’ve said his 2000 election was undemocratic and probably illegitimate, in some fashion. Selected, then elected. And even with all that, I still mentally sustained a degree of deference to him, in some corner of my mind, as President of the United States.
I’ve never called for impeachment and I’m still not. I’m not raving or slamming my fingers down on my keyboard. I’m feeling very calm. I’m not trying to be funny, snarky, witty or anything else. I’m just grappling with the incredible hubris. . . words fail. “Irresponsibility” is too thin. What’s the word? How does one characterize the absolute contempt this man has for human life, for the expressed will of the American people, who have completely repudiated his failed occupation of Iraq, now that he’s indulging his fantasies of an escalation?”

New early VU recording

Because three people (my Dad, Steve F. and Terri – thanks!) have forwarded me this story, I feel sort of obligated to link to it here:
First Velvet Underground acetate sells for $155,401

“We pieced together that this was probably a surviving copy of the legendary Scepter Studios recordings, which had been regarded as lost (hence the application of the moniker “the lost Scepter Studios recordings” to these unheard sessions over the years). The recording is composed of the primitive first “finished” version of the LP that Andy Warhol had shopped to Columbia as a ready-to-release debut album by his protégé collective.”

I’m not sure HOW I feel about this, frankly. That record, as all of the VU releases, is firmly etched into my mind and is still opening itself to new and fresh interpretations on repeated listenings. I think it’s safe to say that I get lots of different things from it now than when I was first listening to it as a pimply-faced teenager. My only previous knowledge of the VU was (look how cool I am!) from a copy of Loaded, which I remember convincing my Dad (when I was maybe seven or eight) to buy for me because I thought it’s comic-book illustration cover was cool.
Well, that, and all the hushed reverence that I read the rockcrit intelligentsia spout fountains about – about some mystical artifacts that were then nigh-impossible to find – in my teens.
So do I want something new intruding into my shockingly still-forming opinions about the old?