One-thirty-eight

Something I need to remember more often is that someone saved my life. When I think about the amount of time I’ve spent pondering my self-worth, it boggles my mind that I haven’t more time spent meditating on the fact that one time I actually might have died, but a friend saved my life.

I was 19. Bummed. It was a  Monday in February, it was cold. I was hanging out at the house where several friends including my ex-girlfriend lived, drinking vodka and feeling lonely and getting sloshed on a weekday for one of the first times ever as some some lame half-experiment/half-cry-for-help. Absolutely nothing memorable happened, and I passed out on my back on the living room floor. At some point in the middle of the night, my friend Stephanie heard an awful sound and rushed in to find me choking on vomit. She rolled me over and I started breathing again.

I’ve mentioned this story pretty casually to people over the years, but as I’m thinking about now it’s as if I’ve really considered it, as if the full gravity and significance of this have finally sunk in, after thirteen years. Just when you were hoping for a nice little bit of type of growth that happens when yr still growing.

There was a dream, ahh…

-1:18AM, 4/28/13, home, Avett Brothers, as has been the case for so many inspired moments over the past sixteen months.

One-thirty-seven

I will say that I’m pretty pleased with how my hair is looking these days. At this moment, my hair is as close as it’s ever been to the look I’ve secretly aspired to ever since 2005: Rick Danko in the Last Waltz. I’ve come close a few times, but this past week I’ve really been feeling it, and I think the secret may be the shampoo I started using two weeks ago, which I found under the bathroom sink at my apartment.

I was ready for a new chapter in my shampoo life; I’m pretty conservative with my usage, so for the past decade the average length of time a bottle of shampoo has lasted is around a year-and-a-half to two years. The bottle that just ran out I distinctly remember purchasing in November 2005, and hung on to it for six years before I started using it. In the interim, I won a bottle of shampoo from a prize wheel at the grand opening of a new Long’s in Brentwood, and received 3/4 of a bottle from my Mom, who couldn’t explain it’s presence in the guest bathroom and gave it to me.

I guess the point is that hair care is something I am not too picky about, and when I realized in February that I was going to run out of shampoo in the next few months, I figured I’d find a new one under the bathroom sink, under which there’s perhaps ten years worth of cleaning supplies and personal care products purchased by past residents of my apartment. I coulda sworn there was a nearly full bottle of White Rain under there, but I couldn’t find it, and if one of my roommates threw it out, I guess I don’t blame them- there was some mold on the bottle the last time I saw it. Instead I found an unexpected treat, “Shampoo Sidal Hidraloe Neuvo”. The label is in Spanish, which has brought a slight smile to my face every time I’ve picked it up.

Anyhow, I was just thinking about how happy I am re:my hair and it occurred to me I could use an internet translation to confirm my suspicion about the Spanish word next to the date 01-Jun-2007 on my new shampoo. My hunch proved correct, vence does in fact mean expires.

I’ve been using some Spanish-labeled shampoo that expired six years ago, and it’s got me feeling pretty good about my looks.

“Put on Pinkerton and write about it!” -my internal monologue circa half-an-hour ago

Writing the important ones,

El

-1:23am 4/22/13, home, now listening to Weird Al “Lasagna” thanks to the alphabet! This chapter brought to you by the letter W.

One-thirty-six

It came to thinking about my mojo tonight.

I was outside, thinking about how writing is crucial to making me feel whole, and I thought Man, Not Writing Is Affecting My Mojo!

Then I thought Shit, Did I Just Use The Term Mojo In My Inner Dialogue? That’s Fucking Ridiculous.

That I might be subcounsciously thinking about Austin Powers more than I knew was a troubling notion.

But I was laughing.

I have found the most crushing aspect of depression to be the feeling I adopt that I can’ write when I’m down, can’t write when I’m sad. Saying to myself repeatedly, obliquely: I want to write positive things, and I can’t write it unless it’s real…how can I make it real again?

This is how you start to convince yrself that yr own life doesn’t have worth. However, one kernel of knowledge I’ve gained from numerous turns through the cycle of depression is simply that they end. I always find myself teetering on the edge of going nuts because I can’t remember how I snap out of depressions; I know that I’ve done it before, but I can’t for the life of me remember what the catalysts for change are. How can I not remember such an important lesson? It is a fucking intense feeling the first time you feel like you understand the phrase “It’s enough to drive you nuts” in a mature way that basically refers to your ability to maintain your own sanity. One step beyond! I’ll have the mackerel!

Somewhere along the trajectory I finally accumulate enough little moments to allow me to write when I’m down. I can tell myself it’s okay to write and be down, to write and not end on a happy note. You can write whatever you want.

Several years ago now, on o a day that looked like rain in the midst of the worst depression of my life, I started drinking around 9am and walked from where I was staying in Alameda to the Coliseum to see a dollar Wednesday afternoon game. I brought a sprite bottle with Old Crow in it, which was wrapped up in an extra sweatshirt in my backpack. I was sorta nervous about trying to sneak booze in, and also sorta nervous about what the hell I was doing drunk and walking to a baseball game I didn’t care about just for something to do.

Walking up towards the box office a guy offered me a ticket which I declined at first, but when he said he was just giving it away, I figured I might as well save a dollar and took it. The guy then shuffled off pretty quickly, which I self-consciously assumed was because he had smelled the booze on me and was fleeing the scene of a grave mistake. This amplified my nerves about the booze in my backpack being discovered, so I killed a few minutes trying to act normal. At the gate my backpack wasn’t even checked.

I go find my seat and am amazed to discover the guy who gave me the ticket sitting next to me. He seemed startled, and luckily I had no room to shame myself for startling him, as I was instantly consumed by the realization that I had not considered that our tickets would bring us together again. Thoughts of the Jesus, What Is Wrong With Me? variety, but the kind that usually turn into a good gonzo laugh. We sat there for a tense minute before the guy said something about going to get something and leaving his seat. He never came back. The game went into a rain delay in the fifth inning that it never came out of, and as the rest of the crowd gradually left their seats to wait out the delay under the eaves, I sat in my free seat and drank Old Crow out of a Sprite bottle.

-11:15pm 2/18/13, home

One-thirty-four

Something I’ve always blamed my early adulthood in Arcata for was a strong aversion to some sound ideas that for better or worse find themselves expressed very commonly on bumper stickers. In fact, much of their attendant vocabulary similarly raises my guard to this day- I will probably be forever wary of people using the word ‘community’, which after much deliberation, I have decided is just an unfortunate reality and not, as I have sometimes feared when I think about it, evidence of a hopeless heart of stone.

The upside to this whole condition is that I can still be knocked over when, alone at home on a Saturday, listening to some great tunes makes me nostalgic in the best way, the way that traverses a weird variety over the spectrum of good and bad feelings, and think about simple phrases in a nice little way that I haven’t done too many times before.

Love life.

-10:43PM 10/27/12, home.

One-thirty-two

There have been plenty of times that a trip out of town has gone awry and beer has not been to blame, but I never thought that would be the case for the night I spent in Milwaukee.

It was October 2008, and I was visiting my girlfriend S in Chicago. S was nineteen, and had a great sense of humor. We had had met on a train about two months earlier, and despite my reservations about getting into a long-distance relationship, we went for it. We talked and texted on a daily basis, and that was my first experience dealing with extended text conversations. Those were difficult on the dinosaur cell phone I had, and she was constantly berating me to program the T9 capability so that I could respond at the same pace she was accustomed to. This I always brushed aside, and tried to spin it as one of the numerous charming aspects of being with someone of the older generation. The debate never resolved, but in any case we generated a ridiculous amount of MC names via text banter. Based on the example a friend of hers had set, we formed a band that didn’t exist just as a repository for song titles that crossed our minds. We named it Chronic One-Uppers, after our mutual tendency to try raising the bar when countering each other’s stories, and we made a MySpace page. Did I mention it was 2008? We were both determined to hit upon some million-dollar internet-based idea as our long-term plan for success amidst the ever-unfolding economic collapse. The country’s ever more evident financial woes played  a large part in the whimsical decision making process I was utilizing at the time, and I felt very romantic as I quit my job and extended the visit  I’d planned to see S around Halloween. It was going to be the second time we’d spent time in person.

In the weeks leading up to my visit, we had joked about me renting a 70′s Caddy from some vintage agency so that we could cruise the South Side in style, but given my recent self-imposed unemployment, I had to be realistic and reserve an economy car. The joke then became that at least when you’re driving a Kia, no one mistakes your girlfriend for a ho. I wound up with a Chevy, but it had a decidedly Kia-esque lack of character.

The first day I drove to Calumet City as part of an ongoing cheesy mission to get closer to the characters in the Blues Brothers. I was also keen on finding a hat to complete my Halloween costume, which I was calling “Failing Private Eye”. When I landed in Chicago, the costume consisted of my only suit, a lengthy backstory I was prepared to give anyone ready to listen, and a picture of a muppet I had torn out of the in-flight magazine that I decided was a picture of the guy I was looking for. The outfit really needed a hat to tie it together, and I figured the fictional home of Jake and Elwood Blues would supply just a hat. I didn’t expect to pick it up at the Burlington Coat Factory, but who cares about that part?

I found driving in and around Chicago to be really frustrating, so the use of the Chevy in-town was limited to one evening where S and I rolled over to the Gold Coast after midnight to pick up some crusty friends of hers who were staying with a drug dealer. We got rippin’ high and drove aimlessly around town for hours, at one point passing an all-night pumpkin patch on Fullerton. I wanted to turn around and check it out, but S successfully convinced us that it must be crawling with lowlifes, so what element of society demands/supports a 24-hour pumpkin patch remains beyond my knowledge. I ran a stop sign that I didn’t see at one point and freaked everybody out, and they were unamused by me trying to play it off as “part of the fun”.

Anyhow, the main reason I had rented the car was to make a voyage up to Milwaukee the night before Halloween. S had to work again, so we didn’t leave Chicago until after eight. The original plan of stopping by her old hometown to meet her folks was canceled due to the late departure, leaving us no real agenda once we got to Beer Town other than to get a hotel room, get hammered, chain smoke, and hopefully find COPS on TV. The first crimp put into this plan came when I stopped at a convenience store and found the beer cooler locked up. Noting the thick glass protecting the cashier, I figured we must be in a rough part of town where the cooler had to be unlocked by request. The cashier responded to this request with the terse and cryptic “After nine.” He repeated this statement several times, and, thinking I was just dealing with an asshole, I left, resolving to find a friendlier store. I went back to the car and grumbled to S about the jerk in the store, and the color drained out of her face.

“Oh shit, babe. I forgot. You can’t buy beer after nine.”

I’d considered stocking up before leaving Chicago just in case such a stupid law existed, but I worried about being judged a paranoid alcoholic, so I demurred. Now my paranoid alcoholic fears had proven well-founded, and I was in disbelief.

“Aren’t you from this Goddamn state? Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“Babe, I’ve never bought beer.”

Idiot, what are you doing in Wisconsin with a teenager? Why did you quit your job? You’d better hope the economy collapses and the credit record is erased like you’re counting on. My first night in Milwaukee and I can’t get a beer, what is wrong with my life?

“Sorry, I didn’t think about it,” she said. “We’ve got that Vicodin…”

This was true. A friend of hers with some sort of connective tissue disorder had given us a criminal amount of painkillers and muscle relaxants. All was not lost. But I had to ask…

“Well, you mind if I stop into a bar really quick just to grab a beer?”

“And leave me waiting in the car?”

It was worth a try.

While we commenced searching for a motel, S revealed that while she had been to Milwaukee several times, there was really only one part of town she was familiar with. This was the area surrounding Marquette U and The Rave, a venue she’d been to a few times. This irritated me; when we’d discussed visiting Milwaukee and what we might do while there, she had portrayed her familiarity of the city along the lines of “Oh yeah, I’ve been there a bunch of times”. While this was technically true, the fact that she hadn’t explored the town beyond the campus area further drove home the point that she was nineteen and I couldn’t get a beer.

We stopped at the first place we came past. The Village Inn fit the description of the sort of place I was looking for, i.e. cheap. We were buzzed into the front office, where the desk clerk grumped behind the counter while some guy sat watching a small black-and-white TV in the minuscule area on the customer side of the lobby. I started getting a clearer picture of the sort of lodging we were signing up for when despite my paying with a credit card, the clerk asked for both of our IDs to make a copy of. The impression deepened when we saw the room.

The lightswitch by the door did nothing for us, nor did the bathroom light. Instantly full of trepidation, I had to step slowly to the middle of the room while S held the door open to find a light that worked. The pale light revealed that the headboard of the bed was gone, though a jagged half of the two-by-four it had been mounted on dangerously remained. There was an impressive array of tears in the carpet and cigarette burns in the comforter.

“I think this is a hooker motel,” I remarked to S.

“I’m getting the same feeling.”

“I think my California ID made me look like a John.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, next to your Wisconsin ID that still has the under-18 stripe on it…”

Even with an economy rental car, my girlfriend had been mistaken for a ho. Milwaukee was not a complete bust; in the morning we took a nice stroll along the Lake Michigan waterfront, had breakfast at a crummy restaurant where I could smoke inside that gave me my change in three two-dollar bills, and visited the Miller Brewery, which was fucking wonderful. But that first night, as I lolled around on Vicodin, chain-smoking in a hooker motel and listening to for-pay sex through the wall, I should have anticipated the reaction of a Marquette student we encountered back in Chicago when we told him where we stayed.

“Oh shit, that place? And you didn’t have any beer or heroin?”

One-thirty-one

The Mr T Experience was going to play at Bottom of the Hill on a Friday in late January. I was excited; MTX had been my favorite band in high school and I hadn’t seen them in a few years. The lead man, Dr. Frank, had shifted his focus to writing a few years earlier and put the band on the back burner, I can’t recall if they’d played any shows at all since 2005. But in the weeks leading up to the show, I had mixed feelings about it- was it going to be the same?

I was down on myself again. I’d been back at my pizza delivery job for five months, and I’d been living with my girlfriend and her roommates in a cold apartment that the landlord was trying to throw them out of. We had pulled the classic “move the boyfriend in without asking or telling anyone” move, and while I was grateful that none of the roommates gave much of a shit once they realized I was living there, it put me in the weird spot of feeling like I had no place to say anything about the place. One roommate had two adorable little kids that he was constantly yelling at, which dismayed me to no end. His erstwhile girlfriend, the kids’ mother, would come by every so often, and her visits almost always ended in a vicious trading of verbal cheap shots. The landlord served a rent increase on the apartment, an in response they filed for a court hearing and stopped paying rent. The other two roommates moved out in the months thereafter, leaving just me, the Dub, Arr and his kids, and the awful chill of 53rd Street.

I was happy to be back at work, and it felt good to be paying off the debt I’d incurred the previous summer, but I also felt trapped at the job. A friend’s band had asked me to go on a national tour with them as merch dude, and I said no. Going on the road to see the same band as a was the primary thrust of the trip that had recently bankrupted me, and following the crushing experience of winding up busted at my Mom’s house without a job or a cent in the world, I had built a minefield in my head around the notion of walking away from steady work to have fun. I was standing in the back of the pizza place with a heavy heart when I called my friend to tell him that I couldn’t tour with them because I didn’t want to quit my job. That MTX was playing the day after my friend’s band left for their tour was cold consolation, and I thus I had started building it up to be something much more than it deserved to be; in retrospect I realize that I expected the thrill of that one show to be equivalent to what I imagined the fun of a national tour would be. Seeing my favorite band from high school was supposed to be the same as a lifelong dream.

So I was really upset when my friend Josh couldn’t make it. When I spoke to him that evening before I left Oakland for the City, he said that his Dad hadn’t shown up for work that morning and had not been heard from. I didn’t know what to say to that, who does? I recall saying something along the lines of “Shit, that’s weird. Well, I’m sure everything’s OK. Sorry you can’t make the show. Talk to you soon.”

The show was fun. I saw an old pal I knew from Arcata days, still wearing that letterman’s jacket. ‘I Fell For You’ still made me smile.

The next day I thought about calling Josh a few times while I was at work, but I didn’t.

Sunday night I was standing around at work, waiting for an order to cook, when the usual happened: Victor asked if I could close for him. Victor was the driver who was scheduled for the closing shift on Wednesdays and Sundays, but in the preceding months it had become commonplace for him to ask me to cover him so he could knock off early and get some rest before beginning his other job at four in the morning. I never had any problem with this; I didn’t have to be up in the morning, and the longer I was at work meant less time at the dismal apartment, and thus less risk of hearing Arr yelling at his little angels like they were dogs.

The order was almost up when I got the call from Josh. His Dad had been found dead; suicide. I told him I had one more delivery to make and that I’d be over as soon as I could. Time started moving very slowly as I told Victor and my manager what was up, it seemed like hours before I was in my car heading towards Emeryville with the delivery. The address was a huge apartment complex that I’d only been to a few times, but those few times were enough to dislike the place. It was one of a handful of addresses where there was always some sort of nonsense that accompanied the delivery, so it was no surprise that it took three calls to get ahold of the person once I was waiting at the front and then another ten minutes waiting for them to come down and meet me.

I sat in the front lobby of the complex for ten minutes thinking about how helpless I was to make the person whose dinner I was delivering come claim it faster so I could jet out to Brentwood and be with Josh and his family. I thought about my friend’s band out on the road, somewhere in Montana. I wondered if there was any way the person on their way  to meet the pizza guy could know that their lackadaisical behavior was keeping me away from a friend in need, and furthermore, if they knew this, if they would tip accordingly.

I later heard that one of the foremost concerns on Josh’s Dad’s mind was money woes, and it’s sick that dough worry has the power to destroy people. As the year progressed, I got sorta tired of the job, and restless for adventure. I couldn’t stop thinking about Montana, so towards the end of summer I made an essentially stupid decision to quit my job so I could go out and have fun again. I took a train from Portland to Chicago, and woke up shortly before dawn the first day of the journey at the western edge of Glacier National Park. I recalled the photos from my friend’s band’s tour from back in January, four feet of snow around the van in Billings. Now there was nothing but green, and light, and if I’d been in Montana back in January, I wouldn’t have been around to be with Josh when his Dad died.

I recently read a great essay by Betty Smith, the author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The essay was entitled “Fall in Love with Life”, and these are the concluding lines:

“To live, to struggle, to be in love with life- in love with all life holds, joyful or sorrowful- is fulfillment. The fullness of life is open to all of us.”

It’s crushing, losing people. All you can ever do is make the most of what’s left, and there’s so much. I’ll meet you high up in your anger, of all that is waiting and hoping for you.*

Peace.

-3:15PM, 7/31/12, home, confused, ecstatic. Blind archer in the Olympics. Jeffrey Rhodes, four and half years gone, but not forgotten. Sun’s out, again. Lotsa sun this summer…

*Neutral Milk Hotel, Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone

One-thirty

In October 2003, things were rolling along pretty well for me. I had realigned with K, who I’d dated briefly earlier in the year, and we were well into that illogical second-honeymoon period where since both of you are happy to be with somebody again, yr both totally oblivious to the reality that the problems that drove you apart the first time around are still there, lying dormant, waiting for the days to get shorter before they rear their ugly heads again. My desk clerk job at the hotel had yet to turn brutal; I was still getting enough hours, and recently I’d had the opportunity to dress up and greet people attending a chamber of commerce mixer at the front door. The story of the acquisition of the costume is good:

There was a costume rental shop, the only one in the county, just a few blocks away. My boss had called ahead and reserved their porter costume. The idea was to have me dress up in a vintage mid-century porter’s uniform to give the hotel an air of class that was completely unrepresentative and out of sync with the actual character of the hotel; it was general manager’s  keen awareness of the actual shabbiness the place that inspired this ridiculous greeter scheme in the first place. Anyhow, the day before the chamber mixer, my boss covered the desk while I walked over to the costume shop to get the uniform.

The shop was in a warehouse, and I stepped inside to find it filled quite literally to the ceiling with costumes. There was about six square feet of open space by the front door, other than that, every conceivable inch of space in the building seemed occupied by some costume or accessory. Ballerina’s gown’s hung from the ceiling in formation. It was fucking surreal.

I called out twice to see if there was anyone there. A minutes passed before a very short woman, like 4 foot 8 or so, emerged from the forest of costumes and said “Woah! You’re tall!”

I agreed, and explained why I was there.

“Oh no, that costume’s not going to fit you.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, that costume would be way too small on you.” (I’m 6’4″)

“Oh…”

“It’s okay though, we’ll find something else for you to wear. Let’s go look at tuxedos.”

The tuxedo section proved devoid of a tux in my size, and I was starting to get a little irritated fighting my way through the shop’s crowded “aisles” following the wood sprite when inspiration struck her.

“Ah! I know just what you need.” She directed me deeper into the morass of costumes, but the trek became worth it when we arrived at a costume I have always described as Indian Prince circa 1935. Stark white with red pinstripes down the pantlegs, it also featured a gold sash at the waist and elaborate red epaulets on the shoulders fringed with gold tassels. It was freakin’ comical. I happily accepted the costume and had one of the finer hours of my life the following evening as guest after guest walked into the hotel and laughed out loud, much to my boss’ chagrin. Later that night I wore the costume to a party at Garrett’s place by the Vets Hall, and returned it to the costume shop reeking of cigarette smoke and Steel Reserve.

Then Arnold Shwarzenegger won the gubernatorial recall election, and I began to completely lose my grip on reality.

Things had been showing signs of cracking. My hours at the hotel had been cut as the tourist season died down, the honeymoon phase of my second go-round with K was nearing an end, and me and my friends had been getting into painkillers more and more. I had bought a hundred somas in TJ the day after Halloween, taken four of them alongside two copa de nadas, and later been “arrested” by two cops driving an animal-control truck in Rosarita. They seemed somewhat unnerved by my willingness to submit to arrest and climb in the metal box in the back of their pick-up, and I’m sure my case was probably in the top-ten most time-consuming shakedowns of the month as they finally got frustrated and “took me away”. This is to say they finally drove off and around the corner, where my friends flagged them down and gave them sixty bucks for my release. I got in a half-serious argument with my friends over repaying the bribe money, saying I wouldn’t have minded spending the night in jail and finding my own way back. The argument continued all night as we lit off roman candles on the beach and blew open a water main to get our money’s worth of municipal Rosarita.

This sort of savage thinking carried on throughout November, as I woke up every day thinking “Pretty soon they’re going to swear in Kindergarten Cop as the governor of California”, taking a bong rip and a soma, and triple-checking what time I had to be at work, since my mind was sorta turning to mush. My friends made plans to record a Christmas album on Thanksgiving, so I showed up at Erin’s place as soon as I got off of work and took four car-bombs in a row to get the creative juices flowing. We hit record and began improvising a take of “All I Want For Christmas” that lasted fifteen minutes. This was followed by a stab at November Rain, and I was passed out within in the hour.

The level of brutality was upped the following week when three different close friends went through bad break-ups, so I decided to join the sadness gang and break-up with K, fully aware I was putting myself in a delicate position since she lived in the same apartment complex as me. Two jobs I thought I had a line on fell through, one with the post office and another with the County planning department, and I started to feel desperate and trapped with the ever-declining hours at my gig with the hotel. The beginning of the end was when the schedule for the last week of the year was posted. My boss walked up next to me while I was examining it with her usual obnoxious smile.

“Hey, I gave you New Year’s off!”

For whatever reason, the boss, who I did not respect whatsoever, had decided I was her favorite. However, why she thought that giving me New Year’s Eve off but scheduling me at 5AM on New Year’s Day would excite me is beyond normal reasoning.

“Yeah… thanks.”

That New Year’s Eve, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and pondering the mess I had made of my life until a phone call informing me I officially did not get the job with the County finally jarred me upright. I screamed FUCK at the top of my lungs and sat down in the chair next to phone to brood. On cue, a few minutes later K knocked on my door to confront me about how I’d disappeared a few weeks earlier, and all I could tell her was sorry. She told me that was shitty and left unsatisfied. I went over to Kaydee and Ces’ place and started drinking rum around 2 in the afternoon.  They put on The Hours, which I was in too foul a mood to make it more than half an hour into. I passed out around eight in a terrible mood, the only ray of light being that I had successfully gone to be early enough to get a decent night’s sleep and make it to work in the morning.

The howling wind woke me up at 3AM, and I lay in bed listening to holiday revelers carousing outside my window. I tried to fight my way back to sleep despite the noise and my anger, which I should have known was pointless, and by the time I threw in the towel and went downstairs, no one was around. 2004 came in like a cloud of shit, and I found a strange mixture of comfort and disgust as I cruised down the highway in the pre-dawn fog that morning in knowing that our governor was a former movie strongman. I decided I would find strength in the illogical bend my life had taken and overcome the idiotic position I’d fallen into, which is why by the end of the January I’d no-called no-showed to my job and taken to sleeping on the living-room floor.

The tone for the year to come was set.

One-twenty-eight

This will attempt to recount how my initial distaste for reggae landed me in a sticky,  racially-charged moment in a bar when I was twenty-seven.

I didn’t hear much reggae bumping out of cars in Brentwood  in my teen years. If I had to guess, I’d say I’d probably heard no more than a handful of reggae songs ever before I moved to Arcata to begin college. I don’t even remember anyone wearing Bob Marley shirts in high school, though there must have been a few mixed in there with the Tool, NIN, and Nirvana shirts. My stance on reggae upon entering HSU was pretty similar t0 my stance on any “world” music that I was mostly unfamiliar with; a stance best encapsulated by the timeless teenage shoulder shrug/ “Whatever” combo. However, it did not take me long to start hating reggae.

Those unfamiliar with the term ‘trustafarian’ must consider themselves lucky, as the people described by this term are really some of the most contemptible young people I’ve ever come across. The defining elements of trustafarianism are a wealthy and privileged background, the escape of which results in a deeply flawed understanding of the message of traditional rastafarianism that manifests itself in an enthusiasm for reggae music and tattered clothing much moreso than the belief in a universal spirit of love and self-empowerment. This misunderstanding is then combined with an obnoxious and heavy-handed proselytizing attitude used in dealing with people who don’t like reggae that is actually no different than the common contempt any stripe of rich kids feel towards anyone different than them. The insidious part of trustafarianism is that these fucking asshole rich kids that are dressed like paupers from a Dickens novel will give you no end of shit if you dare say anything crossways about reggae music, or wearing garbage, or blatantly smoking weed in public while waiting to get into a show at a venue that has very nicely asked you to keep the weed smoking low-profile.

Thus did I come to associate the tones of reggae music with people I loathed. There was also an element of oversaturation at work; reggae can at times be inescapable in Arcata, and hell, sometimes yr just not in the mood. Once I was eating lunch with a co-worker at the cafeteria and he audibly groaned when ‘One Love’ came on the sound system. What’s Up, I asked. I Can’t Take Much More Bob, Man, he said. He continued to explain that the only CD that lived in the sculpture lab where he spent almost half of his week was Legend, the Bob Marley greatest hits collection. It’s As If The Wheels Won’t Turn Unless It’s Playing he said, sadly.

It took years for my opinion on reggae to soften, but it did. Then my friend Shawn became obsessed with Joe Strummer’s version of ‘Redemption Song’, never my favorite Bob song to begin with. It became a running joke between us where he would put it on at every possible time, and I would sigh and pretend to hate it, then sing along with gusto at the brilliant line “emancipate yourself from the chains of mental slavery”. After numerous listens, I finally grew to like the song, and I now smile when I see the bumper sticker with that lyric on it. However, there was to be one last awkward moment between me and the ghost of Bob Marley, and it happened at McNally’s on a dead Thursday night in the summer of 2008.

Shawn and I were there with a few other people, and other than us, there weren’t many other people in the bar. The jukebox died, so Shawn went to put some money in. I called after him “Yeah, put on Redemption Song!” and laughed derisively. He laughed over his shoulder as he walked towards the far wall where the jukebox was mounted, but another guy at the bar didn’t think it was funny. “What’s so funny about Redemption Song?” he asked.

How could I explain the entire personal history that had led to this stupid inside joke to a very pissed-off looking black dude with dreds in a bar in Oakland on a Thursday? My mind got stuck, and all that came out of my mouth was “Uhhhhh…”

“I’m waiting for an answer,” he said, “What have you got against Bob Marley?”

Shawn walked back over from the jukebox and intervened on my behalf. “Oh, it’s just a joke we have.”

The dude was not amused. “I don’t see what’s so funny about that song. It’s a great song. I’d love to know why you don’t like it.”

Now Shawn was stuck. “Well I do like it, it’s just a, um, you know, a joke…me and him have…” He trailed off.

Unsatisfied, but apparently now willing to let the matter be, the dude shrugged and turned away.

What the fuck? Confusion reigned. Bob woulda been mad dissapointed, and Joe Strummer probably would have as well. Anyhow, now the tale has been told.

Happy Independence Day. Burn forth.

7/4/12, 2:20PM, home. Still confused about the true meaning of ‘One Love’…

One-twenty-nine

As you judge this life, consider the nature of judging.

Whatever yr notion of judging is, consider the flattening fact that if yr reading the words I’m writing, yr thinking in English.

Yr thinking with somebody else’s words. Do you mean that now?

What I aim to say is that life as I have known it is best gauged in a light that acknowledges the primacy of YR vision. The essence of he etymology of the term homo sapien sapiens is that we are not only aware; we are aware that we are aware.

This is to say that we must learn that the way we see things are very, very similar to the way other people see things. However, they are literally entirely unique, and we are of a specie that has the capacity to acknowledge that we can realize that however much we have in common, we can never be certain that we truly know what the other person thinks. Further, it is damn near impossible to know what somebody means when they say something; anything whatsoever.

This is my plea for peace. May God damn what we say. We strive for brilliance, we walk in the ruts of what is to come. When we come to realize that what we are, and what we could, some Goddamn day, do together, is why there will be no end of tomorrow unless we collectively will it. i, me, would like not to will that. i hate uncapiailized personal i’s, but i have enough faith to realize that if i start intentionally missing the shift key, i doubt it will affect the world much.

i hope one day to meet you. For what it’s worth, i wrote this in hopes of using language to influence a greater of love and peace in yr heart, but if y’ get me, then y’ know what I’m saying here is that I’ll never know you-

Yet I still want to meet you!

Let’s start with a hug, before words get in the way.

Luv,

Landon

One-twenty-seven

It seems to me now that the primary underlying struggle in the transition from childhood to adolesence is the sheer horror of yr first mature perception of the world around you. Some of us are lucky enough to be living lives of fine sand at that point, but I think it’s safe to say that most people’s reality at the dawn of adolescence doesn’t entirely measure up with their childhood dreams.

My hypothesis is this: When we are very young, nothing makes too much sense. We learn to rely to certain things that are more-or-less predictable; our parents’ presence, hunger and satiation, the daily path of darkness to light to darkness. Then we age a bit.

It does not matter what culture on Earth you are from, or how extensive your ‘formal’ education is. At a certain age in childhood, you start to understand a little bit about how the world works, on a strictly practical and experiential level. Based on this, and perhaps with a the aid of some subconscious underpinnings that know the dread that awaits, you form the ability to dream of things you have never seen. These things are of all nature, and some are bad, some evil, even, but mostly there are good- they are about a world better than the one you are in. A Fantastic world. This, with any luck, is a period of maximal joy. At the dawn of conscious imagination, we are all cartographers. We map out our dreams to the smallest detail, because we have no idea that it not always productive to dream.

This bliss ends. Half as fast or twice as slowly, we become aware that our lives do not sync with our dreams. This house is OK, but it sure ain’t no palace. I do like playing in the creek, but this Central Valley dirt town isn’t Paris. I don’t have as many friends as I thought I would by now. I’m hungry. I’m not hungry any more.

Seemingly overnight, a worldview of possibility and grace mutates into “I’ve had enough”. Ennui is the place where the ghost of you thinking you could be the President mopes. This ghost rolls around in the basement of yr brain and moans once a day, right when you were just about to fall asleep…

The linear confusion of having yr world turned inside out by yourself, for reasons you don’t understand, leads you to feel alien in yr own body, and the first apearence of the staggering notion of feeling alone on a crowded planet. Nostalgia creeps in at some point. Yr visiting yr youngest sibling’s elementary school, and you walk in thinking “Pfff, this place.” But now yr looking at a dinosaur poster, and thinking When I was my brother’s age, and I went here, I loved that poster. It made me happy. I wanted to be a dinosaur. Now that sounds stupid. I know that’s stupid.

But I’m not happy.

Some people go their entire lives without ever thinking about being a dinsoaur ever again. There’s a lot of people who think about it every now and again, and a good amount of people who think about it on a fairly regular basis- often enough to be sane, and cool, and content. Then there are the people who forget about being a dinosaur for a while, then remember, and really go for it.

I’m a triceratops. I am not kidding.

12:11AM, 6/14/12, Mom’s house. Cut the lawn today, cleaned the garage. Now it’s Flag Day. How do you celebrate that? How do you celebrate that?