solitaire

i woke up with the husker du song “don’t want to know if you’re lonely” in my head even though i’m not a big husker du fan and also that particular song is one of my least favorite song in their “canon” but what are you gonna do? by the time i had fed the beast and started the coffee(had to use a paper towel for a filter even thought i had pointed out to myself yesterday IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS that i had better get to fred meyer PRONTO and pick up a new box of coffee filters) i had forgotten the husker du song but then a funny thing happened. when i sat down i decided i’d write about being alone in the apartment for the last week and a half due to the fact that wooks and lenner have been in france(the south first and then gay paree) and was thinking of a song to start the post, something about loneliness, you know? the 1st thing that popped into my head was the lou reed song but then i remembered about the husker song and i wondered if i knew something in the back of my head upon waking which would’ve prompted me to have that song that i don’t like in my head. because i wasn’t planning on getting up at 4:30 and if i did i wasn’t planning on writing so how the fuck could i have pre-picked a song i dislike for a task that i wasn’t going to perform about a topic i hadn’t chosen? this is where cause and effect(affect? this one’s always tricky) become murky, kind of like the chicken and egg thing except involving aspects of presentiment and the interconnectedness of all things, large and small and literary and venal. i had to look up the definition of “venal” just now to see if it fits and it doesn’t really but i’ve decided to let it stand because i kind of like the word, it means “showing or motivated by susceptibility to bribery.” but don’t worry, dear reader, nobody’s paying me a goddam cent to share my thoughts, not even a penny. which i guess is a cent. not yet, anyways(the venality, that is).

so the thing that’s funny is that i lived alone for 10 years before moving in here with the 2 girls(there of course was guzzy, but you know what i mean) and never minded it and in fact was(or so i thought) a person who really needed his “space” and almost didn’t move in here because of it but the fact of the matter is that for all of my previous bluster and worry apparently now that i’ve experienced living with others( in a “family” environment, not sure why that’s in “quotes”) i’d rather not return to my previous ways. i mean after i drove them to the airport i came home and got to work on some pieces and felt pretty good about having all this time to get some work done but that only lasted about 3 days, after which i was pretty sick of myself and since i can’t really be working on art 24-7 i have been having to face that being alone is not all that i cracked it up to be for that solitary decade of which i spoke. and when i realize this i begin to wonder what the fuck i was doing not dating or anything all that time, just putting up with my own petty grievances and delusional “needs” while there were girls to meet and people besides myself to spend time with. but as we all know looking back and monday morning quarterbacking is at the very least problematic even if you happen to be tom brady with a sack full of deflated footballs and a machiavellian scheme so i’m gonna go ahead and leave that aside.

anyhow i didn’t use the husker du song, i used the lou reed song and i don’t even like it that much but it IS about being alone. i guess i could’ve stretched it and used this one

because it’s a much better song but it’s about william burroughs and i could never figure out what hell burroughs was doing when he started cutting sentences up like so much sausage and rearranging them and then calling it a book. actually a few books, a few books that i just couldn’t get through. in fact the only bill burroughs book i managed to get all the way through was “junky” which was a great book but just had regular sentences. like the type me and you might write if we were engaged in regular correspondence and neither of our names was bryon gysin.

anyways i still got a few more days to be all by myself(and although i briefly thought about it there’s just no WAY i was gonna use THAT song) and i’ve got 5 new pieces waiting for me to work on them and i guess i should hunker down(husker down?) and quit futzin’ and putzin’ around. the world goes on whether you’re alone or elsewise and there’s no use thinking too much about it although i just spent 871 words figuring that out. i guess i could’ve save us both the trouble but who knows what’s gonna happen when you foray into the wonderful world of words?

playing hardball with a soft one

i awoke after taking an elbow to the head from the little pipsqueak who had once again conned her way into our bed at some point during the night without me noticing. she’s a tiny little thing but the bed wasn’t made for 2 and a half humans, it’s just a straight-up deuce. anyways the elbow made me feel like i had somehow found my way onto the ice during the stanley cups and i wasn’t in the mood for playoff-caliber hockey at such a witching hour so i rolled out of the rack and into some slippers. i sit here waiting for the coffee to finish percolating so i can get this show on the road for reals.
apart from sneaking into the old folks’ sack at ungodly hours the little one we call lenore has taken a shine to the great game of baseball, the first such sports-based interest she’s expressed in the year since i made her acquaintance. it all started 2 days ago when she was invited by her friend sammy(who she has a crush on) to participate in a 2-tyke demonstration of the joys of america’s favorite pastime. a bunch of other kids ended up showing too and they all played baseball and leni sort of fell in love with it. wookie, always keen to encourage any budding interests that the whippersnapper might express, took her over to big 5 yesterday and bought her a pink aluminum bat and some of those soft baseballs to go with a glove she already had for some reason and then it was off the school yard for a little pitch, hit, and catch. for only her 2nd day she was pretty damn good, was able to connect with maybe 35% of the pitches we tossed her way, able to get in front of(if not catch) ground balls hit her way, and showing a general hustle/lack of fear which is the cornerstone of any good athlete. we’ll see how it pans out(kids are fickle) but if this shine that she’s taken holds i’m looking at several years of teaching/coaching/watching in my future and i don’t know, it sounds sorta fun.
after that we went down to the food carts on division st and i’m telling you chum, this street has gotten out of control. previously considered a bit too far south for any “happening” portlander(and perhaps a bit too trashy to be considered desirable), division has become one of several ground zeros in the burgeoning portland gentrification craze that’s been sweeping the previously-liveable city for more than a decade, gobbling up affordable neighborhoods like a cash-crazed pac-man on ritalin and leaving block after block of shoddy, yuppefied development in its wake. division has gone from being a sort of desolate outlier on the portland map to become a glaring example of how money fucks everything up, packed wall-to-wall with bistros, cafes, organic groceries, “pubs”(as opposed to bars), vintage shops and what have you from se 7th to se 50th ave and making driving along this stretch at almost all hours a royal pain in the tush. and the congestion is also symbolic: every up-market SUV only serves to represent 3-4 more yuppy dingbats crowding the overpriced specialty ice cream stores and spilling out onto the sidewalk while waiting for a table in one of the slick “foodie” dumps popping up like acne along the thoroughfare and destroying the last vestiges of any thoughts you might harbor regarding a sort of gritty, low-rent existence. i don’t want to pretend it’s just portland but it IS true that our fair city was cheaper than most to begin with which makes it a double tragedy. or maybe just a single tragedy that stings a little bit more than it otherwise might.
but i’ve been down this alley before and there’s no use in riling myself up thusly in the early goings of what looks to be a beautiful sunday. wookie will be off to work soon and leni’s going to grandma’s and i’m gonna take the opportunity this presents to visit my old friends and neighbors stan and karen across town. i AM psyched about the baseball thing though, i was a pitcher and an all-star 2nd baseman when i played little league in my youth and it’s just a neat, interesting game. very zen. so far lenore isn’t biting on t-ball or softball, she wants to take it straight to the boys in double A ball next year. hopefully by then i will have figured out a nickname besides “slugger” for her, she doesn’t like that one. i also tried “clemente” because roberto clemente, along with hank aaron, is my favorite baseball player but she wasn’t having any of it and i’m avoiding the players of the “steroid-era” altogether. although i always will remember the year bonds broke the home run record, drugs or not i’ve never seen anyone so locked into the zone and it’s always fun to watch something like that. sometimes sports are pretty cool, and parenting can be pretty neat also. we’ll see what happens when you put them together.

sweet nothing

“nuthin'” is exactly what i’ve gotten done this morning and there’s hardly anything “sweet” about it. the only time that nothing adds up to something is when you’re doing it on purpose, like say to clear your mind of clutter-accumulation or to avoid going to work. when you’re actually trying to be PRODUCTIVE in one way or another and STILL end up with bupkis then you’re just screwed, you can’t get that time back nohow and it’s hard to rationalize spending large chunks of one’s time on an endeavor that comes up empty-handed often enough to raise the question of PRIORITIES. like i got up a little before 6 and came in here to work on a couple of pieces of art and when you’re doing stuff like that it means that you’re NOT doing a lot of OTHER stuff, shit like trying to make money or writing to your senator or tackling income inequality or simply helping those in need, you’re not doing any of those good things and so when your otherwise-focused attention nets you a big hollow goose-egg to show for it you can call that a wasted opportunity, chum, and too many of those and you wake up one morning to discover that you’ve become a bitter old sourpuss with a drinking problem or a drug addiction or both. and that’s no way to live.
jeff called me from japan and he liked the 4-track stuff that i sent him and he still wants to put it out which is something of a relief, in the process of listening to my songs over and over again while doing the mixing i became pretty hyper-critical of the whole shebang and was having a hard time getting past the gnawing sensation that i’ve been hauling all of these tapes around for the last 10 years for no good reason as the music contained therein is pretty obviously sub-standard stuff. i had this scenario mapped out in my head where after all of this time spent ruminating about my lost “album” and then talking to jeff about putting it out and then finding all of the stuff on the unmarked tapes and then buying an only half-way functional 4-track machine and then going into the studio to mix them with evan and then not liking those mixes and then going BACK into the studio to remix everything with evan and then titling and sequencing the songs, after doing all of that i envisioned jeff receiving the finished product and not liking it one bit. that’s what is known in the scholarly work as “fortunetelling” and i’m terrible at it. or maybe i’m actually a little too GOOD at it.
but none of that happened. jeff liked it and he’s putting it out and we’re gonna tie it into promoting my art in some fashion and so this long saga which began close to 20 years ago when i got a little tascam portastudio for christmas and carried on forward through the dark years and even the darker ones has now pretty much resolved itself. i’m gonna have to somehow come up with small collages on demand as part of the “ad blitz” but that might be kinda fun, i won’t have the luxury of puttering around in the foggy soup of my psyche and will just have to throw the noodles against the wall and hope some of them stick. if they don’t then i’ll have to serve potatoes.
last night me and wookie and our friend marti went and saw a documentary about the underground music scene that was happening in san diego in the early ’90’s, i was briefly a part of that scene because the band i joined was one of the big 3 down there for a while. or maybe the big four. ironically i ended up in that band because they were the only ones doing stuff that i thought was interesting and at some point there was an opening in personnel if i was willing to knock someone else off of the “gravy train” and that was one of the very few times in my life that i WAS willing to leapfrog over another human and it paid off for everyone except the frog. anyways the documentary was called “it’s gonna blow” and they got the title from one of the band’s songs which was written and recorded before i joined but is quite possibly the best one that they/we ever did and so here it is:

i played this one for one of my neighbors once, a semi-interesting thug that lived in huge beat-to-shit farmhouse across the street and had a hobby of getting into drunken bar fights and selling pot, because he was curious about what my band sounded like. about halfway through it he looked at me and said “so…it’s just like a bunch of noise, is that it?”. and he was sort of right. thugs are like that.
today is saturday and me and wookie have a free day, i’m pretty sure we plan on doing some relaxing/eating/reading/necking before we have to go to a birthday party at a sushi restaurant later on tonight. no sports on for me but i’m in the middle of another pelecanos book(my 7th this month?) and i’ll probably try to troll some yard sales in an effort to come up with some new frames i can use for collages. the weather looks to be fine and i’ve got a headache but in the process of writing this i was able to exorcise the sense of stagnation that had settled upon me after hitting that old familiar wall earlier this morning. i hate that fucking thing.

good morning to me

wookie just did me a solid and gave my slightly-sagging spirits a boost. i’ve got this piece i’m working on and it’s a large one and therefore needs a lot of different images and although i’ve had the basic layout done for several days i could not figure out what to do in the middle and an interesting middle is crucial for the overall effectiveness of the piece, at least most of the time(and this is one of them). anyways i’ve been hemming and hawing and the thing about collage is that you’re limited to the images that you can find, you can’t just conjure them up out of the mind like you can with pretty much all other types of art. so i’ve been thumbing through cut-outs and trying different combinations and this morning i thought i had it when i came across an ad that had an amorphous group of people dashing toward another amorphous person who was standing in the center of the crowd holding an orange something-or-other, i thought that image was going to do it but after doing a lot of intricate cutting(each little amorphous person with their hands and feet and heads and arms) i discovered that the scene just didn’t look right inside the larger picture, it looked somehow EXTRANEOUS or something and over the years i’ve tried to pare the collages down to their necessary constituent parts and have started to drift away from flourishes and filler. so that was out. instead i arranged some neat looking sea urchin-type things in a row sort of diminishing into a sun which is actually an eye. when it was layed out i was still as unsure as i was when i started and also frazzled and a little dejected, i got up before 5 this morning and this was many hours later and my progress felt stymied and my attempts futile.
which is when wookie wandered into the picture and looked at the piece and said “guess which 2 parts i’m not completely sold on?” and i said “the horse that looks like he’s popping out of a window and the dragster in the top left corner” and she said “how did you know that?” and i wasn’t exactly sure but maybe i’m just starting to be onto her or something. anyways that wasn’t the good part, the good part was when she looked at it some more and said “i really like the middle part”. and this is what she was looking at:

i know the photo is no great shakes but you get the idea.
now i’m not strictly a confident person in most areas but generally i do have faith in my capacities in the arenas of art and music, the 2 things i’ve invested the most time and energy in during my 45 years hanging around on the corners of this world. i think i’m confident in these pursuits because i’ve done them often enough and long enough to develop my own approach to both of these things and once you’ve staked out your own little piece of real estate in any certain endeavor you’re in like flynn, i mean that’s kind of the whole point. i heard it said once about public opinion that “some people are going to like it, some people are going to hate it, but most people won’t give a fuck one way or the other” and i think that’s true. but back to the gift wookie gave me this morning.

the thing is that since moving into this apartment i haven’t FINISHED a single piece of art and while the 4 i have going might be considered far enough along, until they’re finished they’re not DONE. which means that all the self-doubt that is kept at bay when you’re producing stuff begins to creep back into the picture little by little and the longer it takes the more doubt you’re gonna have to deal with. being stuck on the above collage was allowing that self-doubt to hang around and grow and do all that other negative shit that feelings and thoughts of this nature thrive on. until wookie’s little basket of kind words was put before me and blew those fucking things right out of the water. that’s all it took, words are funny things in that way. so use them carefully and use them wisely and for god’s sake try to use them in constructive ways, the world needs more good words.

craigslist is a way of life

i’m now looking at all my stuff in another place and realizing that i’ve got a lot of shit. it first dawned on me while i was transferring all my stuff from my old place to this new one here and moving the records by themselves took 2 days. we finally found a bookcase(6′ X 3′ X 12′) that could fit them all but now we need another one that’s 9 feet long and about 3-4 feet high that will actually hold books, as well as my recently revamped turntable and receiver. and for some reason bookcases are not only difficult to find in the right dimensions(those of space and time) but cost way more than one would expect. so now i think we’re stuck with going to ikea which is not only a place that i’ve managed to completely avoid all these years but also requires that you assemble their furniture at home. god help me, i’ve been yuppified(though i still despise bourgeois society and all its accoutrements, which is a pretty bourgeois word to describe my dilemma).
one thing i did get into during the moving process was getting rid of stuff on craigslist. i had done it before about 5 years ago when i thought i was moving to long beach, ca but didn’t and back then the method was to put shit out on the curb and if nobody took it fairly quickly i’d post it on craigslist and lo and behold that thing would be gone pronto. i gave away all kinds of things and some of them got snatched up so greedily that it was obvious i should have sold them instead but my mind was messed up at the time and i didn’t feel like making deals. this time i was a little more pro-active and was able to sell just a handful of things but hey, $80 is $80.
my most interesting craigslist ordeal centered around a stack of cruddy paintings i did about 7 years ago, i had decided at some point that i was going to teach myself how to paint and spent probably over a year working at it and pretty much ended up where i started which was at lousy. anyways i was in the process of loading them into the truck for a dump run when i decided that what the hell, let’s see if anyone likes them and so i posted them on craigslist for $5 each under the heading “free weird paintings from a guy that actually does collage”. the gist of the ad was that i didn’t think much of them but that art was subjective and that if my collages ever took off maybe the paintings would be worth something. nobody even nibbled, let alone bit, so i reposted them for free and got a lot of responses and i tend to think that was solely because the price was right but you tell me:

and those are probably the best ones.
the 1st guy that wrote me flaked off pretty quick but there was a guy named john who drove all the way from milwaukie(oregon, not wisconsin) to look at them and he took 4. i guess they’re for a 3-bedroon 1200 square foot mobile home he just bought for $13,500 and he was psyched and that made me feel good. so then i started getting other responses and since giving away paintings to people who liked them made me feel good i decided to try to give them to as many people as possible which is what i’m in the process of doing right now, there’s 5 people and i’m having them send in their faves in numbered order and then i’ll figure out what goes where and then they can come pick them up. it’s fun, and if doing art wasn’t a full time thing i’d probably keep giving stuff away for free. because the thing about capitalism is that it’s all about exploitation and manipulation and since the goal is to make the biggest profit possible someone always ends up on the bottom and anyone with any soul to speak of is not interested perpetuating that dynamic. ripping people off is a rotten thing to do unless you’re ripping off people who can afford it in which case it’s fair game because if someone is rich you pretty much know for a fact that they’ve been on the other end of the stick ripping OTHER people off and turnabout is fair play, especially for cruel fuckers like the bourgeois and even the petit bourgeois, yep, even the petit ones are fair game.
anyways i almost got the painting-distribution plan assembled, i’m just waiting for one more person to write in with their list of faves and then i’ll throw all the numbers in the hopper and hope everyone gets something of a bingo. making another person happy is a nice thing to do and since i’m trying to do that in my non-painting life(which is all of it at this point) i’m gonna let the same sentiment seep into every endeavor where it belongs. wookie and leni and guzzy deserve it so let’s see how i do.
fuck the midterms, politics these days is just another losing proposition.

repeat after me

now i know for a fact that i’ve posted this one before and also that i post stuff by the fall not infrequently but what the hell, it fits the topic at hand. i was just starting a pot of coffee when for some reason it hit me that although many of my favorite artists tend to repeat themselves pretty often in one way or another this fact does not mean their artistry is diminished in any way and you could even say that their transcendence of somehow limited forms(and boundaries, self-imposed or not) is a good analogy for what art actually tries to do which is to take whatever tools are available and utilise them to create some sort of concrete representation of a person’s vision. it’s like with language where we have a finite set of parameters(so it doesn’t sound like gibberish) but at the same time are able to use these principles to generate a seemingly limitless array of combinations of words and sentences to at least semi-accurately relate what’s on the inside to what’s on the outside. it seems to me that whatever structure you use the fact remains that human creativity knows no bounds.
i like to watch movies over and over again sometimes and also re-read books and then there’s of course music where it’s possible to hear the same song over and over and still not get tired of it and here i’m not only talking about the same parameters but also the same exact result so just think about what’s possible when you use the principles(or materials or process or whatever) in the service of creating something new? in that case the similarities are harder to detect and why would you want to think hard enough about these things when you could  just be enjoying it? i mean who cares if every ramones song sounds pretty much the same if those songs still manage to move you? movement is what makes the world go round and art is what makes the world bearable so why not combine the two and really start to get somewhere?

and while we’re on the subject here’s a short list of transcending repeaters:

1)charles bukowski…tons of drinking, lots of sex and other bodily functions, poverty, poetry. so called “low” culture has never reached such heights.
2)philip k dick…reality vs illusion, breaks in the time-space continuum, drugs, relationships, mental illness in on form or another and power politics. these things were dick’s bread and butter and most of his stories utilise barely-disparate plots to address these concerns. he also shot a pretty high future-prediction percentage.
3)the fall…very consciously use repetition as a sort of hypnotic hammer to lull you into a trance before scraping out your brain like a cantaloupe.
4)raymond chandler…used the same archetypes(the tough dick, the femme fatale, and los angeles as a wasteland) over and over along with pretty simple and similar plots but wrote transcendently ass-kicking scenes and chippy dialogue.
5)the velvet underground…every song was pretty much in 4/4 time, lou reed’s voice was generally monochromatic, themes were urban and characters were fringe, and elements of feedback and drone were often used for color.

you can’t call jazz repetitive because even though a lot of structures and motifs are simple and/or standard those are just the framework and in jazz the important thing is what happens between the lines, like AFTER take off. and i won’t even start with country or blues or any sort of old-time music because i’m not up to snuff on such things even though the repetitiveness seems pretty blatant to me.
wookie took leni to work with her yesterday and apparently leni was a big hit w/the old folks there even if the place seems to be held together by water-damaged scotch tape. and while we’re talking about repetition let’s not forget what a job usually is which is the act of showing up at the same time at the same place and doing the same thing for eight hours over and over again and into the distant future and in that kind of job the openings for creative input into the process are small if not non-existent and for that reason such jobs should be abolished and instead of machines that print assault rifles(how the fuck do those 3D printers work, anyways?) we should use technology in the service of reducing(if not eliminating) all the shitty work that needs to be done in any society so that its citizens have enough time to use whatever materials are around to generate rewarding and important creative output which can then be added to the discussion we should all be having about jobs and bosses and repetition of the worst kind. happy monday

what goes on(45 and counting)

had another birthday, that makes 45 and at this point every year is the gravy on top of the stuffing. i always said i’d never make it to 30 and that wasn’t only wrongheaded of me but it also was a little over-dramatic. you know how youngsters can get sometimes. anyways there has been at least a couple of times when it didn’t look too good for ol’ kever, and one period where it really could’ve gone either way. i don’t remember too much about that time except there was a huge(for portland) snow storm at some point and i spent a lot of time on the couch. also i kept losing the phone IN the couch, it would fall between cushions or whatever and since it was a hide-a-bed there were lots of nooks and crannies where the phone could hide. sometimes my neighbors would have to come find it for me, someone would call them and say they couldn’t get a hold of me and they would drop by and ferret it out. also around that time  my cat stinky got spooked by the situation and found some hole in the wall under the kitchen sink and would sequester herself there and cry. guzzy was a cooler cucumber and seemed concerned but not overly freaked-out. that couch became known as “the death couch” and when everything kinda cleared up i hauled it off to the dump. good riddance.
i also got rid of a lot of other shit, i thought i was moving to san francisco or long beach, CA, and my apartment was cluttered w/all kinds of furniture and whatnot. it started to feel rather burdensome(everything sort of did) and so i started purging which basically consisted of me dragging a dresser or a bookshelf or something out to the curb and leaving it there. you wouldn’t believe what people(including me) will take off the street if it’s free, and if you post something halfway useful in the free section on craigslist someone will always come and snatch it up. anyways i ended up with an empty apartment and i also ended up not moving so all those trips to the dump were for nought, but thanks anyways chris!
chris is my friend and he had a bigger truck than i do so he helped me out in my pinch. chris is a funny guy, i’m like 18 years older than he is and i’ve known him since he was 8. back then i dated his cousin allison and would run into him from time to time at family gatherings or at the fred meyer or something. me and allison broke up after 5 years but by that point i was working with her dad bill painting houses, so after we split i was still in her family’s orbit, and eventually chris re-entered the picture and would help me and bill do jobs. back then i always had a tape player at work and i was listening to all sorts of weird and noisy shit, albert ayler and the electric eels and pussy galore, etc. and it must have sunk in to chris’s young and hungry brain because he began to gravitate towards music that was pretty out, he’d always show up at the worksite with some unlistenable “experimental” tape and i’d let him listen to it for about 20 minutes and then re-commandeer the tuneage. he was also developing an outlook that i thought was pretty healthy but certainly a bit off the map, and at the moment he lives in a cabin he built on a farm getting ready for the apocalypse which may or may not be coming. i’d say it’s about 60-40 at this point.
anyways after the death couch episode i disappeared for a while, bailed the state and kind of flattened out the frayed ends of this rope here that i call existence. when i got back chris was still around and by that time was playing guitar pretty well so we decided to start a band. i had been in a working(but not paying) band for like 12 years but had quit and hadn’t been playing much since then but i had had a bunch of songs i had written over the years(i was a drummer but had picked up guitar along the way) and figured what the hell, we’ll learn the 20 or so songs and maybe a few covers and we’ll be good to go, we can record and play shows and do all of that normal band stuff.. all we needed was a drummer so i called my friend paul and he said he was in so we started rehearsing. the good thing about paul was that not only had we lived and played music together some years prior but he also had a little recording studio(sort of) in his basement so we had everything we needed, right? not so fast amigo.
now paul was a lot younger than me also, about 9 or 10 years younger, so here i was with a couple of youngsters(i was 40) trying to learn some songs and i gotta say we should’ve had those tunes together QUICK because even though the band i had drummed for was pretty bent and rhythmically pretty abstract there was nothing abstract about my songs, they were all 4/4 and wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a mid-period stones record. and if you’re at all familiar with the stones then you know that although charlie watts is a good drummer he isn’t fancy or tricky at all, the beats are solid but simple and fit the vibe of the music quite well. my songs were about as simple as you could get, i used to say to paul “y’know if you just start playing a steady 4/4 and keep it going for 30 or 40 minutes we could get through all the songs and you wouldn’t even have to stop”. i was thinking he should play like mo tucker but paul had other ideas and wanted to play more like one of the flying wallenda brothers on crack, he simply REFUSED to play the obvious beat that fit the song and would instead start playing some kind of confusing prog-rock nonsense that only served to muddy up the waters because being the youngster that he was he had not yet reached the age when you realize that the most obvious answer is usually the right one, and not only that but he also wanted to show off his chops. who he was trying to impress i can’t say because we never made it out of his basement and after about 6 months or so i gave up and that was the end of the band, i don’t think we ever even came up with a name.
so i guess the point is that there are some benefits to getting older, especially if you’re trying desperately to avoid the standard routine, which a lot of us are. i’m of the generation that had to live through 8 fucking years of that asshole reagan(followed by 4 years of bush sr.) and once you’ve done that the “normal” world starts to look not only boring but also completely soul-sucking, and when you have these sorts of evil clowns running the show you do not want to cooperate. when you’re younger that’s a bit scary because you really have to find your way w/little help from the culture writ large, but a lot of the angst starts to dissipate at some point and if you’ve tried hard enough you’ve managed to escape the noose and can start using whatever skills you might have picked up along the way. things get simplified in a way and for that reason you don’t NEED to play a fancy beat when the song begs for a 4/4. maybe it’s because you’re tired and maybe it’s because you’re wiser but you begin to learn that the most direct route is usually the one that’ll get you where you want to go as painlessly as possible, and who doesn’t want less pain? masochists i guess but the rest of us want less, certainly.
anyways i changed my death-age from 30 to 60 and now it’s up to 74. i wanted 72 but wookie said no dice, bub, and tacked 2 extra years onto the end of my life. maybe some day i’ll thank her, but right now i’m just glad that i made it this far. dying young and confused is no way to go.
next stop 46.

rock ‘n’ roll animal

happy birthday to lou reed, thanks for all the help…