HARDBARNED

Separated At Birth?

2011-06-18T12:43:00.000-05:00

Maybe it's just me, but the resemblance is uncanny. It kind of freaks me out. Do you think Emmylou Harris could have been MJ's long lost sister? Maybe she has the other diamond-studded glove. I wonder if she can moonwalk?

Be My Wingman Anytime

2011-06-11T17:20:00.000-05:00

I'll admit to a pretty dorky obsession with Top Gun. I still love the movie as much as I did 25 years ago, and I don't care if you think that's lame.

Kayla Webley's recent TIME magazine piece about Top Gun has started some interesting conversations for me lately. She has ten reasons to share about why Top Gun is "still awesome." I'd have to agree with her.

Bring up Top Gun, and everyone over 30 has an opinion. I say over 30 because my wife had no opinion on it and hadn't even seen it until I insisted that she give it a chance a year or two ago, and she just turned 30 a few months ago. Now she usually just rolls her eyes when I mention it.

I was born in 1976. In 1986, when I was nine or ten years old, I was visiting my Grandmother in Hawaii and saw Top Gun in the theatre. It exploded onto the screen with a velocity of sheer awesomeness I could never have imagined. I didn't think it was possible for anything to approach the level of awe that the Star Wars trilogy already inspired, no, stamped upon my impressionable young brain, and until I walked out of that theatre as a pre-pubescent aspiring naval aviator, Star Wars was it, period (read my previous post/rant about George Lucas for more evidence of this). Somehow, going Mach 2 with my hair on fire in an F-14 seemed like the best way to spend my future adulthood. Sadly, my nascent dream was soon crushed by a guy my mom used to date who referred to me as "Piss Ant." Dick (his real name) pointed out that I was "too tall to be a pilot" and "not good enough at math." I imagined my neck snapping like Goose's did while ejecting after being caught in a jet-wash (Goose was taller than those other pilots, I worried), and I gave up on being a pilot. I even ceased my pathetic attempts to emulate Ice Man by trying to comb my wavy hair straight up from my forehead. Still, my love for Top Gun endured.

Obviously, when I saw the film, I didn't have much of a concept of sexuality, hetero or otherwise. I only began to understand the sexual undertones of the film years later, as a cynical teenager, and man, was it macho. It celebrated dudes and jocks and machismo to the fullest extent of the word. I was something of an outsider in high school. I got along with most people but hung around with the artists, musicians and misanthropes. The jocks, macho men and prom queen types were not part of my group. Or maybe I was not part of their group. Either way, I always found the outsiders to be a lot more interesting. Despite its unabashed celebration of everything jock, even in high school, I still loved Top Gun.

Yes, the movie has been and could still be fairly referred to as a Reagan-era military recruiting video, and I was listening to heavy metal, growing my hair out, discovering punk rock and turning into an angry teenage liberal, eager to expose the evils of the system. Yes, Top Gun was a product of late-stage cold-war paranoia and flag-waving patriotism, but even if I didn't admit it at the time, I loved my country, and despite my teen angst and too-cool skateboard buddies, I still loved Top Gun.

Even though Tom Cruise had literally been an Outsider, as Maverick he was captain cool, mister macho, the ultimate lady killer . . . a jock type that was not the kind of dude I'd be hanging around in high school, yet Maverick too was an outsider until he proved himself in battle and won the respect of his peers. None of that mattered to me; I just loved the movie. It wasn't real life. It couldn't be, for me, at least. It never represented me or anyone I knew. It was just supreme entertainment.

After reading Webley's article, I passed it along to several friends and family members, most of whom responded positively, agreeing with me that the movie is definitely "still awesome" as she claims. I found the "homoerotic subtext" bit an amusing way to read the film. I'd never thought of the movie as gay, but Tarantino's rant in some unnamed movie about Maverick "coming to terms with his homosexuality," along with the re-cut trailer that turns the movie into a romance between Maverick and Ice Man were just creative and funny, I thought. I discovered that a lot of people have written about the movie in this way. Just
Google Top Gun and "gay" and see what you get. Even though I minored in film studies in college and grad school, I somehow missed this "homoerotic" take on one of my favorite movies.

I can remember a certain drunken event in my freshman dorm room involving about eight male friends, arm in arm, in white tank tops, singing along with the Top Gun soundtrack at the top of our lungs, but hey, uh . . . that's not gay, is it?

Of course, teasing macho men with their macho-to-the-point-of-homo antics is nothing new, and is often funny, not because there is anything wrong with being gay, but because ultra macho men are often super homophobic, and homophobia is easy to make fun of and laugh at, if you ask me. Top Gun isn't the first ultra-macho movie to be called gay. It's not hard to find similar claims about 300, Batman and Robin (not just the crappy movie--the canonical relationship itself) and several films involving Sylvester Stallone.

A respected family friend and ex-marine who is at least 30 years my senior didn't agree with me at all about the amusing nature of Webley's article and responded with an unexpected homophobic tirade that really caught me off guard. He is also a fan of the film and was furious about Webley's suggestion that there was any trace of homosexual subtext in the film. He found the notion insulting to the "military ethos" and was eager to let me know that the "marketing" of homosexuality as "normal" really pissed him off. I told him to lighten up. He went on to call Webley's article "evidence of our society's ever-increasing rate of descent into depravity, marketed as 'sophistication' to suck (no pun intended) in the unwary."

Wow. I can't expect to change my friend's viewpoint, but I responded honestly, telling him that I respect the men and women who wear the uniform immensely, straight or gay. I find his homophobia disgusting, but for many other reasons, I respect this man and call him a friend. When speaking of this episode and how to deal with it with my mom, she found it ironic that I once used gay slurs as a teen, and reminded me of how she had sat me down and firmly instructed me that I was not to be critical or insulting of people who live their lives differently from the way I live mine. I guess I learned the lesson because I don't remember saying those things, and I am vehemently opposed to anything less than absolute equality when it comes to gay rights, including marriage and everything else. I didn't expect the backlash. I just thought Webley's article was entertaining, and let's not forget that the "homoerotic subtext" was only one of her TEN reasons why the movie is STILL AWESOME.

I saw Top Gun in the theatre at least six times. I watched it on TV. I watched it on VHS and DVD and have yet to watch my blu-ray copy, but hell, it's the 25th anniversary this summer, so I should. Happy birthday, Top Gun. I'm starting to feel the need for speed, so let's see if I can get my lovely wife to take one more trip back to Miramar. Show me the way home, baby.

Fighting For My Right to Write

2011-03-27T13:49:00.000-05:00

Last week at my new job--which isn't really a new job since I've been there a year now--I had to wear a suit and tie for three consecutive days, which already puts my sum total of days spent in a monkey suit at a potential all-time high for 2011. I've already worn it a couple times this year, so that makes five. I don't like how this is trending.

I own just one plain, black, three-button suit jacket and pants, and it is accustomed to making only periodic appearances at weddings and funerals. I prefer it that way really; I feel like an imposter in a suit. It's like a fancy fabric-based trap, impractical, restricting, a seemingly pretentious status symbol that says "take me seriously. I have shoulder pads." How the hell James Bond always manages to kick so much ass, execute sweet stunt driving moves and defeat all manner of adversity in such an outfit is mysterious if not preposterous. I find it difficult to merely back out from a parking space with the constrictive uniform of international business choking and straight-jacketing me.

But once and a while is really no big deal. Every day is casual friday at this cubicle job of mine, and I don't even work fridays anymore. I sit in a cube but wear jeans. Yes friends, I have been gainfully employed as a technical writer for just over one year. You read that right. Read it again. My job title features the word "writer." Jamiroquai! How could this have happened?

Crossing over again, back into the white collar milieu, having survived one week at an insurance company, three months of unemployment, seven months in retail sporting goods, four more months of unemployment, three years of hauling barns on a truck (being HARDBARNED in rural BFE) and five months in corporate business sales (just to flash back in reverse through my last six years of trudging through the post-higher-education wasteland), if I have to wear a monkey suit once in a while, than so fucking be it. It only took about five thousand job applications over five years. I could be exaggerating, but holy crap it was hard to get the proverbial foot in the door.

Part of being an American means earning the right to complain, doesn't it? Where else in the world can a majority of citizens have everything they need for basic survival, not to mention an insane amount of extraneous bullshit they don't need, and still have the time to complain about their less than inspiring "careers?" I have finally conquered the epic "do something at least slightly related to your education and skill set" challenge. The next looming task involves finding work that not only engages my education and skills but also focuses on something that I am truly inspired by and exited about. Ha! How ridiculous and naive of me, right? Work is work, right?

I must reject this maxim and remain optimistic that one day I will derive income from creative, invigorating work that engages my true interests and enthusiasms.

But for now, I continue to welcome enthusiastically the long awaited arrival of gainful employment featuring the word "writer" in the job title over my previously accustomed slog through a horribly depressing morass of unsatisfactory labor . . . though I remain hopeful that one day the words "creative" and "passion" and "artistic" have at least something tangential to do with my full-time job.

Until then I remain grateful for the right to write and edit TPS reports.

Keef versus Prince of Darkness

2011-01-10T16:14:00.002-06:00

I finished Keith Richards' autobiography Life recently, thinking it might be a good time, as I had laughed out loud all the way through Ozzy's thoroughly hilarious memoir I Am Ozzy. Though I admit to being a bit of an Oz fan, I was never a big Stones listener, but I always liked them better than the Beatles and was interested in their history. I can't say that Life had as many laughs (Keith didn't blow away his pet chickens with a shotgun--not cool but funny to read about, sorry PETA--or pour seven pints of cognac into his wedding cake batter, but he did stay awake for nine days on a bender and pass out for three more underneath a recording console and wake up during a random band's session) it was engaging if occasionally rambling. I can't quite lavish the praise Liz Phair manages in her NYTimes review, but I enjoyed it. 'Keef' also gave an entertaining interview to Terry Gross when the book came out late last year.

I really liked the bits about writing songs, recording and touring. The pure love for the music this man espouses cannot be disputed, and his various encounters with just about every influential blues and rock musician (mainstream and otherwise) from the 50s through the 70s is unparalleled. Of course there was plenty of band drama, drug drama and lady drama, and it's as scattered and disheveled a memoir as the man himself appears to be, but overall I'd still recommend it highly as a window into a fascinating life that has impacted rock history significantly.

I've never seen the Rolling Stones, though I did once deliver a plate of chocolate covered strawberries to their hotel room. They weren't there. I saw Ozzy live twice. Once in the early nineties with Alice In Chains and Sepultura (awesome) and once about six or seven years ago with the original Black Sabbath lineup. Ozzy kept forgetting the lyrics to all the classic songs. Whenever he couldn't think of what to sing next, he'd grab a bucket of water from a stage hand, dump it over his head, and yell "I love you! I love you! I love you!" into the mic until he remembered the next line.

I still think that John Mayer and Jason Mraz should fight to the death in a cage match, but maybe Keef and Oz should start a side project. Keith points out his lack of appreciation for punk rock, but he never gets after the metal crowd, and even though he never mentions Ozzy, I somehow think these two would make a hell of a songwriting team. They just seem like they're made for each other, don't you think?

The Truth

2011-01-07T17:09:00.000-06:00

The Multi-Billionaire Strikes Back

2010-10-10T18:26:00.000-05:00

Star Wars has been on my mind a lot lately. It started this summer when a friend noticed my beard and said that I looked like Ben Kenobi. That got me thinking about Halloween. I skipped the holiday of holidays last year out of apathy when I looked at costumes in the store and nothing inspired me. I dressed as a bargain basement zombie for the two years before that. But I looked like old Ben, huh?

Inspiration struck. I found a pattern online after discovering the legion of costume-obsessed freaks that invent their own Jedi names and lurk on costuming forums with flashing banner ads featuring photos of themselves mugging in character, eager to dispute the authenticity of Stormtrooper injection molds and Sith Lord robe thread counts. My recently retired mom who loves to sew was happy to enlist in my efforts to make a solid try at an authentic Obi-Wan costume. I cobbled together a couple of old belts and a couple of pouches and buckles that I filed and scraped to arrive at the appropriately weathered look. I got a nice pair of brown boots that I might actually wear again if I ever get another motorcycle, and a relatively authentic lightsaber with light and sound effects.

My next job was to convince my wife to dress as a Star Wars character. She had only seen the original trilogy once, at my insistence a few years ago, when she was in her mid-twenties. Let's just say her enthusiasm after having her first go at the trilogy didn't quite match mine. But to be fair, how could I really imagine seeing it for the first time as an adult? As a thirty-four year-old man who grew up loving those movies, I really couldn't. So I asked my wife to watch them with me again, and she begrudgingly agreed. She liked them all much better the second time, but couldn't get excited about the Princess Leia The Slut or Frumpy Leia The Choir Member costumes we were able to find online.

As I was pondering these costumes and enjoying my old trilogy again, I came across this fantastic Gary Kurtz article in the L.A. Times, which confirms many things that many of us thirty-something fans have long suspected. Kurtz produced Star Wars (IV) and Empire (V) and thus worked very closely with George Lucas until they parted ways for Jedi (VI). Kurtz says Lucas wanted to sell plastic toys, and thus sold us all out, starting down a path to the dark side that began with the Ewoks and Kurtz's departure and continued through the next three movies that don't really deserve any discussion here at all.

But the greatest injustice does not relate to Return of the Jedi, which I still manage to love despite the Ewoks. It is not even the embarrassing cringe-fest that the next three films became. The real tragedy is the fact that the original trilogy has been stolen from us. What have we done, Mr. Lucas, other than love your first three kick ass movies? The latest news that your original trilogy will be released yet again in theatres, this time following the prequels, not only with all the crap you added in decades later, but this time in 3D. There is a great disturbance in the force.

In the 90s, Mr. Lucas, you re-released your original trilogy in theatres and on DVD. You added a bunch of garbage, like making Greedo shoot at Han and miss terribly from two feet away, so that Han appears to kill the bounty hunter in self defense. Well it was self defense when he shot first, man. You went on to add a bunch a cartoon animated crap, like a truly terrible, digital Jabba The Hutt scene in Star Wars, a cartoon dance number in Jabba's palace in Jedi that could have been a commercial for Mr. Potato Head, a fancy new Ewok song and some crappy actors from the newer movies who were pasted on the sidelines. Why?

Again, why? Much has been written about the wisdom of these decisions, but I--like so many young men of my generation--just want my godddamn trilogy back.

Why steal it from us? Why finally release the movies on blu-ray but omit the untouched originals? Have you ever even looked at Amazon? Thousands of us plead with you to do just this, including a Mr. Jonathan Mankuta, who argues that you should

"take the original three films . . . do NOT change the story at all . . . don't add in new footage, cut old footage, change any story elements . . . don't make Greedo shoot first, Luke scream, Yoda dress in drag, Threepio with a gold metal boner, Jawas dancing around a campfire as they cook s'mores, Wampa enhancements, CGI-ing a Colt-45 bottle into Lando's hand, putting Jabbas' fat sister in the same sexy outfit as Slave Leia, or ANYTHING other than what folks actually saw in the theatres the first time the films were released."

Why is it that in order to see these movies the way we like them (untouched) we have to watch them on VHS tape or with crappy DVD transfers from our VCRs? You officially license and sell every other piece of shit that possibly comes to mind, don't you? Why not sell us the untouched originals on blu-ray with great sound and picture but without all the fucking crap you added in later? Why?

Well I'm glad I'm not the only one who is angry, and I can't wait to see The People Versus George Lucas. But yeah, I'm still dressing like old Ben Kenobi for Halloween this year, you asshole.

HARDBLOGGED, Or Back To Blogger

2010-08-14T23:19:00.003-05:00

Due to a plethora of frustrating technical difficulties with my website provider, I will be smashing my old server in a field with a baseball bat and plan to begin blogging here on Blogger again, effective immediately, and maybe I’ll even do it more often!

Not only is the third party comment software unwieldy and awkward, I have to wrestle constantly with the blog system to merely achieve uniformity with the font size in any given post, the results of which you may have noticed.

I'll still have www.hardbarned.com as my anchor site, but I'm back to blogging here, and the blog link there will take you back here. That site is easier to remember than this one anyway. Thanks much to the two or three of you who still check up on this neglected and rambling blog. I moved some older content from the other site back over here, in case you want to check the archives for posts you may have missed. Meanwhile, I'll get busy on some new content and try to make it look legible. Thanks to my friend Cactus Gavvy for kicking my ass back into gear. Maybe I'll get him to autograph my macbook.

Dumb And Dumber Phones (2/1/10)

2010-08-14T22:40:00.000-05:00

My new dumb phone, as it turns out, is not only dumb but perhaps better described as a slow, dim, or even stupid phone. I intended to buy a dumb phone when I went to the phone shop the other day after my apartment flooded and my wife’s phone drowned. The screen on her cell resembled this, so after breaking it in half after sucking fifty gallons of water out of the carpet, I decided it was time for a trip to the phone shop for an engaging conversation with a commission-paid sales person, an interaction I prefer to avoid as much as possible, particularly when making decisions related to high-end electronics. I like to do my own research online and make decisions without a snappily dressed and excessively perfumed young person lurking about offering special offer rebate doublespeak and unsubtle up-selling.

Neither of us has any need for a smart phone. We have smart computers and iPods already. Our television is of at least above-average intelligence. Our appliances are all smart enough to do their jobs. What more could we ask of them?

I don’t want a camera on my phone. I don’t feel randomly compelled by noteworthy unfolding events to record them in a fuzzy, low-lit, half-megapixel sort of way. If I need a camera, I’ll find one for the occasion. I don’t need a miniature keyboard with tiny buttons the size of mouse droppings. I don’t want to type anything on my phone. I don’t want to watch a movie on a screen the size of a gum wrapper. I don’t need to surf the internet when I’m buying groceries or check my email between beers when I’m at the bar for wings night with my friends. I succumbed to the incredibly annoying innovation of text messaging, yes, but I try to keep it to a socially acceptable minimum.

I avoided the smart phones instinctively and went to the display marked “Simple Phones.” Ah, simplicity, the mark of true technological innovation. I like my electronics to perform at the level of a well-designed stapler. I prefer them to do exactly what I want--those few straightforward tasks that I ask of them--and to do them the same way every time, reliably, efficiently. Don’t complicate things with layers of fancy crap that I don’t need or won’t use. Just do one thing really well, like a great local mom and pop restaurant, defiantly thriving despite being surrounded by a rapidly expanding perimeter of smorgasbord chains and all-you-can-eat troughs.

The grandma model looked perfect to me. With comparatively enormous, well-lit buttons and screen fonts, no internet, and no camera, this one even had a bright red 911 button, in case I’ve fallen and can’t get up. It was cheap and two-for-one. I took two. Even though I didn’t need a new phone, it was cheaper by far to buy two than to replace one because the phone company now has their hooks in us for another two years. This reminds me of how the cable company makes it significantly cheaper to buy internet service with basic cable than internet by itself. They are determined to shove commercials down your throat like Serena Williams wants to shove tennis balls.

The problem is that this new dumb phone appears to be a little too dumb. It doesn’t ring unless it’s in the mood. Sometimes it just lets me know I have a voicemail instead. Occasionally it won’t work unless I hold it in some ridiculous way, like upside down and touching a photo frame against the wall, or leaning sideways with a pinky out, for example. I feel sometimes like I’m doing an interpretive dance just trying to make the thing work. There is a considerable and problematic delay between pushing a button and the resulting action, which leads to a debacle when navigating the computerized phone tree of the bank, the internet service provider, or better yet, the phone company.

But I think I’ll keep it. It pretty much works, for the most part, I guess. My wife

doesn’t mind hers, even though it doesn’t ring half the time. I kind of like being

the only person with the dumb phone, unless you count my buddy whose phone

makes him sound like Darth Vader underwater. His phone’s pretty dumb too.

Write Club (2/2/10)

2010-08-14T22:31:00.000-05:00

Work is the curse of the drinking class.

--Oscar Wilde

Actually, I’m a drinker with writing problems.

--Brendan Behan

To sink a few cold ones with the blokes is both an escape and a confirmation of belonging.

--Rennie Ellis

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.

--Henry Youngman

Beer: The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.

--Homer Simpson

Write Club was a small group of close friends with whom I met regularly to write together, encourage creativity and productivity with shared and individual writing projects and exercises, and to drink beer and make each other laugh. It’s easier to motivate yourself to write sometimes if you have buddies who want to read and respond. We all tried to entertain each other with what we wrote on the spot, but we had our personal and more “serious” writing as well. Everyone worked on different projects: songs, poems, short stories, novels, memoirs, and whatever we each needed to get out. We shared what we had written on our own, brought copies and wrote comments and suggestions on each other’s drafts, and then we’d switch to on-the-spot writing. We often used random prompts with background music from an iPod plugged into a decaying Voltron-like conglomeration of discarded stereo parts. We read what we had written out-loud to each other over beers and chips.We met in the basement of my old rental house, an ancient monstrosity divided into four apartments next to a college campus. Creaky wooden steps led down from the dusty hallway into the perpetually darkened, filthy basement. Legend had it that more than a century before, the house had originally housed nuns, but they were long gone. Hundreds of beer bottles of every brand imaginable decorated the steel I-beams that lined the ceiling. Posters of Bob Dylan, At The Drive In, and Beers Of The World shared wall space with Cracker Barrel employee training posters and stolen street and road signs of unknown origin. Insects of undiscovered genus inhabited the dark corners of the basement under stacks of broken appliances and discarded wood. A dank, earthy smell seeped upwards on the way down the stairs and lingered throughout each visit. The web of exposed electrical wiring, phone lines, internet cable, and cable television connections dangled from the ceiling in an intricately tangled mess of code violation. A round glass table covered with a fuzzy yellow blanket was illuminated by a single, low-hanging poker light which gave the surrounding darkness and shadows (falling on various discarded furniture, appliances, tools, wood, and junk) a sinister yet welcoming vibe. The perpetual hum of the house’s washer and dryer was punctuated by the periodic roar of the exposed gas furnace, its blue flames pulsing visibly from the partially dismantled machine of a bygone era. Asbestos- covered lead pipes leaked their powdery remains on the floor in dusty piles from a variety of ancient wounds and gigantic four-inch camel crickets, known scientifically as the Rhaphidophoridae, which sounds like a horrible man eating denizen of the Sarlacc Pit from Return of The Jedi but was actually harmless, would often leap unexpectedly onto the table or into one’s lap during a Write Club session. The Rhaphidophoridae also liked to escape the basement and invade the living quarters upstairs via the air conditioning vents. It was always too hot or too cold in the Write Club basement, but we got a lot done down there. We laughed a lot. We were fearless in what we were willing to write about and share with each other. Write Club lives on from time to time, though we live in different places and don’t get together as often.

Xmas Music Torture (01/13/10)

2010-08-14T22:25:00.002-05:00

I’m no longer in retail, but I worked through most of December in that meticulously manicured monument to epic consumerism, the outdoor shopping mall keystone or “anchor” store—the gigantic sporting goods behemoth next to the big box electronics chain, across from the ubiquitous pusher of middle-American honey-glazed cuisine, greasy tortilla chips and two-for-one well drinks. A few feet away from the bridal chain, the jewelry chain, the as-if-it-were-Chinese-cuisine chain, the arts and crafts chain, the steakhouse chain, and yes, the bookstore chain which has ignored three of my applications thus far.

I just wanted to take a moment and reflect on the experience of preparing a major retail store for the holiday season, and particularly I’d like to highlight the music. The relentless, punishing music. Yes I’ve written here once before about my curmudgeonly ways when it comes to popular music, but the Christmas season is particularly special for popular music, isn’t it?

Black Friday came and went without much of a bang. I expected it to be the worst of my days in retail, but it really wasn’t so bad. I arrived at the store at 4:45am to easily walk through the open front doors, though the line outside the electronics store next door snaked easily over several blocks and around the surrounding parking lot, among the few open parking spaces and remaining tents from the night before. People had apparently camped out in the parking lot on the coldest night of the year thus far for whatever Matthew McConaughey’s new movie was on blu ray for $10.

We were busy, of course, but for once the powers that be had granted us enough staff to get the job done and keep the customers happy. Instead of one or two people in the department as usual, we had six, staggered throughout the day. We were not overwhelmed, as we so often were during the true mother of awful shopping dates: cleat season. We were fed a tasty catered meal for free. Customers behaved and were mostly even cordial. Shoes were sold, and chaos was averted. I do not have any reports from Wal-Mart, however. I hope there were no casualties this year.

The day after Black Friday, the decorations appeared. Enormous, shiny red balls, the size of Ford Explorers, materialized in the parking lot, as if a Jolly Red Giant had been forcibly emasculated in celebration of the retail shopping season. Miniature trees with decorations and lights sprouted up in every department of the store, and holiday themed sweatshirts and chotchkies emerged at each end cap and on every display table.

In the current climate of satellite music services and their vast digitized vaults of every genre of music imaginable, one might innocently (or ignorantly) assume that a natural consequence of this shift from DJ-operated CD players might result in more variety for the listener. Nope.

Just what we usually experienced with the country and pop stations rang true with the holiday music channel we were subjected to. About twenty-two songs per station, in perpetual rotation, throughout the day, meaning we heard every song deemed important by corporate media conglomerates who own the music outlets about once every hour.

Our ears were repeatedly assaulted by the snorting Dominic The Donkey, which apparently has some sort of holiday significance of which I am hard pressed to discern, The Worst Christmas Song Ever, and plenty of traditional holiday crooner ballads twisted into a syrupy R&B mess by a troupe of top forty pop tarts.

The holiday gems were hammered into our skulls relentlessly, every hour of every shift from two days after Thanksgiving and all the way until I left right before Christmas, and possibly all the way through the new year.

Soggy Neighbors, or Three Cheers, The Bitch Is Gone (01/24/10)

2010-08-14T22:18:00.000-05:00

I posted once previously about my worthless neighbor, but I’d like to continue the rant just a bit longer because he’s not the only one, and I’m only writing this for my own therapy anyway, right? Who cares about my stupid neighbors?

The guy I wrote about in that post has since disappeared mysteriously. He never paid us the $200 he promised after smashing my wife’s car. Big surprise there. The cops were no help, despite my two witnesses. They are not interested in “domestic and civil issues” and wouldn’t even assign a detective after I handed them all the evidence they needed, including his license plate number. Then they talked me out of pursuing a court case, assuring me that I’d waste a lot more time and money if I did. Before this kid vaporized, I heard from neighbors in his building next to ours that his drunken antics had spilled out into the apartment next door. Apparently a fight had gotten ugly, and the brawlers were smashing into the door across the hall, where a young single woman and her child lived. They were terrified and moved out when the apartment complex decided not to evict the little scumbag, as the complaints about his bullshit piled up, along with the car break-ins, slashed tires, general riff raff and parking lot beer bottles that accompanied the little shit when he moved in. According to this young woman, several people in his building were moving out for the same reason, and the latest dirt was that the kid had been apprehended for a psychiatric evaluation after either threatening or actually trying to kill himself.

This was more than two months ago. I haven’t seen him or his stupid Transformers car or his little gang of teenage pals since. All I can get from the office is that he’s still paying rent. I thought that maybe I could write a letter to his parents and tell them about how he smashed my wife’s car, lied to me about doing it, finally admitted it when I cornered him, and failed to deliver on his promise to pay for at least our deductable portion of the $1200 damage he caused. I knew that they’d never give me the kid’s parent’s address at the office, but I figured at least they could mail a letter for me to them. That way they wouldn’t be giving away any information, and I could rat the kid out to his folks. But the office lady wouldn’t go for that either. “We try and stay out of these sorts of things,” she said. Guess so. Wonder what he has to do to actually get kicked out at this point? Well, on the bright side, he’s gone. I can only hope to never see his scrawny as-if-it-were-a-mustache again. I guess he’s either in rehab or dead.

So, enough with the next building over. I’d like to reflect a bit on the building I currently share with seven other dwellings. Next door to us live a couple of dudes. One dude has a daughter who is probably twelve or so. He always wears a white ball cap sideways and those tight T-shirts from Target that look like someone tattooed them with a brand name logo. According to his roommate, who approached me at the gym one day and told me all about it unsolicited, dude with daughter and Target shirt is often beaten about the face and abdomen with drunken fists by his maniac girlfriend, who I have heard more than I’ve seen, either stomping up and down the stairs while yammering at shouting level into her cell phone after slamming the door and yelling at the dude inside, fucking loudly against the wall on the other side of our kitchen, or screaming bloody murder at her dude. About a month ago the screaming reached a pitch and was silenced by an authoritative crash, so I called the cops. Sounded like murder. Wouldn’t you be surprised if you acted like that and your neighbors didn’t call the cops? Anyway, they’ve chilled out recently, but we never know when their particular brand of tough love might flare up.

Which brings me to our last and most hated neighbor, the downstairs chick. The last tenant underneath us was also a young single woman living alone, but man, she was nice. We hardly heard a peep out of her besides the Thursday nights when she got ready to go out with her girlfriends and blasted Journey’s Greatest Hits, which we didn’t really mind much. We barely noticed when her friend was wasted and set a potted plant on fire with cigarette butts, and we found out when she moved that she was intending to attend seminary to be a religious minister of some sort. Enter contrast:

Anyway, new chick moves in under us. Slams the utter living fucking shit out of the door every time she arrives and departs, so much that walls shudder and we hear multiple tones resonating from our vibrating wine glasses and dishes in our cabinets, despite their rubber mats. We adjust our pictures on the wall. She continues to slam all three of the doors inside her apartment as a matter of course. She turns on the television at a volume that must be deafening in her apartment—because it is utterly overwhelming in ours—within ten seconds of the first door slam as she enters, multiple times, every day of the week. It’s either Fox News or Mario Kart, not that I can tell the difference, but it’s literally on every fucking second she is home. All The Time. I go downstairs and put a friendly note on the door politely requesting that she consider not slamming the door, signed “your friendly neighbors.” Nothing changes. Of course I am certainly nothing like this guy, but I go downstairs and ask her if she’d mind not slamming the doors all the time because it really is jarring to feel as if a civil war cannon has been fired into the wall of your home when you are reading a book or actually working on a project. How the hell does she study? I wonder, noticing the university parking pass on her car’s rear-view mirror. “Uh, yeah, uh-huh” is all she can manage in reply. Nothing changes. She wakes us up in the middle on the night on a Wednesday with loud music and loud people and more slamming doors. If there is one thing I can’t stand, it’s being woken up in the middle of the night. I put on jeans and a shirt and go downstairs and pound on her door.

“Look, I’ve been pretty nice to you about the slamming door thing, but do you think you could not have a party with loud music and loud people in the middle of the night on a weeknight?”

“I can’t help the door. It just works that way.”

“No it doesn’t. It’s very simple. You hold the knob. You shut the door. Get it?”

--I offer to demonstrate, she doesn’t get it—

“Just hold it down, okay?”

“Uh, yeah, uh huh.”

She doesn’t hold it down, keeps us up another two hours, and offers a little fuck you at 3am as she leaves with her boyfriend, this time slamming the door in a world-class competitive door slamming championship volume level. Furious, I jump from the bed and look outside just in time to see her boyfriend’s last look up toward our apartment as he jumps in her car and they speed away. I decided that the gloves were off now and the cops would be regular visitors to her apartment from that moment on. I had a very hard time not pounding on her bedroom window to wake her up the next morning at 7:30 when I noticed her car was back.

So I don’t know if I believe in karma, but the bitch had it coming. A few days later our washing machine “shit the bed” as a buddy of mine would say, and most of our apartment was flooded. Guess where most of that water ended up going after soaking our carpets? Yep. As I was hauling a carpet cleaning machine up the stairs, she had the audacity to approach me and ask “Do you live upstairs?” as if she really didn’t know who I was. I refrained from sarcastic responses that immediately occurred to me and said “Yes, I do.”

“Water is coming through the ceiling onto my bed, running down the walls and flooding my apartment.” She said.

I resisted the temptation to dance and said “I’m sorry, we’re flooded too. Our washing machine exploded. You can borrow this carpet machine when I’m through if you like.”

I think I detected microscopic evidence of empathy when she said “Oh, okay,” and walked away. I never interacted with her again. She left that night and didn’t come back until the next morning, when she arrived with her dad and boyfriend and moved away. So our apartment is now a mold farm. Our furniture is in piles in various corners. I continue to rotate hot lights and fans in my continuing efforts to dry the place out. We’ve been camping out in the living room on the couches all week. But she’s gone.

Oh the sweet silence.

Blue Jar Jar Dancing In Space? (11/8/09)

2010-08-14T22:05:00.001-05:00

So I have to admit being pretty stoked about the new James Cameron film, AVATAR, which by now everyone knows about, and most dorks, myself included, have viewed multiple trailers already. It's hard not to get excited by this movie, if you're a fan of science fiction film, and if you are even a part-time sci-fi (or SyFy, the ugly new moniker adopted by the former SciFi Channel) geek, Cameron's record is pretty solid. For those of you who are less familiar with his track record in the genre or have been boycotting Hollywood since 1984, he is responsible for spectacular screen gems such as Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Aliens, and The Abyss. I even loved Steven Soderbergh's remake of the Russian classic, Solaris, which Cameron produced. However, Cameron is also responsible for lessor works including True Lies, Piranha Part 2: The Spawning, and something about a boat with Billy Zane.

But I have some misgivings. Being a fan of science fiction movies means being a fan of Star Wars, and by Star Wars, I mean three movies that came out between 1977 and 1983. The summer of 1999 was pretty exciting because George Lucas was finally returning to his beloved trilogy to tell the story of Obi-Wan as a young swashbuckler and Darth Vader as a child actor who stops by Tatooine to whine a little between diaper ads and cookie commercial shoots. Early that summer, anticipation of the new film was high, though nay-sayers were knocking the computerized graphics and predicting a stinker. I would not listen. The early 1999 me thought "come on, people, this is George Lucas! This is Star Wars! How could anyone doubt that it would be fantastic?" I chose to ignore those who cited the Ewok television specials or Lucas' stint as executive producer on Howard The Duck, or even this as evidence that the new Star Wars trilogy would suck. I just thought it was too special and beloved a series to even have the slightest chance of turning into a big shiny digital mistake. Obviously I was so very wrong.

Adrian McKinty, one of my favorite authors, who has a fantastic blog, by the way, said it first here, and he is indeed right on the money to surmise that Avatar looks like Dances With Wolves in space; I couldn't have said it better myself, though I liked Dances With Wolves and can admit it here. I would add the one caveat that there are a bunch of blue folks running around who look like cousins of the abomination that was Jar-Jar Binks, and this compounds our common suspicions of Avatar. The plot appears to be as thin as the average science fiction effects vehicle: Racism is bad, mmm--kay? Centralized power structures are often corrupt. We need to embrace our diversity and cooperate in order to survive, mmm--kay? Yet the best sci-fi looks closely at what it really means to be human, and that usually involves some sort of doppelganger that teaches us, usually after great conflict and loss, that we are not that much different than The Other. One recent example of this well-worn plot coating an otherwise spectacularly awesome movie is District 9.

So the new Star Wars trilogy wasn't even in the same galaxy of cool as the first trilogy or even that of THX 1138, and Lucas will need quite a grand slam to win back my respect. I guess the point is that after enduring the cringe-fest that was the new trilogy, I have to admit that the greats are not necessarily going to remain great. Cameron too is human, so it is with these cautionary notes that I remain, well, cautiously optimistic about Avatar. Sam Worthington was pretty good in T4, which was at least a little better than T3, and now I see that Cameron is in talks to return to the series with T5, which might be cool.

So maybe Avatar won't break much new ground plot-wise. Maybe humans won't ever stop killing each other over our minute differences, but man, those trailers look cool.

In Search of Ninja For Discrete Assassination (10/26/09)

2010-08-14T21:54:00.000-05:00

Living in an apartment can be a real pain in the ass. A teenager recently moved in with some buddies near where my wife and I live. According to neighborhood gossip, he is a seventeen-year-old high school student whose parents are paying for his apartment. He is never spotted—day or night—without his trademark Elton John sunglasses with white frames and black lenses, or the large, metal, cobalt blue spike that pokes through his eyebrow. He often wears a “Hooters” shirt and seems to have trouble keeping his pants up. He has big, wide child-like eyes and a peachfuzz stache on his upper lip. He often has an entourage of other teens, one of whom looks just like Mitch Kramer from Dazed and Confused, the freshman with long hair who got paddled by Ben Affleck. Maybe Ben could come by with that paddle some afternoon. I'll bring the beers. These kids, who come and go about fourteen times a day and cannot be actually attending high school, are no doubt excited about the chance to smoke weed and drink in an apartment with no grownups around.

Elton Jr's sport utility vehicle has a large Transformers symbol on the back windshield, as well as a bumper sticker that reads: PLAYER. The SUV’s interior glows bright blue at night, and bass music thumps aggressively from his trunk, as if he is hosting his own mobile rave dance party, the blue light reflecting from the white frames of his dayglow sunglasses as he cruises the parking lot, slumped over to one side like a thug, his booming system belching at our neighborhood in the dark.

The bass music was what brought us together. About a week after he had moved into the neighborhood, coming and going at irregular intervals with wall-shaking bass thumps that literally vibrated the pictures on our walls, I had had enough of his douchebaggery. I heard him coming and rushed out to meet him, approaching his thundering truck as he pulled into a parking place.

I stood outside the driver-side door and waited for him to emerge. Not un-cordially, but firmly and directly I said:

“Hi. I live right there with my wife. I need you to do something for me. I need you to not do that thing you do with your stereo when you come and go. It shakes the walls of my apartment. In the interest of being considerate of me and this neighborhood, I’d like to ask that you turn down the stereo when you’re here.”

“Okay man, sure. Sorry.” was his reply.

Two days later, I woke up and looked out the window. His SUV was slumped over to one side with two flat tires. Great, I thought. Now he’ll think I did something to his truck.

My wife and I met him in the lot on our way out to dinner and asked what had happened.

“I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with that,” I said. “I can see how you might have pissed someone off with your stereo, but as you know, I like to speak directly with people if I have a problem.”

“Oh, no!” he said. “I know exactly who did it.”

“Yeah, and we’ll see how he likes a .45 in his face!” squeaked one of his many skinny-twerp sidekicks in a T-shirt and khakis from the Big and Tall men’s shop.

Elton Jr. went on to tell me a story about some kid he had feuded with who had texted a mutual acquaintance to gloat about having slashed the tires.

“Sorry to hear that man, that sucks. I’ll keep an eye on the neighborhood, and you should too.” I said.

“Sure, you all have a nice night,” he replied.

The next day the kid and his ten-member entourage were hanging out in the parking lot for several hours, helping fix the two tires and just being kids. Loudly. I went to band practice and got home late. The next day my wife found that someone had rear-ended her car and caused considerable damage. Of course nobody had left a note. I filed a police report, which was required by my insurance, and as soon as the cop left, another neighbor approached and said that he had seen—guess who—little Elton Jr. himself smash into my wife’s car and come back out later and wipe the paint from his bumper.

I saw mini-Elton in the lot again and asked again if he had seen anything that night. Saying no, he shook his head.

“That’s funny, I said, because I have a witness who claims he saw you do it yourself.”

“Naw man, I didn’t do it. I’m honest.” was his reply.

A few days went by and another neighbor came forward, telling my wife that he too had seen the kid smash her car.

I confronted the him again and said, “Look. I know you did it. You know you did it. You caused over a thousand dollars worth of damage to my wife’s car and lied to my face about it. We have to pay a $250 deductible and be short a car for a week because of you.”

“I’m sorry man. I’m sorry I lied to you. It was me. I was afraid I’d lose my insurance because I’ve had other people hit me, and if I have one more claim I’ll lose it. I’m gonna pay you back for it man. I get paid on Friday. I’m sorry.”

He offered me his hand; I shook it and accepted the apology.

That was three weeks ago. Since then he has offered me the excuse that since there has been a lot of rain, he hasn’t been able to work at his job “painting signs,” and so he has no money. Two days ago, I approached him as he was leaving with a truck full of kids and said,

“I want to know when you’re going to keep your word and pay for what you did.”

More excuses and this gem escaped from the window of his truck: “I wouldn’t have said I’d pay for it if I didn’t mean it.” Ah, so he wants me to think he’s a guy who speaks truth. He wants me to believe him. He thinks that I actually think he’s going to pay me. Well I don’t. The cops aren’t interested in “civil cases,” and the apartment complex doesn’t seem to want to kick him out, despite multiple complaints from other residents about his noise and his friends and his general douchebaggery. The other day I picked up a bunch of 40 ounce beer bottles that he and his friends had left behind in the parking lot. Just this afternoon as I wrote this he arrived, booming his bass system as loud as ever. Maybe I should show up at his door with a ghetto blaster from 1982 and blast Dolly Parton's Greatest Hits in his little shithead face until he cries.

So I can’t just beat him into the asphalt without going to jail. I can’t smash his car without witnesses. The cops won't investigate a misdemeanor. Lawyers cost too much. Civil court takes forever and probably isn't worth the hassle. The authorities don’t care. How do I get back my $250?

My question is this: are there any ninja for hire in the area, and if so, how much to they charge for discrete elimination of neighborhood problems? And how does one get in touch with a ninja anyway? Damn I wish we could afford a house. And a ninja.

Pop Radio Curmudgeon (9/10/09)

2010-08-14T21:17:00.010-05:00

Ok so first things first. I'd like to set the tone of this post by sharing this great video. It kind of illustrates my point and gets you into the mood.

After more than a decade of lying in comfortable retreat from commercial radio with occasional and brief lapses due to desperation and lack of alternatives, I am now reminded several times a week of my undeniable status as a grumpy old curmudgeon when it comes to the subject of popular music. Four out of five of my radio presets in the car are NPR, college radio, and local jazz stations. I keep the classic rock station preset, but the other stuff makes me see red. Constant commercials and DJ babble are not entertaining for me, and now I have an iPod. In the car I am master of my environment, but work is, of course, a different story. You see, my customer service job in retail sporting goods involves the perpetual barrage of a dual-pronged assault consisting of unceasing sports television on a jumbotronesque projection TV the size of a king size bed and a concurrent satellite radio program that plays a repetitive collection of blustery, whiny, overblown, corny, empty pop drivel—and these conflicting voices, sound bite sportscasters versus pitch-corrected entertainers, comprise the auditory milieu in which the trade of selling athletic shoes commences.

This particular satellite radio station is exceedingly fond of American Idol alums and former members of platinum selling acts such as Matchbox Twenty and Bush, now selling solo records in the If You Thought My Last Band Sucked . . . category. Also popular on the station are teenage pop tarts and overstyled frosty-haired men in cowboy shirts who sing a sugary concoction of country twang and earworm inducing jingles, a striking percentage of which seem to be focused on romantic fantasies of, well, traditional marriage.

Ok, I’ll admit that perhaps once a day, I’ll hear a song I like. Maybe a seventies or even eighties Billy Joel tune (yes, there are good Billy Joel songs) or an eighties Police song, but if they’re playing Billy Joel, it’s usually from his final (and worst) album, River Of Dreams—usually the song that sounds like The Jungle Book theme song—no wonder Billy stopped writing original material after that. I couldn't even begin to hope for a Fugazi or Iron Maiden tune in this uber-commercialized world of retail sales, so I take what I can get.

The babble on the sports network rambles on all day above the din of the satellite radio pop music:

“So, Jim, what do you think about the chances of Team X this year?”

“Well, Scott, I think they just have to play the game, you know, play it well.”

“Well what if they don’t play as well as they did last year, Jim?”

“Well Scott, they just have to get out there and really, you know, play that game.”

“Who do you think will play quarterback this time?”
“Well you know, it mostly depends on who, you know, throws the ball better.”

“Do you think the fans will show up this year after the fiasco with Player Z?”

“Well these fans, you know, they just love the game. They may not like what Player Z did, but they’ll, you know, they’ll show up and they may have a sign with them that says ‘Down With Player Z The Douchebag’ but they love the game, you know, so they’ll be there, and they’ll buy hotdogs.”

“What do you think about FAVRE and VICK and FAVRE and VICK and FAVRE?”

“Well, you know, Scott, FAVRE and VICK and FAVRE and VICK and FAVRE and VICK, you know, mostly FAVRE and VICK.”

Seriously though, am I the only person that thinks Jason Mraz and John Mayer should be forced to fight to the death in a televised chainsaw cage match? They should. Michael Vick could be the announcer: Two man enter! No man leave!

Something Wrapped

2010-04-23T18:41:00.004-05:00

Three years ago I went to an art show. I wrote down a little bit about the experience:

The fat lady lurked over the sushi table, grazing on the Brie cheese and fried root snacks, making sure to comment to whomever was listening on the quality of the home-rolled sushi. As I was obligated to offer, I suggested that she might add a stylish plastic cup of red or white wine to compliment her caloric loot. “RED!” she said, and I complied accordingly, turning my attention to the other hopelessly hip artist types, perfecting their attempts to get me to pour them a glass of wine without appearing to want me to pour them a glass of wine. Tiring of the unspoken requests and loaded glances, I took to announcing, “Who wants a glass of wine?!” above the dance music din as the trendies pretended to peruse carefully the framed photos for sale on the walls as they surged toward the wine and hors d’oeuvres tables. Meanwhile, my friend and I tried our best to finish off the merlot, so as to leave only Chardonnay for the sucks, and the fat lady returned to graze again, choosing to appear as if she were noticing the table and its delights for the first time and making frowny faces at the lack of particular treats which had long since been devoured. She brought me something wrapped: two Dove chocolates, and thanked me twice for “giving her the merlot”—she grasped her bosom as she reflected on my generosity, as if she were the only one on which I had bestowed such an honor. I left the chocolates at the bar and got the hell out of there. I retreated to the balcony and reconvened with friends, drinking as much red as we could stomach. One friend called and gave his regrets—he would not be able to meet us because he was attempting to recover from the previous night’s party. The art on display was wide-ranging, including everything from melting wax-heads to dog jaw bones, clarinets submerged in water in jars, vandalized bibles, pig-shaped balls designed to be smashed with tiny pick-axes, and plenty of Crayolas.

Shaving Sucks

2010-03-19T17:38:00.000-05:00

Whomever thought it would be a good idea to drag a razor sharp blade across his face on a daily basis and started the trend of shaving is not apparently of my bloodline. This man must have been born in a tougher age when men’s skin was as thick as cowhide and people wore homemade knives on their deerskin belts, because shaving sucks.

Okay, I admit it is nice to make out with your lady when your face is clean-shaven. You can actually feel her face instead of the coarse slug of hair bristling along your upper lip. You can rinse your mouth out with Listerine in the morning without having to hold down your unruly mustache with one finger to prevent it from tickling your nose mercilessly. You don’t have to constantly break out the scissors and manscaping tools to trim the hairs that inevitably stick straight out from your face when you wake up in the morning with a beard.

But shaving is the alternative. I’m an English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and German American. If you’re a white mutt like me, a Euro-honkey of five lily-white ethnic ancestries, this means the fair skin on your face is gonna bleed. It means your chin will get irritated, dry out and turn red. It means you will have to buy mancare products like creams, lotions, aftershaves, exfoliants, and moisturizers, unless you stick with your bar of soap and want dandruff chin, and nobody wants to snuggle up with dandruff chin.

It did occur to me a while back that shaving in the shower might be a good idea: kill two birds, save some water, utilize the hot, pore expanding steam to my shaving advantage. I got one of those “fogless” mirrors that attaches to the shower via suction cups. It was relatively fogless, but cheap as well. At random occasions about once a month, usually in the dead of night, this plastic junk would come un-suctioned from the shower wall and crash into the tub, waking us up instantly. I eventually slammed the vile thing into our fancy married people’s trash bin at 3am.

Speaking of fancy garbage cans, it’s funny how getting married tends to upgrade the quality of everyday objects around your living quarters. We don’t have a house, and we live in a tiny apartment, but damn, we have a sweet garbage can. And good cookware, an essential upgrade from the unenviable state of my bachelorhood pots and pans. You get married and people buy stuff like this for you. We have a pretty badass crockpot too, but I digress.

So I try to wear a beard as many months out of the year as possible, but it’s hard to keep it through the hottest summer months, when I usually end up going under the razor. I try to stick it out as long as possible, but here, Down South, usually sometime in April or so, the asphalt jungle starts heating up, the humidity begins to soar, and the sweat sticks your clothes to your back. My wife, seemingly hatched from a heatlamp-heavy incubator, seems to be happiest when the apartment swelters in the low eighties. She is part lizard. Sexy lizard.

Anyway, it is around these months and in these heatwaves that my beard begins to feel quite like I have stapled a sweaty squirrel onto my face. Dripping and invasive, he is perpetually attempting to crawl into his den: my mouth. He has won for a few months, until late August, when the beard creeps his way forth once again. Bring on the shaving cream.

Gun School

2010-03-18T17:12:00.003-05:00

About a year ago, in the midst of an unprecedented national spike in gun sales, just after the election of Barack Obama, I decided to go to gun school in my very red state. It really was a coincidence. I wasn’t worried about the democratic victory. I was glad he won.

Now I’ve never really been much of a gun guy. I am not a member of the NRA, and I’m sure as hell not a Republican. I just like to be prepared and informed, and you never know when the zombie apocalypse might happen. I mean to say that I like a lot of movies with guns in them, and I enjoy a few violent novels and video games and even a few comic books that feature gunplay, but I’m not a hunter. I’ve never been in the military. I’m a liberal guy. I think gun control makes sense; I don’t think most people need assault rifles, but I agree with our right to bear arms. I don’t think Obama or anyone else is going to take away everyone’s guns. It just won’t happen. But the zombie apocalypse might. Just ask Max Brooks.

I used to have a .22 rifle that my Dad had when he was a kid. I took it target shooting a few times and kept it in the closet with the shotgun I bought in preparation for the impending doom at the turn of the millennium. I shot the shotgun a few times at a target and ended up selling it after the world seemed to hold together a little better than some people predicted. I hadn’t gone all out with the survival supplies like some people did in late 1999, but I figured a shotgun might be a decent investment in home security. After giving Dad back his .22 and selling the shotgun, I had no guns for the next six years or so. I didn’t seem to miss them.

Then, in 2006, I got married. You could say I married into guns. My wife is originally from Michigan, and her Dad is a lifelong hunter. When she moved to another state to attend graduate school, she lived alone in an inner-city area with a high crime rate. Her Dad insisted that she take a handgun safety class and pack some heat in her apartment. I kind of liked the idea too. She would be able to defend herself if she needed to. She took the class and received her handgun carry permit. Though she never carried the gun around with her, she had it in her apartment, just in case.

So when we got married, we inherited a couple of guns (and motorcycles—a topic for another post), so I decided to take the class, earn the permit, and make everything legal. I figured that if I’d have the things in the house, I’d better know how to use them and be legally permitted to carry them, if I ever needed to take them anywhere. Not that I ever do, except for a couple trips a year to go to a range to practice. Anyway, I’ll be in better shape when the zombie apocalypse hits, right? I’m a zombie fan, ever since the wife and I completed a zombie movie festival via Netflix, and after reading Max Brook’s books and The Walking Dead comic series (now destined for television), which I’ve mentioned here before.

So I had to find a gun class to sign up for. Everything in town was expensive. Online I discovered a place way out in the middle of some country town I’d never heard of, though I suspected I’d probably delivered a barn or two out there at some point. It was a little one stoplight town with a gas station, a Sonic drive in, and not much else. The kind of inconsequential little town where a zombie outbreak usually happens. I showed up early in the morning, my breath steaming in the chill. The store looked imposing on its huge parking lot, its windows covered with black steel bars and firearm manufacturer decals.

Other early arrivals were hanging around outside the gun shop against the brick wall on the side of the building, most of them rotund. They wore trucker hats and camo hunting jackets, smoking cigarettes and chewing on toothpics simultaneously. Some munched fast food breakfast biscuits. All the men had goatees. There were a couple of middle aged, overweight women in sweat pants and holiday sweaters, though it was January.

We were all summoned in and took our seats in the dull gray classroom. A dignified man with a silver mustache and razor sharp posture stood before us, easily appearing seven feet tall under the low ceiling and fluorescent lights. We looked up from our desks as he unveiled an assortment of real handguns, though he made his first gestures and comments while demonstrating with rubber pistols: a blue revolver and red semi automatic. After an opening discussion full of comments from the class about how our newly elected president was going to take away our guns and raise the tax on assault weapons, how the socialist healthcare takeover would kill grandma and take away our freedom, the instructor smiled patiently. He let us know that he agreed with us, that the liberals would pry his guns “FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS,” the chorus shook the room as the true believers shouted back in unison. I sunk a little lower into my seat.

Of course I couldn’t help but think of Charlton Heston, which reminded me of Bowling For Columbine. I like Michael Moore because he’s a talented entertainer and sometimes asks important questions that other media often ignore, though he can certainly make an ass of himself. Though I was interested in the movie and appreciated it, I felt a little sorry for sad old Charlton, the once mighty Ben Hur, as Moore berated him in his own home, on camera. It just felt wrong.

So anyway, the distinguished gentleman instructor waited for the gun class to quiet down and proceeded to lecture about how guns work, what the gun laws are like Down South, and what we needed to know as gun owners and gun permit holders. He let us know that he had been carrying multiple guns in his car (legally) for more than a decade, but had never needed them. He also made it clear that if Obama managed to turn America “commie” and made his permits illegal, he’d still carry his sackful around with enough ammo to shoot it out with the Taliban elite when they invade the Mayberry town square.

We watched some flickering, grainy VHS movies featuring “actors” playing complex roles such as “homeowner” and “invader.” Debbie Gibson and Lorenzo Lamas weren’t much better in last year’s little seen masterpiece, Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus, which I watched last night, incidentally. It seems to have been completely ignored by the Academy, much like Farrah Fawcett.

We viewed interviews with local judges, cops, attorneys and gun experts, each weighing in carefully with his own stern warnings about proper public and private handgun etiquette, each peculiarly obese.

Eventually, after a lunch break, a study session, and a brief written exam, we were allowed to take our turn shooting targets at the indoor range, most of us with our own guns, which we had brought along with us, having stashed them in the trunk as directed, the ammo separate and in the cab. The problem was that there were too many of us, maybe sixty or more, and there were only two ranges in use for the class at one time. The other indoor ranges were constantly rented by customers: men, women, grandma, and little kids in tow. The customers would file in with hard plastic cases filled with firearms, and file out thirty minutes later, instantly replaced by more Soldier of Fortune subscribers. As I sat in the waiting room, waiting my turn to shoot, leafing through NRA and hunting magazines and occasionally watching the NFL game, it was hard to ignore what sounded something like the gun battle from the Los Angeles bank robbery scene in Michael Mann’s Heat going on behind the door to the ranges.

Semi automatic assault rifles were available for rent, as well as handguns of all shapes and sizes. The door between the waiting room and shooting range would often fly open as people came and went, leaving enough time for plenty of what sounded like the skull shattering Rambo soundtrack to thunder into the waiting room. The whole place was slammed like Wal-Mart on Black Friday, and I could barely even wander around the shop upstairs, trying to escape the noise down in the waiting room. People were shoulder to shoulder, buying guns and stocking up for the pending Democratocalypse.

Eventually I escaped with a genuine, legal handgun carry permit, complete with my picture on it. I didn’t have to tell anyone I had happily voted for Mr. Obama, but I would have if they had asked.

Neighbors Part III

2010-03-10T16:06:00.006-06:00

Nevermind. Hardbarned has returned to its old home here at Blogger. I'll still have www.hardbarned.com, but I'm going back to blogging here instead. It just looks and works a lot better. The blogging features on my .com site are not very user friendly. Until they improve significantly, I'll stick with Blogger. Sorry for any confusion, and bring on the comments, if anyone is still reading this crap!

Anyway, I was digging through my hard drive today, doing a little spring cleaning, when I came across a letter I had written to my upstairs neighbors at my previous residence. I thought it might be fun to post it here. If you've been following this blog much, you know that I've had some real fun with neighbors: my wife's car was smashed up, my apartment was flooded, I kept getting woken up in the middle of the night, people yell at each other in the stairwell between the apartments and stomp and crash up and down the stairs, smoking their cigarettes and throwing them all over the place, their kids screaming, their booming systems blasting bass noise, shaking the walls, slamming the crap out of their doors, etc . . . living in an apartment can make you feel like George Clooney at the oscars, just pissed enough to beat up Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin simultaneously.

At least we're enjoying a momentary respite from neighbors, as the downstairs apartment below is is still vacant. I'm just glad we don't have the new neighbors that my friend in the next building over just encountered for the first time early on Sunday morning. They woke him up with three consecutive rounds of fighting, fucking, and puking. No kidding; one after the other, punctuated by oppressively loud music and perpetually slamming doors. My favorite. Holy crap I wish I could afford a little bit of land and a house away from people.

So here's that letter from a few years ago. I posted it on their door. Does it make me sound like an asshole?
I thought I seemed pretty reasonable.

Dear Upstairs Neighbors,

How are you? We’re pretty good. Just wanted to make a request. We’re not sure if you are aware of this or not, but every time you move around upstairs, we can hear it downstairs. We do realize that this happens when you live in an apartment building.

The problem is this. Pretty often we hear ridiculously loud stomping, scraping and crashing upstairs in your apartment, late at night. It sounds like you are moving furniture, sumo wrestling, herding cattle and practicing the shuttle run.

This noise happens a lot, again, late at night, and it wakes us up. For example, one of us was awakened last night around 2 am by what sounded like someone lifting weights and dropping dumbells on the floor. The exact same thing happened the night before as well.

We know we are going to hear you sometimes, and you may hear us sometimes. The thing is, we both work early in the morning, and therefore are asleep by 10:30 or 11 most nights. Perhaps this hasn’t occurred to you before. We have had encounters previously over this and we don’t wish to have any more.

This is our friendly request for you to make a significant effort to be quiet at night. We really appreciate it. Thanks for listening.

Sincerely,
Your friendly Downstairs Neighbors

Grouper & Goat Gristle

2009-09-03T08:26:00.000-05:00

I spent a week in Florida scuba diving with my wife in July and was thrilled to see that most people were not from America. Hey, I love America as much as the next guy, but it’s nice to get a break from Americans sometimes. We had some free miles on the airline and a credit card, so we figured we’d go for it. Why not go into a little more debt to give ourselves a vacation for a brief and shining six nights and seven days? We dove from shore and explored the extensive reef systems, drifting along peacefully in the shallows with our floating dive buoy, but we mostly dove from a boat out at sea; the highlight was seeing a purple 500lb Goliath Grouper face to face at the bow of a sunken research vessel at 110ft. That’s the last time we dive somewhere semi-exotic (compared to cold, dark rock quarries Down South, at least) without a decent underwater digital camera.

We met a cab driver from Haiti who gave us multiple rides to and from the marina we hauled our dive gear to and from in order to dive a few wrecks and reefs that required a boat ride. We got along so well with him that he offered to give us a free ride wherever we wanted. We agreed, as long as he’d let us buy him dinner, so we asked him to take us to his favorite authentic Haitian restaurant. Neither of us had ever experienced Haitian food, and we love to try international cuisine whenever possible. The fried chicken and stewed vegetables and salad were tasty, though the goat meat had a lot of fat, bits of spinal column and gristle. Everyone looked at us like we were the most unlikely of patrons, and our host wondered aloud why Haitian restaurants did not advertise; surely there were more non-Haitians who’d like to try the native cuisine. I’d try it again.

Another cabbie—this one a less likeable person and a native Floridian—who drove us from the marina to our hotel, talked about how much he loved to watch television and lay around at the pool when he was on vacation. He couldn’t understand why we hadn’t used the pool when we were staying a block from the beach, and he was flabbergasted at our revelation that we had not turned on our television once (though we did watch Man Vs. Food and Alien the night before we headed home). This guy talked about how his wife was always trying to go to the beach and read books when he just wanted to watch TV and sit by the pool. Reading books on the beach with cold beverages was what took up most of our above water time, as it turned out. This cabbie said, “I’m glad I’m not married to YOU two!” So were we.

We discovered an excellent Greek restaurant close to our motel and returned for their simple yet exquisite hummus. My wife considers herself a “hummus snob” since she makes it for us at home so often, and she was very impressed with the recipe at this place. I made the stupid mistake of asking if they had falafel, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask. Our friendly waiter brought me a couple of Mythos Greek lagers, which I enjoyed and found refreshing in the oppressive July heat.

Walking along the beach late one afternoon, we passed a drunken Russian fisherman named Andres who introduced himself and shared with us his whiskey from a bicycle squeeze bottle. We made small talk, and I asked what he thought of the new Russian president Medvedev. In his thick Russian accent he proclaimed dismissively,

“IS PUPPET!”

At our parting, I shouted “Nostrovia!”

Andres gasped at me and said, “How you know this?”

“The Deer Hunter,” I said.

“Ah!” He nodded and smiled, miming a toast and taking another swig as we walked on.

Our motel room featured a full kitchen, and we walked to the grocery to avoid eating out for every meal. One day an older woman stopped us as we walked home, sweating in the heat with arms full of groceries, and insisted that we catch the free shuttle bus with her. Eager to help, she suggested we try a local bar known as the Bamboo Beach. We met Andres on the way there.

Bamboo Beach was a little Tiki Hut bar and restaurant right on the beach, the perfect spot for enjoying dinner and drinks at dusk, watching the ocean, and watching the people, as it turned out. We liked it so much that we ate dinner there three nights in a row. The first night, we had fried Grouper with salads and French fries and were witness to the dramatic reunion of a large group of scantily clad lesbians, many of which were former lovers, all of which were loudly discussing the pros and cons of their past relationships with each other and reasons for their emotional breakups at volume levels well over the jukebox, which made our eavesdropping quite involuntary if not somewhat entertaining. At a table near us sat two hulking bald men with Playboy bunny, artificially enhanced girlfriends half their age. It was something like a bad reality television show, but without commercials.

The next night, we sat at the same table with excellent views of the ocean and the bar, and this time, instead of lesbians, seated in front of us at the bar, their backs to us, was a large group of obese southerners. We were amazed again as one of the huge women sat on her husband’s busy hand, the two giants precariously spilling over their adjacent bar stools like the sloppy lounge lizards in Hunter Thompson’s take on Las Vegas, both engaged heavily in drunken conversation with patrons on the other side of the bar. The outsized man was vigorously massaging his wife’s nether regions through her pink shorts from behind with one hand, calmly hoisting a beer with his other as he appeared to be fully engaged with the ongoing bar chatter on the other side of the bar, apparently oblivious to the fact that we and everyone else seated at tables on his side of the bar were bearing witness to his quite public display of something more than affection for his wife’s crotch. She too belied no upper body language to reveal what was going on below the bar. Above board she was drinking and chatting with the rest of the crew.

The third night was truly special. We arrived at Bamboo Beach to a constant stream of Michael Jackson’s music, which neither of us minded much—we like many of his songs. It was certainly better than top forty or country, and we figured it was appropriate due to the recent and premature demise of the king of pop. We assumed our customary spots at our table, sipped our drinks and perused the menu, relaxed. This time in the Lesbian Drama/Crotch Grabber bar stools sat a group of east coast meatballs in their thirties with sleeveless shirts and flat tops accompanied by a tough guy in his fifties with his wife. They started arguing with the bartender in their toughguy meatball east coast accents. Another bartender got into the argument, and then various male servers headed over.

Soon the meatballs were chest bumping and f-bombing the entire male staff of the restaurant in what looked like a full-on brawl ready to happen. I kept hoping a Roadhouse-era Patrick Swayze character might appear with some jump kicks and uppercuts, but no such luck. The very small and stylish manager arrived with big hair, gold bracelets, a hockey jersey, and some enormous guys with backwards golf hats and gray goatees. The glaring and the staring and the chest bumping and the threatening and the shouting got so close to our table that I had to move my chair in order to get out of the way of the rapidly expanding, surging ball of testosterone. Finally the meatballs gave up and were banished. Then we learned the genesis of the argument from our server.

The east coast bigmouths had placed thirty dollars into the digital jukebox, loading it with several hours of Michael Jackson songs and nothing else. They had proceeded to get wasted on a steady stream of draft beers. Before we had arrived, many people had complained about the lack of musical variety and had actually left the restaurant, so the management had voided the musical selections on the hijacked jukebox and returned the stereo to a mix of musical styles. This had enraged the meatballs and started the conflict. The drunken men had continually screamed about the “fuckin’ free-loaders” (patrons like us) who had been—from their perspectives—benefiting from the meatball contingent’s investment in the night’s soundtrack without being charged for it.

“He’s the greatest singuh whose evuh lived! Evuh!”

The older meatball leader continually pronounced aloud to nobody in particular.

Epic Heavy Metal Tennis Challenge

2009-07-10T21:07:00.003-05:00

Many people discount tennis and think it’s for fruity rich guys in short pants who have a court in their backyards and want to hit around for a while before teatime. Well I’m here to tell you that regular guys in cargo shorts with tattoos and black t-shirts who can barely afford a one-bedroom apartment might love the game too. My dad taught me tennis when I was but a wee lad, barely able to hold the racquet and run around without tripping over my own two feet. I played in the competitive city leagues when I was growing up, and I was the only sophomore to make the tennis team at my high school, and that was a big deal then. I played the game and loved it, and wasn’t really pressured to do it by dad, even though he got me started. I went to tennis camp a few times and had some lessons too.

The problem was heavy metal. How could heavy metal be a problem, you might ask? It’s such a universal source of unrelenting pleasure, you might think? Well I had a scheduling problem. I was a metal head, a skate boarder, and a tennis player, as it turned out. I didn’t mind that I was the only tennis player with a dumb haircut, baggy skater clothes, and a hat that had Soundgarden and Metallica patches on it. I was good enough. I didn’t want to wear those goofy little white short shorts or visors or matching polo shirts or cardigans or any of that crap. For me there would be no K Swiss. If I could compete in my old Airwalks and argyle socks, I would.

The problem was scheduling. My life had recently changed; I was in a band. My buddies and I had started playing heavy metal (or our closest approximation of it) after school in one guy’s spare bedroom, before his mom came home from work. I played bass and wrote lyrics for songs like “Madness Throne,” (yes, we listened to Alice In Chains’ “Angry Chair”—I guess it rubbed off). Our singer was so bad that we couldn’t even stand to be in the same room with him, so we gave him a wireless microphone. He sat in the next bedroom and screamed and growled from behind two closed doors. I had my first chance to rock; I had had a taste, and something stuck. I had a decision to make, as tennis practice was every day after school until five pm, precisely the only time available for my band, known as Hard To Figure, to practice. Rock beat tennis, and I threw away my hopes and dreams of tennis success for an endless series of shitty bands nobody has ever heard of.

It was worth it, but the longer version of the rock story is for my next book. When I say next, I mean second. Second book, you say? You missed the first book? Well it’s not out yet. It’s coming soon. Really. That’s why I’m so behind on blogging. It’s called HARDBARNED. How did you guess? It will be out soon, I promise! Tell all your friends! I’m sure that both of you who still read this blog will love it. But this post was supposed to be about tennis.

Anyway, I quit the high school tennis team and rocked out. Fast-forward sixteen years or so, and we arrive at my decision to break back into the world of competitive tennis! Ha!

However, indulge me for one more drop back into the past to briefly mention my first semester of college: I always thought I’d walk on to my college tennis team, despite spending years away from serious play. I still loved the game and still thought of myself as a pretty good player. Then I showed up to watch one of my University team’s practices and realized immediately that I was crap, and that I’d never make the team. I still had a few freshman phys-ed requirements to take care of, so I took intermediate and advanced tennis classes, and scuba diving.

Off and on, from finishing undergrad in 2000 until today, I had occasionally sought out some sort of competitive tennis in my area. Accustomed to my city leagues back in my hometown, I assumed that a town with such a phenomenal collegiate team would naturally have a great city tennis program as well. Well, maybe it does, but you might have to be over sixty years old and into mixed doubles.

All I wanted was to be involved in regular, somewhat evenly matched, somewhat competitive singles matches with guys around my same level of play, so that I wouldn’t be slammed into oblivion by world class players like the guys on the local college team, but I wouldn’t be chasing homerun moonballs hit over the fence by rookies either. I didn’t expect to win tournaments or anything remotely like it. I just wanted to get some regularly strenuous exercise, work on improving my game, and have a good time.

The first thing I did was call the tennis coach at school who also had presided over the two tennis courses I had taken. He suggested that I call a local lady who was supposedly organizing local tennis. I called this lady and was told that nobody really had anything organized at all, but that I was welcome to pay this woman forty dollars for the privilege of showing up on Saturday mornings with a wide assortment of local tennis enthusiasts, men and women ranging from children to senior citizens who would pair off for random singles and doubles play that couldn’t be more unpredictable. What was my forty dollars for, again? This was all my town had to offer its tennis-playing citizens?

I stopped searching for my local tennis nirvana after this, and I probably picked up a racquet once or twice a year when visiting my dad or hitting with a friend on rare occasions. A few years had gone by when suddenly I spotted a bumper sticker advertising a local tennis organization. Surprised and intrigued, I located said group online and couldn’t seem to load the website. What came up was a jumbled mess of HTML and lines of text that overlapped, rendering much of it unreadable. I switched to another browser in the hopes of better luck but had none. Sifting through the tangled layers of code and information, I located an email address for a secretary of the group who was listed as a contact for more information. I promptly sent an email inquiring about local men’s singles leagues and got no reply whatsoever. Perhaps the secretary was busy hiring a web designer. Weeks later I went to the site in search of another contact and found one listed for “men’s singles play.” Perfect. How could I have missed this guy in the first place? Surely he would know how I could get in on some well-organized tennis. I emailed him a similar inquiry and again received no reply whatsoever. Again, weeks went by, and I was irritated. I went back to the site again and this time found the email listing for the President of the association. I emailed her and again requested information.

She got back to me pronto and apologized for the “not really working” men’s singles contact and the membership contact/secretary who she described as “a bit distracted.” She too encouraged me spiritedly to sign up for the old “whoever shows up plays” on Saturdays, forty dollar group. I declined. She allowed me to convince her that I was good enough for her to sign me up for a list of players who were organizing a men’s league. Things worked out pretty well. I played two months of tennis on a team with ten guys and really enjoyed it, even though I had to play doubles, a different game entirely.

At least now I had some local tennis buddies and some recent competitive experience under my belt. The difference was that I didn’t want to be on a team of ten guys, and I didn’t really want to play doubles. I still wanted to be able to organize a match a week with just one other guy instead of trying to get a schedule together that twenty people had to agree on every time we played.

I decided that I had to put together my own group of guys, and if I could be sanctioned by the USTA as well, then great. Why not? I emailed the USTA directly about how to officially set up my league and was ignored. I emailed the southern division of the USTA as well, and they ignored me too. Both divisions have ignored me, despite my recent $40 membership fee and $20 league fee. I emailed the president of the local tennis group again. This time, she too ignored me. A month later I emailed her again. She still didn’t respond. What is with these people, I thought?

After emailing around to several guys who were interested in the new men’s singles league, I heard of someone I should talk to—an older lady who seemed a bit scattered but friendly and was supposedly in charge of setting up leagues locally. She too tried to convince me to try the random Saturday get together group. She also told me that the local tennis organization had “voted” to not participate in flexible men’s singles leagues. When I declined to sign up for the random Saturday $40 group and delicately made it clear that I didn’t care if the local tennis group had decided to paint themselves like the Blue Man Group and host group showers—I was starting a men’s singles flex league—she revealed that she was only in charge of the senior citizen and mixed doubles groups.

She talked over me enough that I could barely get my point across, but I was patient and polite, and I did. She said I had to talk to yet another lady who was the league coordinator for the entire region. She offered to contact this lady for me, if only I would email her. I promised to email her immediately and did so. She didn’t respond for several days. Then I got a call from her, asking if I would please get in contact with her. I told her that I had already sent her an email immediately following our conversation. It turns out she had given me the wrong email address. I sent the email again. She then emailed the regional league coordinator and copied me on the email, requesting more information on my behalf. She also copied the president of the local tennis group who contacted me right away, apologizing for ignoring my past two emails for the past two months, saying that she sometimes “let people slip through the cracks.” I wondered who elected her president. Had the men’s singles coordinator, the secretary and the web designer voted for her?

The mysterious lady that was ultimately contacted—the one who supposedly holds the Golden Tennis Balls of Authority to officially sanction our league—has neither responded to the email sent to her from the previous lady, nor to the follow-up email that I sent to her directly.

Some details about other failed contacts and communication efforts aside, after trying to contact everyone I could possibly think of to officially sanction our league, people at the USTA, the USTA Southern, the local tennis association, various state and local league coordinators, online tennis organizers, and elsewhere, I got nowhere. I am moving on, setting up my own league, with the help of a tennis buddy I met on the team I played with recently, and we don’t need the USTA or anybody else to tell us how to do things. Punk rock tennis, heavy metal tennis, DIY tennis, whatever you want to call it. It’s five bucks each, and we set it up however the hell we want.

Tip A Canoe Full Of Brew

2009-07-10T18:30:00.003-05:00

Last weekend I enthusiastically plunged into my one predictable annual tradition: the camping trip with my high school buddies. Though we are now spread across many hundreds of miles, we’ve been at this for approximately twelve years, and we always plan for the better part of four days and three nights in the wilderness, or at least the edge of it. There are usually five of us, give or take one or two who show up late and/or leave early or flake out entirely, and we head to the same spot almost every year. We hike about a mile into the woods and set up camp between the river and the trail. Sometimes other people camp in the area, but they usually stay close to the parking lot with their screaming kids and barking dogs and don’t bother hiking in far at all to spend the night. We prefer to get away from people, though there are usually several groups of hikers who walk by our site from time to time, and we always wave.

The camp trip is a time for us to catch up on what everyone has been up to, to sit around and socialize, to do a short hike or two, to swim and sometimes fish in the river, to cook over an open fire and on our various camp stoves, and to drink plenty of cold beer.

The cold beer is usually the biggest challenge of the entire annual tradition, which I suppose has its roots in our teenage excursions into the woods of our hometown for bonfires and underage drinking. These trips no longer involve broken teeth on non-twist-off bottles of Imports or smashed bottles against tree trunks or high speed drunken chases through darkened woods in competition for the last beer. Now in our early thirties, we still keep an eye out for the authorities, but we go somewhere relatively safe and quiet, and now we’re the ones meticulously picking up our trash and the trash that others leave behind.

The challenge the beer presents is of course one of refrigeration and transport: how does one effectively move large quantities of ice-cold beer to a campsite approximately a mile into the woods? Traditionally, we have carried multiple coolers packed with beer and ice and foodstuffs into the woods, a process bordering on masochism. I have carried one cooler filled with two cases of beer and ice in both hands across my chest down the trail more times than I’d like to admit. I’ve also shared the burden of these impossible coolers with a buddy plenty of times as well. The burning torture inflicted on the arms and shoulders can reduce a grown man to a quaking mess on the verge of tears, but ah, the glory of a cold beer in the woods is seldom replicated.

Two years ago I had had enough. I came across an invention that seemed to be the perfect solution: an all-terrain dolly. The metal dolly was painted bright yellow and featured rubber handgrips and oversized, knobby mud tires. This had to be the answer! As I prepared to hike into the camp spot last year, I strapped the cooler onto the bottom of the dolly with bungee cords and attached the rest of my gear: tent, sleeping bag and mat, folding chairs, etc, to the top of the dolly above the cooler. Despite the all-terrain moniker, the dolly wobbled and crashed through the woods on roots and rocks and was generally an all-terrain pain in the ass. Things kept popping loose from the straps as the entire load was jostled from one side to the other while the narrow dolly clanged its clumsy way along the path. Clearly this was not the answer.

I am somewhat ashamed at my own slow intellect when I realize that it took all of us about a dozen years to realize what may have been obvious to anyone reading this post: we were camping between a trail and a river. Why not float the coolers and gear down in a canoe? I cannot explain why it never occurred to us until last year’s all-terrain dolly debacle, but this year was different, better, and set a precedent, despite multiple capsizings.

This year one of my pals brought his canoe, and everything changed. We converged on the river with three full coolers; one contained a five-gallon soda keg of homebrewed India Pale Ale, a luscious blend of hops and malt that was a real luxury to enjoy in the woods. This keg was on ice and connected to a large pressurized bottle of Co2 for carbonation. The other two coolers contained ice, beer, and food. We also stacked the canoe with an assortment of bags—some designed to be waterproof, others not so much—and we headed on our way with paddles and lifejackets on the bottom of the boat, just in case.

I weighed a bit less than my buddy and thus sat up front as we began our short journey downriver. The boat was sitting very low in the river, and we were a bit concerned about taking on water, but not enough to slow us down, as we cut a quick path through the relatively calm waters, until we hit the rapids, yelled out ideas rapid-fire about which way to turn or paddle, were swept sideways against a huge boulder in the middle of the river, and promptly dumped over with the contents of the canoe.

Since the river was so shallow, we were able to get our footing and grab the boat before everything fell out, though we took on enough water that getting it out was going to be impossible with all the weight of the luggage. We laughed and just made it to the shoreline of our usual campsite without sinking, where we unloaded everything and tapped the keg.

We spent the next three days and nights in the usual ways, lounging, visiting, hiking, swimming, drinking, cooking, sleeping, etc, but the food was much better this time, as we had brought our own special concoctions of steak fajitas, curry chicken, spicy cashew chicken, beef with broccoli, homemade breakfast sausages, bacon and hard boiled eggs, as well as the regular ramen noodles, granola bars, beef jerky, trail-mix, coffee, tea, and Gatorade. We took the canoe out for fun a couple more times and tipped over a couple more times too, as we challenged an increasingly rough set of rapids, but we never felt truly in danger and made it back, sometimes having to trudge against the current through the rapids, knocking our shins against the rocks and dragging the boat behind us. Some of us caught a few fish, but nothing worth dining on.

On a hike back out of the woods on the morning of our fourth day, I dropped a heavy load of gear on a wooden bridge and declared my intention to take a break. My friend accompanying me turned to look at me and was promptly stung in the leg by an angry hornet. I looked down simultaneously and noticed one of my folding camp chairs, teetering on the edge of the bridge, then flopping over the side. My friend started to run from the bridge and pointed out that we had chosen the worst stopping place possible: immediately over a hornet’s nest. They were now swarming around the hive, and my chair was right underneath them. I snuck in, grabbed the chair, and ran in the opposite direction, making it out of the woods without a sting. What a great trip. Can’t wait for next year.

Metal In The Beef Hall Of Legend

2009-07-08T11:32:00.006-05:00

A couple weeks ago my wife and I went to Chicago to visit a rockstar pal of mine named Dallas. Well, he’s a rockstar in some circles, but he’s rapidly expanding those circles, and if you like metal, you should listen to his awesome MUSIC. Anyway, he’s one of my best pals, and he’d suggested several times that we come visit, so we took him up on it. I’d been a few times before, but it was a first for the Mrs, and we were really looking forward to it. Turns out we had a great time, even though we never were able to find Chicago style pizza for my wife. Everywhere we went, people were selling NYC style pie. We saw the German submarine that was captured during WWII, a real highlight of the trip at the Museum of Science & Industry. We three had read Robert Kurson’s great book SHADOWDIVERS, about the scuba divers who found an unidentified German sub in waters off New Jersey in the early nineties. One of the divers had made repeated trips to Chicago to tour the sub in the museum in order to make mental notes for his multiple dives on the unidentified sub, as fellow divers and friends of his were literally dying while trying to identify the wreck in treacherous waters, 230ft deep. Being recreational divers and big fans of the book, we were in awe of the enormous U-Boat and enjoyed a spirited monologue from one retired submariner who shared his jolly and expletive-ridden story with us. We were bummed that we didn’t make the interior tour, but according to this lively submarine veteran, the tour guides just read from a script and “don’t know their asses from holes in the side of the sub.” We went to the Chicago History Museum next, and their exhibits about crime in the 20s and race relations in the 60s were powerful.

We went up to the top of the John Hancock building and checked out the view for the admission price of an $8 Guinness for Dallas and myself and a $14 martini for the Mrs. This beats paying $20 each for the “observation deck” that is actually below the bar level, where you don’t even get a drink!

We checked out the Billy Goat Tavern underground and Dallas pissed off a wise guy sitting in a section clearly marked “Wise Guys.” We spent too much money at The Goose Island brewery but enjoyed the delicious varieties of IPA and British Bitter. I heard a guy next to me in a golf outfit tell his friend that IPA meant that the beer was “Indiana Pale Ale,” and that it was shipped into Chicago from Indiana. I didn’t say anything. We made a couple stops for breakfast at the quirky & tasty Earwax Café, where I had possibly the best green tea I’ve ever tasted, and my wife had an exceptional fruit smoothie. We visited the Flat Iron bar in Wicker Park and had some sort of lemon-lime & vodka concoction while wandering around and checking out all the great local artwork.

We entered Anish Kapoor’s unique Cloud Gate sculpture downtown, which is locally referred to as “The Bean,” due to its obvious bean shape. It’s composed of 110 tons of polished steel, and walking inside is like entering a warped clown-house of mirrors.

The Puerto Rican festival was going on all week in the Humboldt Park area where we were staying, and we enjoyed listening to the music from our friend’s roof one night as we watched the sunset over the city skyline and sipped a few tasty brews. We walked all over the place and rode several buses and the El. It was nice to use just public transportation and our feet, getting away from the cars, but the sheer amount of planning and logistic considerations for inner-city travel sometimes seemed overwhelming to a guy who enjoys the ease of getting around in his little town. We learned that on the last night we were in town, about a block from where we were staying, someone was stabbed at the festival, right around the time we were walking between bars. This added to our appreciation of our slow, quiet little city. Chicago is rad to visit, but I like a tree-to-people ratio that leans heavily in favor of the trees.

Dallas also took us to his place of employment, a unique and fantastic burger joint that I was glad to welcome into my own mental catalog of perfected fleshy deliciousness, the Beef Hall of Legend. Until this trip, only two meals held esteemed status in the Hall. These were the MEATCAKE that my buddy Greg made for me as a surprise 30th birthday gift, and the roast that my friend Francois cooked when he was visiting last May. Both meals were unparalleled triumphs of their respective genres, and the burger I had at KUMA’S CORNER in Chicago was also a pillar of magnificence in a wide field of burger goodness. Click on that link above and read through their website. It’s fucking awesome. They name their truly inimitable variety of burgers after metal bands. Their beer selection would make a dedicated homebrewer weep tears of joy. Their beer menu says “Death to Miller and Budweiser . . . they are over-produced and inferior products that prevent passionate craftsmen from sharing their gifts with us.” Beautiful. If only people like me could afford to pay for such gifts on a regular basis. They play a non-stop barrage of loud metal—no, you can’t make a request—in their tiny, dark restaurant that seats about thirty people. They have epic fantasy artwork custom-painted and framed across all of the walls. There is an enormous flatscreen television running constantly above the bar—no, they won’t turn on the game—with obscure movies about naked women and samurai. Lots of boobs and decapitations. Because of or in spite of this intense ambiance, this is THE place to go, and the wait can be up to three hours. The first time we went, we couldn’t even get in, and we were with my buddy who works there. They’ve only been open four years, but the line still goes around the block regularly. Chicago readers of a local paper voted them the best burgers in town, and business seems to have reacted accordingly. It is common, I am told, to see suburban families, Grandma and the grandkids, suits on a lunch break, street urchins, and metal dudes with facial tattoos all at one lunch sitting. Cool as hell.

When we finally got in for a burger one night around 11:30, my “Melvins” burger was served up on an exquisitely toasted pretzel roll and topped with fresh basil, prosciutto, mozzarella, tomato, and onion. I had a side of Kuma’s homemade potato chips. The beef was browned slightly but red inside, more rare than I’d usually request, but it was the best burger I’ve ever had, period. I didn’t even think about the history of the Chicago stockyards or The Jungle or the environmental impact of cattle farming as I pondered the source of such a seemingly flawless hamburger. Chased with a local IPA with luxuriously floral hops and a bitter aftertaste, I can’t remember a more blissful burger experience, despite the dirty drunk who sat next to my wife and kept harassing us all to drink more. Thanks for a great trip, D-Ray.

Rise Of The Machines

2009-05-18T10:24:00.003-05:00

After what appears to be a resolution in the continuing saga of breakdowns, diagnoses, estimates, repairs, more breakdowns, sales, and replacements relating to three of our vehicles, now another set of machines is angrily rebelling.

The electric dryer broke down about six months ago. I am no appliance repairman. My father in law helped me determine the cause, and I replaced the heating element, or, actually, I watched him do it. Things went well for, well, six months. Last week it stopped heating up. Surely that $60 heating element didn’t need to be replaced already? After another diagnosis by my wife’s dad, we determined that a heat sensor needed to be replaced. As it turns out, this particular heat sensor had been discontinued and isn’t even available at America’s Largest Parts Superstore Online, much less at Lowe’s, Home Depot, Sears, or our preferred venue, the little local guy’s parts place. However, I did easily find a seemingly compatible replacement part for $16 online and replaced it myself.

Things worked fine for three days, or at least long enough to clear our apartment of wet laundry. Our home had started to look like an Indian brothel with our variously patterned, multi-colored sheets hanging from drying racks and door frames and draped over furniture with pants, shirts and assorted male and female underwear all over the place.

Then the dryer stopped heating again, and the washer started leaking water all over the floor underneath itself and the dryer, making repair attempts for a poorly equipped repairman like myself even more precarious. I think I have some rubber boots from a construction stint in Alaska.

Fed up, I spent a couple hours online last night researching washers and dryers, reading Consumer Reports and sifting through stacks of customer reviews and ratings. I really wanted energy efficient machines with Energy Star ratings, if I was going to do this, but every time I started to zero in on a washer that was rated highly by both Consumer Reports and all the customers who had reviewed it, I would discover that the dryer designed to go with it was not Energy Star compliant. This happened twice after extensive research.

I thought it was particularly hilarious and frustrating that the washing machine that was rated highest on Consumer Reports was rated an average of 2 out of 5 stars by the fifty or so customers who had reviewed it! The suggestions for “Best Uses” included “Boat Anchor” and “Modern Art.”

“DO NOT BUY THIS PIECE OF CRAP” one review said.

“USELESS AND DANGEROUS” read another.

“THIS WASHER WILL RANDOMLY JUMP AROUND THE ROOM AND BANG THE WALL AND THE DRYER. IT SOUNDS LIKE THE ROOF IS COMING DOWN. BRAND NEW CLOTHES WILL COME OUT WITH HOLES RIPPED IN THEM.”

“ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OUR CLOTHES DON’T LOOK WORN BECAUSE WE HAVE TO REPLACE THEM OFTEN.”

“WORST WASHING MACHINE POSSIBLE.”

“AVOID IT EVEN IF YOU CAN GET IT FOR FREE.”

“LITTLE DEMON.”

All these comments were on the first dryer that comes up on the recommendations page.

My wife suggested washing clothes in the bathtub and getting one of those handheld wash/scrub racks you see hanging from the wall at Cracker Barrel—the ones that Old Timey bands use to keep the rhythm with the banjo and the jug. You don’t get much more energy efficient than one of those babies. You don’t even plug it in.

I decided to delay my purchase and think about this for a while. I don’t mind the hanging underwear so much, but I really don’t like the idea of scrubbing clothes on my knees in the bathtub. I don’t want to spend a bunch of money I don’t have on fancy machines, but I don’t want to buy another set of old clunkers and go through this whole mess again. Plus, I really do like the idea of having more energy-efficient machines. Looks like I could save at least $50 a year on electric bills. Wow. Can’t we do better than that? Help me, T. Boone Pickens, you’re my only hope. Shouldn’t we have solar or wind powered appliances? Why can’t our apartment complex install panels and turbines on the roof? Of course, when I asked the girl at the apartment complex office about recycling, she looked at me like I was speaking in Russian and said, “No one’s ever mentioned that before.”

As Terminator 4 releases this week, and I find myself trapped—sinking in what appears to be a perpetual vortex of machines conspiring to take over my life—I feel a sort of kinship with John Connor. I know my cars and household appliances aren’t trying to murder me or assassinate my mom or wipe humanity from the face of the earth, but how can I be so sure?

How much do we really rely on these machines in our lives, and how scary is that?

Wrath of the Car Gods

2009-04-15T17:51:00.005-05:00

Whatever it is that I have done to anger thee, oh Gods of Transportation, I'd like to repent. I give up, oh you Omnipotent and Omnipresent Lords of the Combustion Engine. You Ultimate Entities in Charge of Vehicular Regularity and Reliability. You Bastards of Inconvenience and Collectors of Commuters' Complaints. I know not how I have offended thee, but I get the motherfucking picture. You don't like me. Well I don't like you either, assholes.

Here is the sequence of events, which began merely four months ago. My wife's Saturn decided not to start unless it was in the mood. Fairly often it wasn't in the mood when my wife was, like when she was leaving work or a parking lot somewhere sketchy after dark. My wife didn't like this. My local mechanic repeatedly asked, "when are you going to get rid of this thing?" My wife was understandably stressed out. We sold the Saturn; my wife drove my Toyota, and I went without a car for a while. Then my grandfather unexpectedly and generously donated his Lincoln to the family cause, and this car had very few miles on it for being twelve years old. It was comfortable and clean and seemed to be a real windfall for us. My wife liked it and was happy to have the replacement.

Then the transmission started malfunctioning on my Toyota. Yes, my Toyota. Aren't they supposed to be bullet proof and indestructible paragons of automobile artistry? I guess not. Did you Great Gods of Cars not create the Toyota in your own image, in one of your spectacular birthing chambers for Iconic Vehicular Perfection? I got several estimates and decided to drive the Toyota 180 miles away to save nearly a thousand dollars with a trusted family mechanic whose estimate for transmission replacement undercut the competition massively. My kind step father loaned me his truck.

When I tried to drive the truck home, I noticed it was pulling to the right, viciously. I checked the tire pressure and evened all tires out, and nothing changed. I went to the garage and discovered that the truck needed almost $1200 worth of work to fix the brake pads, rotors, shocks, struts, alignment, tire rotation and balance, etc, before it would be in shape to drive the 180 miles back to my house. We had to fix it.

We got the truck home; the Toyota remained in the shop. Then the Lincoln took a nose dive, losing power to one of its eight cylinders. Couldn't it just run on seven, you might ask? Well yes, but it wouldn't pass emissions standards where we live. It runs fine now but shivers a bit, perpetually flashing the check engine light. It needs an incredible amount of labor to merely diagnose the problem. Couldn't your Great Bearded Divinities of Driving cut me a break and make the Lincoln all better without twenty one hours of labor to remove the entire engine in order to access the cylinder in question and discover the true reason for the problem? Is it really that funny to watch us mere mortals struggle with machines beyond our comprehension?

So we decide to sell the Lincoln while driving the loaner truck and awaiting the discounted though still costly repair job on the Toyota. My wife's parents step in unexpectedly and buy a fantastic used Nissan for us, and we are blown away by their generosity and timeliness. My worries are lessoned considerably knowing that my wife is behind the wheel of a comfortable and reliable vehicle. I'm not even bothered that the repairs on the Toyota have now taken over a month. I continue to drive my step dad's truck.

The Lincoln still up for sale, we hear from our mechanic, three hours away, that the Toyota is "performing beautifully" with its new transmission and that it is ready for pickup. My mom and step dad go to pick up the beautifully performing machine, and my mom phones me triumphantly from her Volvo on the way home from the mechanic's garage to tell me that my step dad is driving my Toyota back to the house, and that the mechanic had been singing the praises of my car, commenting on how well it was running with the new/used transmission he had just installed. She and my step dad were almost home.

Good to know. I returned to the stove top to finish cooking a spicy vegetable curry dish and drink a cold beer. Thirty minutes later, my step dad calls, saying "I don't know what you've done to anger the Gods of Transportation, but I think you've rubbed one Car Genie the wrong way." So he continues, telling me the story of how he drove my Toyota half the way to his house from the mechanic's garage with a real sense of relief, both for himself, I'm sure, as he would finally get his truck back, and for me because he's a great guy and has a lot of empathy for the fact that I'm the apparent recipient of the combined wrath of the Coalition of Angry Automobile Allahs. Halfway home, he hears a catastrophic-sounding BOOM! from under the hood, followed by awkward shifting by the transmission, another BOOM! and squeals from the confused tires, unsure whether to follow the path of the car itself or obey the counterintuitive instructions from the newly installed transmission that apparently has now abandoned my car on this evening, their first date. My step dad was able to limp home with the seemingly mortally wounded car to tell the tale, and life goes on. The Toyota is returning to the shop, one way or another. The bicycle on my porch is looking good.

As far as problems go, mine are petty and insignificant, as I am an extremely fortunate man to have what I have, but you lousy Gods of Vehicular Transportation, wherever you are, you can blow it out your goddamn radiator hose.

Rejection, Sweet Rejection

2009-03-03T13:12:00.006-06:00

This picture is from a day in December of last year, during my final month of hauling barns. It was consistently amazing for me to witness the sheer ubiquity of these gigantic, inflatable, holiday-themed lawn "decorations." I saw Frosty, Santa, Jesus, and Nathan Bedford Forrest, and sometimes combinations of several of those on one lawn, even. I cannot explain the two birds with Santa, though. Maybe they're some family-friendly version of Heckle and Jeckle. They just don't look cynical or rude enough to be the real deal. I was constantly tempted by such oversized, air-filled characters to bring my 60th anniversary edition Daisy lever-action air rifle along in the truck for some high speed drive-by icon assassination revelry, but alas I never did.

So I swapped my desktop for a laptop and have enjoyed working on my book wherever I damn well please, instead of being chained to a desk in the dark corner of the bedroom. I actually have sunlight streaming in over my shoulder and a little Sun Ra in the background as I soldier on with my manuscript,which is definitely going to be titled HARDBARNED, colon, something else. The something else is taking some time to work itself out, but I've got a few ideas. Here are some of my favorite potential subtitles so far:

1. One Man's 25-Year Odyssey Through An Endless Wasteland Of Stupid Jobs

2. Liberal Arts And Other Effective Ways To Waste Your Life

3. Work Sucks, And I Can Prove It

4. How To Deliver Barns And Become A Misanthrope In 3 Years Or Less

5. Anger Management In Mud & Feces

6. Mud, Blood, Detours & Dinars

7. It's Fun To Laugh At Rednecks

I'll be calculating your votes. All three of you who actually vote will win a free Miller Lite in the can from me, or maybe an original Old Milwaukee, which recently appeared at my local grocery, if you come over and drink it with me. The beer budget in my living space has taken a nose dive with the whole unemployment thing. Oh how I miss the good ol' days of Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale, and frothy mugs of Guinness and Murphy's, when they made regular appearances in my fridge. I'm really jealous of my two buddies from Tennessee who moved to Poland to teach English in some small town where they apparently don't sell lousy beer or even beers in containers smaller than 24 ounces. Nostrovia, brothers!

Last November I entered a writing contest for the first time, and I just found out today that it's over. Brace yourself for this: I didn't win. Not even an honorable mention, and there were a lot of honorable mentions, but I feel really good about it. It kind of reminds me of when I first met my future wife. I was in a bar, and I spotted her across the room. I knew that if I didn't at least try to talk to her, I would be kicking myself for it later. I talked to her for a while, and when I asked her for her number, she said no. I still felt great after that because I knew I had tried my best. Not to sound like a real loser, but the same thing applies to the writing contest, and not just because I eventually married her.

All one ever reads about when researching the publishing industry and the trials of getting one's first book into print is the endless rejection. Read Stephen King's On Writing, Walter Mosley's This Year You Write Your Novel, Katherine Sands' Making The Perfect Pitch, or really any book about getting a book into print for the first time, and you'll see that every writer received boatloads of rejections, and not just the ones who succeeded!

And since I'm already used to being rejected by employers when I've applied for hundreds of writing jobs, it's somehow comforting to know that I'm finally being turned down for my writing's sake, and not because my resume isn't interesting or impressive enough, you know? I sent a short story to Playboy magazine, for shits and giggles, and I expect their rejection to arrive shortly. I just feel that much closer to actually calling myself a writer, now that the rejections have started rolling in, and that's really a good thing.