Did I lead off on Martin Luther King Day with a piece on The Beatles?
Not exactly, I guess, because I wrote my Monday morning post on Sunday night. Still, my bad. Let me just say that MLK is one of my lifelong heroes, and one of the most important and inspiring voices of the 20th century. I think his mug should be added to Mount Rushmore. Why do we kill these people?
I was a teenage girl in 1964.
I had a bouffant hairdo. I wore teardrop-shaped black framed eyeglasses, a plaid pleated skirt and knee socks, and when I saw The Beatles on stage at The Ed Sullivan Show, I was transfixed and transformed.
No, I am not transgendered. I just saw a DVD of The Ed Sullivan Show from February of 1964 and September of 1965. This is my way of saying that finally, after forty years, I really saw what those screaming girls saw on those nights.
For three consecutive Sundays in February, Ed presented The Beatles in live stage performances of their earliest hit songs: “I Saw Her Standing There,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” Please Please Me,” “Twist and Shout,” and more. The studio audience was made up of hundreds of teenage girls who, at least for those moments, became part of history. For they saw the future in this odd-looking band, and they responded to it so viscerally that America was shocked, and their boyfriends angered and jealous.
I, a musician, didn’t see it. The vocal mix was bad. Their hair was completely out of line. Their pants were too tight. They wore faggy high-heeled boots! None of that mattered. What I didn’t see was the immense talent — songwriting, arranging, singing, playing — but more than that, I failed to see the magic.
Magic doesn’t happen very often, and if you’re an analytical type like I am, and uncomfortable with change as I used to be, sometimes it goes right over your head. The girls in the theater and all over America on those nights were ready for magic, ready to see it and feel it. They screamed, they wept, they held their faces in their hands, they were spellbound. Their reaction looked sexual, and no doubt on some level it was. But really they were reacting to being touched, deep in their souls, in a direct, truthful, fun way that had — dare I say it? — never happened before. The world was changing, and these girls were among the first to notice.
Of course I came to realize that The Beatles were special. Like many millions around the world, I became a huge fan. But this evening, watching this primitive black and white television show, shot with cameras that had vacuum tubes, for God’s sake, I felt the magic, and it nearly drove me to tears. Hey, I have admitted here that I am somewhat in touch with my feminine side. Deal. Watching these performances, I was touched by the magic. I was joyous like a kid, like the kid who watched these shows live forty years ago, only this time I got it.
If you love pop music, and you want to see some roots, get this DVD, and maybe you’ll get it, too.
Man, I wish I could just take a pill and be happy.
You think it’s easy being an intelligent, introspective man? Let me tell you, it’s a tough gig. I have to engage in so many activities to keep my mind off the waking nightmares that stalk my mind: tsunamis, neoconservatives, office politics, nepotism, what others might think of me, bills, money, mortality (mine), fear of artistic/financial/social/sexual failure.
In order to avoid dwelling on these things I have to go to movies, make movies, work out, play guitar, build or upgrade a computer every six weeks, make and drink pot after pot of gourmet coffee, telephone friends, write songs, sing songs and jack myself off with this blog (and sometimes without it). Even staying busy at my crummy job gets me through the day.
Sitting idle for more than a few minutes turns my mind inward, and it’s dark in there. I wonder if other people have that darkness, too, and if they’re afraid of it. Is everybody on the treadmills at the gym running from something? (Disclaimer: I don’t go to a gym. I see these people through the windows. The whole gym thing is another post.) Or are they just working out? I wish I knew. I wish I knew if the chaos inside me is inside everybody. Sometimes I’m sure it is, and other times I think I’m the only one.
Most Saturdays I spend completely alone, just me and whatever blows through my mind, so if I’m smart I get a few diversions going. Today I was only half-smart, which is what led to this little outburst. I enjoy most of the activities listed above (except for working and working out — hmm, seems to be some kind of connection there…) but I wonder how I can hit that state of feelin’ alright naturally. High on life, as it were, not evading the demons, just not even fucking knowing about them.
And now for some cheery lyrics by Leonard Cohen:
I’m not looking for another as I wander in my time,
walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme
you know my love goes with you as your love stays with me,
it’s just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea,
but let’s not talk of love or chains and things we can’t untie,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.
No matter how many times I read the letters “LOL” on the internet,
in chat rooms, IRC, blogs and email, I still get only a few opportunities a year to actually laugh out loud at something I see on line.
Thanks to Rene (the Kicking Bitch) for providing this one.
The comments section of the previous post sets a new record for revision99.
I’m sending out love to everybody who is reading it and to all who joined in. I will revisit the topic of pigs and pussies again soon (maybe today), and in the mean time the comments section there remains open.
Readers of those comments will be heaving a huge sigh of relief for me, for themselves, and for the world, as I was almost talked into posting naked pictures of myself. Fortunately, it was revealed to me at the last second that someone was having me on, and a crisis was averted.
I started this thing before the U.S. presidential election of 2004, because I had to say a few things about politics, a subject I am interested in. But I don’t have time to do the research to back up my opinions, what with trying to earn a living and all. Today I heard a columnist with the Chicago Sun-Times on the radio saying he worked as a street reporter for twenty years before he had earned the privilege of stating his opinion in print. And that’s the way it should be. There are too many political pundits today who have never been anything but pundits. They are not seasoned in news gathering and they don’t know what has gone before, so there is not enough depth to their writing. Some of them are good writers, but I think I am coming down on the side of “Make them work for it.” As a corollary, I had to get out of the pundit business, and fast.
I still believe what I believe, politically speaking, and of course I’m absolutely certain I’m right. I mean correct. But putting it down here without being prepared for instant attacks and rebuttals from, like, EVERYONE IN THE WORLD, is just blogger suicide. Blogicide. I’d get killed, and then I’d whine, start to cry, become morose and alienated, and, well, we all know how easy it would be for me to get automatic weapons. Nuff said.
So I backed off politics and fumbled around for a few weeks, typing a few things here and there, but mostly becoming obsessed with reading the blogs of others, a pastime that continues to derail all my efforts to be productive in any way. So anyway I’m drifting away from politics and just sort of raving about nothing, trying to be nice so other bloggers will like me, and I am dumbfounded when I come upon a request, nay, a demand, for naked pictures. Go look at the previous comments section if you don’t believe me.
Up to this point the commenters are keeping it real and the commentary is pretty gown-up, considering the subject. I try to counter with a grown-up appeal to enlightenment and intellectual questing, but this commenter, it seems, won’t take no for an answer. Desperate, I start to think how I can satisfy this bizarre demand, as I always aim to please. I don’t have any naked pictures of myself. But I do have a tripod and a camera.
I’m trying to remember how the guys posed in that copy of Playgirl I saw, but I keep thinking of the line the Playgirl art director used when she was interviewed in Rolling Stone. Trying to describe the perfect photo, uh, package, as it were (stimulating yet legal), she said she was looking for “maximum tumescence in repose.” My heart starts to palpitate as I picture my tumescence maximized, but in repose. The picture is not a pretty one. But I think “This reader is challenging me. I am going to call her bluff.”
So I gave in, and I put it in writing — keep watching, and I’ll give you some skin. But as I said above, somebody chickened out, and it wasn’t me. Now she’s trying to act like it was all a joke, but I didn’t see any smilies or anything. On the other hand, thank God she let me in on the joke, before I embarrassed myself and icked everybody out.
I may be frisky and flirtatious, BUT I’M TAKEN!
I was reading tonight in the blog of, that’s right, a 30-year-old woman about how she met this other woman who let it be known that she was of the lesbian persuasion. No problem, except that the new girl repeatedly brought up the fact that she was not available, as in “I already have a girlfriend.” One of the comments on this blog (Blogger and Commenter — you know who you are) touched a nerve that I have had exposed for most of my life and that can be summed up as “Waaah! Why are you telling me this? Are you trying to hurt me or ‘get’ me in some way? Are you trying to one-up me or something? Am I such a rotten companion that you don’t even want me to make a try for you?”
To put it another way, it’s all about me.
Yes, I’m that sensitive about my own feelings, and that insensitive to yours. Hey, once you break down and admit you love me (you know you want to), that’s different. Then I am totally in touch with my gentle, poetic side. But in normal social situations, keep your boyfriends or girlfriends to yourself.
Examining this syndrome to a depth that I have never bothered to do before, I see that it is another example of my insecurity and lack of confidence. I mean, maybe I am talking to someone who is exuberant about her loving, committed relationship, and she is merely trying to share her joy with the world, including me. Why would I immediately have to get defensive about it?
The fact that I usually think the “I’m not available” remark, however it’s expressed, is a jab AT me also suggests that I view a LOT of women as potential — say it with me — sexual partners. Maybe I do. Maybe it’s more obvious than I thought it was. I no longer look directly at the breasts when addressing a woman, and I feel like I’m being a gentleman, and I quit that pubic-hair-on-the-coke-can routine right after the Clarence Thomas hearings. But, hey — boys will be boys, and they will be IN YOUR PANTS, girls, if they can. So that’s it: I feel busted, and guilty. As polite as I tried to be, I had filthy intentions, you saw through them and DERAILED MY TRAIN. Caught red-handed trying to follow God’s Plan. Oh, the shame. But I’m feeling better already, having confessed.
You know who I admire? The guys who see all women as potential sexual partners, win some and lose some, and don’t get too fucking mental about it, like I just did. I don’t understand women (You’ve never heard that before, eh?). They have a million ways of shooting you down. I should know by now that I don’t have to make up new ones of my own.
Note to the blogger who got me started on this track: Yowzah! You must be some hot mama! You even make the girls nervous.
I’ve only been a blogger for a short time, and I am finding that I enjoy reading blogs more than I do writing them.
Maybe it’s because I am not as clever as I thought I was, and when I re-read my posts I am usually disappointed. Either it’s not funny when I thought it was, or I wandered off the point somewhere in the middle and never got back to it, thus making the whole thing look like a 7th-grade essay, or I just didn’t find the words to say what I meant. I used to have a great vocabulary, but I lost it gradually after coming to the realization that a lot of people had no idea what I was talking about. I started speaking in plain English, and gradually forgot all the big words. See, I don’t even have a big word meaning “big words.” But I used to.
Now that I’m writing on the internet — I should say now that there IS an internet — plain English is not that important. People can look up anything they want — even get it translated from some other language into English. Plain English, if they want. So I don’t have to talk down. I could use all the polysyllabic verbiage and circumlocutory constructions I wanted. But now plain is the only way I can talk. So my blogging is a little, um, boring.
On the other hand, I have read hundreds of other peoples’ blogs, and they are funny, intelligent, well-researched AND they freely use big words that I understand but can never think of when I want to. They are also poetic, god damn them, and dirty, god bless them. Yes, sex blogging: How I love it. The filthy details of randy midwestern housewives’ masturbatory fantasies, and how they become my masturbatory fantasies.
I have noticed that all blogs are written by 30-year-old women. This, I suppose, should not surprise anyone. Who writes diaries? Who are the diarists in your life? Girls, then later women. Enter blogging. Wow! Diaries that others can read, but they are just as private as any journal under lock and key because no one knows who you really are!! So you can keep your secrets while you reveal them. And you can lie about your exciting life and your dates with Brad Pitt or Gwyneth Paltrow and hey — it might be true.
But back to 30-year-old women. OK, they aren’t the only bloggers, but they might be half of all bloggers. When do they find the time to put together these witty, sexy, smart rants? It takes me a week to write five paragraphs, and they are knocking out daily posts, while they raise three children alone, hold down a full-time job, attend law school, read voraciously and pursue two or three potential boyfriends, all of which activity shows up instantly in their blogs. I am ready to submit. Women are truly superior beings. I get it. I humbly request to serve at your feet.
And now, because I read more than I write, I feel like I have all these new acquaintances, people who know me, and I know them, and we chat a little every few days, and we get each others’ jokes, and we are concerned for each others’ emotional and physical health. If someone posts pictures I study them as if they are of my sister’s wedding, and comment on them as if anyone gives a shit what I think of them. Some of the 30-year-old women have man-trouble, and I am right there with my wise advice, which is about as useful as tits on a bull, and I fervently hope no one takes it seriously, or I could have some real liability, but I feel like it’s OK to give advice and if I have a breakthrough maybe I will even ask for some, too, because, you know, I feel like you are all my pals.
Except that you’re not my pals, really, and we really don’t know each other, and I only think I know who I am dealing with because I have — in many cases — accepted more or less at face value who each of my blogging buddies says (s)he is. And this makes me pathetic, I guess. Not that I don’t have any friends in real life. I have lots. Ok, two. But still, I know they would go to the mat for me. How many of you would do that? All right, then.
OK I apologize for the previous post.
I didn’t watch every fucking second of the Today Show this morning, because at some point I had to take a shower (etc.) and get dressed, but at no time did I see anything about the guy they pulled out of the Los Angeles River the other day. Everything seemed to be preempted by the Brad and Jennifer breakup. There were at least three segments, maybe more, devoted to this. What’s the deal? He’s prettier than she is, but he can’t act. Oh, wait: Her name is Jennifer, so she’s probably been drafted to be Affleck’s next squeeze. Good luck to all three of them.
Every time it rains in Los Angeles, someone falls in the flood channel.
As noted here, there is no good reason for this, except that it makes for an excellent couple of hours of reality TV, as a million firemen try to save the clown while the video cameras roll. Anyone who wants to see this spectacle, please tune in to The Today Show on Tuesday, January 11 (NBC). Our local NBC affiliate has been teasing the fact that one of the numbskulls who fell in and got rescued is going to be interviewed, hopefully by America’s cutie pie Katie Couric. They have some great footage of the rescue. This will be good television, people.
OK, I’m a geek.
I admit it: I know a lot about computers: I build them, I fix them, I experiment with them, I try lots of different software and hardware, not all of it absolutely necessary to my survival. OK, almost none of it really necessary. OK, none of it.
Two or three weekends a month in my town, we have a humongous computer swap meet, a tribal gathering of hundreds of fly-by-night vendors*, thousands of bargain hunters, pocket protector types, retired engineers, students, geeks and cool guys like me, all searching for that hard-to-find ISA SCSI adapter, that one magical piece of software that will change their lives, or maybe a brand new computer because they have had it with the old one crashing all the time.
This mob crowds into exhibit halls at the L. A. County Fairgrounds, which is in Pomona, California, as far away from Los Angeles as you can get and still be in Los Angeles County. Usually the “computer show,” as most people call it, occupies two high-ceilinged football-field size buildings at the fairgrounds, and despite the enormous space available the crowd is shoulder-to-shoulder within minutes after the gates open at 10 AM, and it stays that way until closing at 5 PM. The treasures for sale are previous-version software applications, OEM peripherals, beige-box computers, off-brand flatbed scanners, oddball cables and adapters, motherboards, sound cards, hard drives and all the individual components needed to build a PC from scratch. On a good day it is a chaotic bazaar, a sweaty, shouting, frustrating, pushing and shoving experience. Saturday was not a good day.
On that day I drove forty miles of bad road through a torrential downpour to get to the fairgrounds. My mission: Find a software firewall to protect my home network (I said I was a geek), and buy it cheap. My home is a fortress, digitally speaking, and I guard my network jealously. The old firewall was, well, old, therefore possibly breachable, and I had planned this trip for more than a week. Who knew the Storm of the Century would be going on? OK, the century is young, but still. I could have called it the Storm of the Millenium, so lighten up. When I parked the car, the rain had let up a little, and I hopped out and headed for the gate.
For some reason, this was the day the promoters of the event had decided to tighten up security, and I mean they tightened it up. 600 mild-mannered technophiles were standing in line in the rain, while two rent-a-cops checked everybody for weapons! They had an airport-style walk-through metal detector and metal-detecting wands! Almost everyone had to go through two or three times, because, you know, this wasn’t fucking LAX, and no one was expecting to be scrutinized. Shucks, we were just there to shop, not hijack the fairgrounds. It took almost a half-hour to get to the front of the line, during which time the storm kicked up again, drenching all of us. A somewhat overly friendly older man with a striped umbrella struck up a conversation with me, and edged close enough to shield me from the rain. I was feeling a little nervous about this attention, but any port in a storm. Five minutes after the rain died down I had to remind him that it was OK to close the umbrella, and get the hell away from me. Call me a tease, or an umbrella whore, if you must. After a while we noticed that there were three lines, and the other two were going much faster than ours. They were the lines for the Easyriders Bike Show and the LA Tatoo and Body Art Expo ’05, which were taking place concurrently with the computer show. We passed the time debating whether it would be OK to stand in the faster, shorter lines, since it appeared that everybody ended up in the same place once past the gates, but the signage was clear — Computer Fair Here — and being the law abiding computer nerds that we all were (except me, I’m not a nerd), we decided to stay put. I noticed that all the babes were in the other two lines, and had to ask myself again “Where did I go wrong?”
Finally at the metal detector I emptied my pockets into a little plastic basket and went through the gate, which sounded an alarm because of… my belt buckle, maybe? But no matter, because the rent-a-cops had found my pocket knife in the basket, a miniature Swiss Army knife with a 2-inch blade, used primarily for cleaning fingernails and opening mail. They got so excited about the knife that they forgot to use their wand on me to find out why the alarm had gone off. They escorted me to a girl seated at a folding table and told me I had to give the knife to her, but that I could have it back upon leaving the venue. Thanks guys.
The girl took my knife and my name, and placed the former in a little ziplock plastic bag and the latter on a list of names. She tossed the baggie containing my knife into a cardboard box on her table, wrote my number on a card and let me know that I would have to present the card to her (and picture ID, please) to get my knife back. I was number 34, and I could see in her box that almost all the other “checked” items were knives like mine, in identical baggies with small numbers on them.
The fairgrounds are big — 487 acres, to be exact, and I walked about two blocks (through the rain) to the first of two exhibit halls. My elderly protector with the umbrella was nowhere around, probably having been detained by the guards for carrying an umbrella. I was getting wet, and I was no longer packing my weapon, but looking around at the bikers and the body art people I was relieved to know that we were all similarly disarmed.
Once inside the actual computer show, and confident that terrorists weren’t about to hold us all hostage by threatening to beat us with umbrellas or clean our fingernails with little Swiss Army knockoffs, I made quick work of my mission. I got the new firewall and headed for the door, when I noticed a disturbing anomaly: One of the largest booths, surrounded by one of the largest crowds, was selling knives! Buck knives, gut hook knives, fillet knives, carving knives, “police” knives, hunting knives, daggers, non-reflective stealth tactictal knives, “assisted opening” knives as well as a wide selection of samurai-type swords and shorter blades. Outside, the guards were confiscating knives. Inside, the vendors were doing their best to replace them. I had to leave my 2-inch blade at the door, but I could walk out with a fully functional switch-blade if I wanted to.
I didn’t want to, though. I still had to get back to my home network with my new firewall, and it was raining harder every minute. So I beat feet back to the main gate, stopping to get my pathetic little pocket knife. By this time the girl had figured out that, while it was pretty easy to officiously confiscate and toss peoples’ stuff into a box, it was a little bit more demanding to retrieve said stuff and return it. She was frazzled from pawing through her box of identical-looking knives in baggies with tiny little numbers on them. It took way longer to find my knife than it had to toss it in the box, and while she was looking more people were pushing their numbered cards at her and asking for their stuff back. One guy suggested that we be allowed to look for our own stuff, but she didn’t like that idea, so we just had to wait. This part of the stupidity was totally her fault, but she was too innocent to harrass, and I was a little peeved at the guy who informed her about the brisk knife and sword sale that was going on inside and repeatedly asked “Are you aware of that?” as if she should do something about it, and pronto.
I don’t know why you’d set up a knife booth at a computer show. Maybe somebody misunderstood what the term “hacking” means. Or maybe somebody thinks that computer geeks need weapons, or want them. From the look of things on Saturday, they might be right. I also don’t understand why you’d want to frisk people who only want to shop — I thought the President said we had to shop, or the terrorists would win. If the terrorists’ goal was to cripple our country by making us all stupid, it looks like they are on to something out in Pomona.
In the meantime the real security is at my house, on my network. Just try to hack me.
*To be fair, the vendors at computer shows are honest and hard-working. I just wanted to use the phrase “fly-by-night.”
