revision99

Two years ago on this day of remembrance I posted Another Memorial.

I want to say something on Memorial Day that means something, but I don’t understand the event. I’ve lost friends and relatives to war, and I don’t think it was noble. I just want to forget it. I wish I could. I have no new words today, so here’s that post again, this time read aloud.

Turn your speakers down a little (off if you’re at work) and click the blue arrow to hear the audio post.

I’m sorry about the sound quality. I had a hardware failure in the studio while I was experimenting. I won’t be able to fix the equipment until next weekend, so I am forced to use this unfinished mix.

So I went through my closet a while back.

I was going to say “…cleaned out my closet” but you don’t even know all the shit that’s in there, packratted for decades, wedged on the shelves, stuffed all the way to the back, boxes stacked on boxes, unopened since the Reagan administration. Come to think of it, neither do I, and it’ll probably be a long time before I do.

But my wardrobe was getting wrinkled, ya know? I needed space, so I had to at least weed out some of the Qiana disco shirts, bell-bottom cords and heavy coats from the San Francisco days.

So after I made a little elbow room in there, what did I find but a pair of perfectly good work shoes. They weren’t new, but they were in excellent condition, in the original shoebox. They were brown, which might explain why I stopped wearing them, since I went to all black pants, all the time. I may be a dork , but I’m not about to wear brown shoes with black pants.

OK, I know what you’re thinking: Brown shoes don’t make it. But I was sick of the black pants thing. I wanted to wear black shirts, but jeez, black shirts with black pants? I’d look like Trini Lopez. Not even Johnny Cash, that old faker, but fucking Trini Lopez. If I had a fucking hammer.

So I got some tan pants. This made the black shirt acceptable, but holy shit, the black shoes, sticking out beneath tan pants! The horror!

Anyway, these brown shoes would save the day (not to mention about a hundred bucks). For some reason, back whenever it was that I squirreled them away I had stuffed them with those tight little balls of paper that you find jammed into new shoes, that you have to take out when you’re trying on shoes at the shoe store. So I took the paper out and stuffed it, one wad each, into the black shoes, then I put the black shoes in the brown shoebox and stashed them in the closet.

But I spilled coffee on the tan pants that day, and I had to go back to the black pants the next day, so I took the black shoes out of the shoebox, pulled out the paper and stuffed the wads of paper into the brown shoes, which I stored back in the shoebox. Maybe I was half asleep or having some kind of flashback. Why would anyone do such a thing?

Who knows, but for the next month or so I kept switching back and forth between the different colored pants and shoes, pulling the paper wads out of the stored shoes and stuffing them back into the shoes to be stored. I saw myself doing this as if I were watching some other nincompoop. It was an out-of-body thing, if not completely out of my mind. I said to myself “This is stupid. What are you saving these wads of paper for?”

I switched the paper wads back and forth for a week after I knew it was really aberrant behavior, but you’ll be glad to know that today I threw them away.

That’s what kind of nutcase I am. I won’t blame you for backing slowly away.

Hope I still have some friends here.

I know what happens to bloggers who don’t post often. Most of us say we’re only doing it for ourselves, but of course what we want — what I want — is to be read, to be understood, to have a chance to explain myself, to demonstrate to the universe that I’m a good person.

But I don’t have time for that right now, so here’s the short version quick catch-up:

• The new band is now called Big Noise, and it took up most of my free time for the last two months. We’re doing a few songs that I wrote, but mostly it’s a party band, so we’re doing fun covers that you can drink to. I don’t like to sound like everybody else, so I’ve spent a lot of time finding obscure music to play, learning it, transcribing it, arranging it and teaching it to the band. This has been hard for me, but exhilarating at the same time. All the pressure of trying to showcase at The Roxy and get a record deal is off, and what’s left is pure, sweaty, rockin’ fun. Still, it’s time-consuming work, so, no time to blog. (I’m not apologizing, just sayin’.)
• Now I find out that even the cheesiest dive in town (yes, I’ve checked) wants an audition CD before they will talk to me about booking. I guess I’ve been out of circulation too long, but I thought I’d be able to go and talk myself in at some neighborhood bar, and they’d be grateful to have me. But no: now I have to book a recording studio and record a demo. Rehearsing for parties is different than getting ready to record, so now I have to start a new phase with Big Noise, wherein I try to hear if the bass and the kick are working well together, if the harmony intervals are as they should be, etc. This is because if you make a mistake at a party, someone may hear it, but no one will really care as long as there’s dancing and an adequate liquor supply. But if you release a recording with a mistake on it, people will be able to play back your bad playing or singing as many times as they want, and sooner or later any lame-o will detect the errors and from that day forward they will hear nothing else, just the mistakes. Not conducive to getting booked.
• The strutting, loudmouth egomaniac about whom I have previously written, the executive who has ruined all my fun for the past year at my day job, was fired. Actually, sources tell me he sneaked into the building on Friday morning before we opened and cleaned out his office, sneaking away again without speaking to anyone. I know he was fired, because if he had left voluntarily he’s the kind of jerk who would have called a meeting and given a speech, a speech in which he would have talked about himself for an hour or so, then told us that he loved us and he hoped that the things he’d taught us would serve us well, but he was moving on to a higher calling. In fact, he practically killed our business, decimated our staff and destroyed the morale of everyone who didn’t resign. He wore a suit like nobody’s business, but he had no idea how to run our operation, or, I suspect, any commercial venture. I guess I shouldn’t be, but I continue to get amazed that a big, fancy corporation like HugeCorp still gets taken in by con artists like this guy. I could tell he was jive as soon as I spoke to him. Why can’t they? Anyway, leading up to this blessed event, pressure at the office had been building to an exquisitely high pitch, as I and the few professionals too stupid to leave tried to hold everything together. Once again, not much time to spend with you, my precious few bloggin’ buddies, although if you would pay my rent I’d blow off the job in a minute.

I compose blog posts in my mind all day, and — also in my mind — I email all of you with love and good cheer at least once a week.  I hope you’re getting it all.  More soon.

The mission was “accomplished” four years ago.

Since then several hundred thousand people have died in Iraq, our military has been stretched to the breaking point, a half-trillion dollars has been wasted, worldwide terrorist incidents have more than doubled and the American voters have sent a clear message to this president that they want out, NOW.

Yet the President continues to insist that we stay there, even escalate our presence there, despite all the evidence that the fun is over, and we have lost all our marbles.

Bush could have signed the current funding bill. Politically, it would have made a lot of sense. He could have acted as if he hated the idea of surrender, but the Democrats were forcing it on him, and if he wanted the money to keep our troops safe and well-equipped he had no choice but to sign the odious funding bill with the timetable for getting out. Then when it actually came time to get out, it would be right before the next election and he could claim credit for ending the war. Nixon called it “peace with honor,” but I’m sure the current crop of Orwellian spin doctors would have come up with a better slogan. There’s no way the Republicans will win the White House in 2008, but this strategy would have cut their loses in the Congressional elections, and Bush would come out of it looking like a statesman. Completely aside from the rightness or wrongness of it from a moral standpoint (like, what does he care about that?), it would allow him to write a fitting end to the fairy tale of his life that he’s been spinning for the past six years.

So why didn’t he do it?

Is it because the war is an excellent diversion from what the neocons are really up to? Is it because they’d rather have us all angry and frustrated and incredulous and demonstrating against the war, when what’s really going on is something else altogether, something more important to them than human life and the honor and reputation of their country?

Is it because they don’t want us to notice that they are looting the United States Treasury, destroying labor and the middle class, redistributing all the money into their own pockets? Are they using this insane war to distract us from the sight of their curly little tales wiggling and the sound of their rapacious snorting as they belly up to the public trough and take their fill of your tax dollars? Are they hoping the war will keep us from noticing that we are being turned into worker drones, working more and more hours for less and less real compensation, and always with the threat that our jobs could be done for even less by someone overseas if we don’t like it?

Heck, I don’t know, Maybe they’ve got an even stinkier plan. I’m just wondering.