revision99

Anybody else tired of hearing about the “blood and treasure” we are spending in Iraq?

What’s that all about, anyway? Is that supposed to be some sort of euphemism, so we don’t think about the dead and broken bodies and the hundreds of billions of dollars that are swirling down the drain? What’s a little blood, after all? Everyone’s cut themselves. No big deal, right? And treasure.  Oooh, you mean like in “Pirates of the Caribbean” Yeah, pirate’s booty, not the pallets of cash, shipped literally by the ton in C-17’s, only to disappear down the Iraqi sinkhole. This happy talk is an extension of the U.S. policy of not showing pictures of military coffins as the dead are brought back, and the policy of not allowing cameras in the hospitals where the wounded are being treated. Sure it’s dishonest, but we’re talking about the Bush Administration, so what else is new?

And why is every military person, especially the grunts, now called a hero? Most of these kids didn’t know what they were getting into when they joined. They thought it was a good way to get out of their boring hometown, or they thought they’d learn a trade so they could later get a good civilian job (ha ha, the jobs are now in China), or they were packed off to the Army to get some discipline into their lives. Some of them were deluded into thinking they’d be defending freedom, or making the world safe for democracy, or liberating an oppressed people, or avenging the terrorist attacks on New York and DC, or [plug in the hyperpatriotic bullshit phrase of your choice]. Sure, now that they’re in, they’re doing a tough job and performing well, but who wouldn’t if the alternative was death or dismemberment? I’d like to see more of them stand up and say “This is wrong and I’m not going to take part in it.” That would be heroic. That would be taking a moral stand against overwhelming opposition.

In the sixties there was a bumper sticker that read “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” It was expressing the foolish idea that if we stopped lending our bodies to take part in the depraved militant fantasies of greedy old men, there would be no war, because there would be no one to fight it. We assumed that the politicians and generals wouldn’t do it themselves, and I don’t think we were wrong about that. And it recognized the reality that we — you know, The People — have the power to change things.  All it takes is unity, across social class and national borders.  If we stand up en masse and say “This is wrong and we’re not going to do it,” it’s over for the depraved, greedy old men who move us around on their chess board map of the world, “sacrificing” a thousand of us here, a million of us there, destroying whole countries, dislocating entire populations.

I’m not stupid enough to think anything like that is going to happen. I can’t say why, but it seems an impossible dream.  Most of us will say we want peace on earth, but we stand ready to join up and kill our enemies, even though most of the time the enemy is us.

(Click here   for the soundtrack to this post.)

It came with a strap, too.

I do the laundry at my house.

OK, let me refine that: I take the laundry from my house, once a week, down to the local laundromat, and do it there.  Three to six washer loads, two to four dryer loads,  bring it home, fold it and put it away. Real men are not embarrassed to admit stuff like this. I do a damned fine job of it, too, producing visibly whiter whites, brighter brights and sharper creases. Because I have moved around a lot, and never really got set up with a washer and dryer, I’ve been doing it this way for most of my life.

For about as many years, I’ve been playing guitar in rock bands.  At first I had a guitar bought at Sears, a Silvertone.  Later I had a Harmony thin hollow body two-pickup single cutaway electric, shiny black and looking from a distance quite a bit like George Harrison’s Gretsch Country Gentleman (the only guitar I’ve ever seen with button upholstery on the back).

In San Francisco I started a band called The Hots, with a couple of guys from New York named Thom and Pfeffer.  They had packed up and driven their ‘67 Mustang to California, where they found that nothing was as good as it had been in New York, and the stores weren’t open as late, either, goddamnit. Still, they had come to town hoping to catch a little of that San Francisco Airplane-Dead-Quicksilver-Santana mojo, so they stayed and we played.

I thought things were going pretty well, but one day they sat me down to tell me that I needed a better instrument.  They said I didn’t seem to take pride in my guitar, the way musicians in New York did. They said my guitar didn’t sound right, didn’t look right, that it was shabby, and too cheap. Since they wouldn’t shut up (New Yorkers, remember?) and since we were going to be big stars and have lots of money, I decided to humor them, and that’s when I made the first truly killer deal of my young life.

I went to a hock shop on 3rd Street, just below Market, and bought a 1961 Cherry Wood Gibson ES-355, with a hard shell case, for $275.  I’ll wait while you look on eBay to find out what that guitar is worth today.

OK, got it? No, it’s not for sale. $275 was a lot of money to me in those days. I had to borrow some of it and I really sweated the purchase. But once I had that guitar in my possession, once I played it in the band, stroked it and fingered it and caressed it, once Thom and Pfeffer got a load of it, I was so high that I didn’t need to smoke anything for a month, and I dreamed about that guitar for the whole month, played it every waking moment, polished it every day.

Over the ensuing decades I’ve played that guitar and others on a thousand bandstands from cheesy to regal. I became a journeyman player, but even though I never got to be a rich rock star I never regretted the money I spent on the 355, or the J160, the Strat or the Blackjack.

Lately I’ve been thinking I need a new guitar, and the one that’s calling my name is the Fender Telecaster.  I’ve looked at them online, and discovered a bewildering array of sub-models: the Standard, the American Standard, the Deluxe, the Baja, the Highway 1, the Classic ‘72, the Vintage Hot Rod ‘52, the Thinline… well, the list goes on for 9 pages on the Musician’s Friend web site, with ten entries per page.

But I went to a store that had a bunch of them, and I played them all, compared the sound and the playability, sorted through the various features and I picked one. I picked one, but I didn’t buy it, and now I can’t stop thinking about it. With this guitar, I imagine, my life will change. I will find The Lost Chord, and when I play, the angels will sing! I wake from a sound sleep with the Tele twang ringing in the room, the fretboard under my fingers, and I think maybe today I’ll go back to the store and bring that baby home.

But I hear this other voice in my head, a practical voice, and this other voice is making a sensible suggestion:  Instead of another guitar, when you already have so many, it says, why not get something for the home, something you can really use, something you don’t already have? Why not buy a washer and dryer?

I have to admit that there is logic to this idea. I spend two hours doing the laundry every week, and that time is devoted entirely to the mundane task of getting our clothes ready to wear for the next week, over and over, every week.  Nothing new is produced, and nothing permanent.  The next week, I have to do it all over again.  If I had my own mini-laundry at the house, I could do a load of laundry whenever one was needed.  I could do small loads, hot loads, delicate loads, using settings that don’t even exist on commercial washers.  Of course I couldn’t do six loads all at the same time, but this inefficiency would be balanced by the convenience and efficiency of being able to wash some stuff whenever. While the machine was doing its thing, I could be in the home studio, playing one of the guitars I already own, writing new songs, creating my Art. And let’s not forget about all those quarters - it’s costing 400 bucks a year in quarters to do things the way I’ve been doing them, so a washer and dryer would pay for themselves eventually (you could make a similar argument for the Telecaster, but it would really be a stretch).

Why does life have to be cluttered with these compromises? I can hear both of these voices, both of their arguments, clearly. They both make sense to me. One tugs my heart, one appeals to my brain. Is one more important, more valid than the other? Ben Franklin’s handy cast-iron indoor fireplace (the Franklin stove) brought modern technology to bear on an enduring problem of life in much the same way a washer-dryer would address my own situation, but what have we lost because of it? While Ben worked on his invention and all his other devices (bi-focals, mousetraps, etc.), he may have solved practical problems and made life easier for us all, but he wasn’t putting his great mind to work on the Eternal Questions (who are we? why are we here?). There’s no doubt now that humanity has decided to rely on technology and engineering, but are we really better off with homes that are comfortably heated at all times? What if there were more philosophers, painters and songwriters, and fewer answering machines and 500-horsepower sports cars? Are we in balance with our planet, with our nature?

In short, which fork in the road do I take now?

Eternity?

or the Franklin stove?

_________________________________________________

*Title lifted verbatim from an essay in a textbook collection I read in high school. Can’t remember the name of the book or who wrote the essay. Help me if you can.

When we lived in Austin, the “lake” was a couple of hundred feet outside our back door.

There was our back door, then a little patch of dirt that would be the back yard in a nice neighborhood, then a gravel track, not a street, not an alley, then a short embankment that led down to the polluted water.  Everybody in town knew not to go in it, because the Hormel packing plant was using it to dump their waste. Whatever chemicals and entrails they didn’t put in the Spam went in the water.  The lake was brown and lifeless.

When I was a little boy, I killed a frog back there.  I remember it was a cloudy morning, and wet, I think.  I found the frog near the gravel track.  I must have been afraid of it.  I held it by one leg and threw it into the air as high as I could.  Again and again.  I was laughing, to convince myself that I was having fun.  After a while the frog stopped writhing on the ground when it landed.  I threw it in the lake then.  Walking back to the house I had a strange, empty feeling, with all the mirth drained out of me.

I had to tell someone I had killed a frog, and how funny it had been, to see him flying so high, spinning out of control, then falling, falling helplessly and splat!  Hitting the gravel, or the dirt, and bouncing, and then the stupid thing couldn’t get away from me, so I caught him again and threw him up again, ha ha.  I wanted it to be so funny, not serious at all.

My mother was shocked.  The look on her face told me what my heart already knew: I had sinned against Nature, snuffed a life.  I had been the ultimate bully, torturing and killing for no reason at all.  When my father came home, he suggested that the frog might have been a father himself, and there might be a frog family waiting for him to come home.  But he would never come home now.  I pictured our family, my mother and me and my brothers and sisters, waiting for my dad to come home, not knowing what had happened to him.  I was devastated.

Years later, when I was living in California, I heard that Hormel had cleaned up the lake, and promised not to dump any more poison in it.  I don’t know.  The maps I’ve looked at don’t show poison or death, only streets and buildings.  But I know there are some things you just can’t clean up.