Category: Life

Sometimes I just have to bite my tongue.

Once, a long time ago, when a waitress asked me if everything was OK, I told her “No — look at the mess in Bosnia-Herzegovina! My God, it’s humanitarian disaster!”

No one in the room, including the waitress, thought this was funny. Or they didn’t know what I was talking about — I always have to consider that possibility. The people at my table were embarrassed, for me or the waitress, I wasn’t sure. In any case, the incident taught me to keep my mouth shut when these stupid thoughts occur to me.

So tonight when the checkout guy at Trader Joe’s asked me if I’d found everything I was looking for, I did not say “True enlightenment? No, I haven’t found that yet. But I will continue my quest, thank you.” I said,”Yeah, I guess so,” or something like that.

Everybody was happy, and the checker grinned and asked “Paper or plastic?”

If you’re an aspiring musician looking for a name for your new band,

…you may need to look no farther than your email inbox. Today I received otherwise useless messages from:

• Elusive Toothpick,
• Campanile Cross and…
• MegaDik

to name but a few.These would all be excellent band names, I think, but I have a question: Do the spammers really think I would send my bank account information to someone named Elusive Toothpick, even if they have approved my loan application?

I’ve been hearing on the radio lately that if I replace five of my regular light bulbs at home with these newfangled curly-cue compact fluorescent bulbs, it will be like taking 400,000 — or is it 40,000? I don’t remember — cars off the roads in California.

Sounds good to me. I’ve put in four of these bulbs in the past month, which (taking the low figure) should equate to 32,000 cars staying home.

Unfortunately it seems the other 8,000 of them are maneuvering around on the roads between my home and my office, usually at the same time I am trying to get from one to the other, and none of them are using their turn signals.

What’s the deal with turn signals? They are on every car I’ve ever owned. They’re mentioned prominently in the California DMV Driver’s Handbook. In fact, if you show up at the DMV to take your driving test in a car with non-working turn signals, you get sent home to fix them. You have to have them, and the handbook is pretty specific about the legal requirement to use them, too. Maybe it’s different in other places, but in my town, in my state, nobody uses them, or they use them wrong.

Of course there are the drivers on the freeway who feel perfectly all right about changing lanes whenever they feel like it, no matter who they might cut off. I rarely go an entire week of commuting without having at least one red-light, heart-in-the-throat, ABS-thumping incident due to some oblivious asshole sliding his crossover SUV in front of me with no warning. They are usually not going as fast as I am, either, which leads to ill will on my part, and when I eventually get to pass them, I look over, but they seem not to realize they have sinned, as they talk on the phone, fix their makeup (this is LA: even the men wear makeup) or tune their Sirius radios.

That’s bad enough, but I can sort of understand this lack of driving courtesy: they are turn signals, you know, and changing lanes isn’t really turning. I have more trouble empathizing with people who are actually turning and who don’t signal. They will turn right in front of you when you are rushing toward them at an intersection. They seem to think that the key is to get their car in your path at any cost, at which point you will have to let them through. Following this line of thought, you can see that signaling would defeat their purpose: If I know you are going to turn, I can speed up and prevent you from doing so. And I would, too, because the main reason I ever get in my car is to obstruct your trip to wherever the f*ck.

Then there are the drivers — and I use the term loosely — who signal only as they enter their turn. To them, the signal means “OK, I am turning now. See me turning?” They are not signaling about something they intend to do very soon, like maybe in a couple of hundred feet. They are signaling about something that is happening right now. Why signal at all? If your turn is going to cause an accident because no one knew it was coming, the only difference will be that your blinker will be blinking when I crash into your car.

Look, it’s just plain thoughtless rudeness. Or maybe it’s willful rudeness, I don’t know. Signaling is something you do mainly for the other guy, and in today’s world, with all your responsibilities and deadlines and preoccupations, who cares about anybody but yourself? The other guy would stick it to you in a heartbeat if it served his purposes, wouldn’t he?

Maybe so. Maybe there’s no cure for this epidemic of boorishness. But I warn all you non-signaling drivers: I have 50 more compact fluorescent bulbs in my garage. If you don’t shape up pronto, you are all going to be riding your bicycles.

It’s the last of my five-day minivacation.

I had a day off work on Independence Day, and I took a couple of vacation days after that, Thursday and Friday, so I got myself a looong weekend. Five days for the price of two. I can’t pass up a bargain like that.

All I have done, really, is work on the recording project. Ten songs, covers, unusual choices, I hope. This is so I can put my garage band to work. At this point I no longer know why I want to do this. It’s just what you do. I mean, is it really a “band” if it doesn’t go out and play for people?

My instinct is to pick up the guitar and play it, to hear the notes and the harmonies, to feel the strings under my fingers, the body against my chest, to imagine the possible meanings. (It’s pathetic, really, how hard I try, and how little I produce.) But if you just do it alone, if you never show it, is it real? I don’t know.

Anyway I’ve decided that I have to make this CD, a digital audition, so the owners of bars and nightclubs, and maybe some booking agents, can be assured that the band is competent. They won’t have to bring us in for a real audition (although they still might demand one), so there’s no chance they can make a mistake.

What I have been doing, mostly all by myself in my home studio, is replacing most of the guitars from the original recording session, and all of the vocals. The tracks were recorded in a small room with no isolation between the instruments. Every open microphone became a drum track. Here’s what the floor tom sounds like from 30 feet away, with the mic six inches from the floor and pointed away from the the drum. Or how about that snare, mic’d from three different, apparently random, locations around the room?

This is nobody’s fault, of course. To save money, I set it up as a rehearsal recording. We were supposed to get a live mix of the session. One CD, nothing more, just to get an idea of how we were doing. For fifty bucks more I got the guy to give me the individual tracks, so I could shine it up at home and actually use it for something. Three vocal tracks, two guitar tracks, one bass and thirteen tracks of drums, on ten songs. That was three weeks ago.

Now I’m finished. Well, almost. I have resung all my parts and all the bass player’s parts, and got my brother to redo his parts. I have replaced almost all of the guitar tracks — some of the rhythm guitar tracks my brother played on his ancient Rickenbacker were too good to fuck with — and I have massaged the drums with EQ, echo, noise gates and automated mixing. I even had to move a couple of misplaced snare hits, and replace a couple that, for some reason, weren’t there at all.

It took more than two weeks to do this on the first five songs, and then — on my mini-vacation — just three and a half days to do the other five, which goes to prove what an impediment to progress my crummy job is. Along the way I felt pretty good about the whole thing. I mean, I have no illusions about this band. It’s a garage band. We should play cheap neighborhood dives and Pigma Sty fraternity parties. These kinds of gigs are exactly where I started out. Without changing much of anything, I have become a Classic Rocker.

But while I was working on the CD I wasn’t thinking of any of that. I was thinking about notes, mood, balance, placement, texture — as if it were any band great or small. Technically speaking, I did the best I could with what I had.

But I know no one will listen to a CD of ten cover songs by a garage band, and so the work is not quite finished. Now I have to cut those songs up into bite-sized pieces and string them together into one five-minute segment that will not allow you to turn it off, a demo so compelling that we will never be able to live up to the expectations it engenders. Given the attention span of most of us in this day of fast television cuts and instant gratification, I should try to cut it down to about 60 seconds, but the idea of ten-second songbites offends even me, so I’ll just go with the feel of each song, cut out the fluff and keep it under ten minutes for the whole thing.

Anybody could pay attention for ten minutes, right?

But before I do this…

After tonight this project will be over. Oh, there may be some whining from the band about the way I put it all together, and I’ll either have to spend some time beating back their criticisms, or spend some time making changes to mollify them, but in my mind I’m done. The next phase is what you’d call marketing, and I mean face-to-face retail selling the product, something I have little heart for.

That’s a step toward putting this group on stage. We’ll never make enough money to pay ourselves back for our time, effort and investment so far, but, you know: It’s what you do. I just don’t know why.

The bandstand used to be my refuge, the safe place where I could act any way I wanted, and nobody knew I was really shy, and I could be there at the dances and the parties and the clubs and the concerts in the park with all the people, and no one could question my legitimate reason for being there. Foolish thinking, I suppose, but it made me want to be there. It made me need to perform.

This time around it feels like I’ve gotten on a train without looking at the schedule to see where it was heading, and my stop is coming up, an unknown destination, and I don’t know where it is and I haven’t packed even a toothbrush.

Maybe it’ll stop at Willoughby.

This is where I’ve been spending all my time lately:

I’m getting too stupid to remember for sure, but I think I have mentioned that in the 21st century, even the cheesiest dives in my home town demand an “audition CD” before they will talk to you about booking your band. I mean, these are places I would never go as a customer. When we started our little garage band I thought it would be easy to talk my way into a gig at one of these toilets, but I guess everybody’s so hip and advanced now that they think they can make musicians jump through hoops. As if that has changed since the 80’s.

Well, OK, I’m working on a CD, but I will not be giving any more blowjobs.

We call our band Big Noise. Last weekend we went to a 24-track studio in Orange County and recorded the basic tracks on 10 cover songs. Actually, it was nine covers and one that I wrote, but the one I wrote sounds so much like a cover that nobody even noticed. Basic tracks were two guitars, bass and drums. However, by opening two vocal mics and putting every drum on it’s own track the engineer managed to fill up all 24 tracks.

All I cared about was the drums, because I can’t record them at home. Too many mics, too much noise. Now that I have the tracks I am transferring them to my home recording computer, where I will re-record most of the guitars and some of the singing, then mix it down into a guaranteed, sure-fire, audition-passing CD. This is, by the way, the recording computer that broke down while I was doing this post, forcing me to put up an unfinished version of what I was trying to do. With the recording date looming and the boys in the band counting on me (and threatening me, in their quaint way), I had to put it back together.

With the machine rebuilt and the tracks in hand, I have had no choice but to spend every free moment in this cramped, poorly-ventilated room, staring at the timeline scrolling past on the screen like the last hours of my life, pinching my ears by wearing glasses and headphones at the same time, fighting exhaustion, figuring out guitar and harmony parts until my fingers and throat are raw, trying to make Ross’s old tubs sound crisp and modern and facing, again and again, that I am neither the singer nor the guitarist that I want to be.

And lovin’ it.

[Oh yeah: Today is the first day of summer, so off with the clothes, everybody!]

A kid named Brian joined the United States Army last year.

I don’t know why on earth he would do such a thing while the current Dimwit-in-Chief is in the White House. Kids really should talk to me before they make such decisions. But this isn’t going to be another of my anti-war rants, though I’m sure you’re spoiling to read one right about now. It’s just a little story about a mother’s love and the good that can flow from it. Forgive me if I don’t get all these details exactly right. I’ll give you two links at the end of this, so you can read about it yourself.

Brian made it through basic training, as most do, and he got bigger and stronger and faster and tougher. His mother Lori, whom I am proud to call my friend, used her blog to keep us all posted on his progress. They spoke on the phone whenever they could — never often enough for Lori — and they visited in person a few times. The pictures often showed them happy but exhausted after all-night drives to spend a day together. Eventually the orders came for Brian to go to desert training.

A couple of months ago, Brian was deployed to Iraq.

Lori knew this was coming for quite a while before she told the rest of us. Maybe she hoped it wouldn’t happen, that by not saying it out loud she could keep it from being true. But as the song says, “This ain’t no foolin’ around,” and so, inevitably, Brian the young soldier had to go and do what he’d been trained to do.

Once he was gone, there were long periods when Lori wouldn’t hear from him. Think about that. Try to be Lori for just a moment, with your only child on the other side of the world, in a place where everybody has a rocket launcher under their shirt, and most of them would like to shoot you. Live with that fact, and get up and go to work every day and smile at the people, not knowing.

Lori sent care packages, of course, and Brian was properly grateful, when he was able to communicate. He asked for little: wet wipes (?), camera batteries. Who knew?

And this tough soldier asked for soccer balls, for the Iraqi children he was meeting on patrol. Lori complied, and threw in a Beanie Baby or two, reasoning that a toy is a toy. If the kids wanted soccer balls, why not stuffed animals?

Brian responded that the Beanie Babies were a big hit with the kids, and the other guys in his unit enjoyed giving them to the children, and could Lori maybe send a few more?

She could, and she did. She mentioned it on her blog, and soon she had 20 Beanie Babies. A week later she had 80 of them. Her bloggin’ buddies were also sending them directly to Brian’s unit. Lori started to doubt herself, figuring they must think she’s insane, a crazy mom, one step away from the shopping cart. Brian reassured her that the kids were loving them, the guys were loving them, and keep ’em coming.

I think war is the ultimate degradation of the human spirit. I have come to believe that nothing is so important that we must mount armies, invade nations, kill and be killed. As I have said here before, has anyone noticed that it never ends, that nothing is ever truly resolved?

And yet, against a backdrop of brutality, car bombs, assassinations, IED’s, RPG’s and suicide bombers, in the middle of this insanity, young soldiers (at least one of them barely past childhood) are handing out stuffed animals to children. These are the next generation of Iraqi’s. Someday they might be asked to do some killing themselves. I know it’s stupid to think that a remembered kindness could change their answer. It’s stupid, and yet…

As Lori says,

If world leaders can’t come to terms, at least we can, as mere citizens, shake one another’s hands, hand a few toys to their kids, and put smiles on their faces. If that’s not one step toward world peace, I don’t know what is.

One mother’s love has reached around the world and touched the hearts of some kids who have not had much to smile about lately, and by “kids” I mean both Iraqi children and U.S. soldiers. Maybe it won’t bring world peace, but maybe it will.

If you want to read about this yourself, Lori has started a new web site devoted to her “Toys For Troops” campaign. The Beanie Baby craze is over in the U.S., but it’s just beginning in Baghdad. Maybe you’ve got a few you’d like to send, or maybe you’d like to help in some other way. Check it out at

http://www.toys-for-troops.com/

This whole thing is merely days old. Lori admits that she’s still spinning from all the activity and the unexpected generosity from across the country. This is not some slick campaign put together by rock stars. This is people reaching out to people, a pure grass roots effort and a labor of love.

Lori’s blog, where it all started, is at

http://gnightgirl.blogspot.com/

Click on these links. Get to know Lori and Brian. Leave a comment. Find out if there’s a way you can help. I guarantee you’ll feel better.

Some junk mail is too beautiful to keep to oneself:

If your “prick-horse” is not glad for you
and give brake for you
come to us.
You’ll feel that curb “it” is impossible.
You must come to us now
and you’ll be a real cowboy legend.
We wait you today, because the hot week
of discounts is now.
Don’t miss your chance.

As with most great literature and poetry, I don’t know exactly what it’s about, but I know I don’t want to miss my chance.

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.

This weekend the new band travels to sunny San Diego to play its first gig.

The occasion is a party for a couple of hundred attorneys. I think we’ll open with “I Fought The Law.”