Category: Life

You may have found yourself living in a mansion, depressed, confused or alienated.

You may not know how you came to be living in a mansion, and you may fear that you will be trapped forever in a gigantic house or estate, surrounded by other gigantic houses. You need to stop and take hold of yourself, pull yourself together and start living on a human scale, in a normal size house.

How do you know if you are living in a mansion? Often, the person living in a mansion is the last person to know. Here are some warning signs. You may be living in a mansion…

• …if it is more than four hundred feet from your front door to the street.
• …if you occasionally wake up in rooms you didn’t know you had.
• …if there is an intercom near your toilet.
• …if you are paying Social Security tax on the person who brings you your coffee in the morning.
• …If there are golf carts parked in your family room.

That’s all well and good, but I don’t live in a mansion. Denial is a common symptom in the early advanced stages of living in a mansion. Sadly, the healing cannot begin until you admit that you have a problem with living in a mansion, and prepare to confront it.

A lot of people live in mansions. What’s the big deal? If you live in a mansion, chances are you are surrounded by other mansions in your neighborhood, and it may, indeed, seem to you that “a lot of people” live in mansions. However, statistics do not bear this out. In fact, less than two percent of all Americans live in mansions. Worldwide, the proportion is even smaller.

So what if I do live in a mansion? People who live in mansions may develop a tolerance, and find that they are spending too much time in search of ever larger rooms, longer hallways, more grandiose staircases, and so on. Living in a mansion affects the central nervous system, resulting in a decrease of activity, anxiety, tension, and inhibitions. Even a medium size house can result in a decrease in the ability to think clearly. Concentration and judgment become impaired.

OK, but I can move out any time. Once you have grown dependent on living in a mansion, you may experience painful withdrawal symptoms. When the great big ol’ house is taken away, symptoms of withdrawal may include elevated temperature, increased blood pressure, rapid heart rate, restlessness, anxiety, psychosis, seizures, and rarely even death.

Maybe I do have a problem, but how can I tell? Ask yourself these questions:

• Have you ever felt that your house is unmanageable?
• Is someone in your family concerned about the size of your house?
• Have you ever been absent from work or lost a job because of the size of your house?
• Do you find that you “need” a bigger home than before to achieve the desired effect?
• When everyone else has left, is it “OK” with you to just stay in your mansion, alone?
• Do you try to hide your mansion from others?

Many people who live in mansions don’t recognize when their houses have gotten out of hand. In the past, treatment providers believed that mansion-dwellers should be confronted about denial of their problems, but now research has shown that compassionate and empathetic counseling is more effective.

If you’ve been living in a mansion, don’t despair. You’re not alone. There is help. Living in a mansion doesn’t make you a bad person. You might want to join a support group, seek therapy from a psychiatric professional, or even enter a rehabilitation clinic.

But please, do something.

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(This public service announcement brought to you by revision99, the Ad Council and Americans Who Can’t Afford to Live in Mansions.)

Holy cow, check this out.

Today on the drive home from my crummy job, I heard a story on NPR about people with home recording studios. I know all about recording studios, home and otherwise, but this story had a twist: You can hire session musicians, even big-name players, and they will play on your tracks long distance! So you (or I) could assemble a band of top-level cats for your next home project, and it wouldn’t just sound professional, it would be professional.

Of course you’d have to spend some dough on it — nobody rides for free — but isn’t modern technology just super-dooper?

Click here for the story. I think there’s a transcript there, but you can also listen to the story, and you should.

As always, my heartbeat’s thumpin’ like a big bass drum.

PS:Â Blue Girl and Neddie Jingo have already done this.Â

Lucky for you I couldn’t finish the post I started the other night.

I was trying to say I felt kinda bad about not posting, then I got to explaining why I wasn’t posting, and part of the reason was my crummy job, so I had to go into details there, and that was bringing me down (and it would have brought you down, too), and then I was going to explore just why I should feel bad about any of this, or why I would be explaining it to my imaginary friends, and, well, let’s just say lucky for you I got too sick and tired of myself to finish, and I went to bed and now I don’t feel like any of it needs to be said.

The short version is, I’m not cut out for any kind of real job. I have one, and I do it well, but I don’t care about it and it’s taking up too goddamned much of my life.

As if the crummy job isn’t enough of a time sink I’m organizing a band in my spare time, which means I don’t have any spare time. I’m picking songs, learning them, making charts, booking rehearsal time, geeking with the electronics — it’s like a second job that I do for free. I know, you want to know more about the band. My Craig’s List ad for a bass player should cover it:

Do you play bass?
Can you sing?
Do you appreciate rock/R&B/blues/pop/country music?
Have you been around for a while? (i.e., do you remember Rick Danko?)
Do you love to play, but you’re too busy with job or family to devote full time to a heavy rehearsal and gigging schedule?
Are you NOT down with hip-hop, grunge, death metal, emo and the latest fad-rock?
Are you too old to play kid stuff, but too young to quit playing?
Do you have a sense of history AND a sense of humor?

If you see yourself in there even a little, give us a call. We’re putting together a working-class band of like-minded players to make some noise, work out a few sets, jam a bit, play some parties and do an occasional club gig. Right now we need a bass player. If you can sing, even backup, it’s a big plus. Male or female, we don’t care (but you’ll have to carry your own gear).

You’re busy — we’re busy too, so it won’t be too intense. We’re serious about the music, but we’re in it for the fun and the escape. We might make some money, but if you need a gig to pay the rent, this isn’t it.

Ready to rock? Leave a message at (XXX) XXX-XXXX.

This yielded a couple of calls and the first guy we jammed with was the guy we went with, so now we are two guitars, bass and drums. I’m loving it, but I don’t have time to blog. I’m reading your blogs, though, and I expect you to keep up the high standards I’ve grown accustomed to.

So, you slackers with only one job: Get busy with the keyboard, OK?

A few thoughts, that I may keep in touch with everybody:

• Valerie Plame — an articulate, telegenic celebrity spy, now unemployed. The networks must be drooling over the prospect of signing her up. How long before she has her own TV show, or is at least a regular commentator somewhere?
• Halliburton is moving to Dubai! Where do you think Dick Cheney will be when the subpoenas start to fly?
• Alberto Gonzalez. Hey, his initials are A.G., just like in Attorney General! President Bush is saying he fully supports his boy, so maybe it also stands for Almost Gone.
• Note to Presidential Primary voters across the nation: Just send your choices to us here in California, as we will now be selecting your candidates. Also, if it gets a little quiet in your state for the next 20 months, it’s because all the candidates are here.
• This was the warmest winter on record, since they started keeping records in 1880, but there’s really nothing to worry about at this time.
• Who thought it would be a good idea to fire all the U.S. Attorneys at the same time? The other day White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said it was Harriet Miers, but now he says “At this juncture, people have hazy memories.” I take this to mean that at some later juncture, after they’ve had a sitdown and worked out what they’re all going to say, their memories will become clear.
• I tried to find a bass player on Craig’s List recently, and I’ve decided that I will be one in my next life. Those guys are rare! They must be working all the time, and naming their own price, too.
• I’ve entered into a suicide pact with a woman at work. Don’t be upset — it will probably prolong my life. Here’s the deal: If either one of us becomes so fed up with the job that we feel we simply can’t go on another day, that person has to kill the other one first. This means no suicide for us, as neither of us would ever shoot the other. At least I don’t think so.
• Today in my glorious hometown we had exactly 12 hours of daylight, and tonight we’ll have exactly 12 hours of darkness. It doesn’t get any more symmetrical than that, my friends.

As always, my love knows no bounds.

I feel like I’ve lived too long.

Like a guy who has made a deal with the devil. I get to live as long as I want. Heh, heh — only eventually I discover what Satan knew all along: that immortality is hell, and after a few hundred years I’ll be begging to end it.

I started this blog just a couple of years ago, so you’d think I’d have some reasonable expectation that my magical, invisible, virtual “friends” that I made in the early going would still be with me. And some of them are. I won’t list them — you know who you are, and you are the wind beneath my wings.

But my mind keeps wandering to the friends I’ve lost. Some have simply vanished, leaving no way to reach them or find out how they are. Some have made announcements, ranging from “I’ve been discovered at work and I have to shut down” to “I have nothing more to say,” to “I’ve got a book deal, so long, suckers!” Some have deleted their blogs and pornographers have taken their blog names and planted pages of nasty links where once were the writings and art of people I sort of knew.

Each time one of them departs I get that “deal-with-the-devil” feeling: I seem to be going on and on, even if a bit sporadically lately, but my bloggin’ buddies are departing the blogosphere, leaving me behind, feeling lonely and a little desperate. In self-defense I become more withdrawn. After all, why make friends if you know they are going to leave you? This is a little weird and pathetic of me, I know, so I’m trying to buck up.

In the meantime, I hope all you lost sheep are OK.

In another room, a glass shatters.

Jarred from my work, I am angry, jangled. It’s nothing, really, just a broken glass, but heat rises in me anyway. Why isn’t she more careful?

I resist the urge to go see what happened. It’s nothing, but seeing it would only make me grind my teeth. And I’d have to clean it up.

I should have run off with the circus when I was seventeen. Except I can’t do any circus tricks, and clowns give me the creeps. What’s up with the crazy makeup and the big shoes? Is that supposed to be funny?

Maybe clowns are pathetic people, so desperate for attention that they will wear big rubber noses in public and put on baggy suits in outlandish colors, just to keep all eyes on them.

But no — they must be hiding. Hiding in plain sight. They must be horribly, painfully shy, and they are hiding under the heavy makeup and oversized costumes. Why do they want to be clowns, then, doing pratfalls, tooting their little horns, cramming themselves ten at a time into impossibly tiny cars? There’s a sad, frightened little person in there, isn’t there?

I guess in a way I did run away with the circus. I ran away with a rock band. Actually, a series of rock bands. They took me first to the homes of friends, where we tried to figure out the songs we were hearing on the radio, using pawn shop guitars, all plugged in to one overloaded second-hand Standel amplifier, everybody sharing a single six-dollar Radio Shack microphone.

We graduated into backyard parties in the next town, where we played crude versions of the songs we had taught ourselves, using borrowed and rented gear. We played “Battles of the Bands” for cheesy prizes at car lots and shopping centers. Some of us disappeared along the way and newcomers who played better (or had better equipment) were recruited to replace them. At some point we found ourselves organized into groups that actually sounded OK and had real gigs at real parties and dances and nightclubs and saloons and pizza joints.

We got more sophisticated and more into it and inevitably some of us hit the road, which I guess might be a little like running away with the circus. You go to strange towns far away, and you have only the stuff you brought with you and the people you work with as touchstones to your old world. You stick out as aliens. The locals treat you bad, or they treat you good, but you can’t ignore the fact that they treat you different. Because you are different.

You live with the band, maybe not in trailers or circus tents, but when you venture into the street during the day you might as well be wearing a bright red wig and a clown suit, because everyone knows you are not one of them.

At night you stand up in front of them and do your act, and most of the time they let you do it. Sometimes they show you a little love, sharing that small part of themselves that can be shared with someone who won’t stay long, can’t be part of anything. You will be there only a short time, and the End of Your Gig waits there at the stage door that opens on the alley, smoking, patient, persistent. The End of Your Gig says there are other bars and bandstands, other sights, other women in the next town, and now that you have run away, the deal is that you have to keep on running, even if you can’t remember why you’re doing it.

Justin Timberlake: WTF?

This morning I am beat up of body and hoarse of throat

…because yesterday I played and sang loud, high-speed rockabilly for three hours, seriously thrashing my Strat and my Deluxe (and me), and then stood in the cold, windy parking lot for an extra half hour, reliving the fun with the guys.

My voice is deep and resonant today, though, and I’m sure I could sing some of those old Leonard Cohen songs, whose range has escaped me in the past.

Lesson for this weekend:

OK, so it turns out that if a great big cockroach manages to get into your house and you want to, you know, kill it, and you whack it with something that flexes a little, something that’s not hard and brittle, like a rolled-up newspaper, what you get is a great big dead cockroach, usually on it’s back. Then you quickly cover it with a paper towel, pick it up and throw it in the trash.

But if you step on that great big cockroach — assuming you are fast enough to get it — what you end up with is a great big, disgusting splat! and a thick puddle of white and brown goo on the floor and no one in the house can suppress their gag reflex long enough to pick it up and dispose of it but somebody has to do it and you know it’s going to be you.

Oh, and the tacky pus-like mess is also on the bottom of your shoe, and you’ve got to do somethiong about that, too.

So a word to the wise: use the rolled-up newspaper.

I’ve been feeling a little down lately, partly about my crummy job and partly around the issue of self-worth.

Sorry to anyone who reads here and is tired of my more-and-more frequent whining. I love to laugh and have fun, but I haven’t been doing as much of that as I want. So here’s what I’m going to try:

I’m going to have hope. I’m going to hope that none of my selfish coworkers pull any annoying stunts that will make my job harder. I’m going to hope that my latest (and most obnoxious) boss moves on soon, leaving Upper Management chastened about their hiring practices, and looking for someone with more insight and compassion. In fact, I’m going to expect these things, which would be just the opposite of what I have been expecting lately.

Furthermore, I’m going to hope and expect that I will somehow find more time for playing music, and that I figure out how to hook up with like-minded musicians to play with. I’ll be hoping and expecting that the creative ideas I have inside me will pop out when I need them, when I’m stuck for a line or a rhyme, when I’m jamming and I don’t know where to go.

I’ll also be hoping and expecting that I’ll find a new day job pretty soon, something moderately satisfying and arguably ethical. I think I’ve been bringing myself down by expecting the worst every day. I don’t expect to fly like Peter Pan by thinking good thoughts, but maybe if I focus more on what could go right, I’ll be able to smile more each day.
I may not have much faith, but I can always hope, and maybe if I start the day expecting better things, I’ll even get to laugh and have a little fun.

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On a more somber note, can we all stop talking about “surging” the troops in Iraq? This is just another cheesy White House euphemism meant to conceal what’s really happening. During the Viet Nam conflict, they called it “escalation.” Maybe if we called it what it is, we could talk about it more intelligently. It is sending more troops to battle. Period. The lesson of Viet Nam was not that you have to win or the world will fall apart. The lesson of Viet Nam is that determined and dedicated locals can beat you no matter how much power you think you have.

The experts, and the President is not one of them, agree that more troops would simply be more targets. There is a civil war going on there now. Nobody is neutral. The locals are not “seeking a political solution.” Anyone you meet on the street is in one camp or the other, and our soldiers are in the middle. Our government has been dishonorable, and now we are not trusted. Everyone wants us to leave, and they will shoot at us until we do. Sending more troops to battle will only prolong the agony. Maybe President Bush wants to do just that: string the stalemate out until he leaves office, and let the next president extricate us. The voters clearly don’t want to do it this way. They have seen that this war is a monumental mistake, and they want out, now.

Will we kill a million people and spend a trillion dollars so that Bush can feel good about himself?