Category: Life

I want to go to a bar.

Hang with some guys, shoot some pool, listen to music. Any bar. A little neighborhood dive would be fine, up to and including the Viper Room. Trouble is, I don’t drink.

Well, let me put that another way: I am taking a break from drinking, while my friends catch up. I got so far ahead of them that they weren’t any competition to me anymore, so I stopped to give them a fair chance to equal my intake. But the bastards have been very slow, and after almost ten years, they still haven’t caught up, although to give proper credit, some of them are trying heroically. Thing is, I said I would wait, and I’m a man of my word, so I’m still waiting.

Those of you who aren’t horrified at the idea of not consuming alcohol ( please follow the bouncing double negative) are probably saying “What’s the big deal? Go out, have a good time, drink Perrier.”

I’ll bet not one of you has tried being the Designated Driver for Life. It’s not as easy, or as fun, as it might seem. OK, I know it doesn’t even seem remotely fun, but to me it isn’t a bad thing, either. It just kind of is. I actually have no problem abstaining. I was a drunk, now I’m not. As I say, I’ll be a drunk again when my friends have proven they can keep up.

But when you do something like this, your old friends get uncomfortable. I’m not sure if this is because they are afraid you will be sober and judgmental (sober as a judge, get it?) while they get loose and do stupid things, or if it’s some Fraternity of Drunks thing, where they want you to be on the same level as they are. There is some kind of weird sanction against drinking alone, but A) I never had any difficulty doing it, and B) you’re rarely alone in a drinking establishment.

The world of bars is geared toward serving liquor. The drinking of liquor begets the buying of more liquor, which begets the drinking of more liquor, and, well , you get the idea. The stuff I want to do — pool, hang, music — these are the things bars have going to get you to drink. They are peripherals, not the main attraction. It’s not a temptation thing. I’m just not comfortable being such a square peg in such a round hole. People are not cool with it, no matter what they say, and no matter how badly they might need a ride. They look at you funny.

Once I went to a costume party in the garb of a Catholic priest (Side note: It was literally the garb of a Catholic priest — my date’s brother, who didn’t know I had his stuff.). Talk about looking at you funny. Everyone knew me, and everyone knew I was wearing a costume, but still they treated me differently. Raucous conversations died when I approached. Joints were kept hidden in cupped hands, away from my eyes. No necking took place while I was around.

Flash forward a few years. As word spread that Larry wasn’t drinking, I started to receive that same treatment. I hadn’t changed, but people thought I was not the same, and treated me accordingly. It was like I was wearing a costume, one that was just a little too real for them to ignore.

Thus my dilemma. I know a big part of this problem is inside me — I can’t blame it all on stupid people unable to live and let live, much as I’d like to. But I’ve told you before, don’t psychoanalyze me. Damnit, I’m missing out on a lot of male bonding. Foosball, sports on giant-screen TV’s, waitresses in skimpy costumes — darts, for Chrissake!

Maybe I will try coffee houses. Not coffee shops, like Denny’s or Bob’s Big Boy, but the dark, inviting descendants of beatnik hangouts in North Beach, circa 1955, like the place I went on my imaginary date with Gwyneth Paltrow. I love coffee, and, as with hard liquor, I can drink gallons of it at a sitting. As a big plus, coffee generally doesn’t cause projectile vomiting, the way Kamchatka vodka does. Coffee houses often have entertainment, although I can’t think of any that have foosball tables. Come to think of it, the entertainment is likely to be a “folksinger” or a “poet,” which may not be my exact cup of, uh, tea.

Maybe the thing to do is to go to bars, drink coke from a cocktail glass and act drunk. Bars being what they are, it would be an open secret in no time that I’m not really drinking, but I think the pose might put people at ease. Nothing like loud, slurred speech directly into someone’s ear to make them feel the love. Maybe I will find other people at the bar who are pretending to be drunk, and we can play pool and secretly judge the real drunks.

I figured out that if I take the leather case off my iRiver MP3 player it is a very svelte little package indeed.

I can slip it into my shirt pocket, run the wires up the back of my neck, stick the little earbuds in and I am walking in rhythm. Who needs this thick leather case? Without it, the player even looks better. This only took five months to learn.

The songs (several hundred from various sources, and the thing is like one-tenth full) are mostly upbeat, so it’s supposed to keep me happy. There are a few ballads and nostalgic pieces, but mostly it’s hard rockin’. This is not the soundtrack to my life. I wrote about this little box once before, and someone said “Great, you can create the soundtrack to your life.” The problem is, the music just plays. There is no musical director who senses my mood, or prevailing conditions (horrible monster behind the kitchen door, for example) and adjusts the music accordingly. No matter what happens to me, the music plays.

No one else hears it but me, and with the invisible way I am wearing the thing, few even realize I am musicized. But when I feel kicked in the teeth, I want to hear “Man of Constant Sorrow,” not “Hey Ya.” I carefully chose those titles to be somewhat illustrative of what I am saying, without getting into extremely era-specific material, so you won’t be picturing the real geriatric me, gimping around with an MP3 player hooked up like an oxygen tank. Anyone who cares to find out will know that I am 57 years old. Funny — for the last twenty-eight years or so I have told people that I am one year older than I really am, so that on my birthday, when the actual age catches up, I will not feel so bad. I can’t believe I cared about this when I was thirty. But when I signed up for this blog I dutifully reported my real birthday, and Blogger went ahead and calculated my age and there you go. It’s right in my profile.

I’m a relatively young 57, not that it makes any difference. In the real world I am fitter, smarter and more creative and energetic than most guys I know who are twenty- and thirty-something. I have almost no nose hair. But blogging seems to be primarily the realm of twenty- and thirty-somethings, and in THIS world I feel impossibly ancient when I am reading a blog and the girl says”Eewww, this OLD GUY tried to hit on me at the gym, and I had to like, run.” How old was he? Seventy? Or 57? I make a special point not to hit on anybody, but still. I don’t remember being so mean to old guys or women when I was thirty. Maybe I just didn’t have the venue.

More on that in a later post. For now, you kids should be ashamed.

I have been cut off. By someone who blogs. As I have said here in the past, I read a lot of blogs. I have read many great books in my incredibly long life, written by professional writers like Salinger and Dostoevsky, but these days I am really digging the amateurs, and I mean that in the sense of “volunteers,” the bloggers who are telling their stories, expressing their feelings, telling on themselves, as another blogger put it once. There is something real and powerful about it that the pros often lack. And there’s interactivity, by which I mean that I can comment, and the blogger gets to comment back, and we can find out about common ground, new ideas, stuff like that.

And I was doing this with this other blogger, thinking communication was happening, and then all of sudden she disabled comments and put up a post saying she was writing for herself and didn’t want a conversation. I felt like I had been poked in the eye, since there were only like three people commenting and I was one of them. Funny how I can get to thinking that some kind of connection is happening in cyberspace (I know, but what other word can I use?) when actually nothing at all is going on.

And then before I can even fully wrap my mind around what happened there, or didn’t happen, as the case may be, another woman (not a blogger) who has recently had a perfectly good chance at me and didn’t take it, is heard to say that she needs to get laid, and has felt that way for quite some time. And, without going into all the intimate details, the situation she’s looking for is pretty much the exact one I offerred. What’s a boy to think?

I need no consolation here, people. I just want to know why all the shit has to hit the fan at the same time.

I am a man of constant sorrow.

I’m a distressed blogger tonight.

There are a lot of us out here. You know who you are. You’re students, stay-at-home parents and office workers. You know how to use a computer — many of you are certified computer gurus, twiddling with your blog templates, writing your own code, tracking the IP addresses of your readers. Some of you know just enough to get Blogger working, don’t care about anything but typing your thoughts.

And a lot of those thoughts are unhappy. Marital problems are huge these days. There are husbands frankly admitting that they want to find some nookie on the side, wives who are at the ends of their ropes with unresponsive, uncommunicative husbands; students who are so bored with classes that they are blogging during lectures; receptionists, secretaries, IT personnel and various levels of administrator who are so disgusted by their jobs/paychecks that it seems all they do at the office is blog about how they’d rather not be at the office.

I am your brother tonight. My life hasn’t changed, but something is different. This has nothing to do with the Superbowl and the imminent end of the football season. The Vikings got drunk after Thanksgiving dinner as usual, and they’re just sobering up now, so I haven’t been following football since then.

I have a sense of foreboding this evening, as if something bad is happening, but I am not in on it. Yet. I have dark confessions burning within me that must not escape. I am contemptible. I am wallowing in undefined self-pity. It’s unworthy of me. My mind knows this, and is repulsed, but my heart doesn’t care. It is heavy with longing and broken hope.

I have never shown my face but I can’t hide from myself. I have gone too far, or have I moved at all? No one knows me, or have I revealed too much? I have nothing to say, but an urgent need to talk. I am your distressed blogger.

I’ll be fine by the time the sun comes up.

I like a woman who says “panties.”

If you say “panties,” you probably think everybody says “panties,” but you’re wrong. Some women say “underpants.” Some say “underwear.” Panties is what they are: sexy, frilly, taboo articles. I tried to wear my sister’s panties when I was a kid, so I learned they are naughty. When you say “panties,” I think you’re naughty, too. Am I alone in this, guys?

I also like a woman who can handle a stick shift. OK, a manual transmission. It’s a control thing: You have to know how a drive train works in order to drive a stick. RPM’s, flywheel, clutch, synchros. And connect all that to pushing the right pedals at the right time and sliding the shifter into position. Being in the right gear. And this doesn’t even take into account the motion of the legs required to accomplish this, preferrably in heels. This is a woman who knows what the hell she wants, and how to get it. The ultimate extension of this is the woman who downshifts to pass. If you drive like that, can I ride along?

I love a woman who can carry a tune. She doesn’t have to be a pro, or have any particular singing style, but the ability not only to recognize a melody, but also to recreate it more or less faithfully — that turns me on. It’s magic when she pulls the notes out of memory and performs the task of converting that memory into physical sound, using lungs, larynx and lips. I did it for a living for a long time, but the how of it remains a mystery. I become entranced when I witness it.

And red, red lips. I like lips a lot, and they can be plain or painted with any number of colors and glosses, and it’s all good. But when you do ’em up in Real Red they take on an erotic charge that’s hard to look away from. Maybe you think red is the wrong color for you. I urgently request you to think again.

Did I say “heels” earlier? Yeah, I know they’re uncomfortable and orthopedically incorrect, but good God you look hot when you wear them! And every time I hear a pair of them clicking down the hall outside my office, I start having nasty co-worker fantasies just from the sound. They could be the simplest black pumps or exotic platform sandals — they do something for you, from the tilt of your ankle to the line of your calf to the curve of your ass. Geez, now I’m all sweaty again.

Put on your pretty panties, baby, your high heel shoes, red dress and lipstick. C’mon out and play. C’mon out and dance in the sprinklers, twirl in the moonlight. I’ll be wearing my skinny red tie. Pick me up at the corner and let’s go for a ride.

I just realized that the residents of Baghdad are probably called “Baghdadis.”

I also realized that I know less about women than even I thought possible. Blogging women, anyway.

I fought in the Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s on the side of Free Love, raised consciousness, gender equality and mutual respect. Some of us thought that’s what women wanted, and I lived a large segment of my life thinking that. Turns out they want to be tied up and played with — spanked, tormented, tickled and sexually humiliated.

As you know, I am more of a blog reader than a blog writer, and I regularly cruise for blogs to enlighten me. Since half of all blogs are written by women in their thirties, I have become one with that demographic, and in the past ten days, I have read no fewer than five posts from these girls admitting, sometimes shyly, sometimes brazenly, that they are curious about this particular kink, and want to try it, with someone they trust, of course. These women are not web sluts cruising for horny guys willing to pay for a peek at their webcams. They are single and married Moms, working women, college students and computer geekettes and other apparently normal people.

What the fuck? Why didn’t I know about this? I didn’t get the memo, I guess. This is a fantasy that I gave up on as a boy, thinking it was unattainable/creepy/illegal/perverted. Sounds like fun now, though.

To get in the proper mood I will write a bit of soft core pornography, and post it here this evening. Get the candles ready and the ambient music queued.

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In the meantime, while you wait for the dirty stuff, you may savor this picture. While I was working out this morning, I watched part of To Catch a Thief, with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. The part I saw was the section in which they meet and get to know each other, over a 24-hour period. The chemistry is unbelievable, the erotic tension palpable — you don’t see it in movies these days — and the dialog is so fucking snappy I wanted to memorize all of it. Sadly, I was not able to. However, I did come to the conclusion that this woman is indeed a goddess.

Amazing Grace. Who’s your Baghdadi?

So, it appears I have wasted my entire life.

It was a challenge, and there were times I didn’t think I’d be able to do it, but after a thorough inventory I am here to report that I have apparently frittered away enough of my time on this planet that there is no way I can salvage anything of value. Oh, well. At least you can benefit from my experience. Just read and follow these handy pointers.

#1: Be Born Into It

OK, this first one isn’t really a pointer at all — it’s just a sad fact of life. If your parents are underachievers, chances are good you will be, too. It’s not heredity. It’s environment. Nothing could prepare your young mind for failure better than growing up with people who aren’t focused on success, tuned into personal growth or interested in making it. It may not seem fair to you that some of us have this advantage, but get used to it: Life isn’t fair. If you really want to waste your life you can catch up by following these other tips.

#2: Be Afraid
Be very afraid. All of us have fear: the unknown, rejection, retribution, criticism and failure. Just make sure you don’t stand up and confront your fears. When facing a difficult or scary proposition, such as starting a business or asking for a date, remember: Your concerns are legitimate. The results could be devastating, the pain unbearable. Keep this in mind and you’ll never get anywhere. As an added bonus you will be able to go through your whole life virtually unknown.

#3: Screw Around in School
Where I come from you have to go to school until a certain age. This is the time of your life you will one day think of as “your youth.” Your mind is at its most fertile during these years, and school is an excellent place to stifle any creative thinking. Hang out with friends, cut classes, eat pizza and attend football games and dances. Remember: You don’t have to learn anything to graduate from high school.

#4: Go To School Forever
If you didn’t follow the advice in Tip #3, you may have graduated from high school and you could now be tempted to get started on some kind of productive career. Go to college instead. You’ll get nothing real accomplished there. Also, there is no end to it. You can take ten years to get your first diploma if you want to, and then there is no end to the number of additional degrees you can pile on. A growing number of people are stopping right here at Tip #4 and wasting all the rest of their lives in college.

#5: Avoid Successful People
It may seem self-evident, but don’t forget that if you get too close to people who are making something of their lives there is a danger that you will be swept up in that maelstrom of success. These people may appear friendly at first but don’t be fooled: They are scary people, they have an agenda and they are liable to suck you into their alien world.

#6: Try the Arts
A career in sculpture or music is almost as wasted as one in academia (See #4 above). There’s maybe one chance in a million that you’ll be any good at it, and even then you won’t be able to earn a living. If you really want to taste the waste, go into pop art, like movies or rock ‘n’ roll. In those fields you will be competing against other “artists” who may not even be as good as you and who have billions of fans. The odds of producing anything useful? Zip. (Bonus tip: Shooting for a career in sports can also be a monumental waste of time.)

#7: Experiment With Drugs
A lifetime addiction is best, but even if you find that you cannot make a real committment to drugs or alcohol, substance abuse can slow you down for years, often your most productive years. You’ll find a wide variety of recreational drugs, from pot to heroin and cocaine. Cocaine packs an excellent double whammy: It wastes your money as well as your life. Those who want to keep it legal will find liquor to be every bit the equal of the heaviest drugs, with a bonus: it can destroy your liver, too.

#8: Be A Team Player
In any enterprise, somebody does the work and somebody gets the credit. The work has to get done, and it’s always good sports like you who do the heavy lifting. But the acclaim — and the money — generally goes to someone else. Understand that these are two distinct skills: Doing the work, and being known as someone who gets things done. The latter lead lives of happiness and wealth. The former just waste their time.

#9: Play Fair

Treat people with dignity and respect. If you have an unfair advantage, don’t press it. Consider the feelings of others. Resist the urge to simply take whatever you want from those who are weaker, less experienced or ill-prepared. Crippled in this way, get out in the world and fight for your share of the action. But fight fairly. This will ensure a lifetime of failure and frustration.

A guy named Dick wrote these things.

I have only included the highlights here. Glance through it, and I’ll tell you why I am including any of this shit here.

50 Things: By Dick

1. The person I love most in life is my son.
2. I pray every day that his mommy dies.
3. I’m actually a nice guy besides #2.
4. I’m overweight and can’t stand it anymore.
5. Lost my virginity when I was about 16 or 17.
6. Her name was Eileen Kelly, pretty w/big boobs.
7. In addition to #2, I hate fucking Muslims. Fuck you, you smelly, dirty pricks!
8. I would not mind going into Iraq.
9. This is the longest I think I have ever been with one person where I haven’t cheated on them. I still have no desire to do so.
10. The answer to life: Have enough money. Then anything or anyone is yours.
11. I think growing up I turned more jaded and republican, maybe it’s the same thing.
12. I love big breasts, God I love ’em.

You can go here if you think you might be able to stomach the rest of Dick’s 50 Things, or if you have big breasts and want to show them to a Dick, but I think you get the idea. I immediately clicked on the comment button and wrote to Dick:

“What a nice guy you seem to be! You certainly deserve for your son’s mother to die. Hey, why don’t you kill her yourself? Then you will be able to teach the kid about hating Muslims, going into Iraq, getting fat, and the fact that you can have anyone you want if you have enough money.”

I didn’t say how cool I thought it was that he mentions his first fuck by her full name (she’ll be so proud!), that he usually cheats on his partners or that he’s jaded and Republican and thinks it’s the same thing.

I also didn’t send my comment. I looked at it, and I looked again at Dick’s post, and I realized that if you’re a Dick, there’s nothing I can say or do that will cause you to reevaluate your beliefs, no matter how patently stupid they may be, and all I would do is hurt the dumb fuck’s feelings, and then how would I feel? Instead, because I just can’t let things go, I’m venting here in my own blog, poisoning my beautiful Sunday in Paradise.

Weep for me. people. But at least I’m not a Dick.

(And don’t miss the invitation in my previous post, from late last night –it’s the next one down. Reproduce it, ladies, and send it to you-know-who.)

Man, I wish I were anonymous. That guy is everywhere!

I could have been anonymous. This whole thing could have been set up to completely hide my identity. But it didn’t occur to me that there might come a time when I would want to hide. This was supposed to be a writing excercise. I actually told my friends about this blog. Don’t laugh — pity me, the fool. Once I considered asking for a real writing job at an alternative weekly newspaper in Los Angeles. They needed someone, and they didn’t have a lot of money to pay. Perfect gig for me, I thought. I can write like crazy, I’m used to no money, I have a lot of things to say and my insights will be spellbinding to underground L.A. Then tomorrow the world.

But one of the job requirements was this: When you come for your interview, be ready with proof that you can meet a deadline, not just once, not just for a month, but with perfect regularity, for a long time, and I realized that I couldn’t do it. I mean, not that I was incapable of writing on a deadline, but that I hadn’t done it, I had a lot of other projects at the time, and I wasn’t absolutely certain I could pull it off. This is one of my biggest problems in life, I think — too courteous. I could have jacked them around long enough to get a few bylines, be invited to a few parties where there would be free booze and loose women, but no, I had to think ahead (for them!) and make the call that Jones was not right for the job.

That was a long time ago, but ever since then I’ve had it in my mind to someday take a shot at deadline writing. Not that this blog has a deadline, but I figure by writing in it as much as I do I am getting good at cranking stuff out on demand, which is so close to working on a deadline that I can finally be at peace in the knowledge that, hey, there’s one more skill I’ve mastered, on my way to being master of all things.

Also, I have noticed that I feel better if I crank something out that people are interested in, and that causes readers to comment. So I am encouaged to keep at it, in much the same way that a paycheck encourages me to go to work. It’s not a paycheck. It’s a kick.

I got a kick out of my very first real girlfriend. She’s one reason I’d like to be anonymous right now. I was a late bloomer, so I was maybe 15 before I got my hand under anybody’s panties, and they were hers. See, I can’t say her name, because I’m not anonymous. Why did I fuck this up? I can’t start over now. I have blogging buddies now. I will never be able to find new blogging buddies if I stop this blog and start a new, anonymous one.

Anyway, the venue was a ’57 Buick Super. The front seat was almost as big as my living room, so while there was a little bit of twisting around, it was nothing like what kids must go through today, in their Miatas. If any kids read this, let me know how you manage to make out. Tell me all the details. I can’t remember now the first kiss. Isn’t that sad? That first kiss must have been electrifying, because I had been having erections for years, so you know my body was saying find a girl, junior, for quite a while. I mean, I was so ready. I probably don’t remember that kiss because I may have blown my load right on the spot, as it were, and I was then preoccupied with concealing what had happened, and filled with shame at what I had done. Thinking back, I realize that I could not have been fooling her, the little bitch.

Ah, but Young Love! For a year and a half we made out wherever we could, mostly in the car, but also all over her parents’ house, usually while her parents were there, feigning sleep. I was agitated all the time, at school, at home in bed, trying to study, doing my paper route, thinking about her tits, her soft belly, her very generous behind, her eager lips and tongue. We sucked face and felt each other up thoroughly at every opportunity, but we didn’t go all the way. I thought sex without marriage was wrong. She actually attended a Catholic high school. Fucking was out of the question, or so I thought. Geez, I hope she never finds this and looks at the picture in my profile. Oh, lordy.

It wasn’t love, but an incredible simulation. It would have been enough to get us hitched, and then the fucking would have begun in earnest. No doubt we would not have tired of it for a few years, during which time many babies might have been born, and bingo! — instant family! One day we might have looked around and both said “This is not my beautiful house! And who is this person I am tied to forever? Have we ever talked?” I would have grandchildren by now, and they would be listening to hip hop.

But what did happen was that we went to colleges in different cities, and we just… stopped seeing each other. Oh, there are details that I am too ashamed to tell, but suffice to say that our Puppy Love sort of dribbled off. We got together once when we were in college, home for some sad holiday, estranged from each other, and she let me do her, but it was miserable. I knew she was fucking her psychology professor, a worldly older man, and I kept wondering what she thought of me, compared to him. Really miserable, don’t make me tell it.

At least ten years after that, I did a little detective work, found her phone number and called her on her birthday. She was surprised but guarded — who could blame her? We met for lunch, both of us settled now, so you’d think there would be no sexual tension, especially after our miserable final one-nighter. But if she was hot as a teenager (and she was), she was smokin’ as a twenty-something single mom career gal, and I found myself in lust all over again. Oh, Christ, I am really stepping in shit here. You don’t even know.

To my credit, I was a gentleman. I wore a tie and I paid for everything, even though it wasn’t, could not be, a date. In my mind we got a motel room after lunch and I did all the things I should have done when we were in high school, all the things I know now that she would have gladly done with me. In my mind we messed each other up good that afternoon, and every afternoon for a long time, in the park, in elevators, in taxis, on the ferris wheel, on the dining room table, shameless and filthy, wet and breathing hard, not hiding, not concealing anything, flaunting it all, big, bad, dirty fun.

It was a lost opportunity. It probably wouldn’t have gone as well as I pictured it, anyway. I promised myself something that day, and I can’t say here what it was, because I am findable, and not anonymous. But I still call her every year on her birthday, and sometimes we still do lunch. She should be a grandmother by now, but her daughter is a lot like her, and not cooperating. Our worlds are in different orbits, and between birthdays we spin off into distant voids, where we can’t see each other, but the gravity of Puppy Love pulls us back together once a year. I owe her a lot. She wasn’t my first time — she was better than that. She was before my first time.

I might write more about this, but I’m trapped. People could find out about me. I might be exposed. True feelings revealed. Those of you who have stayed behind the curtain, I envy you. Must get underground. I need counseling. I need a violent raquetball game, no thinking, just hitting and scoring. I need a good spanking. I need a fast ride down the coast, big V8 suckin’ gas, runnin’ hot, I’m a runaway with white line fever, a sunset tryst in a real hotel on the edge of the world, white linen tablecloths, white cotton sheets, white terry robes, love letters in the sand, and I will never, ever grow so old again.

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.