Category: Life

I have to say something about John Edwards now. Don’t worry — this will be short.

I’m sad. The world we live in is fucked in so many ways. The longer I live (hint: It’s already been way too long) the worse it gets. Global climate change, the collapse of the world financial system, the rise and apparent superiority of authoritarian government (see China), peak oil, the unending appetite for war and more war, the closing of all the libraries, the Minnesota Vikings, the corrupt and inept Bush Administration, the destruction of Labor and the middle class in the U.S., and on and on.

But I still wanted to hope. I still wanted to believe that we as humans have a better nature, and that with a little leadership and inspiration we can overcome our bad selves and work together to raise us all up to a higher level and create a happy, thriving planet on which we spend our energy and resources making things better, instead of simply stealing the better things from whomever already gots.

I thought that was the John Edwards message, and it appealed to my hopeful instinct. I thought that if a guy with such a vision could even get close to competitive in our rigid two-party presidential system, maybe things weren’t so bad after all.

But even as he was putting forth his hopeful message he was, it now appears, sabotaging himself, and — if he had won his party’s nomination — wrecking the nation’s chance to escape the criminality and venality of the modern Republican Party. For surely his affair with Rielle Hunter would have been exposed, as it has been, and presto! — President McCain.

I supported Edwards, and when he dropped out I was disappointed, but the reality was that he was not getting the votes he needed. I couldn’t see why, because Edwards seemed to be the answer to a lot of our wishes. But you have to be practical. I switched my support to Obama, and kept hoping that Edwards would either be on the ticket or in an eventual Obama cabinet.

I don’t really care about the infidelity. I don’t know how it happened or why. It’s none of my business. But I do feel conned. I’m mad at myself more than at John Edwards, because I was all pumped up and ready to buy the snake oil.

I was right. Things are fucked. There is no redemption.

I watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics last night.

I probably shouldn’t have. I should have boycotted it, what with the bad human rights record the Chinese have and all, and the way they treat the Dalai Lama. I mean, it’s a repressive regime, no getting around it. Our president didn’t mind too much, though. He was there in the front row, to see and be seen. But then Bush seems comfortable with doing the bidding of others, as long as there’s profit in it for his family and friends. The Chinese own so much of the U.S. that Bush might not have had a choice in the matter anyway. What do I know?

But talk about keeping order! The new Olympic Stadium, called “the bird’s nest” over and over again by commentator Matt Lauer, was filled with 91,000 spectators, and the government thoughtfully provided 130,000 cops at the venue, probably to give directions and retrieve lost children and stuff. Oddly, no fights broke out.

I’m already sick of the Olympics, because I watch The Today Show every morning as I’m trying to start my day, and NBC — by virtue of a billion-dollar payoff to the Chinese Olympic Committee — is the exclusive purveyor of all things Olympian to the U.S. television market. They started months ago with a daily “Countdown to Beijing.” Daily.

Every morning they interviewed some jock or other, and showed an inspiring video about their struggle to be the best. Then Ann Curry or Meredith Viera would put on a fencing suit or a pair of shorts and engage in a little swordplay or maybe some beach tennis (yes, it’s just like beach volleyball, only not) out on the street in front of 30 Rock, all in fun, until somebody fell down, and then “…this is Today, on NBC,” and cut to that glorious trumpet fanfare they’ve been using on NBC since the LA games in 1984. Three months of this. I don’t care to see the games, since they no longer include team handball.

But that opening ceremony – whoa! Fifteen thousand performers. An LED video screen 400 feet long, that you can dance on! An epic pageant, displaying the history of a culture that is thousands of years old. Who even knows when they started? But I can tell you this: the Chinese invented paper and movable type. They invented the magnetic compass. They invented gunpowder, and the subsequent stuffing of it into rockets. So they were able to sail safely to far off lands, shoot the bejeesus out of the natives, find their way back, and write it all up in the Sunday papers.

And what did we learn from the scene where a thousand or so invisible Chinese carried a dance floor the size of a basketball court around on their shoulders while a solitary woman danced evocatively on top of it? That the glory of any achievement is possible only through the anonymous labors of many, many faceless laborers. And what lesson from the part where the beautiful children carry the flag around the floor of the stadium (excuse me, the bird’s nest), smiling and waving, only to have it snatched officiously by uniformed soldiers and run up the pole, where artificial breezes unfurled it only at the very top? That children may be the future, but it is The State that will protect and defend that future. Out of the way, kids!

I really only watched to see the fireworks, and I have to say they were not disappointing. At one point early on, the entire city of Beijing was used as a stage, as footprint-shaped explosions took place in the sky, 29 of them, symbolizing the 29 Olympiads of the modern era, each one a half-mile apart, pefrectly synchronized and marching to the bird’s nest. Holy shit, you’d never get the permits to do that across all the districts and municipalities of Los Angeles. And once the show started, there haven’t been so many rockets in the air since Bush took Bagdhad. I mean, it wasn’t launch-boom! launch-boom! launch-boom! It was more like the sky was on fire. It’s amazing the kind of fireworks you can buy for a billion dollars.

Anyway, the Chinese wanted to show that they’ve arrived, and they really showed that. They didn’t want any dissent, and by damn, there wasn’t any, that you could see, anyway. They wanted to show that they can plan and pull off stuff with precision and on a gigantic scale, and there’s no doubt — they did it, big time.

I surrender. There is no way to stop the Chinese. They are alien (like, totally!), they are many, they are ancient, they are modern, they are clearly superior. Learn the language, folks. This will be the Chinese Millennium.

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:Â 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.

I have no excuses.

I wasn’t misunderstood.

I wasn’t ahead of my time.

I wasn’t fiercely independent.

I just missed the train, all the trains, over and over again. Stood nervous on the platform, and waited.

Waited for the next train, and the next.

Drank at the station, taking notes, making lists. Ready to get on, soon as I completed my list.

Read the big board, all the cities along the track, distant destinations. Oh, Atlanta! Memphis, Austin, Eugene. Might as well have been Mars.

Didn’t want to catch the wrong one, get my only ticket punched for the wrong town.

Along about midnight, picked up my bag and went on home, whistles cryin’ in the night.

Five years after I saw “Rock Around the Clock” I got my first guitar.

By that time, my mother had moved me and my two brothers and two sisters from Minnesota to Southern California, on the run from domestic chaos. I don’t know exactly when my parents’ marriage started to disintegrate. I was too young to understand, and I guess I still am, but that’s another story. I mention it here only because maybe coming from a “broken home” somehow made me want to be a performer.

Certainly I was a fish out of water in California. Shell-shocked by the divorce, transplanted to an immense and unknowable city, just about to start my teen years, I found myself alone among the super-hip, super laid-back kids of Torrance, California. I was far ahead of them academically, but that didn’t matter to them, and eventually not to me, either.

I started ninth grade with no contacts at the school. There were a thousand kids at Stephen M. White Junior High School, the largest student body I’d ever been part of. Ninth grade was the third year of the three-year program there, so everyone pretty much knew everyone else, except for me, or so I thought. It wasn’t horrible, but I found myself alone a lot. I made a few male friends and mostly fantasized about the beautiful, aloof, tan California girls. It was during that year that I heard live rock’n’roll for the first time, at school dances and assemblies. They were surf bands — lots of twangy electric guitars, lots of reverb, not much singing.

The next year my mom bought me the guitar. We got it at Sears, brand new for about thirty-five dollars. It looked like this:
I had no idea how to play it, but I’d been hanging out with another transplanted misfit, a transfer student from Oregon named John McClain. He’d taken piano lessons for quite a long time, and so he knew chord structure. By that time (1964) the writing was on the wall, and it was clear that the guitar was going to be cooler than piano, not to mention more portable, so John got a guitar, too, and together we figured out how to play chords, translating what he knew from the keyboard to the fretboard. Pretty soon we were copying licks from Rolling Stones records (themselves taken from Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry records).

I can’t remember how long it was before we decided we were a band. Maybe six months, maybe a year, but here is where we’re starting to get to my point.

See, a rock band is a team, in some ways like a sports team. There has to be coordination and practice to make it work. The big difference is that in a band, you might find yourself playing with a bunch of people who all want to do something different. In athletic terms, it could be like playing on a team with a power forward, a quarterback, a shortstop and a goalie. Everyone’s a jock, and while this is clearly not the ideal situation, everyone is skilled, and whatever game you happen to be playing, there’s at least a reasonable chance the team can hold it’s own.

In bands, this mix-and-match thing happens because at first, you know who you know, and if one of your friends happens to play drums and you don’t know any other drummers, you sign him up, even if he’s mostly into Sousa marches. It’s not like you have a lot of connections and you can select the perfect drummer to complement your own musical style. Circumstance threw me together with John McClain, and it was a useful collaboration for a while, but in the end he was more Tony Orlando and I was more Hank Ballard. We still played together for a year or so after that.

As you grow up and play more places with more people, you have a better chance of hooking up with the “right” players, musicians who have the ability and the inclination to work in the same sort of musical style that interests you, but in my whole life I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a group or even known a group in which everyone was exactly happy with what was happening and all the players were on the same page musically. Naturally when there’s enough money involved you can take your pick of great players and make them do what you want, but A.) this scenario (tons of dough) is rare, and B.) if you’re a sensitive creative artist you might want to feel as if your bandmates are diggin’ it as much as you are.

Now I will tell all you aspiring musicians a secret. This is not the secret to landing a huge record deal and having a billion fans and hooking up with nubile models in the hotel room. Obviously, I don’t know that secret. This is the secret to making a living playing music. It’s so simple I don’t know why it’s a secret, or why it took me thirty years to discover it. Ready? Here it is: Find a niche and stay in it.

If you want to play the blues, play the blues. Or be a zydeco band, or a klezmer group. You could play R&B, folk-rock or bluegrass. But the key is to be consistent. Develop a style. Be the band your audience expects to hear, every time. Because there is a blues crowd out there, and a soul crowd, and a folk crowd. If you try to do everything, you’ll be competing with everyone. If you try to play a little blues, a little speed metal, a little punk and a little jazz, you won’t be as good at any one style as those who do only that style, and you won’t have an audience, because those who were hoping to hear a little jazz will walk in after you’ve played your jazz number, or they’ll leave before you get to it, and all they’ll hear is your rendition of Black Flag’s “Nothing Left Inside,” and they will never come back.

If you find a niche and stay in it, you’ll probably never have a billion fans. But eventually you’ll have 5,000 fans, and they’ll come to every gig. You’ll be playing music and making a decent living.

So I am dismayed when someone in my band wants to do a song that, in my opinion, doesn’t fit in with anything we’ve been doing, a song that is so not in the groove we’ve been building, a song demanded, perhaps, by some faction in the audience which does not like the niche we are working within.

A song like “Kryptonite.”

I know this was the long way around for this explanation, and I’m sorry. Believe me, I could have gone on for much longer. But down at the bottom, here’s what I’m saying: I can’t play with anyone I want. I have to play with who I know. I’m trying to have fun with this, and if I look for the Perfect Situation, the fun will be delayed, possibly forever. And I want to focus on a particular musical niche, and I want these guys to enjoy what we’re doing, because the pleasure is infectious and feeds on itself and makes everyone (especially me) happy.

We’ve got a gig tomorrow night. Lawyers. Why does it have to be lawyers?

Music has always thrilled me.

As a little kid I remember a cheesy portable record player, with a tone arm heavy as a log and a needle on the end of it as big around as a No. 2 pencil. Maybe it was the equipment that fascinated me as much as the music, because, really, all I had was a Gene Autry record, a 78, I think, Gene singing “Here Comes Santa Claus” b/w “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” There had to be other records, but my memory is hazy. There might have been a comedy record by a guy named Yogi Jorgensen, who pretended to be drunk. I might have had “How Much is That Doggie in the Window?” by the fabulous Patti Page. Hey, don’t blame me. I was four years old. But I enjoyed messing with that little record player, and I played those records until my parents must have wanted to scream. I shudder today when I think what the tone arm and stylus must have done to those poor old discs with every play.

You might think it was a lame time for white American music. But it was the very early 1950’s, and I know now that there was a lot of cool stuff going on. Just not at our house. Musically speaking, I guess my parents were dorks. It wasn’t their fault. I remember the music that came on the television: Burl Ives, Perry Como, Dinah Shore. I was so brainwashed that when Elvis showed up on The Ed Sullivan Show in the Fall of ’56, when I was 8 years old, I was as disgusted at his filthy gyrations as The New York Daily News, which reported that Elvis “gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos.” Hmmph.

The following year I went by myself to see “Rock Around the Clock” with Bill Haley and the Comets, and I think I can say it changed my life. I had never seen anything like it. The bass player fell down on the floor and played the big upright bass as it lay on top of him. If the sexual suggestion wasn’t strong enough, girls in the on-screen audience twirled their poodle skirts so you could see their panties, and all the dancing was done with what seemed like erotic abandon.

I wanted me some of that.

I completely lost interest in Patti Page. I tried to get my father to build me an electric guitar (I don’t know why I didn’t ask him to buy me one. Maybe I thought such a strange contrivance had to be custom-made. It certainly didn’t look anything like my Uncle Ralph’s ukulele.)

That was how it started, the obsession. It would be five more years before I got my first guitar, but I was mesmerized that afternoon, and I haven’t really come out of the spell yet. Maybe I never will.

All this is in response to kStyle’s interest, and Smokin’ T’s advice, but it’s late and it’s a long story, so I’ll work on it some more and try to make my point here soon.

I’m feeling ragged and emotional tonight.

Sydney Pollack is dead. Dick Martin is dead. I accidentally deleted ten directories off the network today at work. It will take one full day to recover from that, plus the stress of trying to conceal that it was my fault, followed by catching up on all the work I didn’t do while I was recovering from my stupid mistake.

I’m feeling rotten about my band. I’ve always known I’d get nowhere with it, and that was OK. It was just for fun, just so I wouldn’t have to be defined as a low level bureaucrat in a legal-but-immoral corporate enterprise, just so I could forget my real life, just so I could touch the strings and hear the noise, just so I wouldn’t die in utter boredom, just so I could share the happiness I feel from playing rock’n’roll.

But my bandmates don’t get it. I don’t know what they think I’m about as a musician, but the other day it was strongly suggested that we learn and perform a song called “Kryptonite,” by a band called 3 Doors Down. I resisted as long as I could, because I smelled something fishy, but over the weekend I was forced to listen to it for the first time, and I thought it was some kind of joke: a wall of distorted guitar is thrown up at the 8th measure, and it stays up for the next three minutes, no dynamics, no letup, while a “singer” intones sophomoric lyrics, the melody ranging perhaps from “A” to “C”. It probably fades out. I don’t remember. It wouldn’t be worth the server space to post the MP3 or the lyrics to this piece. I’ll just say it isn’t merely a song that wouldn’t be right for my band. It’s a crappy song, period.

Today, after I fucked up the network, I looked up the song, and I found out it was a monster hit eight years ago, Number One on the Billboard chart, and 3 Doors Down won a million awards for the song and the album it was on, and it made them huge headlining stars and they’re rich and idolized all over the world.

And I hate it. That’s how far out of it I am.

I’m not used to being out of it like that, and it’s depressing me. I made my feelings about the song clear to the band, and they’ve backed off as if they’d stepped on a rattlesnake. So I’m pretty sure I’ll never actually have to play “Kryptonite,” but what turns me upside down is the thought that someone — someone I know — would suggest that song to me. Am I working with guys who have no discrimination at all?

I guess I can hope that we are in one of those generally sucky periods of music, such as the one that immediately preceded the first English Invasion in 1963, when Tommy James and the Shondells were the best we could get on the Top 40 radio, or just before the Punk/New Wave explosion in the late 1970’s, when tedious pomp rock ruled the airwaves. People that come of musical age during such awful times don’t know any better. I can’t blame them for making “Kryptonite” a hit.

Now, I’m sure, I’ve offended somebody, and I’m sorry. That seems to be what I do lately, and I’m sorry for all my sins and it’s been 40 years since my last confession. Mea maxima culpa. If you can defend “Kryptonite,” please do. If you can tell me what’s profound or memorable or clever or even fun about it, I’d like to hear.

And now a gratuitous picture of Goldie Hawn in a French maid’s uniform. Say goodnight, Dick.

NOTE: I want to make it clear that, while I am generally pretty exasperated by the sheer volume of commercial messages that fill my eyes and ears, I have no problem with the hard-working people whose job it is to create all this advertising and sell all these products. They’re just doing a job, and I love them like brothers and sisters.

All my life I’ve been pummeled by advertising.

I have listened to and watched millions of 60-second spots. Over the years they have changed from live presentations by TV and radio personalities who have tried to cultivate my trust through a sort of pseudo friendship, into ever shorter and “punchier” 30’s, 20’s, 10’s and even five-second commercial messages delivered in MTV-style videos, no scene longer than two seconds, challenging my ability even to see what’s on the screen, much less understand what I think I’m seeing.

And then there are the print ads. It seems to me they used to appear only in newspapers and magazines, and they were there quite specifically to pay the bills. Now there are magazines that are essentially advertisements themselves, which have no reason to exist except to sell stuff. And the print ads arrive in the mail, stuffing my poor mail slot with junk every day. When I am lucky enough to find a real letter in the pile of shit, it’s a bill, which, by the way, contains seven or eight “special offers,” for driving gloves, negative ion generators, return address labels, clock radios, yearly planners and more, more, more, none of which I need or want.

Now the world is plastered with billboards everywhere you look. Even inside Starbucks, even after they’ve got you in there, they still feel like they have to put up more advertising for you to look at while you’re waiting to order. NASCAR racers are covered hood to trunk with so many commercial messages you can’t see the cars at all. The drivers are similarly pasted with ads. Sports arenas are named after corporations paying to associate themselves in your mind with the teams who play there. Movies are augmenting their box office takes with “product placement” within the shows themselves, and big-screen commercials before you get to see the film you paid for.

When I got my first modem in the eighties, I used it to log onto “electronic bulletin boards,” the precursor to today’s web-based blogs and forums. Everything was plain text — no pointing and clicking, no pictures, unless you chose to download one, which would take nine minutes before you could even see what you were getting. Needless to say, with a tiny, geeky audience, no sound and no graphics, there was also no advertising. I love the world wide web, but its ease of use and its rich visuals have made it another place where advertising can be profitable, and sure enough, most web pages you look at now are pinched down to a bit of content in the middle, choked on all sides with commercials, some so obnoxious that you HAVE to look at them, or click away.

Because I am a leading edge Baby Boomer, I am a member of a huge demographic group, so all through my life I have been a special target of advertising. Companies have figured, correctly, I guess, that if they can reach me and my fellow Boomers they will sell, sell, sell, increase their quarterly profits obscenely, and live happily ever after, or at least until the next quarterly report.

But from the beginning of this bombardment, advertising has had very little effect on me or the way I live my life. At first I had fun openly deriding TV and radio commercials. Many of them were so transparently stoopid that they were fertile ground for my own daily ongoing satirical review, in which I and my friends and family ridiculed their cluelessness and barely even registered the products we were supposed to want, need, buy.

This was fun for decades, until gradually I found that I wasn’t paying any attention to all this advertising. At some point — I don’t remember when — it started to just bounce off. I didn’t buy — or not buy — the stuff I saw on TV or any of those other places. I won’t say that none of it has had any effect. Certainly the culture I live in has been shaped by this onslaught of advertising, and I’m a product of that culture. I know about some stuff and not other stuff because of that culture. But generally speaking I buy what I want when I want it from whatever source I decide is the best one, and you can’t talk me into Jordache jeans or any other pants unless they fit the way I want them to and seem to be priced right for me and my budget, regardless of the pressure to look a certain way, or the same as everyone else. (Those who know me here in meatspace will attest that I am not a follower of fashion.)

It’s kind of funny when I think about it: one of the biggest “industries” in the world is not getting anywhere with me, its intended customer. If anything, I tend to stay away from heavily advertised stuff, on the theory that a big part of the price must be going to pay for all the ads. A corollary to that theory is that if it were something useful, something I might actually want if left to my own devices, then all the advertising wouldn’t be necessary.

The latest product that’s being marketed to me and my fellow Boomers — aside from Cadillacs, which I will never be old enough for — is financial services. Specifically, ways to assure that I will have a comfortable retirement. They’ve got Dennis Hopper, who probably should retire himself, talking hip to us, standing at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, as if to say “Make a wrong turn here, Mr. Jones, and you will be fucked. Hurry — offer ends soon!.”

I haven’t paid much attention to the billions of advertisements I’ve seen in my lifetime, and I will not be stampeded into planning for my future, now that I am actually living in my future. It’s not what I do. I won’t ever retire anyway, and I resent what looks like scare tactics being used on me to get the paltry amount of money I have buried in the back yard. Don’t worry, Dennis, I get the picture: Jones living in a refrigerator box under the bridge, wearing rags and eating cat food.

It doesn’t scare me.

To Merrill Lynch, AARP, ING, Ameriprise, Fidelity Investments, Chuck Schwab, et al: I have practiced ignoring you my whole life. If you think you can get through to me now, so near the end, bring it on.