The Blog

I flew and drove far away to attend a 60th birthday party.

On that trip I injured my back, doing basically nothing.

I went to a memorial for an old friend who died in January. Everybody was drunk, and one of his girlfriends threw another girlfriend into the pool, overturning the buffet table in the process.

On the same day I visited another dear old friend in the hospital, and told him as I was leaving that I’d see him soon. He died two days later.

At the request of his family I created a “memorial website” in his name. It logged 5,000 hits in a week. All I did for 10 days was manage the site, answer email, post pictures that people sent me and forward messages to his family.

When that was done I went to his funeral, a sprawling two-day affair with much laughter, many speeches, and many tears. Frightened, we all promised to be better friends, and stay in closer touch.

All of this felt like Death to me, closing in.

In the 80’s I might have been voted Most Likely to Suffocate in a Pool of My Own Vomit, but somehow I’ve outlived a bunch of the voters, and even though I’m not the last one standing, I see that there are a lot of dark vacant spaces around me.

I’m shell shocked. I haven’t written anything in this space while all this was going on, because nothing seemed important. I’m looking now at my life and wishing I had made more of it. I’m looking at the time I have left — I should say the time I might have left — and wondering what I can make of it.

Oh yeah — my back is better now.

I’m drinking cup after cup of strong coffee and watching Steely Dan videos on the internet.

My job has devolved into marking time and waiting for something to happen. I’m not the guy who makes things happen here. I just clean up the messes, the inevitable chaos that arises from doing business.

The fun-blocking software here at HugeCorp seems to be down. Normally I can’t access YouTube at my office, but today everything is working. I’ve been reading a book about Steely Dan. The book sucks, so I won’t mention the title or the author here, in case the guy googles himself and finds this. I don’t like his book, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings.

Anyway, as a long-time fan of their music, I was pretty sure that the surly, angry complainers depicted in the book were not the guys I’d been hearing on the radio for the past thirty years, so I’ve been taking advantage of this little downturn/downtime in the world economy to research the real Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, and guess what? They are not surly, angry complainers. Oh, they’re not your typical rock stars. They are a bit withdrawn and they may have given some off-the-wall interviews, but the author seems to be a fan and wannabe member of their inner circle, and he has apparently made up personalities for his heroes, and is trying in his writing to emulate a Steely Dan world view that exists only in his imagination.

In the early 1970’s my beautiful teenage girlfriend went by herself to see Steely Dan in concert. I didn’t even know she had a ticket, but the next time I saw her she was still tingling from the experience and she transferred her excitement to me in a long hot afternoon. She gave herself sweetly and completely, and I decided that I was a Steely Dan fan, too.

Soon, though, I betrayed her by going on the road for a few months. I thought of her often, especially when I was singing “My Old School” and “Dirty Work,” and I even sent postcards with pictures of exotic places like the old territorial prison in the Arizona desert. She dumped me while I was gone, for a handsome forest ranger who took her away to Steamboat Springs.

I was shaken, but I got over it in time, and it’s only now that it occurs to me to weep when I think of her.

I don’t care if my neighbor gets government help in paying or renegotiating his mortgage.

I don’t mind if my neighbors are in “too much house,” or if they gambled that rising real estate values would make it possible for them to pay back a loan that was unrealistic for them. I don’t know if they were conniving bastards who put the whole economy at risk with their irresponsible borrowing, or if they were conned by a mortgage broker who was getting a fat commission and passing the risk on to clueless investors down the line.

There seems to be a lot of righteous indignation about the possibility that some people are going to get something for nothing here, and at taxpayer expense, but I’m not indignant. I’m pretty ticked off at the bankers and brokers and hedge fund managers who recklessly plunged us into this economic mess and have now walked away with comfortable fortunes while the rest of us scramble to survive, but individual homeowners? Not so much.

Personally, I don’t think it’s very important to own a house. There are plenty of ways to live that don’t involve marking off a piece of turf and saying it’s “yours,” but if some folks want to do that and feel happy in their lives because of it, I say fine. And because the real estate market and mortgage-backed securities have become such an integral part of the overall world economy, I think we — and by “we” I mean the federal government –Â ought to do what we can to stabilize that market and those securities, and if some people “get away” with something, that’s a small price to pay if it helps get us out of this depression.

Think of it as collateral damage in reverse: When we bomb a neighborhood in Afghanistan, we often kill and maim innocent people who happen to live next door to the terrorist targets we’re trying to get, and we shrug and call it collateral damage, one of the costs of war. On the other hand, when we rescue a neighborhood over here, maybe we’ll accidentally help people who are not deserving, along with the targeted honest homeowners. Let it go, people. It’s just the cost of repairing the economy.

The important thing is getting the country back on its feet and helping the deserving and needy people who are in over their heads. If some opportunistic deadbeats get a break, who cares?

I’m sorting laundry in my bedroom.

Sitting on the end of the bed, a pile of dirty stuff on the floor between my feet. I’m picking up items and tossing them into one of three piles a few feet away — darks on the right, lights on the left, whites into the plastic laundry basket in the middle. I’ve done this thousands of times.

After my friend Rick died, when he was 20 and I was 19, and after the funeral and the cursing and the crying, I spent some time with Mel, his mother, whose heart was broken by the loss of her only son, her firstborn. We talked about Rick, the only thing we had in common. Mostly, I listened. She said that after he dropped out of school and returned to get a job and live at home, it took her months of careful sorting and bleaching to return his white washables to white again. Because he hadn’t separated his colors from his whites while he’d been away at school. I knew this was true, because during that first year at San Francisco State we had done our laundry together, stuffing everything we had into pillowcases and dragging the load a block or so down Haight Street to the laundromat, where we had simply and efficiently dumped it all into the minimum number of washing machines, his red sweatshirt commingled with my white socks.

The only sorting we did was when we separated his stuff from mine after we got back to the apartment. Using this technique, we gradually turned all of our clothes the same shade of dingy gray, the color of The City that fall and winter. We didn’t care at the time. We were liberated and studious, drunk on freedom and Red Mountain and there was no reason at all why we weren’t going to change the world, or why we should have really white T-shirts.

But there’s nothing like death to make you think of life, and after my talk with Mel I started to think about how important the little things are in life, and the more I thought about it the more crucial it seemed to do the things that wouldn’t break a mother’s heart, whether it was wearing safety belts on Highway 99, or properly sorting the laundry.

The safety belt thing was too late for Rick.

But I can still hear Mel telling me in a soft voice that it might take another couple of washings to finish her job of whitening Rick’s white clothes, things that he wouldn’t be needing. Since then, I sort, because I wouldn’t want Mel to be disappointed ever again, and because changing the world ain’t no big thing if your underwear is dingy gray.

Department of music industry doom.

Bobby Owsinski, at the aptly titled Bobby Owsinski’s Blog, notes that in the future, corporate sponsors like Coca-Cola or Doritos may replace the function of record companies, funding tours and recordings in exchange for linkage between their brand and their band:

If this prediction comes to pass, it will push music further into the doldrums, since it only makes sense for a major brand to back an established artist. Artist development (which is what the industry really needs most these days) will really be a thing of the past. . . . Madison Avenue is increasingly responsible for dictating musical tastes in America, as evidenced from everything from radio to television to print. Will sponsorship finally drive the mainstream music industry over the brink of relevance?

Read the full post here. Here’s my take on the subject, as I put it in my comment to Bobby:

Well, on the bright side, if this turns out to be the way of the future, we won’t have to worry about our revered favorite artists “selling out,” since they will be owned in advance by the companies they will later be making commercials for.

And as if this isn’t foreboding enough, now comes word that Ticketmaster is merging with Live Nation and getting into the artist management business. So Pepsi or Toyota will dredge up the (presumably) handsome young boys, shape them into palatable “artists,” turn them over to TicketMaster for “development,” and when they are ready TicketMaster/LiveNation will tell them when and where to perform, and set the ticket prices.

Sort of spoils the spontaneity, don’t you think?

But to answer your question, if this model takes hold, it will fracture the music community into those who are sponsored and those who are not. Those who are not will not go away simply because they don’t have sponsors. They will perform where they can (small venues and indie festivals) and make recordings and peddle themselves whatever way they can (think Internet), which I expect will be effective in many cases. The sponsored groups, homogenized and hyped, will mostly be mocked by the true music lover, even though (or maybe because) they are making a lot more money. I’m not saying that you have to be inferior to make it big in the music biz. I’m saying that I’ll take a roomful of inspired musicians, singers and writers any day, even if they have no budget.

As you have pointed out here numerous times, the music industry is changing, even if the big boys either don’t know it or are actively trying to stop it. It won’t be huge like it was in the second half of the last century, but parts of it will always be relevant.

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