The Blog

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.