The Blog

This is where I’ve been spending all my time lately:

I’m getting too stupid to remember for sure, but I think I have mentioned that in the 21st century, even the cheesiest dives in my home town demand an “audition CD” before they will talk to you about booking your band. I mean, these are places I would never go as a customer. When we started our little garage band I thought it would be easy to talk my way into a gig at one of these toilets, but I guess everybody’s so hip and advanced now that they think they can make musicians jump through hoops. As if that has changed since the 80’s.

Well, OK, I’m working on a CD, but I will not be giving any more blowjobs.

We call our band Big Noise. Last weekend we went to a 24-track studio in Orange County and recorded the basic tracks on 10 cover songs. Actually, it was nine covers and one that I wrote, but the one I wrote sounds so much like a cover that nobody even noticed. Basic tracks were two guitars, bass and drums. However, by opening two vocal mics and putting every drum on it’s own track the engineer managed to fill up all 24 tracks.

All I cared about was the drums, because I can’t record them at home. Too many mics, too much noise. Now that I have the tracks I am transferring them to my home recording computer, where I will re-record most of the guitars and some of the singing, then mix it down into a guaranteed, sure-fire, audition-passing CD. This is, by the way, the recording computer that broke down while I was doing this post, forcing me to put up an unfinished version of what I was trying to do. With the recording date looming and the boys in the band counting on me (and threatening me, in their quaint way), I had to put it back together.

With the machine rebuilt and the tracks in hand, I have had no choice but to spend every free moment in this cramped, poorly-ventilated room, staring at the timeline scrolling past on the screen like the last hours of my life, pinching my ears by wearing glasses and headphones at the same time, fighting exhaustion, figuring out guitar and harmony parts until my fingers and throat are raw, trying to make Ross’s old tubs sound crisp and modern and facing, again and again, that I am neither the singer nor the guitarist that I want to be.

And lovin’ it.

[Oh yeah: Today is the first day of summer, so off with the clothes, everybody!]

A kid named Brian joined the United States Army last year.

I don’t know why on earth he would do such a thing while the current Dimwit-in-Chief is in the White House. Kids really should talk to me before they make such decisions. But this isn’t going to be another of my anti-war rants, though I’m sure you’re spoiling to read one right about now. It’s just a little story about a mother’s love and the good that can flow from it. Forgive me if I don’t get all these details exactly right. I’ll give you two links at the end of this, so you can read about it yourself.

Brian made it through basic training, as most do, and he got bigger and stronger and faster and tougher. His mother Lori, whom I am proud to call my friend, used her blog to keep us all posted on his progress. They spoke on the phone whenever they could — never often enough for Lori — and they visited in person a few times. The pictures often showed them happy but exhausted after all-night drives to spend a day together. Eventually the orders came for Brian to go to desert training.

A couple of months ago, Brian was deployed to Iraq.

Lori knew this was coming for quite a while before she told the rest of us. Maybe she hoped it wouldn’t happen, that by not saying it out loud she could keep it from being true. But as the song says, “This ain’t no foolin’ around,” and so, inevitably, Brian the young soldier had to go and do what he’d been trained to do.

Once he was gone, there were long periods when Lori wouldn’t hear from him. Think about that. Try to be Lori for just a moment, with your only child on the other side of the world, in a place where everybody has a rocket launcher under their shirt, and most of them would like to shoot you. Live with that fact, and get up and go to work every day and smile at the people, not knowing.

Lori sent care packages, of course, and Brian was properly grateful, when he was able to communicate. He asked for little: wet wipes (?), camera batteries. Who knew?

And this tough soldier asked for soccer balls, for the Iraqi children he was meeting on patrol. Lori complied, and threw in a Beanie Baby or two, reasoning that a toy is a toy. If the kids wanted soccer balls, why not stuffed animals?

Brian responded that the Beanie Babies were a big hit with the kids, and the other guys in his unit enjoyed giving them to the children, and could Lori maybe send a few more?

She could, and she did. She mentioned it on her blog, and soon she had 20 Beanie Babies. A week later she had 80 of them. Her bloggin’ buddies were also sending them directly to Brian’s unit. Lori started to doubt herself, figuring they must think she’s insane, a crazy mom, one step away from the shopping cart. Brian reassured her that the kids were loving them, the guys were loving them, and keep ’em coming.

I think war is the ultimate degradation of the human spirit. I have come to believe that nothing is so important that we must mount armies, invade nations, kill and be killed. As I have said here before, has anyone noticed that it never ends, that nothing is ever truly resolved?

And yet, against a backdrop of brutality, car bombs, assassinations, IED’s, RPG’s and suicide bombers, in the middle of this insanity, young soldiers (at least one of them barely past childhood) are handing out stuffed animals to children. These are the next generation of Iraqi’s. Someday they might be asked to do some killing themselves. I know it’s stupid to think that a remembered kindness could change their answer. It’s stupid, and yet…

As Lori says,

If world leaders can’t come to terms, at least we can, as mere citizens, shake one another’s hands, hand a few toys to their kids, and put smiles on their faces. If that’s not one step toward world peace, I don’t know what is.

One mother’s love has reached around the world and touched the hearts of some kids who have not had much to smile about lately, and by “kids” I mean both Iraqi children and U.S. soldiers. Maybe it won’t bring world peace, but maybe it will.

If you want to read about this yourself, Lori has started a new web site devoted to her “Toys For Troops” campaign. The Beanie Baby craze is over in the U.S., but it’s just beginning in Baghdad. Maybe you’ve got a few you’d like to send, or maybe you’d like to help in some other way. Check it out at

http://www.toys-for-troops.com/

This whole thing is merely days old. Lori admits that she’s still spinning from all the activity and the unexpected generosity from across the country. This is not some slick campaign put together by rock stars. This is people reaching out to people, a pure grass roots effort and a labor of love.

Lori’s blog, where it all started, is at

http://gnightgirl.blogspot.com/

Click on these links. Get to know Lori and Brian. Leave a comment. Find out if there’s a way you can help. I guarantee you’ll feel better.

Some junk mail is too beautiful to keep to oneself:

If your “prick-horse” is not glad for you
and give brake for you
come to us.
You’ll feel that curb “it” is impossible.
You must come to us now
and you’ll be a real cowboy legend.
We wait you today, because the hot week
of discounts is now.
Don’t miss your chance.

As with most great literature and poetry, I don’t know exactly what it’s about, but I know I don’t want to miss my chance.

So I went through my closet a while back.

I was going to say “…cleaned out my closet” but you don’t even know all the shit that’s in there, packratted for decades, wedged on the shelves, stuffed all the way to the back, boxes stacked on boxes, unopened since the Reagan administration. Come to think of it, neither do I, and it’ll probably be a long time before I do.

But my wardrobe was getting wrinkled, ya know? I needed space, so I had to at least weed out some of the Qiana disco shirts, bell-bottom cords and heavy coats from the San Francisco days.

So after I made a little elbow room in there, what did I find but a pair of perfectly good work shoes. They weren’t new, but they were in excellent condition, in the original shoebox. They were brown, which might explain why I stopped wearing them, since I went to all black pants, all the time. I may be a dork , but I’m not about to wear brown shoes with black pants.

OK, I know what you’re thinking: Brown shoes don’t make it. But I was sick of the black pants thing. I wanted to wear black shirts, but jeez, black shirts with black pants? I’d look like Trini Lopez. Not even Johnny Cash, that old faker, but fucking Trini Lopez. If I had a fucking hammer.

So I got some tan pants. This made the black shirt acceptable, but holy shit, the black shoes, sticking out beneath tan pants! The horror!

Anyway, these brown shoes would save the day (not to mention about a hundred bucks). For some reason, back whenever it was that I squirreled them away I had stuffed them with those tight little balls of paper that you find jammed into new shoes, that you have to take out when you’re trying on shoes at the shoe store. So I took the paper out and stuffed it, one wad each, into the black shoes, then I put the black shoes in the brown shoebox and stashed them in the closet.

But I spilled coffee on the tan pants that day, and I had to go back to the black pants the next day, so I took the black shoes out of the shoebox, pulled out the paper and stuffed the wads of paper into the brown shoes, which I stored back in the shoebox. Maybe I was half asleep or having some kind of flashback. Why would anyone do such a thing?

Who knows, but for the next month or so I kept switching back and forth between the different colored pants and shoes, pulling the paper wads out of the stored shoes and stuffing them back into the shoes to be stored. I saw myself doing this as if I were watching some other nincompoop. It was an out-of-body thing, if not completely out of my mind. I said to myself “This is stupid. What are you saving these wads of paper for?”

I switched the paper wads back and forth for a week after I knew it was really aberrant behavior, but you’ll be glad to know that today I threw them away.

That’s what kind of nutcase I am. I won’t blame you for backing slowly away.