The Blog

• Rev my engine at stop lights.
• Wear leather pants.
• Talk down to a child.
• Let you sweat out your own computer problems when I know how to fix them easily.
• Don’t listen.
• Use advertising slogans instead of real language.
• Won’t admit when I’m wrong.
• Feel sorry for myself when others have it so much tougher.
• Attempt to comb over my bald spot.
• Receive your signals and still don’t get the message.
• Try to play lead guitar on “Bhodisatva” while drunk.
• Ever again say anything to hurt you.

Every now and then, for no reason I can figure out, a chill floats down onto me.

Cold settles on my shoulders, and when I try to shrug it off, it only slides farther down my body, until I am shrouded to the ankles in chilly fog.

Through this fog it is difficult to see clearly the people I love. Their faces are blurry and vague. Are they smiling, or laughing? The music in me becomes distant and muffled, and I can’t make sense of it. Like the sound of a band in the gym when you are smoking in the parking lot, it has no clarity, only a dull thumping, and I can’t find the melody, can’t catch up with the beat.

The things I do seem useless. All my projects – the protest song, the ongoing writing project that is this blog, the books I want to read, the music I am trying to record, the computer I plan to build, the places I want to go – who cares? Not me, not now. Would it make any difference if I did them or not?

Sometimes I go outside late at night and stand in the deserted street and look at the sky. Even through the haze and the lights of this big city and the fat October moon I can see a few stars, and I expand into the universe and I feel huge and empty and weightless with the the stars and after a while I can see the little guy down there on the street, so small, his arms waving toward heaven, and I think What do you want?

But I get no answer. From the street, from the stars, I get no answer.

Are you the Mystery Cougher? Am I?

Today at 5:30 in the afternoon I heard the new Ricola commercial on the radio. I immediately pushed the button to switch to another station, and they were playing the same commercial. Weird, I thought, and hit the button again, and heard the same commercial again. Thinking I had somehow switched back to the original station, I hit the button again, and heard the commercial for the fourth consecutive time. These guys are really carpet-bombing us.

I was forced to figure out what it was about, and now I share with you:

Ricola makes cough drops, and they have always had strange advertising. I remember one on TV that involved some guy in quaint Swiss folk garb blowing on a 20-foot Swiss horn in a subway car, for example.

But the current campaign is truly bizarre. They have a Mystery Cougher, a man (or maybe a woman, they hint) who goes around coughing near people. If you hear him and offer him a Ricola cough drop, BINGO! You win money, up to a million bucks! If this works, we will all have to buy at least one package of Ricola cough drops, and start offering them to anyone who coughs around us, because who can take a chance on losing a million dollars? I’m assuming this is a nationwide campaign, so that’s a lot of damn cough drops. But would you accept a cough drop from a stranger? Would you offer one? Would people call Homeland Security on you if you did?

Looks like we may find out.

I trudge up the hill, alone in the dark.

This is the hill that the kids came to in their cars all those years ago, after football games, after Friday night dances, and I can almost hear the giggling and the urgent exhortations. Boys and girls parking beneath the oil derricks on this desolate piece of land, a giant hump right in the middle of the city, lit by no light but the moon, disturbed by no sound but the grind and screech of the big oil pumps, sucking life from the hill like huge iron mosquitoes. The oil had mostly dried up ten years earlier, but a few pumps remained to make sure that every drop was sucked out. A lot of the derricks were still there, too, standing silent watch, ten-story weathered wooden lattices, relics of the drilling, no longer needed but not worth tearing down. The pumps huddled indifferently under their bases, pumping always.

Once you got to the top and parked the car, the view was breathtaking. This was before the streetlights were orange, and in the night the city stretched like a glittering sequined sheet all the way to the harbor, and the black ocean beyond could have been the very edge of the universe. You felt like you were flying, just standing there next to the car. I did, anyway. I might have been the only kid who actually saw the view, because even though I had a car, I never took a girl up there, to watch the submarine races, as we used to call it. I cruised it enough times, though, to know what it looked like, and I felt good up there alone, above it all, needing no one.

It’s the steepest hill in the region, and back then the pavement ended halfway up. Above that were just the twisting oil company access roads, dirt and gravel. No one lived up here, the derricks your only witness, except for the occasional squad car. Tonight as I walk, high-priced apartments line the freshly blacktopped roads, cheaply built boxes put here to cash in on that view, contoured into fancy-looking architectural shapes through the magic of styrofoam. The hill has been remade, too, primped up with landscaping and terraced lots for the houses, cut sharply into the earth. The derricks are all gone now, and the few stubborn oil pumps are hidden artfully behind stands of palms and local shrubs.

Once there was a nightclub at the very top of this hill. You’d drive along the deserted road in total darkness for a quarter-mile, you’d be aware of music playing somewhere, then abruptly you’d come upon a dirt parking lot lit by a few bare floodlights on makeshift poles. At the far end of the lot was the nightclub, looking like an island of corruption. An impossibly garish neon sign blinked

The hill had its own police department, company security left over from the oil boom, and maybe that’s why the ID check at the door was not as rigorous as in the city below. For whatever reason, my friends drank there. Come on, Jones, the Lost Boys would say. They don’t care how old you are, as long as you’re spendin’ money. I didn’t see the fascination, and my fear of being thrown out was greater than my curiosity. I regret not going now, like so many things I didn’t do.

In the end, I played in the band there, so I saw the place anyway, from the inside. I was too afraid to go in there just to see if I could fool them, but it was OK to do it if they paid me. I was not old enough to be working there, but no one ever asked about that. On stage I was a screaming showoff, shouting the blues like I meant it, but during the breaks I disappeared into the shadows, the better not to get found out and ejected. The irony of this behavior eluded me at the time. Strangely, none of my smartass friends ever saw me perform there, and eventually I came to wonder if they really ever went there.

Now I live in the shadow of the hill, and tonight I cruised it, like I used to. I don’t know what happened to the old roads. They’re not merely gone – their spirit is erased. There are guardrails and asphalt where once there were abandoned jalopies and loose gravel. Somehow, intersections and street signs have been contrived. The seedy nightclub has been razed and at the top, there’s a little park, a lookout point with a stone wall around the perimeter, concrete benches and a statue. Even the park is two-thirds paved.

I leave the car a few blocks down and walk up toward the park. I wonder if any of the boys and girls who used to make out here in cars are living in these town homes, and if so, are they living with the ones they made out with? When I reach the top there are teenagers there, some couples, some groups. I’m pretty sure I know what has drawn them here, but they are safely contained in the bright enclosure, so their natural urges are stymied.

I stand at the stone wall, and the view is still breathtaking. The streetlights below are mostly orange now – is that what makes it less magical? Or is it that we know each other better now, the city and me? I own a piece of it, and it owns a piece of me. I think about flying over the city, like I did when I was a kid, but instead I just feel like I’m falling, and in fact I stagger back from the stone wall, catching myself before I actually take off. After that I leave the teenagers behind, as I always have, and go back to my car.

When I get there, I stand by the side of the road and take in the unauthorized view for a final moment. The city has grown. It is so big and bright now that it eclipses the stars and dims the moon. It is full of living, dying, trying, crying. And out past the harbor, the very edge of the universe seems closer than ever.

I was spellbound for two hours last night watching Martin Scorcese’s Bob Dylan documentary “No Direction Home.”

Maybe it’s because of my age — I was sort of there for the original events — but I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. What a thrilling time that was, and how exciting it must have been for young Bob and the others who speak in this film: Dave Van Ronk, Maria Muldaur, Suze Rotolo (she’s on some of the old LP covers), Liam Clancy, Joan Baez, Mavis Staples – more than I can recall. New York City, 1963. The baton is being passed from the Beat Generation to Dylan and his circle. There are a million places to play. Dylan and the others are sponges, soaking up the old guys like Woody Guthrie, and each other, learning new music, new styles, new voices, and actually saying something in their songs. It’s not a concert show, but I was still fascinated and hugely entertained. Catch Part Two tonight (Tuesday, September 27, 2005) on PBS. In Los Angeles it’s on KCET, Channel 28 at 9:00 PM, but I think it’s a national presentation. This is history, folks, but fresh enough to feel contemporary. Most of the original players are still with us.

While I’m at it, I just want to say “Hurray!” to National Public Radio’s coverage of the ongoing hurricane disasters on the U.S. gulf coast. These stories, mostly on the afternoon news show “All Things Considered,” are precious documents. Heart-warming, heart-wrenching, visceral, surprising, maddening, informative, in ways I just don’t see the mainstream media doing. The 79-year-old woman who lived alone, floating inside her one-story home on her Stearns and Foster mattress for eight days before she was rescued (“It must have a lot of wood in it…”). The New Orleans pump station worker caught by NPR’s reporter dozing on the job – because he had not deserted his post for three weeks nonstop. The man who sent his family to safety and doesn’t even know where they are, while he stayed behind to assist whomever he could in his 9th Ward neighborhood. This is why we need public radio and television, my friends. Tune in and see for yourself.

As always, my heart is yours alone. And again, I might owe some of you an apology. Please forgive my transgressions. I am socially inept, and I should know better.

Avast, me hearties!

Did ye know it’s Talk Like a Pirate Day? Skuttle me skippers if it ain’t! Arrrgh…

I’ve been feeling funky, and not in a good way, since the Katrina disaster.

(Click here to play background music.)

It’s none of my business, really. We all have our disasters to cope with – hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, suicide attacks, not to mention our personal tragedies. Most of the time we are simply aware that shit happens, and we grieve, we deal, we move on. That’s what I do.

But there are facets of this particular mess that linger and sting past the usual spoil date, and as I go through my daily motions I have this nagging heaviness that makes everything seem off, somehow. I am too scattered to make a lot of sense of my feelings. I don’t get paid to make sense. So here’s a list of thoughts:

• A beautiful, atmospheric, historic city has been so heavily damaged that the pain has shot through our entire national nervous system, jolting even the jaded Californian, the preoccupied New Yorker and the usually sanguine midwesterner. I have not wanted to say this in public, but for therapeutic reasons I think I have to: I believe that New Orleans can never be the same. Something will be rebuilt there, for political and economic reasons, and feisty residents as well as outsiders will give it a go, but it won’t be the city of my dreams, the one I never got to see in person.
• The administration that scared the shit out of everybody and then sold itself as the only possible protector of America in the event of another huge disaster seems to be exactly as unprepared for Katrina as it was for the attacks of September 11, 2001, even though this time they were warned days in advance. Four years later they still can’t read the signs, they still have no coordinated plan, rescue personnel are still talking on different radio frequencies (that is, they are not talking to each other), and the best they can muster is a lame duck figurehead with nothing to lose “taking responsibility.”
• Twenty-eight percent of the population of New Orleans was living below the poverty line, a line the right wing cannot lower fast enough to keep people above it. Yeah, they were mostly black, but black or white, they have had to leave. I’m a middle-class guy, and I figure I could hold out maybe three months in another city before I would have to restart my life. New Orleans won’t be ready for a year, which is about 51 weeks longer than those lower-income folks can afford to wait. They will make homes and lives wherever they happen to be, and they will never return. On so many levels, that will kill the spirit of the city.
• Forgive me for focusing on New Orleans. It’s just that the city is the icon, not the Gulf coast. I am aware that this tragedy extends for many miles along that coast, and that only compounds my depression.
• Are we all criminals? People were stealing televisions.
• Wherever you go in this country, for all of our self-satisfied posturing, the black people are the poor people. But don’t worry: Soon the whackjob Right will control all the branches of government, and they will begin to create a whole bunch of poor white people, too, a new world order in which 85% of us live in poverty, 14% are unthinkably rich and one percent are untouchable.
• And speaking of controlling the entire government, could John Roberts please answer one question about how he intends to act when he is the fucking Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court for life? Any question, instead of this mannered dance he is doing with the Judiciary Committee. Based on what he has told us so far, I wouldn’t hire him to flip burgers. And yet he is a lock to be put in charge of the Court until your childrens’ 20th high school reunion. He will have no boss, he will answer to no one, and he can’t be removed except by impeachment, and yeah, that’s going to happen. For those not paying attention, he seems to want to reverse abortion rights, the Endangered Species Act, protection against the government taking your property and giving it to a corporation. He thought it was funny when he worked for the Reagan Administartion to call undocumented aliens “illegal amigos.” If anyone doubts whose pocket he is in, consider this: He was in secret meetings with the White House this summer about being nominated to the Supreme Court at the same time he was sitting in judgment on a case that named George W. Bush as a defendant, and he failed to disclose this or recuse himself.
• All the politicians touched by Katrina are acting like, well, politicians. They are all taking full blame except for the things they can’t be blamed for, which turns out to be everything. So they can’t be blamed for anything. How dare they try to score points with something like this? Is there no end to their venality? Even the new FEMA guy, despite his decades of emergency management experience, has turned into a brown-nosing toady overnight, cuddling up to the President on his recent tour of the disaster.
• Hospital patients and old people in a nursing home died because they weren’t evacuated. Hey Doc: First, do no harm, remember?

I don’t know if this is all out of my system yet. I hope it is. I want to move on. Life is precious, and so damned short. If you clicked on the “play” button at the top of this (and if your computer is capable), you’ve been listening to Paul Simon’s “Take Me to the Mardi Gras:”

C’mon take me to the mardi gras
Where the people sing and play
Where the dancing is elite
And there’s music in the street
Both night and day

Hurry take me to the mardi gras
In the city of my dreams
You can legalize your lows
You can wear your summer clothes
In New Orleans

And I will lay my burden down
Rest my head upon that shore
And when I wear that starry crown
I won’t be wanting anymore

Take your burdens to the mardi gras
Let the music wash your soul
You can mingle in the street
You can jingle to the beat of the jelly roll

As always, my heart beats only for you, the things we have lost, and those we still seek.

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