Archive for October, 2009

This one is still amateur hour and begs detail but I think I’ve begun to fall into a sort of rhythm here.  Crude but gaining momentum.  It’s more personal and the characters are fatter.  I will rewrite the shit out of this story.  Stephen King, who when firing on all pistons is formidable, said he gets the story out first, recklessly even, and then he comes back with all the crayons.  I’m paraphrasing but that’s the way I understood it.  There’s fourteen more under “Man In In Picture”.  Here we go:

 

 

Man in picture. The sun also rises.

March 14, 2008 – 2:08 am Seven days a week. I know all of their faces if not their names. Some look at me with questions, a few with some concern. Long story, my hand up every time I say it. I take my iced venti drip, dump a little, glug half & half into it, stir it with the straw and leave.

$2.65

I sweat in the car and the air conditioner feels like a hose on my face.

At work I stop to put my briefcase and coffee in my office and head down the hall to greet the boss.

I’m self conscious. I begin to sweat and my face throbs. I own that I look like a pile of shit.

You wanna shut the door? He says. He’s alarmed, his eyebrows are up, friendly and neutral.

Nope. I actually fell down the goddamn stairs, I say. I was hammered, I say. I look at him embarrassed because I am. The stairs to my parking garage, I say.

My nose feels like a sliced plum as he stairs at it. I try to breathe quietly through my mouth. It’s not really working.

Sweet Jesus, he says. That’s gotta hurt like a bastard.

It does, I tell him. I tell him if I tear up it’s because it smarts and it’s not because my vagina hurts. He laughs but he’s still looking at me.

His nose barely wrinkles and I understand he knows I’m bullshitting him. It sucks.

I drop with care in my chair, it squeaks like a riot of cats in a sack, turn the computer on, grab the reciever and realize that even the phone against my face is fucking killing me.

They all do the double take when they pass my office.

Mattie’s office is across from mine and he can’t stand it. By lunch he’ll have his angle. He’s six four with a fauxhawk but today I will kill him. I feel fucking mean. Nothing to lose. I will beat him to death with the goddamn fax machine. I picture it and crack a smile. My face hurts so bad tears well up.

The morning is pain and humiliation. No one has really liked me for awhile. They’re all confused and afraid. I can’t blame them. I’ve been confrontational and antisocial for months. Today I show up with my face split open. Like that works.

Put yourself in my shoes. How do you even begin the conversation? We’re pretty close, all of us. But I don’t even hope to tell any of them the truth. This shit is crazy and that’s all they’ll get from me if I open my mouth. They’ll come away thinking I’ve lost my shit. I hate it, but it’s true.

Lunch is cool. Mattie has decided to forego the canyon in my face as a topic. After the first few minutes, I understand this and I’m grateful.

Not cool though. Everyone uncomfortable. Best friends and coworkers are beside themselves because of me. They try to include me in conversation, but look at me with cloudy revulsion and confusion. They have no idea what to make of me and there’s nothing I can say that will put them at ease.

I’m a fucking mess that keeps getting worse in all eyes.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this.

I want to scream that you people have layed awake worrying about how to pay a vendor, while I’ve been fistfighting a fucking demon every night. His eyes bleed and he drools. Fuck me, that’s not the half of it.

Then I go home.

To sleep.

To dream.

I get drunk first. On good gin.

I realize that my flat plasma throws heat because I feel it on my nose.

I go to bed.

I reach to turn off the lamp and on the nightstand, a white plastic pawn.

I’m so tired.

I know, I know, I need to establish the character of the rabbit Watership more.  It was so painful to write.  More detail and back story is needed all around.  I know.  You gotta admit though it’s gonna be good, as in horrible.  Here we go:

 

 

Man in picture. More.

March 3, 2008 – 5:25 am He slips inside. The key is smooth, the knob twists. He enters and shuts the door behind, very quiet.

He throws the bolt.

I see it in my head. The bolt.

I smell lamb and garlic.

Then I breathe shit. Overwhelming. No air in these fumes. He smells homeless. He smells like piss and puke and shit and sweat. It’s a stench so monstorous.

I gag.

I’ll retch. I’m sure.

I hear him begin to fill the empty ice trays on the counter. He turns the faucet off after the first one and he whispers….. too full. Very slowly he poors a thin stream into the sink.

He moves to the bathroom.

I see the spring loaded roll snap into place as I hear it.

My eyes are crusted. He’s rolling away from me. Out of my bed.

Crusty eyes and blurry vision.

Out of my bed.

What?

The front door closes.

My rabbit is dead.

His name was Watership and I adored him.

He’s been sprayed on the walls of my apartment.

His skin is on the floor. The carpet. Ears and all. He was my boy. His velvet nose.

He slept in his cage at night. His water bottle smashed on the marble mantle. He was so sweet and docile. Above the fireplace is a crude scrawl in his blood. It looks Japanese.

I think of that song by The Vapors.

There is fur in the wire around the door of his cage, he liked his cage, he came and went willingly, so I undersand he struggled violently.

He was soft and cocoa brown. His eyes were kind and he shuffled to rub his face on me.

Ever heard a rabbit scream? I have. Sounds like a baby human.

I break all the way down. Collapse. Fold. Fall. Lose it.

I scrape his remains.

Thoroughly. I collect them, all I can get or lift, and deposit them in a ceramic pot I made in grade school.

I don’t know what to do with bowl so I cover it in plastic wrap and put it in the freezer. I’m disgusted by it but it’s all I have.

His name was Watership, I adored him.

As I sit here, I miss him. He was innocence.

There’s a big piece of lumber always propped against the wall by my trash chute. It’s handy for forcing fat bags of trash down the maw. It looks vaguely nautical, like it should be on a medium sized sailboat. It’s been here for the two years I’ve been here.

I take it with me. Back to my apartment.

Hours after dawn and I still smell his fucking pigs.

I will wait forever for him.

He is fucked.

I’m not sure what he is. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to kill him.

As I read it, I realize how clumsy it can be but the concept is still disturbing if I do say so myself.  Again, it needs work, but it will make a fine and horrifying book.  Happy Halloween, here’s another.  To read the entire first draft, search under “Man In Picture” here at brainspank.  Off we go:

Man in Picture part two. The way we were.

February 24, 2008 – 4:01 am I’m a submarine, way down deep, hull compromised. Pinhole leaks will soon begin to gush. You’ve seen the movies. Once that shit starts, it’s the beginning of the end.

Now he e-mails me on all three of my accounts.
Nothing too sinister, emoticons and random puncuation
that I’m sure are supposed to correspond or be in
context somehow with sightings of him.

I haven’t filled an ice tray in weeks, but they’re always full. Lately, the toilet paper is installed properly on the wall dispenser. Something I never do.

I keep hearing the wind blow outside. When I step out
for a smoke, the air is still.

The radio turns on in the middle of the night. Wierd stations that sound like Hamm radio. Sometimes orchestras from the forties.

Constantly lately, what must be ancient perfume. Simple pungent notes. Disturbing but instantly nostalgic.

Then there’s the pigs.

I ask her if she’s noticing them. Not so much says she.

They seem to be everywhere. Iconic to a degree in American culture, she points out, smirk gratis.

Maybe I just notice them more. Everywhere from news magazines to National Geographic.

The ones in the Geographic have dirty tusks and crazy eyes swimming in violence. I smell them when I wake in the middle of the night. I hear their bifurcated hooves in other rooms.

They squeal and clack on my balcony.

They’ll eat anything you know. Anything.

The very next time I see him, his eyes are filled with
blood. Our entire encounter, he blinks once.

There’s a big ass Ralph’s across the street. Tremendous selection of frozen meals as well as standing at the fridge food. Good soup kiosk and a really good salad bar. Single males understand this food dynamic as well as the need for as many plants as you can possibly get down into your goddamn gastrointestinal.

Anyway, sometimes I start on the right because I’m in a hurry. When I start left it’s because I’m cool and I have a little time.

It was an afternoon copasetic as I entered left off the elevator with my smooth and noisless cart. I turned right after perusing the produce section and picking out some avacados, tomatos and onions. I proceeded down the middle north to south aisle. It bisects the store and aisles on your right and left.

He appeared at the head of the first one.

His eyes were rimmed with blood. His hair was more yellow. I thought of a naked corn cob. Right there, thirty five feet to my right. Not showing his teeth today and that’s a relief. Kinda, because the lower front of his face seems to struggle at containing them.

Next block down he’s at the tail of that one and thirty five feet to my left.

The next aisle is a block party. Fireworks bust and spatter in the night overhead. It’s the nexus of this retail venue, and at the same time, red and gold popcorn carts, clowns, balloons and herds of women in pastel stretch pants and heels.

I jerk left down the next lane and it’s just carnival games and frozen food. He’s at that end as I roll up on him while he stares at me through eyes full of blood. He blinks slowly and his lids are squeegees. Fresh red blood runs from his eyes and into his teeth as he begins to grin.

He’s got dozens of pigs with him. Some are hogs. Some are boars. Some are swine.

I understand that if I’m not his demise, he will be mine. I smell this fact when I flip a bitch in front of him and head down the road on the opposite side.

He follows me and it’s loud. He marches and brings his feet down hard. He constantly sucks drool back through his teeth.

I’m panicking. My heart in my throat as my brain screams about how life is fucking tough enough, why me today?

I glance back and his nose and ears have joined in the gush over his giant teeth.

Red blood streams into his maw like rivulets before a wash.

Now he’s ahead of me eating slices of pineapple from a can. Blood and fruit juice run over his chin and down to his shirt to look like sweat. I wonder if I have just minutes to kill this crazy motherfucker.

Or will it be another day?

He beats me to the register and I watch him bag my groceries. His shirt is a dark blue now and his eyes are bloodshot but clear.

I tell him paper & plastic and to pack them heavy. He does all that.

I still understand that I have to be this guy’s fucking hurricane.

In the spirit of the season, I’m re-posting some chapters from my first ever novel.  It’s rough and it really does require an extensive rewrite.  I had intended to revisit it this fall but my work and book about real life in the music business has eclipsed it’s relative priority for now.  I will do the rewrite, as it is a labor of love and I believe the concept to be sound and compelling and it scared the fuck out of me to write it.  If you care to, the entire work is available here at brainspank under the category “Man In Picture”.  It does gain speed and flesh as the story grows.  Trust me, it doesn’t suck, it just needs work.  I hope you enjoy it.

 

 

Man in picture.

February 18, 2008 – 1:10 am It was interesting. Fascinating. Kinda compelling.

I had fun with it.

For awhile.

Sometimes, it was like picking at a scab or the tongue constantly probing a sore in the mouth.

Still, enigmatic in the most consumate of ways.

Until he was standing over my bed on a silent night, when some sense caused me to open my eyes.

I think I first noticed him on a movie poster. Outside a shopping mall. One of those faux shelters for public transportation. Maybe on the side of a bus.

I remember thinking, after clocking his countenance out of the corner of my consciousness, that’s one creepy motherfucker. In the background of one of those visually exploding advertisements for some inspid action movie. He registered only after the fact, in my mind’s eye.

Weird.

Time passed.

I swear I saw him wearing sunglasses in a potato chip ad on the back of a comic book. I don’t really read them anymore, but I’ll thumb through them when I come across a display.

Not long after, he was an extra in a cell phone commercial on TV. I wondered at how many times I’d watched that one before I noticed him.

Tall, pale. Gaunt. Always seeming to stare right at me.

Then, he was pictured on packaging for disposable razors.

Then again, in the very back of an advertisement for a new amusement park ride on a plastic fast food cup. I’ve always kept those cups. They hold a lot and it doesn’t matter what happens to them. They make excellent mini trash receptacles for a coffee or bedside table in the apartment of a single male.

Didn’t hang on to that one.

I would catch a glimpse of him walking opposite me while driving. Of course, I looked back and checked my mirrors. Of course, nothing.

He had large front teeth, maybe buck toothed. Red hair in a sort of crew cut flat top. Pale blue eyes that were unbelievably bloodshot.

I could only imagine all these companies hiring him for these ads must have thought he was kinda goofy and cool somehow, they were infusing their shit with character or quirkiness, or something.

I thought he was scary as fuck.

He started to appear in my dreams. Still pretty innocuous, but more overt. Winking, saying hello to me. That sort of thing.

He kept showing up in different places.

In the audience on a talk show.

Blackjack dealer in Vegas once.

One day, he was pumping gas a couple islands over at a Shell station.

Early seventies GTO. It was green. He pulled out very slow.

I walked through a mall and saw him going down an escalator on a lower level grinning up at me before he looked down, sprinted the last few moving steps and disappeared.

He always bolts or turns away when I see him. He knows me.

Obviously.

He said nothing. When he placed his index finger on my sternum ever so gently, I swear I could smell dirt and grease under a long nail. He said nothing but looked right at me. Not through me, but at me. The sliding door to my balcony was open, wind clattered the vertical blinds. I could smell gasoline.

He grinned; a rictus affording massive and misshapen incisors. He began to drool, then sucked it back violently. He blew air past his lips and walked away, away from my bed and out my front door. I heard him close it quietly behind him.

Now I get phone calls at work and on my cell. HEY MIKEY IT’S ME JERRY!! Or, ANTWON!! Or, WILLIAM!!

It freezes me. I know it’s him before it rings, if I don’t answer the goddamn thing, he’ll leave a voice mail and I’ll be absolutely compelled to listen to it. So I try to take it on the chin and then hang up. Get it over with. I know when it’s him.

Get this, he always wears brown corduroy pants, blue suede Puma Clydes, a maroon t-shirt under a leather biker jacket and he’s pigeon chested. Yeah, it’s all lopsided and the fit of his leather coat emphasizes it. His shoulders are narrow and he’s very tall. Sinewy and long limbed. A glance at his hands tells that one of them would kill you if it got you by the throat.

About a week ago, I was at Starbucks waiting for my unsweetened iced crack and he was backing out the door and firing a gun at me with his thumb and index finger. I pissed my pants. I’m pretty sure no one noticed.

I had to go home. I was late to work. The boss gave me the look and pointed out my shitty performance lately. I nodded and apologized.

I don’t sleep much anymore. I’ve begun to obsess about pigs. They scare the shit out of me. Are you aware of how smart they are? They will eat any motherfucking thing. And we eat them.

This is bad.

I rocked at Jeopardy tonight.  Even nailed the final Jeopardy question.  Rock of Gibraltar.

Shall we do a little politics?

First up, the alleged war between FOX and the White House.  Here’s my take:  FOX lies egregiously and irresponsibly.  Consistently.  They are shameless propagandists.    Therefore, they lose.  This President or any other has every right to neglect them, ignore them or even cast the occasional aspersion their way.  FOX is full of shit and any thinking, attentive American knows it.  It’s Obama’s prerogative.  It’s just that simple.  I kinda like that he’s dismissing them while saying he’s not losing any sleep over it.

Um, looks like the public option is alive once again.  Harry Reid says as much.  He told us yesterday he has the votes.  Turns out he probably doesn’t.  Olympia Snowe is blanching, or posturing as though she will, as I can’t imagine her blanching any more.  That bitch is pale.  Translucent.  Then there’s Lieberman.  Benedict Fliptop.  The little droopy eyed cartoon jowled prick announced he’d get behind a Republican filibuster on the public option.  You know he’s a former Democrat, now an Independent, allowed to retain his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs by virtue of tacit agreement between he and Mr. Reid that he would play ball on domestic policy.  Just so happens he’s the junior Senator from Connecticut, the finest and most luxurious mall in the country for health insurance corporations.  He’s taken over a million bucks in the last five years from the medical plutocracy.

Without even a conversation, not so much as a memo, Benedict Fliptop should be stripped of his chairmanship and barred from even caucusing with the Democrats.  This should happen yesterday.  He should be made to eat peanut butter and jelly on the steps or dine with his stinky Republican abominogs.  If possible, he should be ejected from his DC residence, have his single payer health care revoked and be issued a shopping cart, a hoodie and fingerless gloves, maybe a few cans of Sterno.  This fucker needs to understand that it’s politicians like him what cause unrest.  His own goddamn state favors a public option by some 68%.  What an asshole.

Let the asshat obstructionists filibuster if the Democrats can’t get their house in order enough to vote for cloture.  Force their hand and make them embarrass themselves and their party on C-Span.  Mr. Reid, you boxed.  You’re tough.  I know because you signed and inscribed your book for me at the respectful behest of my mother.  Bring in the cots, order pizza and throw Senate decorum out the goddamn window, at the same time throw tomatoes and rotten fruit.  Roll up your sleeves Harry, get a nurse for the elderly members.  Make the Republicans actually filibuster.  This is one one of the most important issues of our time.  Popcorn and porn for the junior members and Geritol, sponge baths and plasma for the senior ones.  Do I need to remind you that what happens here is not at your convenience but quite possibly at our abrupt financial inconvenience and physical well being?

I joke but I’m serious.  If it comes down to it and the Republicans aren’t forced onto the floor for days and weeks to read from their favorite children’s books, we will be justifiably far beyond angry.  Shame them.  Make them pay for attempting to prevent what every citizen of the richest country in history deserves.  For five fucking percent of our defense budget this would be a done deal.  Get this done.  How long did you want to be Senate majority leader anyway?  This is a cruel joke.  The debate is for and by the stupid.

If we can pay for these ridiculous wars we can pay for the health and welfare of our people and that’s right out of my mothers mouth.  The very first campaign I ever worked in was for you as Lt. Governor, I think I was seven and you were a “Goldust Twin” along with Dick Bryan.  You simply must do everything you can and give this everything you have, or I will campaign against you next year.

Let’s talk about the war.  You know, that one in Afghanistan where more of our men and women have been killed this year than any of the other seven?  The one Darth Cheney has the prunes to accuse Obama of “dithering” over.  The one he and Dumbya dithered over for seven years and ultimately bequeathed this mess of way too much technicolor that mother Cheney made for us?  Darth Cheney has my vote for most evil, most ineffective, most dishonest and most destructive President never elected in the 21st century.  The epoch is young but we should pray he prevails.

My money is on him and I can only hope it’s how history judges him and his little dog too.

I have to tell you I don’t envy our President.  He inherited a shitstorm of clusterfucks.  The electorate is flirting with disappointment.  The village folk grow restless.  The goddamn unscrupulous Republicans are pouncing on anything that moves even if it’s in the throes of death.  They’re stockpiling pitchforks and fagots (no, like torches).  I admit my own handful of discouragements.

We would do well to remember however, that a mess this size took eight long years to manufacture and the public was complicit for at least five or six.  Most of you have just woken up and are still rubbing the shit dust from your eyes.  We may not be all about a rose garden economically but the entire worldwide system is no longer staring into the mouth of the dragon and withering from it’s breath.  Jobs is what we need but jobs is always the last to appear.  It’s dicey yet, but we are closer to some modicum of meaningful healthcare reform than we have ever, ever been in an effort nearly a century old.  Troops are coming out of Iraq and he’s doing his damnedest to figure out Afghanistan.  There is legitimate effort in Gitmo and I’m not sure we’re done torturing or wiretapping but I know we’re up to far less of it these days.  He’s reaffirmed his promises to the the Gay, Lesbian and Transgender community and I believe he will follow through.

You can’t always govern with the President you’d want, you have to govern with the President you have.  I for one am still absolutely confident we picked the very best man.  There is not a doubt in my mind.

Drinks for my friends.

My girlfriend is here.  Picked her up from the airport tonight and she looked beautiful.  So cut & paste bitches.

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/143444/michael_moore%27s_action_plan%3A_15_things_every_american_can_do_right_now/

Couldn’t have said it any better.

Drinks for my friends.

I had my guinea pigs.

Bands and artists that suffered my inexperience.  I made more than a few really shitty recordings.  Sometimes there was some attitude there but I made some egregious sonic messes.  I’m as embarrassed over those recordings as I am over my contributions to my high school paper.  It’s true.  I was a dickhead.

There was a guy named Scott Thomas.  Huge talent but kind of a prick so I don’t feel so bad.  Jesse Montague, I got some of it right but some of it wrong.  The percussionist’s name was Jagoda (sp?), he spilled a bong into the console and smoked the power supplies but we did make some cool recordings.  She played and sang an entire chorus out of time without me realizing it.  Duck Duck Goose, I think I did okay by them, the guitar player had this tiny little 15 watt vintage amp that he got the coolest sound from.  Hard as fuck to record because I had to isolate the hell out of it.  It broke up as beautifully as a cameo broach and he had a lisp.  The gayest straight guys I ever met.

A band called Dumpster; have I told the story about experimenting with heroin with the singer?  A band called Eleventeen who would later become Eve Six.  My lawyer got me home early from vacation for that one.  Found me in Tahoe somehow when I’m not sure my parent’s  knew I was there.  Before cell phones.  Neverland with Pat Sugg, the best I’d ever heard a guitar player sound through Peavey amps.  Bill Kennedy was building the coolest record with them and it just never happened.

I’ve got to go through my DATs as I have thousands of hours of the best LA had to offer.  Before it was over, we were out scouting them and bringing them in.

Salad days.  Golden.

Along came a band called Rat Bat Blue.  Dabro, Ace, Fraulein Sniffy, Alan the genius and Teddy on bass.  Dabro, Dave Abrahams, was the guitar player and the archivist for A&M’s mastering department.  We became friends because he was so damn friendly.  One of the nicest people I’ve ever met.  It was a bad day when Dabro wasn’t smiling.  They were all sweethearts.

We had fun and worked way very hard to render their vision.  All night long whenever we could.  Must have done at least twenty songs together.  Songs don’t happen in a day you know.  Sometimes not in a week.  They could play, all good musicians, with Alan on keyboards being a bit of a stand out.  Alan and I seemed to understand each other right away.  I can’t explain it but we connected.  He was a sorcerer with a grand piano.  Funny and smart.  That actually describes the band as a whole if I toss in the words talented and dedicated.

They were a stalwart team.  They were to be my first experience and example of such a dynamic in many ways.  I was to work with many famous ones that didn’t share a similar ethic and it’s absence was always a hole in the process as much as it was an indicator of an obvious expiration date to come.

Professional.   They never bitched about or maligned each other.  They were confident in their abilities and never failed to share encouragement and support.  They were very sensitive in that way with me as well.  They treated me like a member and often left a few hundred dollars on the console after we’d worked all night and I was the only one who had to get up to clean toilets and fetch fruit in an hour.

I was mixing them the night of the ’92 Northridge quake and had just gotten home to fall asleep with a beer between my legs.  So tired.  Still on the couch.  A 6.9, and I slept through it.  What woke me was the arcing of the transformers.  Not the sound and crunch, but the blinding flashes.

My ears shut down to this day when I sleep.  I hear them turn on right before I’m completely conscious.  They click and work with my eyes.  Weird, huh?

I wasn’t sure what to do but understood something big had happened.  I put on my shoes and wandered out to find a community on the sidewalk.  Battery powered transistor radios, blankets and candles.  Some woman remarked at the irony of such tragedy on a so beautiful a night.  She gestured at the stars.  It was then I realized it had been a quake serious enough to knock out all the power of the entire LA Basin.  A celestial show like that hadn’t been possible in Los Angeles for a hundred years.

I was in bed asleep inside half an hour and slept through all the aftershocks.

I’m an agnostic, yet I can’t help but say, God love you guys for your patience.  Thank you.  Rat Bat Blue certainly wasn’t my first but we lasted, I learned and together we grew.  The first female drummer I’d ever worked with, Fraulein Sniffy, Jeanne Thomason, she could play, she had pocket and she could tune her own drums.  I almost always asked drummers to hit harder and Jeanne was no exception, but neither was it a problem.  She was very solid.  Always there’d be a message on my machine from Jeanne thanking and praising me after we’d finished a batch of songs.

“Magicfingers” she called me.

Dabro on the lot, spreading the word about what a good job I’d done.  Smiling and telling everyone.  This band was instrumental, pun intended, in earning me respect and legitamacy.

The band’s style was pretty eclectic and they seemed to go wherever they wanted musically because they had the vision and talent to afford and accommodate it.  Ace, Michael Baker, was a larger than life front man with charisma, chops and style.  A funny motherfucker, with serious lyrical and melodic ability.  He had an informed and clever grip on humor and pathos.  I was often in awe of him.  He was the real deal.

Exceptionally good live.  Always a function of the band’s ability to play and a front man’s ability to deliver.

When Dabro first approached me, I was still green enough to be leery, but I accepted.  Understand these transactions had nothing to do with money.  It was about us helping each other.  One of the reasons I was grateful is they could play far better than I could engineer.  Like I said, they were patient and I can’t help but know they were grooming me for their needs.  I had no problem with that then and I don’t now.

Before we were done with each other, about a year and a half in, they were being courted by labels and the fish in my pan had gotten considerably larger and a little more supine.  We’d accomplished what we’d set out to do, we’d helped each other and I was glad to have held up my end of the deal.  They signed to Atlantic and Rupert Hine produced.  Rupert Hine picked up where I left off.

It always broke my heart a little when a band I’d helped for free got a deal and never even threw some overdubs my way but I loved these guys.  My heart holds nothing but fondness for them.  We had shared with and nurtured each other in a musical equivalent of graduate school.  They did at least as much for me as I did for them and it was without regret on my part.  We had a good time doing it.  They didn’t owe me a goddamn thing.

As is often the case, they got lost in a shuffle.  Atlantic just happened to go through a “consolidation” and they were never really heard from again.  I never heard the record they made and I can’t help but be curious to this day.  They were exceptional.

The thing is this, when you work with a band for that long and that hard with a common goal, you share something beyond friendship, it becomes a partnership that approaches family.  You get to know each other pretty goddamn well.  I was to join many bands in the years to come but this was my first.  I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.  My heart swells when I think about it.  Good people.  Good times.  A lot of honest talent and sincere friendship.

Here’s an epilogue for ya:

I’m not sure how, but word got out at one point about a batch of three songs I’d completed mixes on with Rat Bat Blue.  Mark Harvey, the Harvinator hisself, studio manager and boss hog, approached me to say he was impressed and  asked me to engineer for him that very weekend.  Again, I found myself flattered and intimidated.  A piano vocal session with Astrid Young, sister of Neil Young.  I accepted.  There was no way I could let this man down.

I was nervous but Mark was cool and It went well.  So much different than my hard ass boss.  We had a pleasant afternoon.  I documented everything I did.  Brian Schueble was to follow up on what I’d done and told me later that when he first looked at my signal chain he thought I was out of my fucking mind but it sounded pretty good.  Brian was one of the good ones still much to my senior.  One of the best engineers to ever walk the planet and as humble as  pornstar with a tiny dick.  He would later spend time with me sharing his micing technique on grand piano with emphasis on phase and right left balance.

Brian is another one I owe.  Damn he was good.  He showed me how to make a piano sound like God.  He handed me the keys.  He taught me to fish.  Listen to Fiona Apple’s first record, that’s Brian.

So the buzz about these Rat Bat Blue songs somehow continued to escalate.  Some of the techs were even talking about it.  I know Dabro was raving all over the lot.

It’s weird being under the microscope all the sudden in the most famous and renowned recording studio in the world.  Discomfiting and confusing.  I’d had the light shined on me before for other reasons and this felt the same.  It itched.  It was sore.  I wanted a vacation.  Given the chance, I might have run for it.

But I knew the songs were good.  I knew my production and engineering was good.  It sounded almost the same as it did in my head so I knew.  If I was wrong I was wrong and so be it, I would never be right.  My colleagues and contemporaries listened and smiled.  It was good.  Nine out of ten dentists agreed.

One day, in the middle of my session, I forget who I was working with, Shelly Yakus, President of Recording, the big cheese, in his inimitable style, walks into my control room, folds his arms on the meter bridge, looks at me and waits for me to stop tape.

I stop tape.  He tells me he heard I did something special.  I tell him I think I know what he’s talking about.  He tells me he wants to hear it.  I say as soon as I’m done here I’ll play it for you.  He smiles evil and says take a break, then tells me to meet him in studio B and exits stage right.  I tell the band I’ll be back in fifteen minutes and head across the hall with my DAT.  I sweat making the easiest patch in the world and bring the DAT up on “stereo A”.  I crack the gain to twelve o’clock.  I’m not sure where to stand so I lean against the multitracks in the back.

His head curly gray head dances without rhythm and he doesn’t say a word or open his eyes for all three songs.

I hear it through his ears with all the flaws and mistakes.  It’s amateur hour.  We didn’t have automation.  It’s overdone.  Too ambitious.  The effects are out of control and I’m positive he flinches where I cut the half inch.  The band helped and did mutes and fader rides and everything because we didn’t have automation.  I can’t tell anything because there’s no meter to his bobbing head.  It’s like he’s listening to a disco version.  But I know he knows.  He may be a sonafabitch but Shelly Yakus is an icon and he knows.

I hate his dancing head.  He’s going to mock me.

I’m thinking about being grateful for his inevitable criticism.  How I’ll be gracious and humble as he points out the flaws.  He’s going to have constructive things to say.  It will be helpful.  I’ll be ok.  He’ll tell me how far I have to go and the bottom sounds disconnected from the rest of the mix.  The mid range is skinny and my balances are off.

The last song ends.  The silence is deafening.  His hands are folded and he’s rubbing his nose with both index fingers.  I hope he encourages me.  That would be nice.  Tell me it’s a good effort and to keep working because I’m onto something.

I don’t know what to do so I pull the patch cords, step close to him to mute the console and sit down next to him for my lumps.

Well, well, well he says.  I can’t help but look him in the eye, you gotta pick one, so I do, and I want it straight.  I pick his right eye.  I’m ready to own what he has to say.

“Congratulations”, he says.  He grins wide and kind, “You’ve figured it out”.  “I’m impressed”.

I really don’t remember what happened next.  Free beer to whomever was assisting me that day or anyone that can tell me who was.

I had just earned myself a whole mess of trouble but I didn’t care.

This chapter is dedicated to Keith Woods, may his soul and consciousness rest in peace.

Drinks for my friends.

I talked with my sister yesterday.  My father and I were outside spectating my mother washing windows.  I was on hand to lend a hand.  I did thus, having long since learned that my mother asks for help when she needs it, otherwise back off.  Tam showed up with flowers and we all sat out back on an incomparable, fall Nevada day and shot the shit.  Mom decided on a red beer and I fashioned my own with Worcestershire and capers that kept clogging my bendy straw, in spite of it’s palatability.

Tam tells me Len Semas is likely nothing more than a right wing operative funded by some notorious PAC and encouraged me to investigate some shit stirrer named Chuck Muth as well.  I’m on it.  She pretty much confirmed my suspicions.

“The concept of America as `One Nation Under God’ has become not only foreign to Democrats — it has become objectionable. They confuse separation of church and state with separation of God from state and they couldn’t be more wrong. This is a nation founded on Godly principles in Christian philosophical tradition.”  -reviewjournal.com

I would beg to differ there Len.  This nation was founded on among other things, the ideal that no church, organized religion and therefore God, influence the manner in which her people would ever be governed.  The Founding Fathers, a significant number of which were either atheist or agnostic, and many otherwise suspicious of organized religion, went to great lengths to instill and preserve that ethic in the documents drafted to, and presented before, the people of this country then so young.  It was the tyranny of the church, it’s inordinate influence as a heavy wrench and complicity as well as cooperation with and to heads of state, and it’s archaic and selective reason, we the people sought so specifically and vehemently to unburden ourselves of.

This is most certainly not a nation founded on “Godly principles in any sort of Christian philosophical tradition”  It is not and good day sir.  Please exit the goddamn building.  You lie and you fucking suck.

Get your Jesus of my penis Len.  Methinks you are a lying fucktard.

“ Semas, 57, says the local Nevada Appeal and the Reno Gazette-Journal are liberal newspapers that are turning off a Northern Nevada populace that is becoming increasingly conservative and favors traditional American values of God, family and country.” -reviewjournal.com (2004)

Hey Semas, your state went blue for the last national election.  You like apples?

I know I do.

“Semas admits he does not always practice what he preaches. He has been married three times.

Semas enjoys drinking, partying and “chasing girls.” His newspaper office, which is a 94-year-old building that once was the home of Abe Cohn, the businessman who financed famed American Indian basket weaver Dat So La Lee, is cluttered with liquor bottles from a past party.” 

“I don’t make up my mind by the emotionalism of news headlines,” he said. “I look for logic and consistency in positions. To me conservatism is logical, it is reasonable. The liberals want women to have a right to choose abortion, but they oppose capital punishment. There is no consistency.” -reviewjournal

Did I mention this guy is a fucktard?  Uh, Len, I’ll bet you support capital punishment and oppose abortion.  Anybody?

“Gays have the same fundamental rights of any citizen,” he said. “They need to quit complaining.” -reviewjournal

Orange Whip?  Orange whip?  Orange Whip?  Three Orange Whips.

Len, like Sarah Palin,  appears to be be tragically less than fond of homework.  Here’s an invitation to all the northern Nevada locals to help me out a little.  This guy is a stupid dangerous liar.  I’m really curious about where his funding comes from and the stink I know to be hypocrisy.  Help me out here.  Traditional searches don’t reveal much, but any individual this obtuse is as dirty as a drain diver in a sewage holding tank.

C’mon kids, I’d like a cub reporter……….

I’m not lazy, just busy.

Drinks for my friends.

I like to go to lunch.  By myself.  I really have no problem eating alone.  I like myself.  I’m never without something to read.  Typically I have an appetizer, any salad not based on iceberg lettuce and a decent pinot grigio or sauvignon blanc.  Maybe a rose’ if I’m familiar with the appellation and know it to be dry and fruit forward.  I like to take my time, read and watch people.

I had a nice payday today, but things being what they are, I found myself at Arby’s.  I was out plying my trade here in the state capitol of Nevada and I loves me some Beef & Cheddar.  When you’re on a budget, improvisation and compromise becomes a soft mantra and Arby’s has pretty good lemonade.  Free refills.  I told myself I wouldn’t be needing my briefcase, just business cards and my cell phone.  I realized I had nothing to read.  There’s always something to read in my briefcase.  Damn.  Fortune visited me when I clocked a newsstand out front.  As I was ordering my sandwich and beverage, fortune graced me again as I noticed a local magazine pile on the counter.  The “Sierra Sage”. It appeared to be of heft enough to last my humble lunch.

I have a tendency to like these kinds of regional unassuming publications.  A sort of Carson City version of the LA Weekly I naively imagined.  There was a community calendar, a crossword and a charming personal obit.  An advice column and some letters to the editor.

There was a woman in her mid sixties with enormous breasts sitting across from what was probably her niece or daughter.  A man with unruly gray facial hair, red suspenders and an impossible amount of food and sauces in front of him with a young man who appeared to be distracted and uncomfortable in every way.  Three teenagers so painfully awkward I wondered if I’d ever lacked that much cool.  A woman about my age slathered in face paint, an ill fitting pant suit and what was likely a permanent scowl.  I imagined her chain smoking menthols.

It didn’t take long to realize I was perusing a publication of the worst kind of right wing narrow mindedness and conservative propaganda I’d ever stumbled upon.  I was blindsided.  Assaulted even.   The featured article, written by the publisher, one Leoard A. Semas, which the table of contents list as beginning on page 4, where an advertisement appears for subscriptions and a house for sale, actually begins on the front cover and continues on page 29, earnestly attempted to tackle the convoluted issue of health care by stating:

“The problem with the current debate on health care is that it is not about health care at all; it is about yet another transfer of power from the citizen to the state ……………..Two things are certain regarding health care in the U.S.  One, the system is far from broken.  Two, a takeover by the federal government is not the way to fix it even if it were.”

First off Len, you beg the question; just exactly how is this a transfer of power from citizen to state?  This smacks of the paranoid government takeover rhetoric and indeed you resort to that post haste.

Far from broken Len?  Over 62% percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 we a direct result of medical costs.  75% percent of those 62% had health insurance.  The amount of bankruptcies rose by nearly 50% from 2001 to 2007.  “….the odds that a bankruptcy had a medical cause was 2.38-fold higher in 2007 than in 2001.”  -The American Journal of Medicine (a clinical research study).

Hey Len, “Profits at 10 of the country’s largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007…….”  -AFL-CIO.  This Len, when the number of insured has shrunk, some 14,000 plus a day and the people who have coverage pay more for less of it.  Hey Len, how is our system far from broken?  Can you give me an example of how it functions well?

Inside the front cover a letter from the publisher, Len Semas again, reveals he’s been under the weather and recent publication of the Sierra Sage has been suspended as a result.  Congestive heart failure, heart surgery to install six stents and an episode with kidney stones.  How’s that insurance working out there Len?

Despite the glaring editorial/layout errors, you’ve got a pretty slick publication here Len.  It’s printed on glossy paper, full color, nice graphics, photography and a what can only be described as a dearth of advertisement.  A publication like this in a fast food restaurant for free in Carson City?    I think I may have to check up on you Mr. Semas.

Oh and by the way Len, you responded to a letter by some ignorant round headed mouth breather named Orlis Trone about Sarah Palin by saying, “She embodies, intelligence, charisma, capability, enthusiasm, and common sense.  Worse, she is a “regular American;” and that is the ultimate fear of the elitists that largely comprise the Left”

First, yes, we are way smarter than you.  I love that you all think that’s a bad thing somehow.  Tell me, does it suck as much as I think to be as dumb as a stick?  Nevermind, you wouldn’t know.

Let me tell you something Len, if you think the biggest fear we as progressives have is Sarah Palin, I invite, I beg you to indulge yourself in that fantasy to your little heart’s content.  Yes, by all means, that stupid, self centered, intellectually challenged, two dimensional, media prostitute is the boogeyman of the liberal left.  Good luck with that.   Please, please run her in 2012.  Please?  Us elitist, liberal left wingers can’t wait.  Maybe you can run her with Glenn Beck or Michele Bachman or Michael Steele.  All excellent candidates and pillars of the conservative cause if you ask me.

Stalwarts.  Overflowing with integrity, righteousness and honesty.  The best and brightest the Republican party has to offer.  Cough.  She, they, well that’s a serious and formidable challenge right there.  Cough.  So bright and capable.  Cough.  They’ll uh, give us a run for our money and uh, lend the whole process dignity for once, cough.

Now, I gotta tell ya Len,  I think you’re full of shit.  I think you just might be some right wing shill funded with your own or some other spurious and shadowy largess, propagating an agenda that would embarrass you.  I could be wrong but I’m sure a little digging is going to unearth some things you’d rather your readers didn’t know.  You people, your kind, disingenuous patriots, are always hiding some odious hypocrisy.

One other thing, if I’m not mistaken, a son of the great state Senator Lawrence “Jake” Jacobson owns the the Arby’s franchises here in Carson and Minden.  Jake was a man who existed and legislated in an era before partisanship was allowed to become so cancerous, toxic and polarizing.  He was a good man, a Republican, without enemies and he counted democratic state Senators and assemblymen as close friends.  Keith Ashworth for example.

I worked for the Nevada state legislature back then and had a serious relationship with a beautiful young woman who happened to be a niece or cousin of the aforementioned son.  I’m assuming the same man owns that franchise today.  I won’t ever darken the door of that Arby’s again.  I may be courting pettiness here but it’s so irresponsible to spread that kind of disinformation.  It’s dumb.  It’s not free speech or opinion, it’s lies.  You’re fomenting lies Mr. Jacobson and you should be ashamed.

I am disgusted.  Piss up a rope.  I will do the best I can to encourage others to boycott you as well.  You should know better.  Think globally, act locally.

Drinks for my friends.

There are so many more stories between those days and the days I’m itching to talk about so maybe I’ll go back and tell some more, fill it all in a little more, regardless, you the reader, will never be the wiser.  There’s no real reason to tell you this.

Whatever.

We’re gonna dance around with this chapter a little.  Got ta, got ta, got ta go see Ben.

If it seems to  have taken too long for me to rise to the occasion of what I expected of myself, it didn’t take very long to get what I wanted once I figured it out.  It was equal parts unwilligness to follow the years long path a typical assistant engineer takes to get a shot at the show, as it was not at all congruent with my aspirations once I finally began to understand what I was doing.

Fuck all that.  I understood the big picture.  I’d seen enough.  Paid my dues.  Fuck all that.  I was busting.

I had a plan.  I was developing mad skills.

There was bullshit.  Shitloads of it.  Nonsense.  I’d be cutting through that.

I was a quarter century old.  I’d produce record and mix my first record before I was thirty.

The fact was, I could hear it in my head and knew how to put it on tape.  Or I knew I could figure out how to.  I had come to understand top and bottom and volume and chunk and circumstance enough to make it so.  I witnessed famous engineers and producers making huge mistakes.  Both in coaxing performances and being clueless while getting a sound.  I witnessed Bob Ezrin leave a turd in the punchbowl with a band called El Magnifico.  An A&M staff guy named Brian Schueble had already nailed the El Mag vibe.  He had already given the band their sound.  He understood them.  Their record was shit and I understood the biggest reason for that was because Brian didn’t do it.  I witnessed Mike Clink fuck up a band called I Mother Earth while I won his confidence after he’d thrown me off Gun’s & Roses two years earlier.

No one was any more or less fallible than me.

It’s a very delicate and elusive thing, the relationship between band/artist and producer/engineer.  As often as not, the band needs nothing more than an engineer with an opinion as opposed to an engineer and a producer.  It’s a fact, I’ve been there.  Foment an atmosphere where they are relaxed.  It sounds simple but cheer lead them into trying harder and reaching further.  Explore harmonies and percussion and other melodic instruments.  Musicians are creative animals and the man behind the glass and in front of the knobs must and should make them comfortable with experimenting.  That man must also contribute and suggest, make the band try things they oppose even if they don’t work because it pushes open doors to other possibilities.

I did the same with a brilliant band called Agnes Gooch.  There’s a story there for later but I’m here to tell you that I understood them and they did there best work with me and I think you’d know their name if it was left to our mutual muse and device.  We fucking killed it.  I joined that band and we did excellent work.  Goddamn they were special.

I punched the same sixteen bars for CC Deville one night for eight fucking hours.  Julian Raymond producing, Phil Kaffel engineering and CC on blow and guitar.  It was a cover of Hank Williams’ “Hey hey good lookin” for some Pauly Shore movie.  From eight at night until four in the morning we did nothing but the same solo over and fucking over.

I punched every note, every space, every nuance.  I could have played it myself by the time we were done.

Nobody stopped the little prick.  Julian was a sweet man but a worthless producer.  Philo was a good engineer but a bit of a prick who always looked like he combed his hair with a sharp rock.  CC was an obnoxious, whiny, coke fueled, Brooklyn accented self absorbed piece of shit.  That Julian didn’t stop the whole thing after an hour or two made him guilty of manslaughter.  It was profoundly ridiculous.  I doubt Julian ever made a dime for Disney or The Mouse (Hollywood Records).  Seriously, every time I worked for Julian, he sucked.  Indecisive and no control or vision.  The whole thing could have been done in any shithole in LA with a multitrack, a decent mic pre and a decent mic.  Instead, CC Deville was allowed to masturbate for eight hours without shooting his load because he was hoovering coke every other take at a studio like A&M at hundreds of dollars an hour on top of engineering fees etc.

Vulgar and insipid burlesque.  The kind of stupidity and waste of resources endemic to a place like A&M; a situation among hundreds that taught me me lessons I wasn’t necessarily supposed to learn.  How is it people don’t get embarrassed in the middle of shit like that?

I’d been engineering on my own.  I was taking all comers.  I was a whore.  You got a polka band?  Bring it.

I was confronted with my first horn section, my first concertina, my first stand up bass and my first violin, mellotrons, organs and Leslie’s etc.  I stood in front of these instruments, listened to them and heard them in my head the way they should sound.  The way they wanted to sound, so I figured out how best to be honest with them and still allow for them to speak in a song.

I took it very seriously.

I had ceased to fuck around.

I was faithful to them.  Honest with them.

I became somewhat expert at guitars and amps and distortion.  How an amplifier breaks up, how different ones behave and how to drive them differently to get what I heard in my head.  Hundred watt Marshalls tend to suck because you have to run them so hard before they bust up.  Fifty watt heads are much easier to make crunch.  Give me a 50 Watt Plexi and a 4X12 loaded with aged Celestions and I’ll go gay.  A Vox AC30 with a Tele or a Moserite.  Class A always runs hot baby.  I loved experimenting with voltage regulators, powers soaks etc.  Vintage Fender Bassmans were a favorite.  Hiwatts,  I adore a Fender Twin.  Boogie dual rectifiers.

My penis on a hot tin roof.  A wall of Ampegs.

Single coil, lipstick or double coil humbucking pickups.  Always check between the bridge middle and back pick up positions for every part.

I always brought my own cables because they made such a huge difference.

Tube or solid state.  Tubes in the pre amp or actual gain stage?  Is it a hybrid?

There is no finer perfume than a hot tube amp.

A/DA flangers, vintage MXR distortion, Wah pedals, Big Muffs, DOD ……..the variables were infinite and a geek’s dream.

A Les Paul, Strat, Explorer, Flying V, Rickenbacker, Moserite, semi acoustic, hollow body, acoustic with steel or nylon or both.

Six or twelve strings.

The thickness of the pick or plectrum, the gauge of the strings.  Where on the guitar the player strummed.  The size of hands and fingers.  The ridiculous shoes worn that day.

It’s kinda about the way you combine all the elements and the combinations were infinite.

Just turn every knob until it breaks up somewhere between barbarian and princess or love of self.  Only then do you add microphones.  414s, 57s, 421s, fet 47s and make sure all the diaphragms are lined up.  Phase is everything.  Use a flashlight but them there diaphragms need to be like ducks.

Before the sun sets, tone comes from hands and fingers.  Ignore that fact at your peril.

I tuned drums even.  Showed the drummer from Everclear how to do it himself.  He thanked me for it years later after a show in Vegas.  I was a shitty drummer, but my kit always sounded awesome.  I understood the kind of heads best for a drummer based on his kit and how he played.  The size of his sticks and how hard he hit.  light medium or heavy batter for the snare.  Ambassador, Emperor, Pinstripes or Black Dots on the toms.  The lighter head on the bottom, the thicker head on top.  Tune the bottom head a little lower, sometimes a little higher.  I spent inordinate amounts of time moving various blankets with various textures back and forth in kick drums.  I built gynecological tunnels and used sand bags, bricks, weights from the sound stage and gaffer’s tape.  I miced it inside, out side and way back, while pounding the shit out of the way back one with the most brutal compressor I could find.  An 1176 with all the buttons pushed in.

I made compression my friend and my bitch.  It’s an ugly muscular mistress with copious facial hair.  Ya just gotta keep it’s head between your knees and below your waist.  Compression done wrong will eat your genitals.

I really digress.  Sorry.

But goddamn, recording is a crude and manly art that begs a feminine touch.  Pricks.  Bitches.  Fags.

All necessary.

Once I understood the tools, and it took a while, but once that epiphany occurred, I had no interest in playing it the way everyone assumed it was to be played.  Studio C was my epicenter.  It was where potential wizards and obvious dipshits were first assigned to study the craft.  The idiots got fired.  I spent thousand of hours in that room as an assistant.  Mostly Demos for the record company but also working with the ‘B’ listers like Quiet Riot, Peter Criss and Alice Cooper.  Older luminaries like Mel Torme, Solomon Burke and Don Cherry.

I ended up being the last engineer to record Don Cherry alive with the Watts Prophets.

From Gospel to hip hop to metal, it was an excellent education.  A solid, real time crash course in just about everything.  I got a brainfull everyday.  I was a shitty assistant but I was learning to be a good engineer.

I understood there was no way I would survive as an assistant engineer.

I understood I didn’t want to.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I could do what these outside engineers could do at least as good and probably better.  At the end of the day, I was right.  I did it better.  Much better.  I heard it in my head.  Took a while for me to pull it off.  I befriended most of the A&R staff and earned their trust.  It didn’t hurt that in the beginning, no one on either side, the recording studio and the record company being separate entities, paid much attention.  The deal was, the A&R department had first dibs on the room (studio C) from nine a.m. to five or six p.m., five days a week.  That’s when demos got done.  The smarter, more adventurous A&R people took advantage of the free time in a world class studio to literally sound out artists with any potential.

Those smart ones I courted with a vengeance.  I made friends with them.  Before long, I was scouting bands and bringing them in under their auspices while they handed me projects.  Pierre Vudrag, Jeff Suhy, Michael Whitaker, Teresa Ensenat, David Anderle, Amy Brokaw (daughter of Tom)………

They just wanted a decent engineer they could trust and maybe spend an afternoon away from the desk and phone playing house and or record producer.  At the same time I began to have some facility as an electron director, I became an earnest student of the socio-political mechanics and egos of young ambitious record company wannabe heroes, lazy but talented musicians and older and wiser record execs.

I made friends.  I began to be a salesman.

Thus I was able to avoid dancing with more substantial egos of the famous engineers or producers by assisting.  I worked with plenty of the good ones but successfully avoided most of the assholes.  I never once assisted Shelly Yakus, Niko Bolas,  only once for Don “Dry as a bone’  Smith…….I did learn tons from Dave Thoener, Ed Stasium and Paul Hamingson, Thompson and Barbiero, Bob Clearmountain, Keith Forsey, Mike Shipley, Jimbo Barton, Tony Platt, Boll Dooley, Steve Barncard ……..

The rest of the twenty four hour cycle and weekends, the studio was free to book the room for profit.  It was such a technologically advanced complex that most people made the mistake of underestimating the little 32 input API without automation.  It was the red headed step child.  The truth was, it was an amazing sounding console and the compliment of outboard gear available in a facility like A&M, made Studio C an absolute asset in the hands of any capable engineer.

My contemporaries were damn fools for not realizing the room’s potential and assuming it was amateur hour.

It was a brilliant venue for overdubs.  But I tracked twelve piece bands, grand piano, horns and full on rock bands, all live, with very pleasant and thickly rendered results in that little 10×15 foot room without a single iso booth.  I used the “Dance Hall”, an equipment storage room down the hall with the master fridge for fruit and perishables.  It also housed some ancient power grid.  Hello sixty cycle hum and phase horror.  I used the guard shack even further down the hall.  I ran cables all the way out to La Brea Ave. on a Sunday for vocals.  I put mics and instruments and amps in the public bathrooms and in the other studios before or after they showed up or went home.  I recorded in the lobby and the live echo chambers.  I made the asses of the office bitches itch by using the mic closet for isolation with amps so loud they couldn’t hear the phones ring.  It was often a dorm room carnival with the phone on the console ringing and us not answering because we knew they just wanted us to turn it down.

Fuck them, it was a recording studio.

We recorded vocals live on La Brea Avenue.

I routinely blew up speakers.  A percussionist spilled his bong into the console and smoked the power supplies on my watch, a story that made it all the way to New York, where my assistant tried to tell me the story without realizing who he was telling it to.  I set him straight.  I had no respect for impedance, voltage, wattage or amperage.  Voodoo bullshit.  When the woofers in the NS10’s were toast, I muted the console, pushed the kick drum fader all the way up, cranked the line amp, twisted fifty hertz all the way to the right, master buss fader and console gain on overdrive and flicked the output toggles open.  Turned down the lights, started the multitrack and watched the little fuckers cough sparks.  Called the techs for a swap.  Learned that from the Kill Bennedy.  Seems like it was always Mad Dog Mannon who showed up with a fresh pair.

He looked at me funny for a decade.  Fuck you Mannon, I always liked you.

By the time I was done, that whole nine to five thing meant dick to me and eventually, I meant dick to management.

I was pushing other people out of the way.  Merely a way of life in a high pressure, high stakes environment.  Borja, Bogosian and a sweet man named Steve Smith who always wore a suit because he was engineering at A&M yet still honked a fatty from his endless briefcase supply. They all would see their gigs dwindle because of my ambition.  These men all taught me well and as importantly treated me in a way that was far more humane and kind than I was used to.  Good men.  I did blow with Borja in the gardens of Yamashiro and Mr. Smith always got me high while I drove him home.  Bogosian took me to the apartments of strange women during the riots and I always got laid.

Good men that I owe thanks to.  Before it was done, each knew they could trust me should they need to step away from the session.  I engineered completely for each of them before it was over.

I became better than them.  I did, no shit.

Inside of eighteen months, I’d taken over the bulk of the A&R departments business, drawing salary and benefits from the studio, between $25 and $35 an hour from the record company and vacuuming the best training any aspiring engineer could possibly hope for.  Most studios weren’t anything like A&M but many were like Studio C.  A new band every week or sometimes every few days for what felt like a forever paradise.

I ate, drank and slept it.

Along with my partner Alex Reed and a few complicit A&R guys, we’d eventually come to control the Studio C schedule for years.

Golden and ripe.

Once I’d figured this out and began to be able to make things sound like they did in my head,  the whole paradigm changed.

I went to town.

We started making records.  No one but Alex and I saw it coming.  Every band we recorded, we saw as a body of work with at least one one radio single.  I recorded and mixed a band named Wink, Michael Lockwood was the guitar player.  He now plays for Aimee Mann and functions as her musical director.  Back then, the singer named Roxy, did a head stand in the ice chest and the band paid me with a brand new pair of sixteen hole oxblood Doc Martins.  I have a Polaroid.  I still have those boots and I wore them on every record I ever made.  A plexiglass drumkit I barely got a handle on, good God it was hard to contain, a genius and kind guitar player, and a junkie singer.  I think we did a seven inch vinyl single and that would be my first produced, recorded and mixed by.

It sounded awful.

Thank you Michael Lockwood.

I kept at it.  I could hear it in my head.  It didn’t take long for me to hear and understand what the engineers I assisted were doing wrong.  I could hear it in my head.  Competent engineers.  More than a modicum of skill.  But they just didn’t get it.  They’d turn it up and make the paper NS10 woofers dance but that was easy.  Make ’em dance with clarity, thump chunk and chaos how you mean and then we can have lunch.  No shit.  That’s what is.  Sorry, but that’s what I did because I heard it in my head.

I figured it out and Alex Reed came along because he was way far from stupid and he knew I needed him as much as I was gonna need anybody.

Alex became my assistant one summer and he asked me to help him with an actual record he intended to make with friends of his from Berkley.  I’m not sure how much I contributed because I was suffering the slings and arrows of being a professional assistant engineer at that point and I really lacked both courage and conviction.  I was more than a little spent and beaten.

I ended up getting drunk a lot and trying to teach him to engineer.  To his credit, a fine record was made.  It was to be the first for both of us.  A band called Love Nest.  A very cool quirky record.  I still like it very much.

The truth is, Al thought I was the biggest most arrogant prick he’d ever met.  It’s true, he didn’t like me at all.  Ironically, we share the same birthday but we are about as different as the sun and the moon.  He was painfully bright, knowledgeable and both subtle and diplomatic.  I was loud and forceful.  He taught me far more than I ever taught him and he learned what I had to offer at a pace that humbled me.  I miss him.  We talk, but not often enough.  Music was our bond, we are otherwise different.  Almost entirely.

I have still, as much respect for him as anyone I ever met.  Alex Reed is is an example to me.  His mother passed while we were working together.  The very first time I was called upon to produce, record and mix a record, I said yes knowing Alex would agree to be there with me.  We made records together and you just can’t know what that’s like unless you’ve done it.  We slept in bedrooms, shitholes and fleabag motels.  We were more than the sum of our parts.  We did four times as much musical good together as we could have done by ourselves.  God love you Al.  I trust you are well.  We did the best we could.

Drinks for my friends.

The far right neocons persist in marginalizing themselves with hate and irrationality, taking with them the entire GOP, Christians, evangelicals, conservatives and moderates.  It’s a spectacle.  A spectacular one.  One buoyed exclusively by vituperative vitriolic invective vehemence.  Pardon me but brainspank literally loves alliteration and it just happens to be entirely true.

I’m trying to tell you it lacks substance entirely.

They’ve abandoned facts and reason completely for fear, anger and hatred.

Republicans used to be wrong, not unreasonably stupid.  Not so unapologetically obtuse.

Misguided perhaps but not insane.

What the fuck happened?  Whatever it was, it took place on my generation’s watch.  The elephantine have always been more racist, a little more greedy, a little too covetous of power and influence, a little too hypocritically pious and a little too lacking in compassion for the plight of the average American. That at least has been my perception.

Over the last two decades however, they’ve morphed into the political equivalent of little Regan from The Exorcist.  Pun firmly and resolutely intended.  Nasty, pea soup projectile vomiting, head spinning, cartoon effigies. When called on their bullshit, they hide behind an ugly wrongheaded nationalism thinly disguised as patriotism.  Naked ugly jingoism.  Ironic the “isms” they so casually toss at the rest of us.

They leave scales like fish wherever they go.  It’s true.

My generation has witnessed the emergence and fortuitous exorbitance of such profound and disgusting dicktards as Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck  and Sean Hannity.  Elected representatives like Santorum, Ensign, DeLay, Palin, Dumbya, Grassley, Bachmann, Cantor, Gingrich, Joe Wilson and John Boehner.   Birthers, Deathers, Teabaggers, Tenthers and Twelvers.  Michael Steele, Joe The Plumber, Dick Cheney and Fox fucking news.  Each and every one on this incomplete list of a uniquely American cavalcade of contretemps is a lying, obfuscating, shamelessly and hypocritically unpatriotic goddamn piece of shit.

And they all represent the contemporary conservative movement.  Bear with me, I’m getting at something here.

Worthless, toxic, poisonous entities.  Zero contribution to constructive public discourse.  Absent everything save prurience and avarice.  Giant boulders of sand in a smallish tub of Vaseline.  Kidney stones the size of a thumb in an already inflamed urinal tract.  Ugly and dumb.

Soon, they’ll disavow being mammals.

Take for example the rhetoric over the Nobel.

Some dickhead from Fox, Brian Kilmeade, wonders aloud whether Obama delayed the decision on troop deployment in Afghanistan to better his chances for the Nobel.

The Human Shitsmear announces that the “Nobel Gang have just suicide bombed themselves”.

Some asshat from Redstate said it was part of an “affirmative action quota”.

Glenn Beck thinks the Teabaggers deserve it more.

And The Human Shitsmear says “Something has happened here that we all agree with the Taliban and Iran about and that is he doesn’t deserve the award.”

Curiouser and curiouser.  Crazier and crazier.  From shrill and scary, to gangs of banshees on meth.

Thus they further isolate themselves and alienate the humane and honest.  As their bubble shrinks, it’s skin grows thicker.  They hear and see less and less of the real world.  Their shared view, ever more myopic.  They inhabit more and more the CAVE dweller acronym.   To wit: citizens against virtually everything.  Get it?

I could spend all day providing egregious example after outrageous foray into overt racism, lies, baseless smears, deliberate distortions, hypocrisy, mean spirited interpretations………but see, I already have.  I have been for years.  I’m not alone.  Not by far.  They are so very afraid and fear is a great force multiplier.

It’s a fact that the number of Americans who identify themselves as Republican is way down and there’s no end to that atrophy in sight.  Disdain for for their lies and misrepresentations grow.  The last two election cycles have borne this out.  Yet The Human Shitsmear still has about 20 million listeners and Fox yet enjoys better than twice the audience of CNN and MSNBC combined.  I can’t help but be ecstatic about the their self perpetuating and therefore self defeating dynamic, but they stall manage to kick a lot of balls and infect substantial consciousness on the way down.

I believe at least 25% of any given population is incorrigibly stupid.  Roughly the number that still supported Nixon.  Roughly the number that still supports Bush.  It’s a fact.  Show me what you’re workin’ with.

Ah but:

“The White House’s battle with Fox News reached a new high on Sunday, when Communications Director Anita Dunn went on national television to blast Fox as a partisan organization that functions as an appendage to the Republican Party.

“Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party,” Dunn told CNN, adding, “let’s not pretend [Fox is] a news organization like CNN is.” Dunn also took her beef to The New York Times, saying in a Sunday interview that Fox is “undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House [and] we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” -The Nation

Fuckin’ A.

There are those who would say, among them David Gergen of CNN, that the administration can neither afford to engage the FOX network in the context of so many larger issues at hand, and that it is somehow unseemly or inappropriate.

I admit I understand, and even feel that on certain levels, but still I have to call bullshit on it.  This ain’t your dad’s TV News.  There are no rules, no decorum, it’s all changed and these guys are assholes.  They have no integrity, they’re in it for the money and they won’t quit until it stops paying.  Reptiles pure and plain.  They all spend time on a warm rock every day.

Never has a President been so embattled with zero emphasis on policy, ever.  They never ever even bother to introduce or even recognize actual stated, written positions or policies ever.  Ever.  FOX news and it’s cadre of asshole spokesholes is the worst example of journalism in this or any other civilized country.  They are the suicide bombers of the American Media.  They would never die for their beliefs but they willingly fall on swords of stupidity and blow themselves up with combustible bigotry all day long.  The key difference between them and the real thing is the lack of integrity and courage.  Truth and honesty.  The ‘real thing’ being fanatics with the twisted courage of conviction and journalists with truth as their ideal.  FOX falls no where in between even those two extremes.  At the end of the day, they sacrifice their dignity and self respect.  They wake every morning fresh, to plunge into ignorance, reckless hostility and enmity and lie after fucking lie after fucking lie.

For nothing but the filthy lucre.

I’m completely aware of the potential consequence (s) a protracted street brawl between the White House and an entity like FOX and I am fully in favor of this administration taking them on and cleaning their clock.  When they do their damndest to lie, call them on their irresponsible and misleading shit.  You think the brain trust at FOX can even approach the level of intelligence, wit and wisdom in the White House?  Me either.  It’s not like it will be heavy lifting or time consuming.

I know full well that there are way bigger fish to fry but this has a strategic component to it too.  Although the mouth breathers are a minority, they are a sizable and vocal one, and the most obvious and singular ringmaster is…….well, the Cartoon Network and then FOX.

Again, this ain’t your dad’s TV News.

“This ain`t no party, this ain`t no disco, this ain`t no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey, I ain`t got time for that now”  -The Talking Heads

I believe it to be an absolute imperative of cunning and tactics.  Bring it.  And just maybe, for once, the Democrats will be seen to have a spine and a pair of testicles.  Wouldn’t that be cool?  Like punching the bully in the mouth so hard he falls down in front of the bus and the Democrats just once, walk up the steps breathing steam, proud and righteous.

That’s what I’m talking about.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

 

The President of The United States of America was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace today.

Wow.

“By awarding you its most prestigious prize, the Committee is rewarding your determined commitment to human rights, justice and spreading peace across the world, in accordance with the will of its founder Alfred Nobel. It also does justice to your vision of tolerance and dialogue between States, cultures and civilizations.  Finally, it sets the seal on America’s return to the heart of all the world’s peoples.” -Nicolas Sarkozy

Nice.

Obama himself admitted to not being certain he deserved the honor and saw it as less of a tribute than a call to action.  I can’t help but admire his lack of pretentiousness.  He is serious and sincere and if they would just let him do what we elected him to do.  What he came to do.  It is so painful to watch, overt cockblocking every time he puts a foot forward.  Nasty, senseless, painfully obvious obstruction for the sake thereof instead of reason or logic or common fucking sense.

It is clear to me that the Nobel committee intended to send the message that it liked the talk, but eagerly anticipated and encouraged the walk.  I’m confident that about sums it up.  There is no mystery here.  They realize the potential power for good America holds in her fists and understand that we now have a leader of the caliber, intellect and compassion to loosen those fists into hands for helping and shaping and lifting.

Seems as though we’re always at a crossroads, a critical juncture.  This President presides over the most persistently precarious positions and potential shifts of paradigm of any President in my lifetime at least.  The ill conceived placement of a single toe, and we stare nuclear holocaust, collapse of the world economy, famine and pestilence in a face so proximate, it’s collective exhale will wither the young, the infirm and most of the worlds crops.

Understand we flirt with disaster by the hour.

Most Hostess and Armour products will endure.  I think I’ll bury some to be safe.  Oh, and some Ramen.  There’s always a silver lining.  Something to snack on while we rot will mitigate the circumstances somewhat.  I’m hoping for blankets and comics until we liquify or sublimate to gaseousness.

Our man literally has the weight of the world on his shoulders.  He bears it, along with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, with grace, dignity and humility.  What’s in play here is not just mutually assured destruction, but racism and bigotry and people with rotting teeth because they don’t eat their vegetables or brush their teeth or read the goddamn paper.

I am proud.  I am firmly of the belief that what stands between Obama, the American people and true, legitimate meaningful progress towards peace, justice and equity, is fear, ignorance, racism and stupidity so bold and heedless as to be unable to define itself, it’s reasons or it’s intentions.  These people are fucking nuts.

Our President received the Nobel Prize for Peace today.  The world roots for us and him.  After the eight years long nightmare we visited on the world by either endorsing or acquiescing to the Dick-in-Bush antipathy and odium for the rest of the globe, the civilized nations are looking to us and hoping, praying, that we will turn the destructive behemoth around.

That’s what this means.  This is what they’re asking us to do.  It’s why they did it.  Don’t be stupid.

It was no phantasm.  It was real and horrible and what it wrought will take decades to repair.  So western civilization is asking, beseeching us, to get back in the game of righting things as opposed to ignoring or tearing them apart.  We are all human.  Humanity is both our lowest and highest common denominator.  Above and beyond country, ethnicity, religious provocation or social and ethical imperatives, we are all the same species.  We are humans.  We are people.  All of us bleed, most of us love.

Still, people don’t or refuse to understand the import of such a momentous occurrence.

“It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights.’’ -RNC chair Michael Steele

Like who fuckhead?  Rush “The Human Shitsmear” Limbaugh?  Michele Bachmann?  Ann Coulter?  Hannity?  John Boehner?  Joe Wilson?  Cornyn?  Cheney?  Rove?  Hatch?  Rumsfeld?  Condi Rice?  Palin?

Oh, the list is sooooo much longer.  More than a gutter, more than a ditch.  A landfill littered with losers just like you.  Guilty and stupid.

Not exactly a roster of live and let live, compassion or peace, love and understanding.  Fuck you Michael Steele you ignorant, sycophantic, Uncle Tom piece of shit.  What we have here is a very good day for America and whomever pulls your strings is more sad and pathetic than even you.  You suck as a human being and a puppet.  How do you and yours sleep?

Drinks for my friends.

I’m a little weary of politics.  What say we do something a little different?

You have no choice you fucks.  Ha!

I saw a woman today I haven’t seen for more than twenty years.  I remember her as being somewhat meek and a little mild.  She worked for me back in the day.  In my food service management period.  I was a teenage fast food restaurant manager Werewolf.  Pre-law.  Pre-med.  Pre famous record producer.  Post cartoon character.  Her husband worked for me as well.  He was always a sneaky little shit.  Slow eyed and devious.  I never trusted him and suspected him of abusing her.  Saw him at Costco the other day.  I have the absolute luxury of not being recognized in my hometown.  Looked right at him while he pushed his cart with same sociopathic countenance he always wore when he assumed he was anonymous.   The gift of anonymity works both ways.  I haven’t lived here for nearly a quarter century.

Nobody knows who I am.

Thank Zeus.

The Sunday afternoon dining at Costco is pretty goddamn something.  I’m not sure exactly what, but there were samples at the end of each and every isle.  Soups, pastas, pizzas and sausages.  Weird dumb people everywhere but the vittles were all up in my periphery.  I left satiated and thoroughly entertained.  Mother bought giant portions of things she required like double A batteries and Marie Calendar chicken Pot Pies.  I purchased six months at least of hair conditioner, thirty pounds of cat litter and some decent wine.

I see people I know all the time but choose not to talk to them.

I’ve been here in Nevada for too long but not long enough.  My father fell from a ladder, broke six ribs and a shoulder and is recovering slow but steady.  I’m back to pursuing the business I came to pursue.  Had a very good day today. The finance manager of the Washoe Indian Tribe returned my call to say he’s very interested in giving me a crack at the credit card processing for all four of their retail smoke shops.

I feel as though I’m in a state of suspended animation.  Time seems to pass so quickly here without a lot happening.  Carson City Nevada just may be the strangest place in the universe for me.  Despite any amount of anything, it’s indescribably weird.  People tend to be friendly but ugly.  Nice but dentally challenged.  The ugliest woman I’ve ever seen in my life works at the closest convenience store that carries American Spirit Ultra Lights.  Festooned with moles, blemishes, boils and a rather manly crop of whiskers, she is the most physically repulsive woman I’ve ever seen.

Ever.  Poor woman.  Sheezus she’s ugly.

We’ve spoken.  She’s very nice.  But holy shit, she may as well be the Elephant Woman.

The youth in this town are nearly invisible.  I never see the 16 to 25 crowd.  I don’t get out much because I’m still somewhat fiscally challenged and in lockdown mode.  Keeping my head down and working the phones.

I’ve gone two months without a haircut and pot and I’m rapidly advancing towards an early eighties Jew fro.  I’m not particularly susceptible to vanity but a man does not want to look an unkempt fool.  Keeping my nose and ear hair in check.

I wanted to look her in the eye.  Brenda.   She had no idea who I was.

Same woman has been cutting my hair in LA for almost a quarter century.  From short to half way to my waist and back again.  We grew up together.  Her name is Suzanne and I adore her.  We are very good friends.  She understands my misshapen head and unruly kinky, copious and curly prodigiousness.

So now it’s Brenda.  She worked for me.  She has blossomed.  The truth is, I fooled around with just about all the girls who worked for me.  I think actually, every single one of them.  A few of them, I wrote their high school papers and they brought me breakfast.  That was the deal.  I ended up with more than breakfast.   I crashed a car with one of them.  End over end off the side of a cliff.  We shared way more than breakfast too.  I loved them all in one way or another.

I wanted to look her in the eye.  Brenda.

I drove by the 70 x 24 foot trailer on the corner of Viking and Nye that I grew up in.  In my early teens we built a 25 x 40 foot addition on to it with a garage.  Property lines and zoning codes dictated that I’d lose my bedroom window but I gained a built in bookcase and my own bathroom.  We put a solid mahogany custom pool table and a wet bar in the giant room that was built “hell for stout” according to my father.  He constructed a massive two level deck behind it and sunk a twelve seat, kidney shaped hot tub in the middle of the lower level.

I could play my drums all night without disturbing my parents or sister.

No cable television but life was good.

The lot itself was a quarter acre and we all worked hard maintaining it.  My parents hated the weed choked portion that belonged to the city so we tore down the fences and cultivated lawn up to the road.  My mother had beautiful roses and desert shrubs.  Multiple trees including a crab apple front and center with a rock garden at it’s base.  Elaborate sidewalks all poured by my father with our infant foot prints and a front deck carpeted in astroturf, with an awning and siding to match the trailer that ran almost the entire seventy foot front built by my father.  Two driveways, one off either street, one leading to the garage.

It was a beautiful blooming yard in the summer.  Flowers, roses and trees all celebrating.  Often a race car being wrenched on in the driveway without a garage.  Men drinking Olympia or Hamm’s beer, thick and muscular tanned arms waving arc welder torches and spark spraying grinders while the sun made rainbows in pools of water and petroleum collecting on the sun baked asphalt.  The women sitting on the front deck smoking long feminine cigarettes wearing beehives and hornrims , flipping through Avon catalogs sipping mixed drinks and moving in and out while tending to the inevitably late Sunday supper.  Us kids playing and running in sprinklers, away from bees, perfecting a makeshift slip and slide fashioned from construction site visqueen.  Craigmont grape, black cherry and cream Soda, barbecued potato chips and the constant sound of a sliding screen door smacking closed and sliding open.

Watermelons and cantaloupe…………tater tots and ketchup……….

Flies in the hot kitchen despite collective effort.  Corn on the cob and potato salad.  Jello concoctions and vinegary bean dishes with awful flavor and texture.  I will never comprehend “three bean salad”.  It is vomit.  I’ll bet it’s worse going down than coming up.  Who eats that shit?  Old people with atrophied taste buds and dumb hicks who can’t know better.

Seriously, fuck me.  I’d rather sip from a bedpan.  Nastiness.

Moving right along.

Steaks, hamburgers and hot dogs.  Fruit salads with throat blocking coconut shreds, Cool Whip and mandarin orange slices tasting of tin.  Delicious homemade cobblers, pies and ice cream.  Yes, homemade ice cream.  Huckleberry and lemon-vanilla  you bitches.

Alive and thriving.  A real neighborhood with real neighbors.  A community.  A village.  Safety and security.

Winter holidays were just as festive, somewhat more decorous and far more elaborately decorated.  At one time my mother had an entire outside structure devoted exclusively and extensively to storage of holiday decorations.  She was raised with ten brothers and sisters.  Birthdays were never a big deal but holidays, Christmas in particular, were huge, in her childhood and mine.  She made sure.

I think what I’m doing here, is writing a love letter to my mother.  Everyday for the past week, she’s been in the 38 foot home away from home, cleaning.  I’ve watched her clean every wheel, every window, apply wood wax to every wooden surface and take clean rags to every blind.  She’s dusted, mopped, vacuumed and wiped every surface accessible.  Her plan is to rent an industrial shampooer tomorrow for the carpets.  She is a house on fire.

She then comes in every single night and prepares a balanced meal for my father and I.

I help as much as I can.

She is a fart in a whirlwind.

She sets things for the meal in motion and then we sit outside and play with the the black canine tripod, throw her toys across the lawn, giver her treats, have a smoke and a drink or two and eagerly talk about nothing or things very important.  I find myself getting impatient for her to join me on the patio.  I’ve learned to make our drinks and just wait until she’s ready.

My mother always has something else to do.

I help with cleanup in the kitchen every night.  I wipe up and dry and put away and collect and wrap and stash.

Then I stun her with my prowess at Jeopardy.  We seriously discuss my appearing as a contestant.  “Goddamn you” she tells me because I’m good at it.  I’m really thinking I should look into it.

I wonder, wonder, wonder.  My mother is so bright and perceptive.  Such an active and adroit mind.  What does she think about while keeping herself so busy?  It can’t be the singular curse of an overactive mind because mine never stops and I’m a relatively lazy bastard.  She’s a thinker.  I know she is.  I know she’s churning.  I’m going to ask her about it.

So anyway, I found myself over on that side of town the other day, my spirits were buoyed a little by the beauty of the day.  A high desert Indian summer.  I’d been warned but wasn’t prepared for what I saw.  No lawn.  No growth.  No greenery.  Grey and black.  Decay and rot.  The slow and insidious violence of absolute neglect.  Like beauty and spirit and air had been sucked out.  Trees angry and twisted and dying.  Rotting crab apples littering where lushness used to be.  A sagging roof, curtains askew and windows like blank crazy eyes.  Like a horror movie.  I still dream there.  I hope what I saw does not go that far into my twilight.

It hurt my soul.  It took my breath.  I thought about me and my sister’s impressions in the sidewalk my father made.  I intend to save those.  I will get them.  I will knock on that door and pay the man whatever he wants to lose that part of his sidewalk.  I will do this before I leave this town.  All the magic is gone.  All that we did and built has been erased by apathy.  Everything is still intact in our hearts and minds and spirits.  What we did and who we are is still complete and golden and thriving.

Lonely is the night.

Drinks for my friends.

The talking heads were hard at it yesterday, pontificating on how Obama has yet to accomplish anything.  This pisses me off for a number of reasons.  Dumbya accomplished nothing good for the average middle class American in his entire eight years.  All he did was consistently kick the feet out from under them.  With the palm of his hand, he held skulls against any given surface and visited violent intercourse upon them dispassionately, save some boyish cowboy glee, from behind.

Primeval.

Archaic.

Yup, in the ass.  Clearing brush and evildoers.  Smokin’ em out.  Fucking retard.

He smirked and smiled all Alfred E. Newman, chuckled and believed his retardedness to be anointed, appointed and ‘special’, to carry out such an awful and dastardly thing.  God made him do it, as opposed to Cheney and the PNACs I guess.

I beg to differ.

The quintessential violent and clueless bully who turns out not to be so bad when it’s over.  Except he’s dumb as a stick.

Oh, and President.  Elected twice and all.  By us and and all.  Without prejudice and presence of mind and all.  I mean President of the US of A.  Dumb as a goddamn branch floating in a polluted river.

And all.

The clusterfuck that Obama inherited is arguably the worst any president has ever walked into.  The blind partisan obstruction by Republicans is easily the most egregious in our history.

A wounded cur, sits and drools increasingly intrepid and malignant.  Snarling and snotty and shrinking.

Still, she keeps barking and smacking.  Protesting everything that moves.  She just can’t stand anything that moves.  Anything that moves.  Oh, she can’t tolerate it.  Kill it, she thinks, the vicious bitch canine trained to hate toddlers and grandmas and the disabled.

You know, not since FDR has any president walked into such a shitstorm.

Bear with me as this is entirely different, from FDR, or any other presidency ever.  Waaay different.

Needless to say, FDR strode bravely into the worst of modern times.   Still, he enjoyed near total congressional cooperation.  At least to begin with.  All on the same page, all willing to advance what needed to be done.  Patriotism over partisanship.  Few questions asked.  Get this shit done.  It was bad and in need of immediate repair.  What follows is the golden phrase.

They worked together for the benefit of us all.

Our man faces the extreme opposite while enduring the same environment and circumstances.  No cooperation.  A stark and ugly deficit of good will.  Twice as hard and he’s black.  So six times as hard.  This man is hoping for eight years and despite my lack of religion, God love him, his family and all of their souls. Godspeed, good luck and pancakes with peanut butter and syrup for each of their souls.

I say to you, you fucking go.  You charge ahead and do as much damage and make as much difference as you can.  Bring it.  Show us your courage and we will fly your flag.  I care less that you are our first black President than I do that you are MY first inspirational one.  You speak to me and to we and it really could be you and me together.  You may stumble, but as long as you get up, we will will be behind you.  At your back.  Wanting and hoping for the the same things.

Bring it and we will stay.  I will.  I will, you are stuck with me.

Fury, hatred and racism have once again become the dubious hallmark of the far right Christian wingnuts and an alarmingly malignant  component of the generic conservatives and workaday GOP.  The likes of Limbaugh and Hannity are so emboldened they simply lie these days.  By what?  Where does the courage come from?  Why?  Where do these fucks get off?

The public option has not the support of the majority they screech, it’s a government take over they wail.  I watched Cornyn puke it up yesterday morning.  He was lying.  They lie.  Over and over, again and again, on national television or whatever venue they happen to ass warm a seat in.  The money for their re-election is a greasy pizza with shitty crust but plenty of cash cooked and delivered by the folks who own and control over 16 percent of our entire GDP.

Let me tell you something.  Americans are goddamn dumb.  Gullible.

You losers who eat this shit should be ashamed.  Show up at the 7-11 after dark for your beef jerky and canned meat.  Slim Jims and greasy food for dipshits and protein starved mouthbreathers.  Watch your Springer and listen to your Hannity while you drive around in your ridiculous trucks feeling your genitalia are somehow more special than they should be.

Over two thirds of adult Americans want and wish for a public option.  I don’t believe a president has ever been elected with as vastly voluminous a majority as the one in favor of a simple public option right now and today.  It’s what we want.  It’s so simple.  But this is your government at work and it’s disgusting.  One of the biggest businesses in the history of man.  The precise and exact opposite is the truth and they know it as well as I and as well you should if you can afford to pay any attention at all.  Without shame or conscience they just throw tires on the fire, so everyone can see the thick toxic smoke.  Lie and lie, because that’s what they’re paid to perpetuate.  No different than your bought and paid for Congresspersons and Senators.

If we do not get this, it will not be ok.

I’m really not holding my breath because the Democrats have been nothing but a lesson in how to suck so far without regard to future endeavors at all.  Oh well.  I’m a little drunk.  Yer mama.

Drinks for my friends.

Obama wasn’t able to score the economic boon that would have been the Olympics in Chicago.  I kinda assumed it was close to a done deal and he was going there to seal said deal.  Turns out it was the opposite.  Turns out that’s why he showed, to try and save it.  This is our President and it’s why he’s our President.  The shining American city of Chicago placed dead last.  Sucks don’t it?  Not just because of the potential jobs and renewed  dignity on the world stage, but because of the mill grist his unsuccessful sprint to Copenhagen will avail itself of; we’re off to disingenuous right wing shovelry again.

They wasted not a second.  I listened to Hannity and the Human Shitsmear yesterday morning and they were having a field day.  Extended recess and shitty pizza for the retards.  Toxic glee. They pretend not to be cognizant of the guaranteed monetary benefits to be reaped.  They posture as though it were warrantless hubris.  They carry on exploiting the stupid and making a killing on the backs of the ignorant.  As shameless and vulgar a debacle as I ever have borne witness to.

That’s not entirely true, they’ve done so much worse.

Still, this sucks.

He tried.

I’m not about to say he fucked up.  He didn’t.  He did the right thing.  It was important.  It would have been instant jobs.  Enough to eclipse the current losses for months.  It is why he was there.  He understood it be an opportunity to salve his country’s considerable wounds.  Deep lacerations courting infection that he discovered only after walking in.

The irony is that it has more to do with the leadership for the previous eight years than anything else.  It was Dick-in-Bush that raped the pooch.  Our system for awarding visas is archaic and that is the least of it.   Whenever former leadership took a step, it was bad and stupid.  Unilateral wars and severely mitigating civil rights and ignoring laws both domestic and international for reasons unsound and flat out made up.  No wonder the world thinks we’re shit and I can’t blame them.  It isn’t Obama’s fault that everyone now knows we’re dicks.

Yet, everybody knows.

Can you say conventional wisdom?

Zeitgeist?

I could not and do not blame them.  We’ve been the biggest assholes on the planet for almost a decade now.  I’m sick of America and I live here.

I simply must be unpatriotic.  Un-American.  According to all the jingoistic rounheaded fucktards.

I pride myself on being well informed.  I am well informed.  I’m as certain of this as I am of adoring  large breasts.  Boobs.  Knockers.  Huge scoops of flesh and the sigh of brainrot.

Oh Lord, don’t strike me down.

Once again, our man’s biggest problem is the one who came before him.  Handicapped by the mentally handicapped.

The mess he inherited is more copiously voluminous, egregious and self inflicted than any man before him in recorded history.

Obama walked willingly into a shitstorm.

Remind yourself of that.  Often.

He knew.

George W. Bush wasn’t evil, just breathtakingly stupid, though everyone around him manifested inky terrifying darkness of a magnitude beyond 8.9 on the Richter-O’-graph.  This here is a mere symptom, a flesh wound requiring a band aid in the scheme of damage done and waste laid.  Obama is no ordinary President but I’m hear to tell you, and I endeavor to make it clear, that his circumstances may just be as extraordinary as the birth of this nation and the attendant violence that ensued.

I fear the violence that has yet to come.  I fear it because I know it’s coming.  I fear it’s inevitability and the uncertainty of how it will most certainly emerge.  The Rednecks Cometh.

They just can’t stand that a nigger and his wife sleep between the crisp white sheets in the White House.  An affront to their sensibilities.  So much so that they attack every common sense thing he does.  Maneuvers and criticisms are ugly and transparent.  Senseless and obvious.  Plain, overt, and embarrassing for the rest of us.

Were he to walk on water they would whine about his inability to swim.

I stole that but it’s completely true.

I think we should suspend the sale of Happy Meals.  Prizes in cereal boxes are shit these days so I’m not overly concerned there.  While we’re at it, Crackerjack treasure is shite too, so you know, whatever.  We have nothing to celebrate until Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Those holidays are stained with dubiousness too.  We are so hopelessly flawed.

The most racist among us protest so vehemently that they are not, while they are nothing but.

We’ve got no reason to be happy about a goddamn thing.  Our tits are in a ringer.

This shit is way fucked up.

Drinks for my friends.

My father would say ” I don’t understand all I know about that.”

Me too, or me either.

How is it asshats like Boehner and Bachmann, Cantor, Beckerhead, Limbaugh and Hannity can be comfortable in their own skin inveighing against Obama for spending eighteen hours in Copenhagen, lobbying to bring the Olympics to Chicago in 2016?  If he’s successful, it will bring hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars to the beleaguered city starting the day after next.  They all know this, yet they pretend not too, hoping we won’t know the difference.  Understanding that the people who listen to them exclusively don’t want to know.

Preaching to and preying on the idiots.  How do they sleep?  With a diaper I’m sure.

They understand that’s why he’s doing it.  It’s a chance at a tourniquet and maybe the saviour for an opposable thumb or at least a pinkie toe.

There is no downside for the great unwashed.  As MSNBC pointed out this evening, Dumbya spent the better part of a week on photo ops and ass slapping in China as an embarrassing spectator.  This cartoonery, while embroiled in two worsening wars and seismic rumblings foreboding an impending economic apocalypse.  He spent a third of one of the most disastrous periods in American history on vacation clearing fucking brush on his own stupid ranch.  It was cool, Dick was in charge.  Bush vs. brush for well over a quarter of the entire time.

“Let’s have a non-alcoholic beverage, some chips and watch this here football contest.  Watch I don’t choke and nevermind that daily brief about imminent terrorist attacks.  Hell, I’m the President, have a  real beer.  You like deviled eggs?  Goddamn, I do.  We got whiskey here somewhere.  Sombitch.”

Obama takes a week in the Hamptons and they behave like he’s ignoring Armageddon.

It may have been Michele Obama who said something like, if he walked on water they’d say he can’t swim.  Yup.

You may get away with accusing him of spreading too thin but you can’t accuse him of not working his ass off for us.

I really need to keep this short, I’ve got plenty else going on, but goddamn it’s hard to watch.  As far as I can see, this man is killing himself, working very hard and with beyond ordinate, point blank results.  Iran agrees to let UN inspectors inside in a matter of weeks and publicly states a willingness to entertain outsourcing nuclear fuel enrichment.  That could mean never having enough on hand to build a bomb and never having to say you’re sorry.

That’s just this week.

That’s fucking huge but we complain or worry about his briefest of sojourns in Denmark.

Biden’s got a jacked up lid but I’m fine with him having the conch.  He’s a loose lipped cashier but I trust him.  I own what it is to have an unruly wig and loose lips.

Health care reform is steaming down the mountain and I for one am cautiously optimistic.  On this alone is far further than any President has ever come.  He plays it cagey but he’s too smart to not know what he’s doing.  He may be wrong but don’t think he doesn’t have a plan.

Get the fuck off him you shameless mouthbreathers.

Drinks for my friends.