Music and whatnots

I take the minor victories pretty seriously these days.  Example?  Of course.

I heard Jesus Fever twice yesterday and that nauseating tickle of a teenage memory would not be relieved until I bumbled onto youtube to listen to it again.  And again.  And again.  Good song.

And I wanted to know where the hell I'd heard it before.

Something... something about the guitar... something in the ghostly way it resonates in that damn song was making me think of a long bus ride to Encinitas when I was probably too young to take it but who was paying attention anyway?  I used to hop on at the beach and transfer near UCSD with a book that I read for only as long as it took to get beyond the familiar.  When I couldn't name the streets, I watched the suburbs blur in the salt-sticky window and the coastal fog linger in old Torrey Pines.  When I was a little older, I took the same bus leaning into a friend who got sent away-- for something or other-- to a military school beyond even the unfamiliar.

But on the particular trip nagging my craw, I was alone.  Maybe I had my walkman on.  Or maybe I didn't.  Either way, eventually I got off the bus in front of Lou's Records.  And there, I acted like I knew what I was doing even though I didn't.  I went straight to The Smiths because that was the best way to pretend.  From there, I searched for vinyl-- judging the music by its cover art-- hoping that the music in the sleeve would play the smarts or darkness or confusion or gravity or whimsy of the album design.  Hoping, I guess, that it would play just for me and all my supercharged adolescent angst.

At Lou's, I memorized the posters on the walls and the album covers that I wanted and the t-shirts I could never afford but would covet on the widening shoulders of boys I knew.  I found REM and Alien Sex Fiend and Echo and Psychic TV and the Buzzcocks and Bauhaus and Siouxsie and I wished, back then, that music stores could be more like libraries, so I could sit and listen undisturbed as I gauged an opinion on whether the songs would do anything to make me feel a little... better.  A little... something.  A little... cool.

Lou's would let me listen to an album but only with permission.  And that required human interaction that, at 13 as at 36, put me off.  I never liked authority and I didn't want to talk to some pompous, world-wise 18-year old in an over washed version of the shirts I wanted.  Or t-shirts that introduced me to bands I didn't know so eventually, I would covet the shirt.

On this one afternoon, I remember the guy's fading shirt.  It was The The.  And so I bought an album because the guy wore horn-rims and I'd noted, under the torn cardigan he was wearing on a previous visit, a Smiths shirt.  So, after a long trip back on the bus, I heard Uncertain Smile for the first time.  Or so.

Yesterday, as I listened to Jesus Fever, I heard The The again, buried in a ditch so shallow I could still recognize its form.  So I searched for Uncertain Smile.  And I listened to it.  Again and again.

And that was the minor victory.  Finding it.  Someday, maybe I'll get a fiefdom or sell a screenplay or be able to play the crazy hard chop chord on mandolin that seems more impossible than either of the other goals.  Maybe.  But for now, the minor victory of linking the good in the old and the new is cool.  The memory was too.

How does he do it?

Last night, I had a dream that I was in Tokyo, drinking heavily and watching a lot of kids dance to bad reggae.  I've got to give my brain big props for its integrity with my language skills.  Instead of pretending like I could understand the chattering of the cool kids, I simply sat, struggling to recall the language I used to know.  When a Japanese word or phrase surfaced in my surplus memory, I used it.  Tabetai!  Kirei na?  Chodai!  "I want to eat!" I was saying.  "Pretty, huh?"  "Gimme!"

And when someone responded in Japanese, I waited for a translation, because that's what I would need now.  And when I awoke, I wanted to smoke a cigarette more than I wanted to learn Japanese again.

I have a friend, or something like that, who was always willing to take risks that I couldn't fathom.  He smoked pot early and fucked early and had a nervous breakdown well before any of our peer group had even started to comprehend the value of one.  One night, he rearranged my room while I cooked dinner.  I never doubted the superiority of his floor plan since he was the artist and I was just a residual friend, held over from adolescence for reasons that would never bear consideration but weren't necessary in the face of some mutual, molecular bond.  In those early days, the formation of stable molecules trumped other rational factors, I think.

Nowadays, I don't talk with the friend but I think we keep up with each other.  And these days, I'm admiring his decisions, from afar, wishing- with crossed fingers- that I might ask him just how he puts one foot in front of the other to take the life-saving steps that Saint-Exupery says we must take.  I'm not entirely sure why I want his viewpoint on the matter, but it's probably because I imagine that he makes art day in and day out, and to do this, I wonder, does he complete some daily reckoning or does he save that for the end?

I cross my fingers for the same reason that I used to tune out some of the innocence-fouling stories he shared sleepily with me in late, late night phone calls.  Maybe I can't hear it yet.  Or maybe I never wanted to know.  Truly, does anyone need to know that another eighth grader was just that willing while everyone else was watching Halloween?  Maybe I only need to know that life demands that steps must be taken, and maybe I don't need to know how someone else takes the steps.

Maybe, like all things worthwhile in life, it's better to generate my own rambling apocrypha than to rely on the musings of other minds.  That said, I'm comfortable reporting that one foot in front of the other is the way I take my steps.  It's the riskiest damn thing I've ever done.

Babies v. babies

I've just come home from an afternoon at the cafe.  It's not a bad life.  I sit, eat lunch, drink a pot of tea and wait for inspiration.  The cafe is about a quarter mile from my house.  I walk there, and it might be the only trip into the public realm I make all day.  I don't mind that one bit, having realized lately that the more I keep from interacting with people, the less annoyed by people I am.  From people, I exclude those that I know, those on bikes, those who run when I run, and those who take their dog to the park when I do (as long as we don't have to do too much chitchatting).

Look, it's my epiphany and I'm happy here and usually I start to see the ugly bits of the underbelly well within a year somewhere but this pleasant isolation is saving me the sight.  Yay!

At the cafe, women minded their children.  Or didn't.  A kid came to stare at me while I wrote so I smiled first, hoping to end whatever mesmerization had overtaken the kid.  Then I raised my eyebrows, tilted my head and exhaled, at a moderate volume.  The kid moved away.  I'm not entirely sure if I'm supposed to indulge wandering kids like that, but even if I did, what would I possibly have to say to them.  "Hey, kid, you like to stare at women slurping tea, huh?"  I'm not sure this contributes in any more beneficial way to the village we're supposed to raise than my loud, impatient sigh.  Kids gotta learn, right?

All of this to preface two funny articles appearing today on the tabloid wannabe online paper over here:  the first, headlined, "New 'win a baby' game draws fire," and the second, headlined, "Get sterilised... and win a car."  They use an 's' in sterilized.  I'm just quoting.

Ah, cultural deficiencies.  Whereas India is battling the conundrum of overpopulation by incentivizing a sterilization scheme with offers of a car, motorcycle and tvs, plus a little cash bonus of about twenty bucks to go through with the procedure, over in the UK, a fertility charity got a license from the gambling commission to sell tickets for IVF treatments.  You'd think, maybe, the two countries could just have a chat about their disparate conundrums and engineer some sort of population swap.  Is that horrible?  Well.  Just a thought.

I swear I'm pretty sure there are a sufficient number of babies in the world to keep us all in baby puke and intrusive stares for all time.  As my intentionally child-free doctor told me, "I'm going to be so much richer than all those silly mums.  Plus, I don't have a list of complaints to share with my co-workers."  Indeed.  Well, she did complain about the complaints, but I suppose that's a bit like complaining about the transfixed kid in the cafe.  We get to walk away if the parents don't figure out how much their offspring (or complaints about their offspring) bug.  Yay.  I'll take my $20 now, thank you.