I Always Know When Somebody's Watching Me

Recently, someone blogged about me and to the best of my knowledge, it was the first time this has ever happened, I'm just not that interesting. I don't think I would provide a link to you, but I can't, the post was quickly removed, though I didn't request it. For the record, what was said amused me, even flattered me, but I didn't really care one way or the other that it was posted.

What I did care about was that nothing written was correct. She could have written I was an asshole and a lot of the time, she would not have been wrong. She could have written I was an idiot and this too would have been true more often than I would like. What was written was what she thought I felt and thought, and it couldn't have been any more wrong, and this was through no fault of my own (he says). I'm pretty sure we've all had relationships where we've realized the other person has no idea who we are, so the only reason this is notable is the medium, not the message.

Anyway, if there is one place that I'll be honest about myself and others, this is it. If I get something wrong about you, let me know. I'l lbe certain to do the same.

Well, there's a tunnel anyway

My dad asked me about my ankle earlier today and I told him that it was getting there, which come to think of it is my now standard response. I told him it was a real long road back to where I was before I fell down that hill. I can't quite see the light at the end of the tunnel, but there's a tunnel anyway, and that's something. Any sandhog will tell you building a tunnel is hard hard work.

Imagine how many words I'd get out of a real injury.

So, I'm running now, and that's something. I can run 4 or 5 days in a row, usually I take off more often, but I don't want to waste a good day now. I've got a lot of weight to lose, and a lot of speed to get back. The weights a pain in the ass, but it'll go, the speed well, it's more subtle.

See, what I can do isn't really running, it's mostly jogging, and I know the difference. I love to run, I'm not so sure I like to jog, but that's all I can get out of my body right now, so I guess it has to be enough.

I'm racing on Sunday, well assuming I get out of bed, I wonder what I'll do.

My Life With The Thrill Kill Baby

I used to be really glad that I had done drugs and back in the day I did them all. It was an interesting phase I guess, one that pretty much started and ended when college did. I've had my bits and pieces after that, but they were few and far between. The fact of the matter is I just don't enjoy it that much anymore. I get ridiculously stoned off a couple of hits of pot and I can't imagine what something stronger would do to me. I just don't want to get that fcked up. Still, I've always been glad I did drugs.

I figure having done drugs, I can talk about them at least fairly honestly. I had a lot of good times when I was fucked up, and I had some not so good times. Like most people I said some very clever shit when I was high, and I made some pretty poor choices. So, for a long time I felt that if someone asked me, I could at least be helpful without being hypochritical, and now I'm not so sure about that.

I never was addicted to any illegal drug and for that matter the chances of my becoming an alcoholic are pretty low as I don't like the drink that much (and if you're rolling your eyes in disbelief, the key word is "the", I like drinking, I just don't really love the taste and never have). The ony thing that ever sunk it's teeth into me is nicotine (and apparantly cookies), and I wonder if that something I'll always want.

I've been trying to quit smoking for a long time now, nearly a decade. It's been a long time since I've been a pack a day type smoker, but I've always come back to the habit, though I've been able to keep it at bay for the most part. Most days the last few years I either didn't smoke or only had a half a dozen, which is not a big habit. Still, the point is I couldn't quite give it up, and even when I did (one time for 8 months) I would come back to it. If you're interested, I haven't had one in over two months, but that's not really the point.

Over the years as I tried to quit and failed I started develop some seriously conflicting feelings about it. There's a part of me that would love a cigarette right now, and it's a powerful part, but it's in conflict with every other part of me. That one part seems like it's sabotoging me somehow, it's a bit self destructive. Sadly, it's not so uncommon to want to hurt yourself a little bit.

I realized that last part while Comic Book Guy (the stroke victim) was in the process of killing himself. and I saw how drugs can be wielded as weapons against ourselves. I fully believe that if Comic Book Guy had stopped smoking and drinking coffee, and eating like shit, he would still be ok today. I'd seen people, myself included, do some stupid things because of drugs and addiction, but I had never seen anyone kill themselves with their habits.

I have a close friend who I really worry about too, he's made some bad choices. I won't get into that here. I know people who have lost people to drugs. I wish I didn't

At some point, I thought maybe the reason I kept on coming back to smoking was it was one of the few remaining ways I was able to hurt myself. I'm not really sure if I completely believe that, and I'm not well schooled enough in psychology to self diagnose to that degree. What I do know is it's led me to look at drugs and addiction differently, less cavalierly.

Once upon a time I would have told you that there was no good reason not to try drugs. I don't think I would have sex until I was 25 if I didn't cultivate the image I did, and partying was part of that. I still think there is a particular type of cool I look with a cigarette, though if I see someone else with one, I think they look really stupid.

Once upon a time, I would have told you to be careful. I would have told you that you can have all sorts of good times, but that you could make a lot of mistakes. I would have told you to do what you wanted but respect what you were doing.

Now. Now I see a slippery slope. I see what happens when bad things happen to good people and how drugs and addiction can factor into that. I've seen where unresolved self esteem issues lead to. I've seen too many bad things, and I feel like I've barely seen any at all. I'm really not sure what I would say to someone. I guess this.

I'm not sure how I feel about doing drugs.

My Chuck Klosterman Piece, Part 2: Pump Up The Volume

My friend K2 is serving in Afghanistan right now and she is the person I think of whenever I need to put a face on the war. This isn’t so unusual except that if you had to sort through the pictures of all the people I know, I don’t think you would have chosen her as the one person who would be in a warzone. Of course, if you knew she was a reserve, you might have, but that would have been a different game, right?

Anyway, K2, this one’s for you. Sorry I haven’t written much lately.

K2 has a lot of wonderful qualities (among them the selflessness to go to war) but perhaps my favorite thing about K2 is that she thinks Pump Up The Volume is a great movie. What makes this even more wonderful is that she’s absolutely right. Why K2 thinks this late 80’s Christian Slater vehicle is a great movie is unknown to me, but I doubt she has a deep reason, which is fine. I think we both like the movie for a lot of the same reasons, one of which is that like all great 80’s movies it posits a suburban reality which little examination will reveal is insane, and which we can relate to. It was a prizewinning formula.

These are the next 5 80’s teen movies that pop into my head.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
The Breakfast Club
Pretty In Pink
Say Anything
Better Off Dead

I’m sure I could come up with a whole bunch of things that these movies have in common, but the two things I find most typical of the 80’s teen film are:

1. Adults are either absolutely clueless and mean no harm or absolutely clueless and obsessed with causing irrational harm. The only adult I can think of in any of these movies that is an exception to these rules is the janitor in The Breakfast Club and by the rules of these universes, he doesn’t qualify as an adult I’m pretty sure he doesn’t really qualify.

2. They all take place in the suburbia that 1950’s television suburbia’s would have become. Sure there’s sex and drugs and rock and roll, but this is largely based in love and deep emotional and intellectual issues, they are almost always somehow wholesome. Overall, good and evil are fairly well delineated, but that may just be teen movies for you.

Anyhow, by the time Pump Up The Volume hit the screens in 1989, this formula had been so well mined that most of the key players (John Hughes, Molly Ringwald, Jon Cryer, Anthony Michael Stewart, as well as Christian Slater) were soon to fade from nearly everything but cherished memory. However, the film got the formula right, had a kicking soundtrack (another valuable element), and added one important component, the internet.

Yes, in 1989 barely anyone had heard of the Internet. In fact, I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that not a single person who saw Pump Up The Volume in the theaters had ever been on the Internet, though some had been online. I’d be even less shocked to find out that every person still alive who saw the movie in the theaters has since been on the internet. In 1989, nobody had heard about the internet except a handful of academics and military types, the Netscape browser was 6 years away. I agree it is kind of remarkable that a teen movie would have been made about it. Pump Up the Volume is that kind of prescient.

In Pump Up The Volume, the internet was actually played by two actors, the radio and the telephone and if you want to take the analogy a bit further, you can. A bored Mark, played by Christian Slater, moves to an Arizona Suburbia populated by three types of people; disaffected youth (the only product of these suburbia), clueless but well meaning adults (parents) and a couple of adults (the principal and vice principal) who vacillate between malicious and imperious when not being both.

Chafing, Mark, aka Happy Harry Hardon uses his radio as a pirate radio station to communicate and sets up a telephone line and mailbox so his audience can talk back. Harry shows grow more and more personal as him and his audience anonymously get to know each other better. Eventually this interplay has consequences and pisses off the adults. It also gets Mark a cute Goth girlfriend.

Ultimately Happy Harry Hardon’s message is to Seize The Airwaves and communicate with each other. It was just a few years later when people were realizing we could do the same with the internet and chat rooms, bulletin boards, and newsgroups proliferated. When all is said and done, Christian Slater was the first blogger, or at least the first to have a movie made about him.
* Upon further reflection, I wonder if perhaps there is one adult in all these films who does not fit the two roles I defined. It all depends on your definition of adult I suppose. Let’s just say everyone over 40, which brings to mind how adulthood is largely being delayed in even further by each generation.

My Chuck Klosterman Piece, Part 1: The Wonderstuff

I wrote this a few days ago few days ago in an email to my friend L. There are some minor changes, names, and such.

What year were you born? 1982? I’m listening to a song that came out in August 1988 and you would have been 6 or 7 I guess, and I would have been 16. The song is by a band called The Wonder Stuff. The first time I heard it, I was in an 11th grade photography class. Some girl named Sarah had a copy of it on her walkman, on cassette.

Cassettes were so awful, be grateful you got to skip them for the most part, if not altogether. Plenty of people endlessly extol the virtues of records, there are even some people who fetishize 8 tracks, but no one, no one ever loved the humble cassette. It had portability, but that was it. Of course, if you want the truth, forget about the record and the cassette, what we’ve really lost is the neighborhood record shop and that’s a shame. There was a lot to be said for a good neighborhood record shop, and sure they still exist, but they’re on the margins. They don’t exist for high school kids I suspect. They have MySpace. They have coffee shops too, and that’s pretty cool. At least it sounds cool when you’re 33.

Anyway, the song is called Red Berry Joy Town and it’s on the Wonderstuff’s debut album, The Eight Legged Groove Machine. I can’t tell you much about Sarah, I’m not even 100% sure that was her name. She was overweight but pretty and had blonde and brown hair and I think we might have talked about going to see a band once. At the time, I actually had a huge crush on a girl named Alison who was also in that class. Alison was a year older than me, a very pretty redhead, and way out of my league. Why she hung out with me, I can’t tell you, but I will tell you she was the first of many redheads that I crushed on.

If I had to make a period specific analogy, Alison was the Molly Ringwald character in Pretty In Pink and I was Ducky, though we weren’t as close as those two fictional proxies and I was never as big a dick to Alison as Ducky is to Molly Ringwald. I used to really like Ducky until I realized what an ass he was a few years ago. Well, I still like Jon Cryer, and for that matter Molly Ringwald, even though no one else seems to.

So, Sarah turned me onto The Wonder Stuff and that was all I ever heard of them from other people, or from anywhere They never came up when I was DJing, not a few years later when their follow up came out, and not last year when they had their reunion tour. I’ve always found that very odd. I’ve never heard them played on the radio, in a club, or at someone’s house. I don’t think I’ve ever heard them mentioned in passing in a work of fiction.

The one place I have ever heard them played is on the Cable Channel (Retro-Active), that plays music of that era and on that channel you will hear not just one song of theirs but several of them if you listen enough and I do, as I seem to be unable to get enough of that era. Now, while that channel does play a surprisingly good variety of 80’s alternative, this is still pretty unlikely.

Of course, somewhere behind the scenes, there is a real person who is putting together the play
list for that channel and I like to think that that person is a huge Wonder Stuff fan and like music DJs everywhere, he or she is playing what he or she thinks you should be listening to. Of course, this DJ is not only playing what he or she thinks you should be listening to now, but what he thinks you should have been listening to in the 1980s and by playing it with other favorites of yours from that era is in fact rewriting history if you were paying attention to that particular thing at the time.

I like to think that DJ is Sarah and I actually the remaining image I have of her, fits that role quite well. Come to think of it, I like to think Alison and for that matter Molly Ringwald and Jon Cryer turn to the Retro-Active channel every once in a while. It’s silly, but I just do