When I'm older I hope Ani DiFranco's still out on tour. The way I picture it it's 2042 and she's biggest on the Six Flags circuit. I'm the septuagenerian double-fisting super-sized Diet Cokes, my hearing aides cranked to max, standing right by the PA. I don't think the way she plays guitar and decorates those open spaces it with intellect and depth of feeling will ever lose resonance for me. It means more the older I get. On the other hand I hope it's just her and not a full-band. I can't imagine that cymbals and I will still be on speaking terms at that point.
After the show I'll speak to her and here's how the conversation will go.
Me: [something articulate]
Ani: (long pause). Wow, no one's ever put it like that before. Can we be best friends?
Me: Yes.
Then I'll freestyle rap, spinning a long history of human pain, reckoning, and ultimately reconciliation. She'll beatbox. Then we'll ride some demented centrifugal roller coaster together and I won't throw up. Which by then will likely constitute my full concept of a romantic hangout.
Me: [something articulate, and cadential].
Ani: (Longer pause). Thanks man, I've been waiting for this conversation all my life.
Fist bumps are exchanged. Exeunt all, smiling.
7.10.2011
6.06.2011
Hoagiefest generation/frank admission/kicking and screaming
The eldercare term Sandwich generation implies a single sandwich, a single squeeze or sandwiching if you will. For those among us with more complex conundrums I'd like to re-appropriate from Wawa branding the term Hoagiefest.
Hoagiefest generation -- n., a generation or subgroup of the same finding itself navigating a pile of caregiving sandwiches. Some are classics, some are shortis, some are two-foot party subs. There are many, hence the fest.
Image: the family caregiver stands perched on one end of a seesaw while clowns throw a bunch of sandwiches at her.
Image(alternate): as the family caregiver sleeps, restlessly and half out of his mind, a posse of clowns piles hoagies one by one until he wakes up to find himself covered in Wawa hoagies.
What is to be done, brothers and sisters? We must eat a lot of hoagies. That is the nature of the Hoagiefest.
I want to admit here that caring is alien to me. I love, I really do, but I also connect with my relatives and family members like an alien from another care-free planet, like a sci-fi android discovering a new type of experience, Emotion. Being called upon to do what's right is to grow comfortable in "social situations," replete with "conversation" and "eye contact."
As reported in these pages, a few years ago I gave up drinking. And as these pages also inadvertently chronicle, drinking had played an essential role in company morale. Without it I felt lonelier, more depressed, crazy. The choice seemed to be to start drinking again, health consequences and genealogical tendencies toward alcoholism be damned, or to do some work.
That concept of work has me starting to dip into AA. A couple of months in I can report two things with certitude. First, I think it could help. Maybe it already is. And, there's the part I find controversial: these meetings mostly take place in churches. I have been on church premises more in the past three months than at any point in the past 15 years. No one has to drag me there kicking and screaming. I just head straight for the basement and it all works fine. I feel hope (bullshit aside) and somewhere outlined in the far future is "peace," something I did not envision prior.
One of the things people argue in the rooms is fake-it-til-you-make-it on the spirituality question. For those on similar fences, when asked to close a meeting by repeating the Our Father in a group, I suggest that you replace in your mind the word Father with Hoagie. This simple transposition strips the prayer of most of its patriarchal vestiges (most but not all, dear reader, for if a hoagie has gender it must be masculine). The remainder is downright innocuous, possibly even containing the seeds of a code to live by.
Hoagiefest generation -- n., a generation or subgroup of the same finding itself navigating a pile of caregiving sandwiches. Some are classics, some are shortis, some are two-foot party subs. There are many, hence the fest.
Image: the family caregiver stands perched on one end of a seesaw while clowns throw a bunch of sandwiches at her.
Image(alternate): as the family caregiver sleeps, restlessly and half out of his mind, a posse of clowns piles hoagies one by one until he wakes up to find himself covered in Wawa hoagies.
What is to be done, brothers and sisters? We must eat a lot of hoagies. That is the nature of the Hoagiefest.
I want to admit here that caring is alien to me. I love, I really do, but I also connect with my relatives and family members like an alien from another care-free planet, like a sci-fi android discovering a new type of experience, Emotion. Being called upon to do what's right is to grow comfortable in "social situations," replete with "conversation" and "eye contact."
As reported in these pages, a few years ago I gave up drinking. And as these pages also inadvertently chronicle, drinking had played an essential role in company morale. Without it I felt lonelier, more depressed, crazy. The choice seemed to be to start drinking again, health consequences and genealogical tendencies toward alcoholism be damned, or to do some work.
That concept of work has me starting to dip into AA. A couple of months in I can report two things with certitude. First, I think it could help. Maybe it already is. And, there's the part I find controversial: these meetings mostly take place in churches. I have been on church premises more in the past three months than at any point in the past 15 years. No one has to drag me there kicking and screaming. I just head straight for the basement and it all works fine. I feel hope (bullshit aside) and somewhere outlined in the far future is "peace," something I did not envision prior.
One of the things people argue in the rooms is fake-it-til-you-make-it on the spirituality question. For those on similar fences, when asked to close a meeting by repeating the Our Father in a group, I suggest that you replace in your mind the word Father with Hoagie. This simple transposition strips the prayer of most of its patriarchal vestiges (most but not all, dear reader, for if a hoagie has gender it must be masculine). The remainder is downright innocuous, possibly even containing the seeds of a code to live by.
3.13.2011
Dora on the Skids
As kids they find success, as teens the magic wears off. As young adults they finally consummate the relationship, mostly, she'll remember later, out of boredom. We did it, we did it, we did it yeah takes on new meaning.
The salad days don't last, the spark disappears. The Animal Rescue Center needs a fresh coat of paint that no one will provide.
So too for their hearts. The thrill of the rescue stops being enough, maybe it never was. Dora breaks first, falling into alcohol, weed, heroin, coke, crack, meth. Diego resists but as always he follows her lead. Boots too, and he falls into it worst of all, insatiable. The boots get pawned, and finally the sad little monkey ODs. Not on any one chemical, of course, but rather like his mind and little monkey body stretching in different directions until something breaks. Hardened, Diego throws him out with the trash.
There's the problem of Swiper. He keeps stealing their stash and one morning they ambush him. Dora urges the killing blow. Diego flinches. They let him go with a warning, after which she blackens Diego's eye. Both eyes. The general effect of animal husbandry diminishes: Mother maned wolves nervously shield their cubs, river otters impart to their children never to trust the shifty-eyed pair from up on the hill. Prickers and thorns become a much more bearable alternative. They catch Swiper again, this time sure they'll never be able to trust him. He's still alive when they cinch the trash bag, and all that night neither of them can sleep, sure he's still hanging on, whispering 'oh man' out in the dumpster.
High, high, plenty high. On good days there's enough to go around. On bad days they bicker and fight. One night after a double-stabbing they decide to split. Diego takes up with a couple of porn stars, becomes a kept man. Dora becomes a poacher outright. Ivory. Sharks fins for soup. Maybe jealous, maybe pragmatic, she takes Diego out, throwing him alive into a vat of corrosive acid. The bones are enough to fill two trash bags. Instead she builds a xylophone, carefully aligned from small to big. Resonant. Beautiful.
Time passes. Dora has a change of heart, cleans up her act. Now she's got a desk job, something in project management. The work has a numbing effect (more maybe than the drugs ever could) and it gives her an excuse to go every weekday to the 41st floor of a Madison Avenue skyscraper. In the winters the sunsets are heartbreaking.
The xylophone collects dust in public storage. Dora gains weight, nothing much that you'd notice. A few pounds attributable to contentment.
The salad days don't last, the spark disappears. The Animal Rescue Center needs a fresh coat of paint that no one will provide.
So too for their hearts. The thrill of the rescue stops being enough, maybe it never was. Dora breaks first, falling into alcohol, weed, heroin, coke, crack, meth. Diego resists but as always he follows her lead. Boots too, and he falls into it worst of all, insatiable. The boots get pawned, and finally the sad little monkey ODs. Not on any one chemical, of course, but rather like his mind and little monkey body stretching in different directions until something breaks. Hardened, Diego throws him out with the trash.
There's the problem of Swiper. He keeps stealing their stash and one morning they ambush him. Dora urges the killing blow. Diego flinches. They let him go with a warning, after which she blackens Diego's eye. Both eyes. The general effect of animal husbandry diminishes: Mother maned wolves nervously shield their cubs, river otters impart to their children never to trust the shifty-eyed pair from up on the hill. Prickers and thorns become a much more bearable alternative. They catch Swiper again, this time sure they'll never be able to trust him. He's still alive when they cinch the trash bag, and all that night neither of them can sleep, sure he's still hanging on, whispering 'oh man' out in the dumpster.
High, high, plenty high. On good days there's enough to go around. On bad days they bicker and fight. One night after a double-stabbing they decide to split. Diego takes up with a couple of porn stars, becomes a kept man. Dora becomes a poacher outright. Ivory. Sharks fins for soup. Maybe jealous, maybe pragmatic, she takes Diego out, throwing him alive into a vat of corrosive acid. The bones are enough to fill two trash bags. Instead she builds a xylophone, carefully aligned from small to big. Resonant. Beautiful.
Time passes. Dora has a change of heart, cleans up her act. Now she's got a desk job, something in project management. The work has a numbing effect (more maybe than the drugs ever could) and it gives her an excuse to go every weekday to the 41st floor of a Madison Avenue skyscraper. In the winters the sunsets are heartbreaking.
The xylophone collects dust in public storage. Dora gains weight, nothing much that you'd notice. A few pounds attributable to contentment.
3.06.2011
imagined starlight
On the UWS there's a Children's Museum, which today felt a little shabby, which today seemed more like three floors of rent and $10 times x visitors a month. They'd closed off the third floor for some kid's birthday party and there must have been 150 kids crammed into the other two floors. Dora and Boots and Diego still smiled but they all looked a little exhausted, there on the walls, putting exuberant Spanish-lite to kid after kid after kid. They must have felt like they were phoning it in. Al rescate sounds so sad when it's only mumbled, when it channels only the vocal cords and no heart.
Hung back and watched N. playing with other kids with these giant blocks and sometimes in the interactions of kids you see it all: How one can ignore the vision of another to fulfill her or his own. How one kid's block tower is another kids raw materials, all in quick time.
How every New York neighborhood is always at least three at once, the one it was, the one it is, the one it's on its way to becoming. How empires are the same, built from those of the past, then picked coldly for the best scraps to form new ones.
The joy of that metaphor being that today my kid was a little emperor, building a tower for the ages, beneficent, the best ruler this town has ever seen, with trumpets and saxophones and drums and bass and guitar to herald a new reign, redolent with young joy, a kingdom bound felicitous under imagined starlight.
Hung back and watched N. playing with other kids with these giant blocks and sometimes in the interactions of kids you see it all: How one can ignore the vision of another to fulfill her or his own. How one kid's block tower is another kids raw materials, all in quick time.
How every New York neighborhood is always at least three at once, the one it was, the one it is, the one it's on its way to becoming. How empires are the same, built from those of the past, then picked coldly for the best scraps to form new ones.
The joy of that metaphor being that today my kid was a little emperor, building a tower for the ages, beneficent, the best ruler this town has ever seen, with trumpets and saxophones and drums and bass and guitar to herald a new reign, redolent with young joy, a kingdom bound felicitous under imagined starlight.
1.26.2011
head full of garbage
A guy wakes up in the morning with a head full of garbage. It's the kind of thing you notice right away, like a headache but deeper-rooted, a terrible awareness before he's even opened his eyes. Confirmed by news radio, painfully amplified over breakfast, a sense that try as may he can't eat another bite. Now the paper too, the words swimming in front of him without sense or meaning.
He's freaked but he doesn't say anything to his wife or his kids about it, he just tries to fake his way through. He gets out to his car and thinks maybe now, but the radio attacks him, billboards, people, even the way they walk and look like a kind of affront. It's bad but he forces himself through the motions, parking, onto the train and in, he and everybody else looking down or straight ahead, a sullen cortege for people who die every day, bored by it. Only it's really like he's possessed, the guy has to force every step. Even the corner coffee he buys every day tastes like shit. He should have asked for more sugar but even that...
He comes to in the hospital with a dull feeling in his chest and his wife standing over him and a team of doctors, everybody in scrubs, everybody wearing masks. "I'm afraid there's nothing else to be done," the doctor tells her. Then a quick shot, and a lot of being gone, and when he wakes up he feels a world better, like a new man.
Every day there are meals, and TV, and a little bit of weather through the window. He likes the commercials best. At first he wonders when they'll let him go home. After a few days he gets used to it, falling with his new family into something like happiness.
He's freaked but he doesn't say anything to his wife or his kids about it, he just tries to fake his way through. He gets out to his car and thinks maybe now, but the radio attacks him, billboards, people, even the way they walk and look like a kind of affront. It's bad but he forces himself through the motions, parking, onto the train and in, he and everybody else looking down or straight ahead, a sullen cortege for people who die every day, bored by it. Only it's really like he's possessed, the guy has to force every step. Even the corner coffee he buys every day tastes like shit. He should have asked for more sugar but even that...
He comes to in the hospital with a dull feeling in his chest and his wife standing over him and a team of doctors, everybody in scrubs, everybody wearing masks. "I'm afraid there's nothing else to be done," the doctor tells her. Then a quick shot, and a lot of being gone, and when he wakes up he feels a world better, like a new man.
Every day there are meals, and TV, and a little bit of weather through the window. He likes the commercials best. At first he wonders when they'll let him go home. After a few days he gets used to it, falling with his new family into something like happiness.
1.23.2011
imagined community and its discontents
Bummer way to listen to sports scores listen for the home teams that lose now picture the kids brought to see their firstest games indoctrinated sad into loss in a more personal way a kid's primer on deeper more real loss in preparation for best case later in life when said loss becomes more inevitable, something to let flow around you with a kind of resignation.
Bummer way to watch the news instead of nodding in solemn judgment or fear at the shame that thieves murderers etc have brought upon themselves rather empathize with the moment they were forced too late to recognize where their own mistaken judgment had led them, to instant forever loss to rot in jail or lose their families or real communities to spend a good part of time ostracized, cast out to either never find forgiveness or have to fight every year for many to find some smidgeon of it.
Escape hatch out of bummerville a perception of the beauty of the play of chance at times bouncing right, love conveyed and echoed back of the joy of growth out of winter's tearing down of the fat kid escaping from his dad's arms running down the stands and out to the court grabbing the basketball from the referee's hands and throwing it from mid-court and against all logic but really with the perfect logic of that moment the ball sinks in a perfect arc, nothing but net.
That next morning the jail doors open and the prisoners go free, lightened by their second chance they radiate peace and understanding then by example we all go free politics and history are cast aside disease goes vanquished religion is recognized for the quasi-helpful approximation that it is and everybody gets together that very night for the world's absolute best grade A number one potluck.
Bummer way to watch the news instead of nodding in solemn judgment or fear at the shame that thieves murderers etc have brought upon themselves rather empathize with the moment they were forced too late to recognize where their own mistaken judgment had led them, to instant forever loss to rot in jail or lose their families or real communities to spend a good part of time ostracized, cast out to either never find forgiveness or have to fight every year for many to find some smidgeon of it.
Escape hatch out of bummerville a perception of the beauty of the play of chance at times bouncing right, love conveyed and echoed back of the joy of growth out of winter's tearing down of the fat kid escaping from his dad's arms running down the stands and out to the court grabbing the basketball from the referee's hands and throwing it from mid-court and against all logic but really with the perfect logic of that moment the ball sinks in a perfect arc, nothing but net.
That next morning the jail doors open and the prisoners go free, lightened by their second chance they radiate peace and understanding then by example we all go free politics and history are cast aside disease goes vanquished religion is recognized for the quasi-helpful approximation that it is and everybody gets together that very night for the world's absolute best grade A number one potluck.
1.21.2011
everything is obfuscated
It's not a particularly deep realization but it's wide-reaching, the degree to which as a culture and as individuals we continue to perfect the eternal non-present.
You could argue that what I should say is the multiply-or-diluted present but the net effect is a desensitization, not just to violence, in the foil packaging of a hamburger as opposed to killing the cow yourself, in drone planes that kill by remote control like in some really really advanced and demented video game. Not just to information, with ten browser windows open ten best internet friends and nothing fully parsed but much gleaned at instant summary distance. But to joy as well, in digitizing our photographs, our correspondence, a bulk of our human connection, and so on and therefore holding these things at an easily parsable, easily forgettable and never impactful distance.
So we've become a place of daydream revolutions, revolutions conceived as marketing campaigns or cute little clubs built on 1917 daydreams, lives and loves and fantasy football and once in a while the deluxe and illustrious mechanism breaks down to let real physics intrude, some kid takes a real helmet to helmet hit and ends up knocked immobile, frozen on the field, trying to move something to show he still can, and they bring in the golf cart, and if you concentrate really hard, you can will yourself to pretend it's a golf course, and the kid's just taking a nap on the way to the next hole.
You could argue that what I should say is the multiply-or-diluted present but the net effect is a desensitization, not just to violence, in the foil packaging of a hamburger as opposed to killing the cow yourself, in drone planes that kill by remote control like in some really really advanced and demented video game. Not just to information, with ten browser windows open ten best internet friends and nothing fully parsed but much gleaned at instant summary distance. But to joy as well, in digitizing our photographs, our correspondence, a bulk of our human connection, and so on and therefore holding these things at an easily parsable, easily forgettable and never impactful distance.
So we've become a place of daydream revolutions, revolutions conceived as marketing campaigns or cute little clubs built on 1917 daydreams, lives and loves and fantasy football and once in a while the deluxe and illustrious mechanism breaks down to let real physics intrude, some kid takes a real helmet to helmet hit and ends up knocked immobile, frozen on the field, trying to move something to show he still can, and they bring in the golf cart, and if you concentrate really hard, you can will yourself to pretend it's a golf course, and the kid's just taking a nap on the way to the next hole.
1.20.2011
light and sweet
Would the best apocalypse for the New York metropolitan area be one of fire or ice, ocean or drought. In any case one would want Godspeed You Black Emperor flown in to provide the soundtrack; they could play what was left of the New Meadowlands, only halfway through a hundred Swoops would parachute in to start punching out any Giants fans in the audience. I was going to say to strafe the place, but even in an apocalyptic setting that seems a bit much. We need a gentler, more bipartisan discourse, an NFC East fan base united against more consistent talents.
The ideal, the gentle apocalypse would be slow building, so people would have a good chance to evacuate, so that only the landscape itself were laid to waste. It could be seen as a starting over, a rejuvenation, to open Manhattan and its new-found canals or lakes of fire to colonization by a new generation of artists and musicians, lured by cheap or nonexistent rent, excellent parking, and a reasonably empty environment for drug use. Brooklyn might survive intact and ascend to primacy, with Bedford as the new Wall Street, although development of the Atlantic Yards project should be halted indefinitely out of respect for the displaced.
Which scares you more, severe weather or faulty social institutions, a press with no moral authority or a government with no financial accountability, nuclear proliferation or bad, bad education.
Advantages to bunker: more reading time. Questions re>: wireless internet access, the culinary limits inherent to canned food, and how I'd ever beat these two at Scrabble consistently over the long-term.
The ideal, the gentle apocalypse would be slow building, so people would have a good chance to evacuate, so that only the landscape itself were laid to waste. It could be seen as a starting over, a rejuvenation, to open Manhattan and its new-found canals or lakes of fire to colonization by a new generation of artists and musicians, lured by cheap or nonexistent rent, excellent parking, and a reasonably empty environment for drug use. Brooklyn might survive intact and ascend to primacy, with Bedford as the new Wall Street, although development of the Atlantic Yards project should be halted indefinitely out of respect for the displaced.
Which scares you more, severe weather or faulty social institutions, a press with no moral authority or a government with no financial accountability, nuclear proliferation or bad, bad education.
Advantages to bunker: more reading time. Questions re>: wireless internet access, the culinary limits inherent to canned food, and how I'd ever beat these two at Scrabble consistently over the long-term.
1.19.2011
current events
voltage I mean like a 60 Hertz hum which you could eventually ignore caught up in other sound but which'll remind you it's there time to time in uncharacteristic moments of purported silence.
voltage I mean like an underlying indeterminacy quantum/otherwise but also its opposite in the sense that if you slow down you might sense general order underlying, a general state of hold together more than not despite the grim machinations of chance, cold. voltage I mean that's an easy thing to say if the lucky streak persists.
man I owe you a lot and lately I see more of you in me than I ever did. For a long time I carried only one image of you around; of someone whose resistors had snapped and electricity shot from your mouth in a screaming stream extincting scorched emotion for all in range, a kind of forceful melting to bleach memory of its joy, a kind of forever storm I still see freakishly parked to flood that fucked house.
but of late I have a different image. I see a kid I would never do that to and a kid you would never do that to the same, a chance for both of us to get it right, and there must have been a lot you got right then, if I could only remember.
voltage I mean like an underlying indeterminacy quantum/otherwise but also its opposite in the sense that if you slow down you might sense general order underlying, a general state of hold together more than not despite the grim machinations of chance, cold. voltage I mean that's an easy thing to say if the lucky streak persists.
man I owe you a lot and lately I see more of you in me than I ever did. For a long time I carried only one image of you around; of someone whose resistors had snapped and electricity shot from your mouth in a screaming stream extincting scorched emotion for all in range, a kind of forceful melting to bleach memory of its joy, a kind of forever storm I still see freakishly parked to flood that fucked house.
but of late I have a different image. I see a kid I would never do that to and a kid you would never do that to the same, a chance for both of us to get it right, and there must have been a lot you got right then, if I could only remember.
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