Journal - 2003

PEACE ON EARTH

Bend Over and I'll Show You

I just spent the better part of the afternoon today chasing the legend of Clark W. Griswold. My father set up quite a display of outdoor Christmas lights around the Armstrong Compound this year but they had since gone haywire and burnt out by the time of my arrival. Today, after six consecutive days of eating turkey and mashed potatoes while staring at the darkness on the fence and eaves, I decided that it was time to spend a little time getting the exterior illumination display back on track. It was cold but not Chicago cold. The sun was shining and the Armstrong family dogs, Butch and Kenny, were my eager assistants.

It is a proven fact that Christmas lights couldn't possibly be manufactured more cheaply than they already are. I have plugged in brand new strands still wound around their cardboard or eco-friendly plastic packaging and had them not even flicker. On the other hand, I have a particular strand of fully functional blue lights that I can date back to about the Christmas of 1985. (I can think of another electronic device that works about as reliably and sporadically… my cell phone.) Moreover, unless you had the good sense to purchase all your lights at the same store, of the same manufacturer and on the same day - including backup strands - you might as well forget about finding the proper size replacement bulb for any given string of lights. I had this very problem today. They sockets all look the same and the bulbs have the same grooves and little notch but they simply will not fit into the malfunctioning stand of lights.

Light technology has improved a little over the years. They sometimes now wire strands in series-parallel - as opposed to series - meaning that only half the string of lights go out if one bulb bites the proverbial holiday dust.The past few years has also brought us the addition of little fuses at the male end of the green plug. These have got to be the smallest and most easily dropped fuses in human history. I'm no surgeon, but I am accustomed to working with small electronic parts. These little fuses must have some sort of gravity displacement pixie dust on them. Just try not dropping them with cold and wet fingers. God help the poor frozen fool who drops them into the snow.

All in all, Christmas lights must hold a strange place in the history of electronics. Every year there seems to be a new manifestation of how they are packaged for display on your house. The old school lights had colors reminiscent of a Crayola 8-pack. You can have any color you want so long as you chose red, blue, orange, white or green. Those things had large bulbs that burned HOT. You had your choice of white or colored lights and you could make them blink and that was that. My grandmother outside of Chicago still has functional strands of those classics. Then there were the mini lights, colored, white and eventually strands of a single color. Lucky revelers with a fetish for red, blue or green could properly festoon their houses in accordance with their particular color preference. Chaser lights and lights with a user-selectable pulsing of brightness followed in suit.

Very recently I have seen the arrival of strands of LED Christmas lights. LED stands for Light Emitting Diode and LEDs tend to last for a Very Long Time. You may or may not have noticed but LEDs are starting to be utilized in semi trailer taillights, traffic signals and some flashlights. The switch to LEDs gives the updated machine or appliance drastically increased reliability as the useful life of an LED is commonly measured in tens of thousands of hours. This exponential increase in reliability seems to fly in the face of the obviously planned obsolescence of the average stand of Christmas lights.

Before the dawning of the LED age, the real leap forward in holiday illumination came during the winter of 1999. It wasn't a colony on the moon as foretold in a 70s television program. It was the debut of "icicle lights" that heralded the arrival of the bulb heard 'round the world - or at least 'round the eaves of every house in every town in America. Icicle lights provided two great leaps forward in holiday illumination. Not only were the lights woven to simulate glowing white icicles, but the cords themselves - green only for a generation - were now white.

What this really did was screw up my personal illumination needs for the following Christmas, the Christmas of 2000. My family had long since moved south and was planning an old fashioned Illinois Christmas in my Chicago apartment. I felt that it was imperative that I procure a tree worthy of an entire Armstrong family Christmas. I visited one of the finest Christmas tree lots in Chicagoland, the unparalleled Gethsemane Garden Center on North Clark Street. At Gethsemane I purchased a magnificent tree and the most impressively built Christmas tree stand I'd ever seen. It was a welded steel testament to over engineering called Bowling's Last Stand. The Bowling family sales pitch was "The last stand you'll ever need," and they were not kidding. The stand would take a direct hit from an AK-47 and still keep the tree properly watered.

But I digress. At one point I made the switch from using colored lights on my tree to using white lights exclusively. That precise point happened to be that particular year when my family was due to make the 600 plus mile trek to my apartment. Since those new fangled icicle lights were the talk of the season the prior year the powers that be had flooded the stores with them for the Christmas of 2000. Several trips to home improvement labyrinths in both Chicago and Evanston were fruitless. Stacks of icicle lights taller than I taunted me at every store while I haplessly searched for simple strands of white Christmas lights.

A tip from a friend saved the day at the 11th hour. Drug stores in downtown Chicago are basically useless for anything other than severely overpriced emergency items like bottle openers and film for distraught tourists hell bent on taking home their own shots from the top of the Sears Tower. A friend who worked for the Tribune said that the Walgreen's across Michigan Avenue from their office had some white lights and it was just about my last hope. I actually left home for my day job early intent on getting them before someone else discovered what had to be the last cache of white Christmas lights in the metropolitan area. Fighting a morning rush hour snowstorm and hordes of frenzied shoppers I arrived to find that the Ark was still in the Well of Souls. I grabbed more boxes of white lights than I needed, heaved an audible sigh and headed back out into the snow. Christmas was saved.

As for this afternoon… I tried all the usual tricks and I got most of the lights functioning properly. I tweaked and I shook them. I replaced bulbs and cursed. My hands got numb and my nose ran down onto my jacket. Nobody was there to do the Ellen Griswold drum roll but I got them going just the same. Merry Christmas to me.

What a Difference a Year Makes

One year ago tonight I ate a spinach salad and a turkey burger from a branch of a popular corporate restaurant. I awoke later that night with a stabbing pain in my stomach. I was in too much pain to sleep so I got up and tried to read a book hoping against hope that the situation would improve. It didn't. In fact, it was merely the warm up for a macabre downward spiral of vomiting and seemingly endless pleading for the sweet salvation of death. I can laugh now but it wasn't very funny one year ago tonight... or one year ago tomorrow for that matter. I recall crawling on the floor to the front room in a blanket in order to watch the ball drop in New York on television. I once watched it in person from the roof of my apartment building on 9th Avenue. Funny how things change. Every day of the year has its yearly anniversary. Countless mundane happenings pass us by year by year. Birthdays, holidays and the beginning of a new calendar year remind us all that we are all spinning around in a never ending repetitious circle. In this case my memory is crystal clear. Being seriously ill always gives me an appreciation for how good it feels to feel normal. I survived to feel normal another day. It was a grand year. 2003 brought tears and laughter. It brought blood and sweat and the elation for simply being alive. All in all, it was just like all the rest. Thanks for sharing it with me. 12.30.03



Visions of Sugarplums

Christmas night. December 25th, 2003. The usual holiday sleep deprivation torpor has quietly set itself upon the Armstrong household. Mom is in Dad's recliner playing a handheld Tetris game; a gift of mine on an unknown Christmas past. Dad is snoozing on the couch with the remote in his hand and the din of the unwatched news is spilling out of the living room into the room where I am writing. A sibling and his girlfriend are asleep on the other couch. There are several pounds of leftover turkey, stuffing and potatoes sitting in the fridge. Due to scheduling conflicts I was the one who prepared the nearly 22 pound turkey this year. Not that I mind.

I have a new brother in law and a new cousin in law this holiday. The in law thing is new for me. I have a sizable family and there are many in laws, but heretofore none in my nuclear family. (Nuke-you-lar to our illustrious president.) I am also the only single member of my family - not counting my seven year-old nephew. Sometimes this feels odd, other times it feels too much like right.

I'm sitting in the semi dark back room listening to quiet music and penning one of my last journal entries for the year. What a year. My eyes took in so many wondrous things. There were some tears and, thankfully, copious amounts of precious laughter. 2003 taught me once again that I have the best friends in the world. You can't buy talent like that. 2003 seemed to be a year of push and pull. Of tension and release. What random events, thoughts or feelings do I recall tonight, sitting in the dark with a soundtrack of Kathleen Edwards, Mark Knopfler, Jeff Tweedy, Woody Guthrie, Elliot Smith, Hem and Greg Keelor?

First off, my dear friend Tony Piscotti's CD Release Party. This was back in April or so. It was a rather cold early spring in Chicago. Damn cold, in fact. You can see the annoyance on my face in this picture of me standing in front of some antiwar signs. I drove up from Alabama where the weather is rather mild at that time of the year. I was wearing shorts when I rolled into The Windy City for the first rehearsal. Chicago made quick work of my fair weather getup.

Tony (the artist) and I (the producer) had been working on his CD for quite some time by the time of its release. Looking back I can't honestly remember if it was two or three years. Perhaps somewhere in the middle of the two. It was just another classic example of Joe Armstrong's Modus Operandi of Indirect Routes. Where Sidewalk Chalk Manifesto was released in 2000, Tony's Soapbox Parade stood with a foot on either side of September 11th, 2001.

Most things in my life that had the distinction of traversing the event wound up being changed. The only real thing that changed about Soapbox was the lack of funding to complete it in our originally planned timeframe. This was brought about by the general volatility of the job market. Loc worked in a coffee shop for part of that dark time. I had all manner of lackluster and low paying jobs. (Oh yeah. "Who the hell is Loc," you might be asking? It is my long running nickname for Tony.) We both survived and his album didn't turn into any sort of angry American drivel. In fact, it is quite nice. Tony has a penchant for the dramatic and romantic. He is soft-spoken and his music reflects that in the best way possible.

In an attempt to capture the diverse sound of the recorded tracks Tony amassed an army of musicians for the CD Release Party. He sang and played guitar. I played guitars, mandolin and harmonica as well as singing a little back up. The rest of the core band consisted of some usual suspects… Dan Gottesman on drums, Jason Upchurch on bass, and the incomparable Daryl Coutts on Hammond organ and piano. On top of all that went a fiddle player, a cellist, a percussionist and three backup chick singers

It is fun for me to play sideman. I get all the guitar tone without the stress of fronting and organizing a veritable circus. With all those players, Tony's gig was assuredly a three-ring event, and because Tony chose to do the event in a giant loft, we were responsible for procuring - or at least organizing - food and beverages for the attendees. I tried just being "the guitar player" but I wound up setting up the stage, assisting with loading in the rented PA, and even tapping the first keg. Not that I ever mind that last bit.

What am I getting at, exactly? Not a thing. The performance was fun. Loc sold some CDs and everybody seemed to have a good time. It was cold, though. 12.25.03



Please Clarence, Let Me Live Again

Happy Holidays, everybody. I hope this holiday season finds all of you safe and well - in peace of mind and action. I wonder how many people with "peace on earth" signs in their yards and living rooms supported this year's war. I'm off on the road again, homeward bound. This is the sort of journey that I hope can be uneventful. Jingle. 12.23.03



Where You Bean?

I'm here. I swear. I haven't died. At least not yet today, but it's early. I have been rather busy as of late, and my host computer has been cannibalized for parts. I haven't been able to use any of my usual software that I use to write and post all this nonsense. I'm back in action... for now at least. How is everbody? I have much to rumitate about. I have played a couple shows. The US Army caught Saddam Hussein. I've been to The Hopleaf countless times. I have yet to finish the story of my Trek to Halfdome in Yosemite. And then there's the Holiday Season and all its splendor. Where to even begin? 12.19.03



Where Do You Come Off Calling Me Nick?

A big hats off to Nick Trisanto and his Full on Friday program. I did an on-air interview and performance with him on WLUW today. College radio is the best. Make sure you tune in and support them at 88.7FM in Chicago, and also streaming at WLUW.org.

We've also got a Joe Armstrong Band reunion gig tonight at the Elbo Room. It has been a long time since we were all onstage together so tonight will be special. Sounds like a beer commercial, doesn't it? In some ways, it's always a beer commercial when we play. More beer and less commercial. Here's to good friends. 12.5.03



There Goes the Bride

Thanksgiving was quite the event at the Armstrong Compound this year. The usual bleary-eyed ten-hour drive and family lunacy were augmented by the wedding of one of my sisters last Friday. It is now official. I have in-laws. The law of averages more or less dictated that I, the eldest of five Armstrong children was to be married first - especially considering that there is a six-year gap between myself and the next in line. My life has worked itself out in strange and wondrous ways and it seems that my typical modus operandi involves eschewing societal conventions. I always thought I'd be married by this point in my life. That being said I wasn't even sure I'd live this long. As for now I am still alive and my life keeps working itself out day by day. In short, a heartfelt congratulations goes out to my sister Jessica and her husband (there's that word) Jamie.

Radio Free Tundra

I'll be doing an on-air interview and performance on Chicago's WLUW this Friday at 2:00pm. Tune in to 88.7 on the FM dial and listen to me act like a bona fide musician. Not that it is usually a dial anymore. You can also stream the show on the Internet at wluw.org. There is snow in the forecast for this Thursday and Friday so I'm sure I'll have plenty about which to talk. Not that I really need an excuse for that. 12.2.03



There's a Hole in My Buckley

I'm playing Uncommon Ground's Jeff Buckley Birthday Tribute gig again tonight. This is the 4th year running that I will have played at the event. It is a great opportunity to meet some musicians from elsewhere and to celebrate the memory of Jeff and his music. A few artists from last year are back for this year's performance. Like so many other things in life I simply cannot believe that it has been a year since I last did this gig. In some ways it seems like only yesterday and in other ways it seems like a lifetime ago. So many miles. So many trials. So many smiles.

Here is the blurb I wrote for the program:

I'll be honest. I'm not sure I liked Jeff Buckley the first time I heard him. The music and songs were great but I kept thinking to myself "What in the hell is this guy shrieking and warbling about?" And then I heard Lover, You Should've Come Over. That was my first defining moment and precisely when I became a fan. The second moment came when I was sequestered in a recording studio years after Jeff's passing. A long day of laying down tracks had left my ears shot and I wanted nothing less than complete silence. My friend suggested that we watch a little of the Live in Chicago DVD at the console so we could use the high-end studio monitors to listen. I reluctantly relented and then sat slack jawed for 108 minutes. When it was all done and the silence returned I was left with a renewed sadness of his loss, an elation that the world got to share in his gifts, and the grossly ambivalent feeling that made me at once want to pick up my guitar and to never pick it up again. I feel pretty much the same way today. I find reasons to keep picking up my guitar - and in doing so - assure that Jeff's gifts will endure.

11.17.03



Via Chicago

OK then. Here I am. Back in Chicago. My whirlwind 17 states in 3 months walkabout has brought me back to the city that feels most like home… Chicago. I've never liked the weather and it was hard to leave LA but the universe wanted me to spend this holiday season in the Windy City. All energy flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet. What a food I would be to defy him.

I got myself a gig scheduled at one of my old haunts, The Elbo Room on Lincoln Avenue. This is where I first performed as a frontman and I have done many shows there over the years. I dusted off and lit up the Joe Armstrong Bat Signal (in the shape of a pint glass) and it is looking as if it will be a full on one night reunion tour. We'd love to see you there. Visit the schedule section for details. We're going to blow the roof off the dump… in a manner of speaking. 11.11.03



AM

There's a 5:00 AM now. I know this because I recently traversed an entire night drinking beer and catching up with an old friend. Just on the other side of any great night lies an entirely new and separate day - complete with a sunrise and traffic and headlines. A good hangover must be earned. It must be carefully nurtured with the finest of craftsmanship. These things cannot and must not be rushed. I had a fantastic hangover all day yesterday. Not fantastic because of any inkling of regret - fantastic because I had a great time and wouldn't have changed a thing.

Standing On Top of the World

I was in Yosemite National Park a few weeks back. The place is basically indescribable. It is every bit as amazing as the Ansel Adams photographs you might have seen except that it is right there in front of you - splayed out in full color and gleaming in the sun. There are so many little details about the place and I am positive that I didn't scratch the surface of them on my 3-day visit. I didn't want to leave but I had other roads ahead of me. Must. Keep. Moving.

One of the main Yosemite feats of strength for us mortals is to hike up to the top of the aptly named Half Dome. Legitimate climbers flock to Yosemite from all over the world to experience what might be - in the words of Comic Book Guy - the best-climbing-ever. An Italian husband and wife climbed up the sheer face of Half Dome while I was there. It took them two days and they slept lashed to the face of the basically vertical rock. It can take several days to climb Yosemite's other big attraction, the sheer rock wall of granite called El Capitan.

The Yosemite book that I purchased strongly encouraged readers to take two days to tackle the 16+ mile round trip to the top of half dome. This book also suggested that the ultimate hiking feat of strength was to do it in one day. I'll give you three guesses as for what I felt I was compelled to attempt. The first two don't count.

The next morning the alarm(s) went off in my tent around 5:00am. In a campsite, everyone can hear everything that everyone else thinks they can't. After all, those nylon walls of your tent are thinner than your underwear. I made it a point to turn off the alarms as soon as possible and get myself going. I like mornings. I even like sunrises. But I am in truth a musician who would prefer to see more sunrises at bedtime than when it is time to get up. It was still as dark as could be when I zipped myself out of my tent and onto the bed of pine needles that covered the ground.

A word about bear lockers. Even given the countless hordes of humans that pass through the Yosemite Valley every year the place is still very much wild. This wildness includes the presence of our favorite omnivores, bears. Sadly, grizzly bears have long since been extinct in California but there are still plenty of other bears about and they are serious about eating anything you might have that remotely resembles food.

Once, when camping on a bear-populated island in Lake Superior just off the coast of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I found several shredded and gutted backpacks that had been dragged into the woods by curious and hungry bears. Strewn about the area were chewed up tubes of toothpaste, lip balm, deodorant, ketchup packets, clothes, soap and other flavored/scented items. I didn't find any bones, although I admit that there was a part of me that wanted to. It makes camping more exciting.

In Yosemite there are bear lockers everywhere. Every campsite has one. The day parking areas have them. The rangers strongly encourage visitors to store everything remotely edible in them. These lockers are large enough to hold all your food and your cooler and maybe even a petulant toddler - no matter how much you might want to feed him or her to the bears. They have a bear proof mechanism on the latches and are impressively built. Bears are allegedly able to remove the doors from cars if they become motivated to eat your Carmex. I wasn't sure if I had a bear clause in my auto insurance policy so I filled my bear locker with most of my things. The main annoying thing was the metallic squeaking and creaking sound they made every time somebody had to open them - which was often.

So there I stood in the pitch blackness. The campsites in Yosemite Valley have peculiar lighting due to the fact that they are all situated at the bottom of several thousand foot tall valley walls. More than once I would catch something way up in the sky out of the corner of my eye while puttering about my campsite and notice that there was a mountain just behind the trees where no mountain could seem to exist. Such is the uniqueness of the topography in Yosemite. Because of narrowness of the valley and the height of the valley walls direct sunlight only hits the valley floor around mid day. It is sort of like those cavernous city blocks in downtown Chicago and New York where the buildings rise high all around and sunlight is scarce.

Again, in the blackness I stood in front of my open bear locker with a flashlight clenched in my teeth - amassing my gear for the day. Several power bars, a spare flashlight, a camera, my Yosemite book containing the map, a compass and a profusion of water. You really can't take too much water. I had a full 3-liter Camelback bladder and a spare 32-ounce bottle. I ended up drinking every drop and could have used more. The Upper Pines campsite was asleep save for me. Clad in my fleece in the morning chill I crunched through the pine needles towards the trail head.

There was enough diffused light to plainly see by the time I reached the marker for the Half Dome trail. I produced an apple from my gear and began my ascent. It is very nearly a mile in altitude change over an 8-mile trail from the valley floor to the summit of Half Dome and I was about to walk every step of the way. Like most trails, the lower portion is paved to facilitate the appreciation of nature by those of us unwilling or uninterested in the idea of exertion. The incline is gentle and there are even bathrooms a few hundred yards up the trail. I had seen my first serious hikers at the trail head, a couple obviously outfitted for the same single day Half Dome trip. I passed them and then they passed me as we alternated breaks for photo ops and the catching of breath. The valley floor sits at around 4000 feet of altitude and it takes a couple days to fully acclimatize to the thinner air.

There are options to chose at one point. I chose the longer route on the way up and was rewarded with breathtaking views of the rising sun and the panorama of Yosemite spread out before me. There are also two very tall waterfalls along the way. And I mean tall. As in hundreds of feet. Plural.

It is a long and arduous hike just to get above the treeline. It took me about four hours to complete that segment. Once you're there you have to walk up hundreds of roughhewn steps in the granite of the backside of Half Dome. And then, at the top of the stairs you find a cable run that takes you the final 680 or so feet up the 45 degree slope. There are metal posts drilled into the side of the sloping mountain and on these posts are two metal cables. One for each hand. This last bit is not for the faint of heart or less than fit and that means that I found it to be exceedingly fun. Word has it that it can take a REALLY LONG TIME to get up the cable run if there are many people in front of you or if someone gets spooked and decides to turn around, or worse still, just sits there paralyzed in fear halfway up.

As you hoist yourself to the end of the cable run on the top of the mountain - quite literally half a dome - the grade levels out. You can spend a good deal of time wandering around on top of this relatively flat surface but I headed straight for the edge. There is simply nothing like inching up the the edge of a nearly vertical mile drop. Half Dome makes the 600-foot drop into the North Atlantic at Ireland's Cliffs of Moher seem like looking over the side of your bed. I had met a walking compatriot, Matt from San Francisco on the way up, and we stopped to rest and eat a little snack-a-loo with the entire Yosemite Valley and a deep blue sky before us.

A mild frenzy of picture taking ensued. One has to have the money shot in order to prove that one accomplished such a feat and is furthermore foolish enough to stand at the edge of a perilous cliff.

And this shall wrap up Part I of the Saga of Half Dome. More to come very soon. 10.25.03



XO

Such sad news. I awoke this morning to hear that Elliott Smith had taken his own life yesterday. Most of my readers should know who he was, but for those of you who aren't familiar with him - he is best known as the Beatles devotee indie songwriter who was first heard prominently featured on the Good Will Hunting soundtrack. His morose but beautifully romantic music can best be compared to Nick Drake, but Elliott Smith had his own definitive - if somewhat derivative style. But who isn't derivative of the Beatles in some way? Perhaps saddest of all was the fact that Smith was only 34 years old.

Intolerable Translation

I saw a couple movies yesterday, the latest by my heroes, The Coen Brothers, Intolerable Cruelty and Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation. I enjoyed both of them. I've heard a couple vapid reviews of IT and it just illuminated the fact that some folks just don't get the Coens. I confess that I have a degree of blind faith in Joel and Ethan Coen, but that blind faith was earned with laughter gleaned from every one of their films. My attorney and I have oft said that we would buy "Coen Futures" - meaning that we would happily put down money for tickets for Coen movies yet to be filmed.

Lost in Translation was a good movie. Nothing more need be said. Bill Murray has grown into a fine non comedic actor and he handled this script deftly.

Trick or Heat

So here I sit in Los Angeles. It's the 21st of October and I'm sitting in front of a fan because it has got to be 95 degrees outside. Biology and the prejudices of others have conspired to keep me jobless. I have been finding work along the way to keep myself fed and this strategy works better sometimes than others. Unfortunately for me this happens to be one of those other times. To complicate matters, my friend's computer is a painfully slow 150mhz machine that connects via a dialup modem. It's a little trip back to 1996. Come to think of it I was more or less broke back in 1996 as well.

I just checked weather.com and those folks say that it is currently 97F outside right now. This is the warmest October 21st of my entire life. Not that I am complaining. In a sense I am sitting on the other side of all those times when I wrote how much I'd rather be in California as the snows of Chicago swirled around my dormant and frozen Weber grill. 10.21.03



I Love LA?

I'm headed out to LA again tonight. No time for to write. I will miss San Francisco. I went to the Magnolia brewpub in the Haight District last night. They have a fine IPA, several hand drawn ales (very rare) and a great staff. The employees were pretty good as well. Yuk yuk yuk. But I really will miss this place. Sometimes you arrive somewhere you have never been that just somehow feels like home. 10.16.03



Bigfoot Country

I have been moving. A lot. In the past week I have been to Yosemite National Park, Nevada, Lake Tahoe, back into California, the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company headquarters in Chico, CA, past Mount Shasta, into Oregon, back into California, all through Bigfoot country, Humboldt County, Eureka, Fort Bragg, Boonville and back to Marin County. Along the way I slept in a tent, hiked up Half Dome, ate fluffernutter sandwiches, took a shitload of pictues, watched the Californians shoot themselves in the foot by electing an action hero, got locked into a park and had to sleep in my car, watched the Cubs win a playoff series and managed to hit more than a handfull of brewups and craft breweries. Phew. I don't have the time to write in detail about these adventures at this time but I will get to it soon. Hi ho. 10.9.03

Microscrewed

Cursed technology. In my desire to keep up with e-mail during my travels I have employed a number of tactics. I have web mail for my primary e-mail account but it is wholly unreliable. I set up the account with Microsoft's Outlook at a friend's house along the way. Outlook is the program that I normally use at home for that purpose. In my policy of leaving only laughter and memories behind I attempted to archive all the e-mail I had received while staying with my friend. It all seems so simple and I've done it before, but I can't get it to work this time. All the versions of Outlook don't seem to work as well together as the architects seem to think it does. In real world terms this whole scenario is meaningless. In "life in the new millennium" terms it's just another exponential level of complication that we have all come to accept as normal.

Gonzo Misprint

It seems as if my favorite quotation about the music industry, originally thought to have been penned by Hunter S. Thompson, is a bastardized version of the original. Here's the version that seems to be the mission statement of my life:

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side."

The original, as I have come to learn, can be found on page 43 of H.S.T.'s Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s, published by Summit Books in 1988, and it reads:

"The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason."

It is close enough for me, and unsurprisingly applicable to the music industry. But it is important to set the record straight.

Moving On Up

Two weeks in Marin County has left me with a few observations:

1. Everything in Marin County costs at least $20.00. No matter what I seem to need to "just run in and grab" at the grocery store ends up over $20.00. It really is as expensive as Manhattan, but this leads to point #2.

2. The reason that everything is so damn expensive is that this place is beautiful. Mountains. Ocean. Redwoods. Hiking. Biking. Climbing. Mild weather. Brewpubs. Restaurants. Recycling. Perhaps not qualifications for right-wingers but perfect for yours truly. I have never seen so many rich liberals in my life. I guess there were more per square mile in Manhattan but the variety of people, lifestyles and viewpoints are more varied - thereby diffusing the overall effect.

I finally made it into San Francisco proper this week. My old friends Blue Rodeo were playing a rare west coast appearance and I trekked across the Golden Gate Bridge to see them. What an amazing city. I am looking forward to heading back, but first I have to extend my walkabout to the northern territories before the weather takes a turn for the wetter.

Shit

I just finished a quick read of a second book written about the Mt. Everest tragedy of 1996 during which 5 people lost their lives in one summit bid. This book, entitled The Climb, was penned by world renowned Russian climber Anatoli Boukreev and G. Weston DeWalt and refutes some of the inferences of adventure writer Jon Krakauer in his book on the same event, Into Thin Air.

As a fan of facing danger in the name of adventure and feats of personal strength I enjoy those sorts of books. I might attempt a bit of high altitude climbing myself if I didn't possess such a strong aversion to cold temperatures. I shall have to prove my fortitude in other ways.

I enjoyed Boukreev's no nonsense approach to recounting the events of May 1996. Despite much evidence to the contrary, Krakauer portrayed Boukreev as some sort of maverick, haphazard and irresponsible guide in his book. I really came to respect Boukreev's and his account of his rescue of at least three of the survivors.

He was a man resigned to the fact that his unique talents and abilities lay far outside the realm of normal human skill sets. What I somehow missed was that Anatoli Boukreev was killed in an avalanche in Nepal on Christmas Day in 1997. Shit! Perhaps that was the only proper way a man of his mettle could meet his demise, but I didn't expect such a tragic ending to a story of overcoming nearly insurmountable odds. Shit.

Yosemite

Tuesday next, I am heading for Yosemite to camp and hike and stand around in slack jawed awe gaping at the unbelievably gorgeous scenery. At least that's what I'm told about the mountains of Yosemite. If you've ever seen the work of Ansel Adams they you have more than likely seen some of the surrealistic topography of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the Yosemite area. I'll report back having seen them to confirm or deny these suppositions. 9.26.03



Might As Well Jump

This just in. Fomer Van Halen frontman and Vegas emmisary David Lee Roth had to cancel all the remaining dates of his current tour because he was injured "doing a very fast, complicated 15th-century samurai move.” This is news, people. I wonder if Sinatra had problems like that. 9.25.03



In And Out Of Time

I just heard a song that took me back to a specific place and time. It felt like yesterday, it really did. Then I took note of the fact that the song is 5 years old. Five years of my life. Five years of world history. All the people I met and things I did in five years' time were set in motion swirling around my head and past my heart. I feel as if I have learned so much and still I know nothing. I still don't know the right thing to say to women. Ask them. They'll tell you.

I notice elderly people about town and wonder what they think when they look back at their lives. I wonder if it is similar to the things I think when I look back at my own life. Things like "That sure was a stupid thing to have done," or "Will I appreciate the fact that I did this when I'm looking back someday?"

Then there are the perpetually nagging questions such as "What am I doing with myself?" and "Why don't you spend more time doing the things you love to do?" The questions never seem to stop. I have wondered whether or not death will bring the answers. Will the answers even matter at that point?

For now, I'm stuck in 2003 and I guess that's where all this business about time began. I noticed that the year was 2003 and it didn't seem right. How can it possibly be 2003? Moreover, how on earth can it be nearly 2004? My buddy Jeff and I often said that we didn't really have a plan for this point in our lives because we didn't expect to live this long. It wasn't a morbid concept, just a rationale based on averages. But here we both are, looking like those guys whom we never expect to grow to look like.

I guess that part of all this was brought about because I've been visiting a former girlfriend out here in California for the last week or so. At one point we had a life together and that life wound up exploding into pieces of broken hearts, smashed brooms and the flipping of a coin in order to determine who got to keep the ISP account.

Fast-forward a few years and all that anger and hurt just isn't there anymore. The e-mail account that I won by chance has long since been defunct. Time heals all wounds and time certainly helped out with she and I. We can now look back and laugh at things that were funny without the skeletons making too much noise to hear the punch lines. It feels good and I guess that means I've grown.

At one point it hurt so much that I was despondent. Time passes and if you're smart you let it change you. It's not as if it is now empty - I care for her deeply - it's just that I let go of all the things that brought me down. It just isn't the same between us anymore. It is something different, but I like it. I don't want her back, at least not like I once had her. She is now my friend and that is something good. It's funny if you think about it. It is not the happy ending that I wanted but it is a happy ending just the same. 9.24.03



Eight Miles High

I saw a redwood tree today. I can't honestly say that it was my first redwood as my friend has what would qualify as a small example in her backyard. What I saw certainly qualified as a lot more than just a redwood tree. In fact, I saw an entire forest full of them towering over me and countless hordes of boisterous, poorly dressed tourists.

These particular redwoods were in Muir Woods in Marin County. Just another natural wonder that happens to lie within ten miles of my friend's apartment. I saw trees older than the country in which their roots indifferently grow. These magnificent living entities were here long before my parents were born and they will still be holding up the sun and fog long after my unborn children are gone. Much like the Grand Canyon, the grandeur they posses cannot be described in words or on film. I have foolishly attempted to do so here just as I took a bunch of pictures in vain. I recommend you see for yourself.

Cash Out

I haven't had a chance to sound off about Johnny Cash yet. I guess I knew it was coming and wasn't surprised when my attorney called to say that we had lost a member of our "Badass of the Highest Order" honorees. My great grandfather didn't last a year when he lost his wife. It seems so rare for the female member of an elderly couple to pass on first. When it does happen the man seems to follow in turn and in short order.

The man in black was the real deal. He still is. Even in his passing he exemplifies an honorable way of being. The man was no saint. He had his demons and even showed them a thing or two about passing in the fast lane. He also wrote a few pages in the book. I can't say that he wrote it but he definitely deserves his name on the cover. I'll raise a glass to you tonight, Johnny Cash. 9.21.03



I Found My Heart in San Francisco

Hey, all. Greetings from Marin County, California. I am typing on a laptop and having a hell of a time doing so. If the flat keys and cramped ancillary keys don’t drive me insane the little pseudo mouse finger pad thing surely will. The show must go on.

This place is unbelievable. My friend’s apartment is quite literally in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais – Mt. Tam to the locals – the slopes of which bred the first mountain bike. She has a salt-water lagoon (lake?) and dock in her backyard. The scenery is a key aspect of the unbelievability. The air is sweet and dry and saturated with the smell of trees – something that Southern California is sorely missing. The place feels sort of like Boulder, Colorado except that the Pacific Ocean is right on the other side of Mt. Tam instead of the Eastern slope of the Rockies. The grocery stores have an impressive beer selection. The prime hassle is that you practically have to get financing to afford a six-pack. Therein lies the rub. This place is EXPENSIVO. Like Manhattan expensive. In fact, I was joking with my attorney that this place is like New York without the buildings or people.

Yesterday I took the obligatory short drive down the 101 to see the Golden Gate Bridge. I must say that it is every bit as spectacular as one would imagine, especially on a reputedly rare sunny San Francisco day. I did the also obligatory photo shoot with the bridge before I set out to walk at least halfway to the South side where the Presidio and the City of San Francisco lay. When I reached the middle of the bridge I decided that I had come far too far to not traverse the balance of the distance and set foot on the property of San Francisco. That is precisely what I did. I haven’t made it to the city proper as of yet but I intend to before long.

On the downside, I haven’t had a good nectarine since Louisiana.

Lights, Camera, Ludicrous

Los Angeles was every bit as peculiar as usual. If LA is the City of Angels I have to say that them are some pretty fucked up angels. I met up with my old friend Heather Burress for pints at a local taproom. If you close your eyes when drinking in LA you can almost imagine that you are in a beer garden anywhere in America. When you open your eyes you realize that everything in Los Angeles is a fashion show… from picking up garbage to standing in line at the bank. Heather and I once had a band together… a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline – in a manner of speaking. Now she’s a working actress in LA. She has her head screwed on fairly straight for being a working actress in LA, and that is a compliment. 9.19.03



Falling In Love Again

Discovering new music is like discovering a new girl. I’ll hear a band or artist in which I am interested and won’t initially be able to tell what I think about them. First impressions are funny things with people as well. Or maybe there will be an unexplainable attraction to a song or album right away. Then I’ll buy it and listen to it over and over. It’s just like being in love. I am not content to leave that particular CD in my car or home stereo and end up dragging it back and forth anytime I have to drive somewhere. When I’m not with the album it is all I can think about. It is just like being enamored by a girl. Or a boy, in the case you happen to be a girl or perhaps gay. You get the idea.

Right now I am in love with Lou Ford’s CD Alan Freed’s Radio. It’s so dreamy. The greatest thing about being in love with music is that you can be in love with many albums simultaneously. Since my trip began I have purchased several CDs and have had intimate moments with all of them. I’ll list my current aural pleasure below.

Greg Trooper – Floating

I had the good fortune of being in Austin when Greg Trooper was scheduled to perform a solo show on the UT campus. I first heard Troop on Fordham University’s WFUV streamed on the Internet. I discovered KGSR while in Austin and they too had taken to playing cuts from Floating. My brother and I got tickets for the show and I bought the CD then and there. Buying CDs at shows is a great way to support an artist and so many artists could really use the help. The existing and archaic big record company junta is doing everything it can to keep itself alive, up to and including suing their own customers. Their crystal balls have shown them that they don’t have a place in the future and they are attempting to avert the inevitable. The next thing you know they’ll be sending Austrian cyborgs back in time to kill Shawn Fanning’s mother.

But back to Troop. He’s a gifted songwriter with a near perfect sense of elegant simplicity. He’s a great singer. Producer Phil Madeira’s economical production never gets in the way and this is a welcome respite from so much of today’s music. Now that everybody and their stepson can afford home recording software a lot of the music sounds like a broken alarm clock. It’s a long way from George Martin’s four-track recorder and hence we’re all standing on the shoulders on the shoulders on the shoulders on the shoulders of giants.

Off topic again, I apologetically digress. Floating was my alarm clock of choice for my tenure in Murrieta where I held a short-term job to make some wandering money. I have one of those CD player alarm clocks and have taken to being awakened by music over the last few years. Troop was a good thing to hear first thing every day.

Lucinda Williams – World Without Tears

Alt-country’s favorite perfectionist is back again. She’s as raw as ever, recording most of World Without Tears live in the studio where her band plays her perfect foil. They’re cocksure when called to be, filled with barroom swagger when twanging out roadhouse rockers and they stay the hell out of the way when Lucinda’s soul needs to be laid bare. It’s her lyrical style, describing things like scorpions under her skin that illuminates the emotional weight of her subjects of good and bad love and why they are sometimes one in the same. It almost feels silly to attempt to write about it. See for yourself, buy a copy of World Without Tears, and go ahead and buy her last two CDs along with it. This is her third straight home run.

Lou Ford – Alan Freed’s Radio & Sad, But Familiar

Alan Freed’s Radio is an album I wish I had made. It has a loose theme of the current state of the music industry’s inherent shittiness, using rock and roll prophet Alan Freed as a point of reference. If you are a music fan and you don’t know whom Alan Freed is, off to Google you go. Lou Ford is from Charlotte, North Carolina and I have mentioned them before in the pages of this very journal. The reason for the write up now is that I finally got around to getting a hold of their CDs. I had a couple of mp3s and had briefly listened to my brother’s copies once upon a time. If you apply my music-as-romantic interests model to Lou Ford they would be the Mary Hatch of my Bedford Falls. I somehow never noticed that there was a beautiful girl right under my nose nearly every single day.

Again, I digress. The tragedy of Lou Ford is that they split up this year. I have never met them but I know their story. They a great band with catchy songs that just don’t fit into the hype machine of the new millennium. They play 2/4 country with lyrics too sophisticated for the Alan Jackson crowd. They twang too much for everyone who owns a Korn, Tool or even Aerosmith record. Their rock is pure but uncategorizable in the record store bins. In the year 2003 we have a profusion of sub-sub genres but the really good stuff sometimes falls through the cracks. I am just elated that I managed to get a copy of Alan Freed’s Radio before the talent vacuum that starved the guys in Lou Ford snuffs out their dying ember. I advise you to do the same. Check the usual music e-tailers. That’s what I did.

Sad, But Familiar preceded Alan Freed’s Radio by a couple years. To listen to the two albums side by side an astute listener can hear the potential through the muddy mixes, wobbly grooves and poorly recorded guitar tone. If all this sounds as if the album is bad this is not the case. It just has that young band sound about it – like Toad the Wet Sprocket’s recorded for $680 debut Bread and Circus - or virtually any indie release from the 1990’s. All the elements are there but they need a little refining. And this is the delicate part. When you take off too many rough edges you run the risk of sucking or perhaps selling several million copies of your record. After Sad, But Familiar, Lou Ford did all the right things and wound up with a truly great follow up. Unfortunately, it is an all too sad and all too familiar story when a great local band never makes it to the next level.

Blogging

It seems as if I am a blogger. I didn’t know what blogging was until I noticed that I was, in fact, a blogger myself. I am going to simply ignore any new nomenclature for keeping an online journal and continue to keep my online journal. 9.18.03



Joe Anchower

Hola, Amigos. I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya. I am preparing to make another move. I've been hiding out near Temecula, California and am about to head to the prime center of American insanity, The City of Angels, none other than… Los Angeles. Ghosts of every movie star there ever was play tag between the bumper to bumper cars on the crowded freeways. Expensive lunches are ordered and left untouched at meetings destined to reach fruition in the opening of yet another abysmal Hollywood blockbuster.

Da Who?

Football season has begun. College games started a week ago and the professionals started this past weekend. I don't pay much attention to football. For me, football heralds the fact that basketball isn't far behind. All in all I don't have much time for sports that other people are playing. Week one brought an embarrassing loss for the Bears of Chicago. The St. Ignatius Girls Football team really beat up on the Monsters of the Midway. I don't like to see the home team lose, but if you're going to be the worst you might as well go for it and be the absolute best at being the worst.

Eulogy Z

We have lost Warren Zevon. We all knew that this was coming. He was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer last year and he spent what was originally expected to be the last few months of his life extending that to a year and completing a final album. I can't say that I was a big fan, but his most memorable song, Werewolves of London, is part of the disjunct classic rock soundtrack to my formative high school years. It seemed as if he was sitting in with The World's Most Dangerous Band on Letterman every other week back when a young and even more irreverent Dave was still on NBC. Dave devoted an entire show to Zevon when he announced his diagnosis last year. Any musician who can count Hunter S. Thompson among his legion of fans is OK by me. Zevon's lifestyle perhaps proved that only Keith Richards can survive trying to be Keith Richards. I'll raise a pint to you, Warren. Ah-hoooo.

Save The Ales

I've been brewing again. Ale, to be specific. My attorney and I started this whole brewing thing a few years back, and after much fumbling around finally figured out how to come up with a drinkable final product. Kudos to our friend Matty, who sucked down a bunch of our less than delicious prototype brews. To this day I'm not sure if he was trying to make us feel good about what we had made. We kept telling him things like "Please don't drink this to make us feel good," and "We know that we're not doing something right." He drank it anyway. The rest went into the toilet.

We eventually got it and have had repeated success since. I am now passing on my Jedi brewing skills to my friend John out here in California. My attorney and I learned the old fashioned way, by screwing up over and over again until we got to the end of our rope and imploring a local brewing Jedi to help us. It turned out to be a very simple and very effective fix. John has the benefit of my experience to help him on his way. I am in no way an expert, but sometimes the person one step up the ladder from you knows considerably more than you do, and exactly what you need to know. 9.10.03



Don't You Know

I saw a shooting star last night. Believe it or not, one of the biggest and brightest shooting stars I've ever seen was over Manhattan. I lived at the corner of 9th and 49th in Hell's Kitchen. The only place I had to watch the Perseids meteor shower was on the roof of my 5-story apartment building. (I used to grill out up there as well.) Since I lived on the top floor and the stairs to the roof were right next to my front door the roof was sort of like my own patio. It wasn't exactly a green and tranquil garden but it did provide some sunshine and a great view of Midtown. I could also lean over the front façade with a beer and watch people walking below.

I saw a really big shooting star when I was recently in Austin. I was in the pool at night with my brother and our host. I noticed something in the sky and even had enough time to say, "Hey guys, check this out." They turned in time to see most of it as it traversed the sky. It was long and slow and even had color. Most impressive. Last night I saw a little one; just the universe reminding us that it's still there. All this shit that we think is so important in our daily lives is in truth inconsequential. 9.9.03



You Might Want to Sit Down For This

$1,000,000,000.00 per week. That is the current amount the U.S. government spends every week on "post-hostility" military operations in Iraq. One billion dollars. Every week. Think about it. Let it sink in.

That's $142,857,145.86 per day. $5,952,380.95 per hour. $99,206.35 per minute. $1,653.44 per second. This doesn't include infrastructure expenditures or the sticker price of military operations taking place elsewhere in our troubled world. Check earlier entries to compare these numbers with the pre-war estimates, which were staggering in their own right.

The Simpsons' Bully Says "Ha Ha"

As of this morning, some folks in the Alabama Judicial Building moved the Ten Commandments granite block out of the rotunda. All my Alabama connections are saying that the currently suspended Chief Justice Moore has been planning on parlaying all this attention into a Senate seat all along. He raised hell in the name of God to get his name in the papers and minds of registered voters. He did the same Ten Commandments thing in a similar fashion back in his native hip-de-doo county in order to get the Alabama Supreme Court votes in the first place. Either way, the rock has been moved. 8.27.03



Lion Food

Now there is some sort of Christian Coalition who has brought suit against the remaining Alabama Supreme Court Justices who voted against Moore and ordered the monument removed. They are suing these people because their very own poster boy, the currently suspended Judge Moore, has broken the law. Huh?

Young Franken

The vociferous Left wing bullhorn Al Franken had been being sued by the Fox News Network over the title of his best-selling book Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. On Friday last, a Federal judge denied Fox's motion for an injunction that would have prevented the distribution of the book. Score one for the left. As far as I can tell, Fox News has been the primary source for unfair and unbalanced spreading of guano since its inception. It is too bad that all we really have in office anymore are Republicrats. 8.26.03



Moore's Law 2.0

In this case, this particular Moore is in violation of the law and has been suspended as a result. What I'll likely never come to understand is why people like him continue to get paid when they are suspended. And white-collar crime costs taxpayers - that's you and me - way more to sort out. How much state and federal money has Chief Justice Moore wasted on this personal crusade?

When the common man violates the law he's on his own as for how to support his family. When the rich get suspended they are allowed to continue to pay for their boats, tennis courts and mistresses. A man with a briefcase will steal infinitely more money than a man with a gun - and he'll never spend a day behind bars for having done it.

Thou Shall Not Be Unconstitutional

I nearly called this entry “Thou Shall Not Be An Asshole” but then I decided that the title you see above was more fitting. Our favorite high court zealot, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, has flatly refused to remove the symbolically and physically weighty Ten Commandment display from the Alabama Judicial Building rotunda despite being ordered to do so by both his fellow justices and a Federal judge. When asked if he would oppose the placement of a Koran monument in the same place he replied "This nation was founded upon the laws of God, not upon the Koran. That's clear in the Declaration (of Independence), so it wouldn't fit history and it wouldn't fit law." What an asshole. 8.25.03



Everybody Loves Raymond

Today is Ray Bradbury’s 83rd birthday. Ray is my favorite author and that is quite a distinction given my reading habits. It has been said that only the good die young. Ray Bradbury has disproved this theory. 8.22.03



Burning Bush

OK, then. I haven’t had a chance to sound off about this Alabama Chief Justice who goes by the name of Roy Moore. For those of you who haven’t been keeping score, Chief Justice Moore had a 5300-pound monument featuring the Ten Commandments placed in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial building. On Tuesday, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals twice rejected Chief Justice Roy Moore's request for a stay that would have, in the least, postponed the removal of the monument. Apparently, Moore is intent on having the government spend more money attempting to get him to comply. Moore is under the impression that since the Commandments represent the laws of God, which he believes are the foundation for more terrestrial legal guidelines, no court has the right to force him to remove the monument.

The folks who have asked him to remove it argue that allowing the monument to stay violates the age-old separation of church and state in the United States of America. Thank the powers that be that somebody is paying attention to that guideline. The same folks, including U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson are debating as for whether or not they will charge the state of Alabama $5000.00 per day that the monument remains in place after today. It’s a good thing that Alabama isn’t facing a budget crisis like so many other states. Oh wait. Supporters of Chief Justice Moore have come from all over the country to pray and show support. Don’t these people have anything better to do? Apparently not.

I have often wondered exactly why our money is printed with the phrase “In God We Trust.” Part of the answer is obvious. America is a very religious country. Everyone seems to think that other countries are full of religious zealots and kooks but they don’t notice the domestically produced zealots and kooks that live in our own states, cities, towns, and even beds. A whole lot of our ancestors fled their home countries – giving up everything they’d ever known to face a perilous ocean journey only to arrive in an untamed wilderness – if only to do as they pleased when it came to prolific prayer times. KEY POINT: Their home countries weren’t religious enough so they flew the coop.

I have conducted operations deep behind enemy lines - as I have many relatives in Alabama. I have listened to their talk radio. I have nearly rear ended Wednesday night churchgoers as they pulled out in front of me – more than once. I have spent my adult life lamenting the fact that I have a connection to the state that brought us George Wallace. And I have said it more than once… many southern states were onto something when they seceded from the Union.

Count Temecula

My travels have taken me to Temecula, California where I am staying with a great friend and working for a temp firm. The weather is like a broken record around here – a record that plays a song that is around 100F and sunny with perfectly cool nights. The Santa Rosa Plateau is situated in a valley surrounded by mountains in virtually every direction but up. It is roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, which I have discovered is not a bad place to be. There is the omnipresent California traffic, and all that that implies. There is a profusion of strip malls. But there are also lots of stars. My friend, who is a resident, complains that he is too far from civilization, but there is a sushi restaurant about a half-mile from his house. That does not qualify for boondock status.

An interesting side note is that I see a hot air balloon nearly every morning on the way to work. It is hard to have a bad day when one’s day begins with the airborne tranquility of a brightly colored balloon hanging gently in the sky.

An Iraq War Update

Coalition my ass.

Those Who Teach…

… don’t get paid. In my daily readings I came across and article that illuminated an ugly truth of modern American society. I’ll start at the beginning. A very good place to start.

Come the holidays, when I was in high school, I would have to march around in the slush and snow going door to door attempting to sell cheese and sausage to the residents of my neighborhood. This was how the music programs perpetuated themselves in Batavia, Illinois. I can’t say for certain, but it seems to me that our school system received state money for education, and that music was a priority for the administration. It certainly was a priority for me.

Dubya wants no child left behind. I don’t disagree that American children need to be able to read, write and compute the time it would take two trains to meet having left different cities at the same time at different speeds. I guess that I am of the opinion that our education programs are suffering at all levels. 8.19.03



Lone Star

I visited the Texas Capitol Building while in Austin and had my picture taken with Dubya.


8.13.03



On The Road, Part I

Checking in from sultry Austin, TX. Austin is Stop One on my walkabout. Being in Austin in August is tantamount to being in Chicago in January. This is the harshest month of weather all year around here. It is pretty damn hot but I don't really find this to be a problem. I have still managed to hike and get around. I fear that my Martin would collapse into a pile of wood, wire and melted glue if I left it in my car but that scenario is easy enough to avoid.

Austin is even more green than I imagined. I was here once before but I saw most of the town from the window of a speeding Greyhound bus at hour 21 of a 23-hour trip. Talk about living hell. There is a Mexican restaurant about every ten yards - which is almost enough for me. Virtually everyone with whom I spoke said that traffic was intolerable in Austin. I've been through a goodly amount of it so far and I can say that it doesn't hold a candle to Chicago or New York. We'll just have to wait and see about California, which is where I am bound after a few more days of taking in the Texas happenings.

My brother Mike has accompanied me for the first leg of the trip, and it has been great fun to have him along. We have all manner of digital pictures of our travels to date and I will post them on here as soon as I find a place where I can do so.

Things that I have learned so far:

1. If you happen to need tourist information after 5:pm in Louisiana... just forget it. They have great tourist information centers... however, they're all closed.

2. If you plan on camping in the south/southwest in the summer... bring a fan. We camped near Lafayette, LA the other night and I slept with a fan blowing on me full blast all night. Mike just basted in his own juices in his own tent. He said that it was sort of like sleeping in a ziplock bag.

More soon. Happy trails. 8.4.03



The Man Of Steel

Lance wins. 10:04AM CDT 7.26.03



Old Enough To Be A Wise Man

- It's too bad that all the people who know how to run the government are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.

The wisdom of none other than George Burns. I once saw him at a University of Illinois football game. The powers that be had been touting his impending attendance for weeks. When halftime rolled around this golf cart came screaming out of the sidelines and made one lap around the edge of the field, tearing back behind the stands as fast as it had arrived mere seconds before. On the back there was a diminutive man with what was unmistakably - even from the nosebleed seats - a sizable cigar in his mouth.

- Happiness is having a large, caring, close-knit family in another city.

I'll raise a glass to that, George. 7.24.03



Things I Love In Case I Forgot To Mention Them

Katydids. David Letterman. My brothers and sisters. The Imperial Pint glass. Ray Bradbury. Chicago in the Summertime. The horn break on Sir Duke. Fog. Birkenstocks. My new Son Volt t-shirt. Wired magazine. Van Morrison. Digital cameras. Looking at maps. Vanilla malts. The Internet. Swimming in warm water. Space travel. My left arm tan. Volleyball. Kurt Vonnegut. Ms. Reuland, my first grade teacher. Impossibly soft Wamsutta cotton sheets. The moon. Old National Geographics. Mom and Dad. The smell of corn when it goes to tassel. National Public Radio. Thunderstorms. Toddlers. Sleeping with a fan. Stacks of books. Pub days. Letterboxed movies. Heat. Reading encyclopedias like a book. Riding in Jeeps (Jeep Jeeps, not the variances.). The Old Green Tree Pub in Bath, England. Central Park. Silence. Old friends. New Friends, and the fact that I know that there will be more things I have yet to discover and add to this list. 7.22.03



From The Sporting Press:

"Aitor Garmendia, Ullrich's teammate, said the ferocity of Armstrong's attack on the summit at the Luz-Ardiden ski resort, caught the German by surprise."

Is it just me or is this nearly verbatim, names changed to protect the fictitious, from Monty Python's Holy Grail movie?

Lance kicked a family-sized quantity of ass today. The guy falls off his bike and then gets up and kicks enough ass to win the stage and increase his overall lead. Somewhere on the continuum of human endeavor, with those people who get shot fifteen times and live to tell and the masses of folks who call in sick to work when they get a hangnail lies Lance Armstrong. He's closer to the left side. 7.21.03

Parental Advisory: The Following May Contain Reality and Harsh Language

America doesn't give a fuck about Lance Armstrong. Never mind that he is once again beating America's runner up favorite target, the French, on their homecourt. We just don't give a fuck. Never mind that he is currently in first place, looking to win the Tour de "Freedom." AGAIN. For the FIFTH time in a row. We do not give a flying fuck. Sure, there's a war on, Netscape is in trouble and your children are not safe shopping in Wal Mart. What could bring Americans together more than an old-fashioned American ass-whooping? It seems to be what motivates the masses. In light of that fact what could be more impressive than a guy who whoops ass with one fucking testicle?

As for myself, I can't believe that we don't give a fuck. Especially given the fact that Lance Armstrong is from Texas and knows Dubya. Why isn't Dubya calling up Jaucques Shirac and Kim Jong Il after a couple beers and boasting about Texas pride? Just last night the local news spent over a minute discussing football, a sport that is currently not even active, while not even mentioning Lance. Not once. They don't give a fuck, either.

Well, Lance, I give a fuck. For anyone dedicating themselves to a life outside of the mainstream... I give ten.

No Fate But What You Make

I admit that when I heard that Hollywood was planning on making a third Terminator movie I would have bet the house that it would suck. And when I heard that the plan was to make the new Terminator machine a Femme-inator I decided that I'd up the ante to betting other people's houses. And then, when I saw the actress slated to play this Terminatrix, Kristanna Loken, on Letterman I figured that Arnold must be in it for campaign money. How could this movie not suck beyond rational comprehension?

I was wrong. Dead wrong. Killed by a time-traveling preemptive abortion soldier wrong. I read a review of the flick that gave it a just-as-surprised-as-I-was thumbs up and decided to see for myself. I saddled up the car with my brother and off to the cinema we went. We sat down to watch, freezing in the summer AC, which the theater had set on Hudson Bay, while munching on smuggled licorice and peanut M&Ms.

Even by suspended Terminator realm-of-possibility suspension of disbelief standards I didn't see much that made me yell out "No way!" at a flickering screen. In fact, some parts were so impressive that I actually said "Cool!" aloud. I am an admitted hard sell when it comes to movies so this is on small feat. Will the Fried Green Tomatoes/Steel Magnolias crowd like T3? Probably not. But I did. It's a great action film. And cargo shorts are great for smuggling candy contraband into theaters who gouge you for movie snacking food. If only they served beer. 7.17.03



Oooh, Ahhh

I love the 4th of July. This Independence Day brought volleyball, some intense summer heat and an amateur fireworks display during which an observer took a roman candle round in the chest. Luckily, all that heat had dissipated and this observer was fortunate enough to be wearing an expensive parka that became a de facto flak vest. Fireworks: ONE, Humans: Zero. I have always been a bottlerocket man, myself. Just the right amount of danger. Only a direct hit in the eye or up the nostril could do any real damage. I'm sure it happens all the time, and until it happens to me I'll keep playing the odds. I love that sizzle quick zip and the smell of sulfur and the subsequent low-yield pop sound.

The Great Roman Candle Incident, as it seems as if it should be called in Independence Day lore, was not a product of my fireworks handiwork. I saw the womenfolk, who thought they were a safe distance away, silhouetted in the fiery glow of flaming balls of color - just as another wildly screaming ball zipped towards my head. I ducked and ran. Every reveler for his or herself! A $200 jacket broke the fall of the $.25 firework. Another happy ending.

Weapons of Mass Delusion

As of today, the body count of American soldiers equaled that of Gulf War I, waged by good 'ol George H. W. Bush. I wonder how the piles of bodies of innocent Iraqi citizens would stack up against each other. We'll never know because our government and our media have sanitized the whole thing. It was and is another video game staged in some dusty country halfway around the world when many Americans have barely left the county in which they were born. These same Americans purport to know the rights and wrongs to be imposed on the peoples of the earth. And all along, Rumsfeld and his ilk have been prattling on about how we will be in Iraq only as long as necessary. What he is not saying is that it will be necessary for us to be there for decades to come. 7.16.03



Do it Now

National Telemarketer DO NOT CALL list. You're welcome. 7.2.03

A Chicago Yankee In George Wallace's Court

It seems to me that there are two types of anonymity, rural anonymity and city anonymity. In the country people are spaced out enough that they can do what they want with themselves on their own typically sizable property. At least that is how they perceive it to be. I have observed that rural folk find comfort in this individualistic solitude. In the city people are anonymous because there are so many people that no one is really paying all that much attention to anyone else.

In rural areas everyone knows where everyone is by looking at the cars in the driveways. It must be impossible perpetrate crimes of infidelity. That's how it was while I was in college. We all knew who was beginning to date who because we'd recognize someone's car parked in front of so and so's apartment. One could try and play it off but it never seemed to work.

I am far more accustomed to the city sort of anonymity. It does require a higher degree of tolerance for people's differences but that scenario feels like home to me. When I visit my parents in rural Alabama people recognize me based on the fact that I look like a whole group of people who are more or less indigenous to the locale. My "Yankee" accent is a dead giveaway as well. Since I am an urban anonymist I just try not to talk to the locals. It doesn't seem to work. Like an American anywhere or that Italian kid in your high school the wanderers just stick out. It's the shoes and the colors and haircut and the cheekbones and that peculiar backpack.

Anyone who thinks that other people don't know that they "aren't from around these parts" when they are traveling is a fool. Be it Louisiana or Times Square or a hotel bar in Bath, England, whether your mouth is flapping or is wisely shut tight, the locals know that your bed is somewhere far, far away.

Once upon a time I was traveling in Germany, staying with a friend in Dusseldorf. He had to work one evening so I ventured out to do some wandering. Seemingly instinctively, I found a beer festival and made my way to an outdoor courtyard inside the walls of the brewery. I got a beer and stood amidst the din of hundreds of Germans, talking to their friends in small circles and leaning on trees. The place was packed so I just sort of stood there, listening for English and hoping that I might join somebody's conversation. After a few minutes of taking it all in I noticed something strange and wonderful. When you're surrounded by the din of a hundred simultaneous conversations one cannot discern what language is being spoken. It just sounds like human speech, replete with the range of human emotion - laughter, usually. By that point I had picked up exactly one new German word, and although I was dying to meet some new people I was willing to spare the locals. Imagine the tedium of trying to hold a conversation with a non-English speaking foreigner who only knew the word "train station." 6.25.03



Automanic

I have a New Car. Not a New new car, but new to me just the same. I have just scored a small but significant victory in a long and protracted war. Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a Curse. This Curse causes all manner of idiosyncratic mechanical problems with any given car that I happen to own. The stretch of Interstate 55 between Chicago and Decatur, Illinois (home to my alma mater) can be called "The Official Commemorative Joe Armstrong Automobile Breakdown Corridor." I could give day-long tours telling stories about the various places along the route where my car broke down.

So, enter this "new" car. It is in better shape than most cars I have owned over the years but it is no spring chicken. It has some years and some miles under its belted tires. Much like the other cars I have owned, it has its share of idiosyncrasies. You have to turn a key just so or you have to keep your foot on the accelerator while simultaneously clutching and braking or one flip up headlight doesn't flip up or the radio makes a siren sound from time to time or something ridiculous along those lines. This particular car's idiosyncrasies include one of my all-time favorites... the errant dashboard light.

Some folks call these lights "idiot lights" because it means that a particular problem has gone on too long by the time they illuminate to tell you to get your ass to the mechanic. As cars age these indicators tend to light up erratically even after problems have been diagnosed and repaired. I haven't had a car without some combination of dashboard lights in a decade or more. You learn to ignore them and only notice when passengers say something like "Hey, shouldn't you get that taken care of?" You chuckle and tell them that it's all part of the experience. In the back of your mind you have a chip on your shoulder because you know that you can't afford a car without errant dashboard lights.

But I digress. Back to my "new" car. I purchased this car from a friend of mine, who, in turn, purchased it from a friend of his. There is allegedly one other unknown owner - the original owner - of this car since its birth in the last decade. With the car I received a folder that maps out its mechanical health record and maintenance history. This is a good sign. There are fewer idiosyncrasies with this particular car but it still wore the sign of its destiny, a dashboard light. This light meant that at some point the car was destined to be owned by yours truly. I drove around with the light for several weeks because my friend and its former owner seemed to think that it was just an errant light, and I was so used to this sort of thing that I was already beginning not to notice. Probably just something that I would have to live with until the car tortured me with its macabre and expensive demise somewhere down the road.

Just for fun I decided to investigate. A lark. There, in the tail light assembly was a bulb with two filaments, one of which was burned out. Could it be? Could I possibly have the chance to get a leg up on The Curse? A $1.99 trip to the local car parts franchise would hold the answer. I replaced the bulb and sat in my car with the key in the ignition, the orange neon of the larger than life corporate logo reflecting off my face and onto the dark dashboard, waiting for me to turn it. I was fairly certain that, with the turn of they key, on would come the light, signifying by divine providence that this was truly Joe Armstrong's car. I resignedly sighed and fired up the engine. All the lights came on briefly as they normally do, and there on the dashboard, at the rear of the little diagram of my car as would look from above, a little dark rectangle was no longer glowing red.

I can't be sure, but I imagine I made an audible cheer of victory. I had beaten The Curse! If there had been a place to do a victory lap I would surely have done one - imaginary flowers falling on me from above and trumpets blaring in my ears. Smiling wide to myself, I pulled into traffic to get back to my newly Curse-free life, rolling the window up as I accelerated. I automatically reached over to help the power window up because the driver's side regulator is bad and I don't want to burn out the motor. After all, it wouldn't be my car if everything worked the way it was supposed to work. 6.20.03



Bushwhacked

Dubya is raising money for his second Presidential campaign. The Democrats look to be dead in the water despite Bush's "What me worry?" handling of the economy. People are talking about things getting better the same way that they have been talking about things getting better since they started to get worse. Both of my brothers were laid off last week. How about that for things getting better? Clinton ran a budget surplus for a spell... and Dubya is racking up a national debt bill that makes Reagan's look like beer money.

The dreaded Weapons of Mass Destruction have not been located while meanwhile, back at the ranch, the U.S. military is initiating research on "low yield" nuclear weapons. Along with a Preemptive Strike doctrine, nuclear weapons sure make me feel safer. And that's Nuke-Lee-Ar, George, not Nuke-You-Lar. Call a spade a spade and get the name right for the huge piles of Weapons of Mass Destruction that we've got lying around. And you, teetering on the shoulders of the shoulders of giants, are running the show.

And through it all we're still hunting down former Iraqi leaders whose horrific acts have been trivialized by putting their faces on playing cards. Playing cards. Bush's administration have made this whole thing look like a game. We watched the whole thing on TV without seeing any of the blood. As the saying goes, no blood, no foul. 6.18.03



Keep Moving. On.

Alabama to Chicago. Chicago to Alabama. Alabama to Atlanta. Atlanta to Alabama. Alabama to Chicago. Chicago to Decatur. Decatur to Alabama. Great creeping Christ. Shows. Weddings. Beer. Great creeping Christ. I don't even know what time zone I currently am.

The Admiral Has Left The Bridge

The NBA Finals have wrapped themselves up. It wasn't the prettiest Finals run but the best team won and David Robinson can move on to other things with a sense of pride and accomplishment. For the uninitiated, he is what can only be called an exemplary human being. He's kind, generous, humble, talented, involved, and many things that the majority of professional athletes are not - not to mention the general populace. Hats off to The Admiral.

Listen Up

Here's what I've been listening to lately.

I recently went to see some old friends in the Canadian band Blue Rodeo at Martyrs' in Chicago. I always say this, but they're a great live act. Go see them. Another Canadian artist, the young Kathleen Edwards and her band were in town for a show the following night at Chicago's Park West and they dropped in to see the Blue Rodeo show. Miss Edwards and her guitarist, Colin Cripps, ere invited onstage to sit in on a couple songs and the results were comical and impressive. I met Kathleen and she was kind enough to get me into her Park West show. It is great to see another young artist who is about the music and not her stylist. The buzz is that she sounds like Lucinda Williams fronting Crazy Horse. This isn't far off but she deserves a listen on her own merits.

Jesse Harris is the songwriting craftsman behind a lot of Norah Jones' debut last year. He's had his own thing going for a while and this CD is similar enough to the multi-platinum Norah for crossover listener good vibes. It is also distinct enough for Jesse and his band to earn their own place. I'm happy about this less-is-more trend that seems to be growing in music.

Jay Farrar has a new CD due out next week. Gillian Welch's new CD is also available but I haven't made it out to pick it up yet. Maybe that's because it's hard to buy a CD when you're moving at 70 miles per hour.

I Need A Permit For This Thing

I recently bought a Dewalt 18 volt cordless drill. I've had the same little Mickey Mouse Craftsman cordless drill for a decade and I began to suspect that it had screwed for the last time. I decided to upgrade to the best thing I could find so I wouldn't have to buy another one in a couple years. And did I ever. This Dewalt drill is one serious piece of hardware. The picture on the Dewalt website is pure tool porn. It depicts my very drill with a two-foot long bit drilling through no less than four two by fours. More than I need? Ha! To laugh. I can drill though time with this thing. I'm thinking about drilling back to 6th grade to see whether or not Amy Snyder thought I was cute. 6.17.03

Like a Broken Record

The Iowafarmer.com Corn Cam is up once again; a rite of spring as sure as seeing your breath in Chicago in June.

Monopoly

Little green houses, a minuscule iron, shoe and car, and a website called Clearchannelsucks.org. I never did want to get played on the radio anyway. I was first played on an NPR station and that is fitting in some way. My college band got pretty big until our singer took off to Los Angeles to be a professional actress. We did some radio interviews in the prairie town in which my alma mater is located. I had produced and engineered the whole album top to bottom and the DJ wouldn't cut off the Dolby noise reduction when he played our music on the air. I kept asking him if he wouldn't mind flipping that little plastic switch but I guess he thought I didn't know what I was talking about. Our music ended up sounding like shit as a result. I eventually decided that I should be the singer so that the next time said singer ran off to Los Angeles that singer would be me.

I Wonder if Steve Nash Likes Golf

The San Antonio Spurs made the Dallas Mavericks pull a disappearing act the other night. It was sort of like a quintessential big brother move... "Why do you keep hitting yourself?" Dallas had somehow pulled a Nowitzki-ess game 5 win out of their collective ass a couple nights prior but my prediction was that there was no way that San Antonio would give up two games in a row to Dallas - so I was a little surprised to see the Mavericks up by ten at the half. I sat down to watch at the beginning of the thrid quarter thinking to myself, "Dallas cannot stop attacking. Ten points is not a significant lead at this level." Enter one Steve Kerr... and Steve Nash, a hobbled Dirk Nowitzki and the rest of Mark Cuban's private entertainers were headed for the fairways. See you next year. In the meantime, the NBA has to conjure up some drama for a Texas/New Jersey series. Good luck. 5.31.03



Beer Goes In, Beer Comes Out

I spent the weekend in Atlanta, Georgia, standing up for my dear friend Michael Babincak and his new bride, Alycia. The funny thing is that virtually everything in Atlanta is on Peachtree Street, Peachtree Drive, Peachtree Boulevard, Peachtree Circle, Peachtree Avenue or otherwise. My attorney and I were even at the corner of Peachtree and Peachtree at one point.

Mike and I go back a pretty good way. He's been my guitarist since we began playing together sometime in the last decade. He's also a good friend and I'd like to wish Mike and Alycia a heartfelt congratulations. Mr. and Mrs. Michael Babincak III are more than likely enjoying the Hawaiian sunshine before it sinks into the Pacific Ocean this evening.

Like most weddings, there were all manner of hijinx. Due to the large number of out of towners, Mike's bachelor party was scheduled for the Thursday before the wedding. This is usually an ill-advised policy. This particular bachelor party went off more or less flawlessly.

There were a couple violations of the sacred Bachelor Party Code. Rule Number One is NO PICTURES. A high school friend of the groom is a videoographer of sorts and was intent on documenting the better off undocumented event. There are stills as well as moving picture records of the event in question. The way I understand The Code there can be no record of what unfolded because 1. The stories are better embellished if nothing untoward took place, and 2. There is no incriminating evidence in the event something potentially regrettable actually did. I tried to stop it, but we blew that one.

The other rule is that neither the bachelor nor his compatriots are allowed to see the wife to be or her cronies. Our violation of this rule was an honest accident. Alycia and her friends happened to be next door to the Coyote Ugly bar in which we were reveling. She even made onto the rented Fur Bus in which the guys were riding around for a brief moment. When she did, her tiara was knocked off her head in the ensuing chaos. I snatched it up and hid it under my shirt. My intention was to salvage the compromised evening with a prank - the coup of stealing the bride's bachelorette tiara. As the Fur Bus pulled away - bound for the next seedy establishment - I placed the tiara onto the groom's head… just in time for him to throw it out to his fiancé from the window of the moving bus. Foiled again.

The wedding went off without a hitch. Nice weather. A minimum of botched vows. No cake in the nostrils. I caught up with some old friends and made some new ones. Most of the rest of my existing close friends flew down from Chicago to attend the nuptials. When the sun rose on Sunday morning and the new couple were off to the airport we settled into a day at the pub on Peachtree Street. After all the beverages at Thursday's bachelor party, Friday's rehearsal dinner and the wedding reception we were all exhausted. The only reasonable thing that we had energy left for was to hit the pub. Much beer filtered through our systems. Beer goes in, beer comes out.

A Great Idea

This morning I read that some elements of our United States Federal Government are considering destabilizing the government of Iran. That sounds like a great idea, considering how stable the entire region currently is. 5.26.03



One Ring to Rule Them All

The NBA playoffs are cruising right along… with monumental battles being waged in the west - and then I guess there are some games in the east as well. Chris Webber has blown out his knee and is prattling about a return to action come Finals time. We’ll see whether he’s playing basketball or golf on that creaky knee when June is finally busting out all over. Mark Cuban’s team of wunderkind have taken to waking up in the third quarter and trouncing the once-mighty Sacramento Kings. Sitting in his hospital gown, Phil Jackson twisted his magic ring the necessary one quarter turn in order to steal a game four victory from surging San Antonio - but seemingly didn’t turn it quite far enough to save Robert Horry’s near game winning, buzzer beating three pointer at the end of Wednesday’s game five. The Lakers are now down 3-2, as are the Kings, but neither team gives the impression of being against the ropes. Given Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Phil Jackson and his magic ring and I would say the Lakers would be favored sitting in a 3-0 hole.

Phil first introduced the power of his magic ring to the world back in the days of red and black glory in Chicago. One little nudge from his adjoining finger and the Bulls would steal inbound passes and apply full court pressure that would scare a Green Beret. Sure, we had Jordan and Pippen and a rotating cadre of supporting cast members. We had the assured strategy of Tex Winters. We had the Luv-a-Bulls and red lights on top of the Hancock Building. We had a dynasty. Oh, the sound of that word being used in association with a Chicago sporting franchise. A dynasty! And all because Phil Jackson was in the possession of a little band of metal forged in the foundry of the gods.

After years of loyal servitude and the careful assembly of the aforementioned dynasty, Phil was betrayed and took his mojo to the western conference. Not necessarily to the Dark Side, but cheering for Phil and the Lakers is sort of like trying to be friends with the guy who is dating your old girlfriend – who happened to be the best girlfriend you ever had. I’ll always be a Bulls fan at heart. The memories of Jordan - levitating near the basket and switching hands just as gravity took hold, of a hailstorm of three pointers in the finals, of more game-winning shots in waning tenths of seconds than I can count – are now nothing more than memories. In the meantime I’ll spend my dreary Chicago spring days watching other overpaid NBA teams play what they call basketball. 5.15.03



Badass of the Highest Order

My friends and I have a specially ordained title that we bestow upon humans who possess unique strength of character or who have performed impressive feats of strength in some realm. We assign the label Badass of the Highest Order, and we do not dole out this title arbitrarily. Michael Jordan is a Badass of the Highest Order, whereas Vin Diesel, however impressive, is not. 5.10.03


The Boss Abides

A Comment from Bruce Springsteen "The Dixie Chicks have taken a big hit lately for exercising their basic right to express themselves. To me, they're terrific American artists expressing American values by using their American right to free speech. For them to be banished wholesale from radio stations, and even entire radio networks, for speaking out is un-American. The pressure coming from the government and big business to enforce conformity of thought concerning the war and politics goes against everything that this country is about - namely freedom. Right now, we are supposedly fighting to create freedom in Iraq, at the same time that some are trying to intimidate and punish people for using that same freedom here at home. I don't know what happens next, but I do want to add my voice to those who think that the Dixie Chicks are getting a raw deal, and an un-American one to boot. I send them my support."

I myself haven't chimed in on this Dixie Chicks fracas - primarily because I can't believe that it has become such a big deal. We're fighting for "freedom" in Iraq and shooting those Iraqis who exercise their new right to assemble. Freedom includes the right to disagree. The Dixie Chicks have a right to disagree with anybody about anything. And yes, the music buying public have a right to throw away thier Dixie Chicks CDs in turn.

Conservative people make a lot of noise about why we should listen to these Hollywood types - claiming that they know no more than anybody. These conservatives are saying that we need to stand behind the government and our leaders. These are the same conservative people who normally talk my ear off about all the foolish things the government is regularly doing.

And now Dubya is announcing an "end to major hostilites" in Iraq. Yesterday, Rumsfeld announed that the U.S. is pulling our forces out of Saudi Arabia and moving them to Qatar. That's pretty convinient when you consider that nearly all our troops are already in Iraq.

A bigger issue involves companies like Clear Channel refusing to play DC songs. Large corporations quell the voice of dissent to their agenda all the time. Clear Channel, Inc. owns a sizable percentage of radio stations in America. Clear Channel Radio daily reaches 54% of all people ages 18-49 in the U.S. That's why almost all radio stations suck these days. There goes the last DJ. 5.4.03



Thanks, Mr. Naismith

That special time of year is once again upon us. A lot of you undoubtedly do not give a hoot. I myself was first converted watching #23 on the floor and in the air, hanging seemingly on the grace of wings and power of will. I've been hooked ever since. College hoops is a better game. There's no contest - but I can't keep up with all the college teams as there are too many and one cannot find all of one favorite team's games televised. Since one would never find even one of my alma mater's games on television anywhere I get my basketball fix watching the NBA.

Yeah, I love this game. I've only actually seen one in person, a hapless contest between the hopeless post-Jordan Bulls and an unremembered opponent. The tall boys in red and black looked like the Saint Ignatius Girls High School team. And now that I think of it I did luck into a couple sets of Knicks tickets when I liven in New York City. A buddy of mine knew one of the Knicks City Dancers, the fake-tanned grown up girls playing cheerleader that all NBA teams have, and she set us up with the seats. I prefer to watch the games on television anyway - the best seat in the house for those of us who aren't Jack Nicholson, Spike Lee or Mark Cuban.

This year's NBA playoffs are shaping up nicely. The teams in the East are once again clamoring to find out who gets to be fodder for whatever team survives the carnage in the West. Dirk Nowitzki is tearing up the wood against Portland, Malone and Stockton still have enough gas in their tanks to win a game against Sacramento, and through it all, the Lakers are still favored - even though they're down 2-1 in their 1st round series with Minnesota.

The prime caveat to the NBA playoffs is that the games start heating up at the precise time that the spring weather does the same. In Chicago there are plenty of days with inclement spring weather to allow for guilt-free TV viewing. And many of the games take place on weeknights so one does not have to burn a Sunday if they would rather sit in the long, lost sunshine. I'll be doing both again this year. I endure the din of seemingly infinite hours of football every year and now it's my turn. 3.27.03



23

Today is a sad day for me. I am a man of few heroes. One of them, Michael Jeffrey Jordan, is hanging up his high tops tonight, once again capping the very definition of a benchmark career. In some small way the world always seemed like a better place knowing that MJ was suiting up for a game somewhere. I wonder what life will be like in the Post Post Post Jordan era? There goes my hero. 4.16.03



This Regime is an Ex-Regime

John Cleese chimes in.

Axis to Grind by John Cleese Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the "Axis of Evil", Libya, China and Syria today announced that they had formed the "Axis of Just as Evil", which they said would be more evil than that stupid Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis President Bush warned of in his State of the Union address. Axis of Evil members, however, immediately dismissed the new Axis as having, for starters, a really dumb name. "Right. They are just as evil - in their dreams!" declared North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il. "Everybody knows we're the best evils...best at being evil...we're the best." Diplomats from Syria denied they were jealous over being excluded, although they conceded they did ask if they could join the Axis of Evil. "They told us it was full," said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. "An axis can't have more than three countries", explained Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. "This is not my rule, it's tradition. In World War II you had Germany, Italy, and Japan in the evil Axis. So, you can only have three, and a secret handshake. Ours is wickedly cool." International reaction to Bush's Axis of Evil declaration was swift, as within minutes, France surrendered. Elsewhere, peer-conscious nations rushed to gain triumvirate status in what has become a game of geopolitical musical chairs. Cuba, Sudan and Serbia announced that they had formed the "Axis of Somewhat Evil", forcing Somalia to join with Uganda and Myanmar in the "Axis of Occasionally Evil", while Bulgaria, Indonesia and Russia established the "Axis of Not So Much Evil Really as Just Generally Disagreeable". With the criteria suddenly expanded and all the desirable clubs filling up, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, and Rwanda applied to be called the 'Axis of Countries That Aren't the Worst But Certainly Won't Be Asked to Host the Oympics". Canada, Mexico and Australia formed the "Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Some Nasty Thoughts About America", while Scotland, New Zealand and Spain established the "Axis of Countries That Want Sheep to Wear Lipstick". "That's not a threat, really, just something we like to do", said Scottish Executive First Minister Jack McConnell. While wondering if the other nations of the world weren't perhaps making fun of him, a cautious Bush granted approval for most axis, although he rejected the establishment of the "Axis of Countries Whose Names End in 'Guay", accusing one of its members of filing a false application. Officials from Paraguay, Uruguay, and Chadguay denied the charges.

Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time. 4.15.03

Bio War 2003 - Part III

The latest battle in Bio War 2003 has been waged by Drunk Uncle Nature. (Check another part of this year's journal for my description of Mother Nature being a more apt Drunk Uncle Nature.) I was walking about in sandals last Saturday, minding my own business, when I was stung and/or bit by some sort of heinous insect. I've had fire ant bites before and they aren't much fun. I sort of assumed that a fire ant wielded this latest attack as I didn't actually see the perpetrator fleeing the scene of the crime - my left foot.

I expected the usual burning and itching and localized swelling and annoyance. What I didn't expect was for my foot to swell to a decent percentage of its normal size. Along with the burning and itching and annoyance this swelling was painful all to itself. My toes looked like suckling pigs lined up at an obese mama pig's belly. I can walk, but my shoe is hard to get onto my foot; my chubby foot sort of flops around due to its extraneous mass. Tonight as I sit and write, I have been alternating soaking it in warm water with Epsom salt and pretty damn cold water for the swelling. And don't get me started about cold.

Tranquility Base

My brother was by the house the other day and reconfigured the television set from its normal antenna to a sporadically functional satellite system. My father would surely die without the satellite setup come football season but it may or may not work at any given time during the secular balance of the year. Whatever my brother did to the arrangement disrupted the nominal functionality of the antenna and cabling and now there is nothing on the set other than static and snow. This whole new scenario is much to the collective chagrin of my father.

Last night I spent a goodly amount of time holding the flashlight and assisting dad as he fumbled with splicing coaxial cable and wove a grand tapestry of obscenities. As a longtime audio engineer I have to say that I've spliced a couple cables in my life, but I decided that this was dad's game and he was going to play it his way - win or lose. As he was going down with the ship the true windfall of the situation became clear to me. If the antenna were to remain broken and the satellite system remained nonfunctional I could live in peace without the perpetual whine and din of a television squawking in front of my sleeping father. And that is how the situation remains today. Divine tranquility.

One for you Nineteen for Me

Tomorrow is tax day. I be getting some money back from the Feds - which will go towards paying off the money I owe the State of Illinois. I always seem to get the shaft from my home state. No matter how much or how little money I make I wind up owing them money. I'll be waiting until about 4:30pm tomorrow in order to make my way to the post office in time to have my state tax return postmarked on the 15th.

Blind Faith

I bought the new Jayhawks' CD, Rainy Day Music, on a blind faith basis. There is an elite select cadre of artists whose music I will buy on blind faith having never heard a note. The Jayhawks were pretty close to being in that group and I had read some good things about their new release. I'm listening to it as I write and I haven't been disappointed yet. It seems that I can never hear enough acoustic guitars, harmonicas, vintage amps and crafty vocal harmonies. Their Hollywood Town Hall album is among my top ten all time favorites.

What is this Love?

I am also still madly in love. I would follow the band Hem through the fires of hell - or even the Cleveland bus station. I would buy them flowers and pass them notes in study hall. I would sneak out of my room at night to meet them by the old barn. I would fix them tacos. I would invite them over and light candles and play uninterruptive music. I would stare dreamily into their eyes through a red wine haze. I would sit on the front porch swing with my arm around their shoulders. I would give them backrubs. I would drive them to the airport. I would help them move when their lease was up. I would even make them a mix tape.

Bush League

The Iraq war seems to be going as good as one could expect. POWs are being released. U.S. soldiers seem to have stumbled upon Saddam's "Love Shack." Syria is allegedly harboring Iraqi leaders. I guess that makes it easy to decide with whom we are going to start the next war. Meanwhile, Kim Jong-il is still giving us the finger. I'm still in opposition to Dubya's decision and it's not as if he could have lost my vote. He never had it to begin with.

Loc

I played for Tony Piscotti's CD Release Party performance last weekend. What a band. Dan Gottesman on drums, Daryl Coutts and Jason Upchurch from Sidewalk Chalk Manifesto on keys and bass, respectively, Janet Cramer on percussion, Corri Feuerstien, Lexie Bloor and Teresa Ruth on back up chick vocals, Bethany Swain on cello, Gerry Field on violin and yours truly on electric guitars, mandolin, harmonica and backup vocals. It was a really fun opportunity to get out and perform music that deserves to be fully fleshed-out. The man of the hour, Tony "Tone Loc" Piscotti, sang and played guitars as well. Most of these folks were involved with playing on Tony's CD. There was also a lot of beer and wine and that stuff is just fodder for a good time. Perhaps the coolest element of the show was the wide range of old friends that made it to the show. It was nice to see each and every one of them. I wish I would have had the time to sit down over pints and catch up. I guess that's what weddings and funerals are for. 4.14.03



V - I Day

United States Marines dragged down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Iraq's capitol city of Baghdad today. There was some cheering in the streets, and the requisite looting. The real looting has yet to begin. It will, in time, and the downtrodden Iraqi people won't be perpetrating it. Americans watched all the major networks broadcasting a significant event, to be sure. But we were watching a couple hundred out of 5 million inhabitants of Baghdad. At one point Some unthinking Marine draped an American flag over the doomed statue's face. This was not wise and I'll leave it at that.

In case I never made this point clear… I hope I'm wrong. Now that our idiot leader has gone and started a war it would be seriously against my best interest to hope for it to go poorly just so I could say, "I told you so." My ranting is not about me being right.

In light of the fact that victory seems inevitable I'd like to say that a "victory" proves nothing about whether or not this is and was the right thing to do. History often tells what happened without addressing why - or what the alternate options were.

My concern is what it always was, which is that war begets war. Many more people are going to die. The United States of America is going to be in Iraq for a long time. I don't feel that I need to underline the word 'long' because we're all about to find out the true meaning of the word.

Ten Zeros

The pen might be mightier than the sword, but the sword is certainly better funded. I can't help but think about the domestic disarray that is going on while Dubya and Blair are off saving the oppressed peoples of the world from ruthless dictators. Do you have any idea how many people could go to college for $140 billion dollars? Over ten years the U.S. government is only projected to spend $52 billion on student loans. $140,000,000,000 is enough to put 7,000,000 students through college at a state school. Full ride.

Support

I support our troops. In fact, I support them so much that I don't want them to get shot at. I support them so much that I don't want them to die. I support them so much that I don't want them to have to leave their families behind. I support them so much that I don't want to have them wake up from nightmares about people they had to kill with their own hands for decades to come. Yes, I support the United States troops so much that I never wanted them to go to Iraq in the first place. 4.9.03



So It Goes

Here is a Kurt Vonnegut article that a friend forwarded to me. My journal is turning into an anti-war bulletin board, but I guess I don't have a problem with that.

Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !*!@ By Joel Bleifuss - 1.27.03 In November, Kurt Vonnegut turned 80. He published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952 at the age of 29. Since then he has written 13 others, including Slaughterhouse Five, which stands as one of the pre-eminent anti-war novels of the 20th century. As war against Iraq looms, I asked Vonnegut, a reader and supporter of this magazine, to weigh in. Vonnegut is an American socialist in the tradition of Eugene Victor Debs, a fellow Hoosier whom he likes to quote: "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free." -Joel Bleifuss Bleifuss: You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan wars, Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war in Iraq. What has changed, and what has remained the same? Vonnegut: One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here. There were already all these games going on when I got here. … An apt motto for any polity anywhere, to put on its state seal or currency or whatever, might be this quotation from the late baseball manager Casey Stengel, who was addressing a team of losing professional athletes: "Can't anybody here play this game?" My daughter Lily, for an example close to home, who has just turned 20, finds herself-as does George W. Bush, himself a kid-an heir to a shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an AIDS epidemic and to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment's notice to turn industrial quantities of men, women and children into radioactive soot and bone meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. And to the choice between liberalism or conservatism and on and on. What is radically new in 2003 is that my daughter, along with our president and Saddam Hussein and on and on, has inherited technologies whose byproducts, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint. Bleifuss: Based on what you've read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush's policies and the impending war in Iraq? Vonnegut: That they are nonsense. Bleifuss: My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people are beginning to despair. Do you think that we've lost reason to hope? Vonnegut: I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka "Christians," and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or "PPs." To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass! Bleifuss: How have you gotten involved in the anti-war movement? And how would you compare the movement against a war in Iraq with the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era? Vonnegut: When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high. And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now, TV did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of protesters, unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV, the right of citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their government for a redress of grievances, "ain't worth a pitcher of warm spit," as the saying goes. Bleifuss: As a writer and artist, have you noticed any difference between how the cultural leaders of the past and the cultural leaders of today view their responsibility to society? Vonnegut: Responsibility to which society? To Nazi Germany? To the Stalinist Soviet Union? What about responsibility to humanity in general? And leaders in what particular cultural activity? I guess you mean the fine arts. I hope you mean the fine arts. ... Anybody practicing the fine art of composing music, no matter how cynical or greedy or scared, still can't help serving all humanity. Music makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up. But that is the power of ear candy. The creation of such a universal confection for the eye, by means of printed poetry or fiction or history or essays or memoirs and so on, isn't possible. Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author. Any ink-on-paper author can only hope at best to seem responsible to small groups or like-minded people somewhere. He or she might as well have given an interview to the editor of a small-circulation publication. Maybe we can talk about the responsibilities to their societies of architects and sculptors and painters another time. And I will say this: TV drama, although not yet classified as fine art, has on occasion performed marvelous services for Americans who want us to be less paranoid, to be fairer and more merciful. M.A.S.H. and Law and Order, to name only two shows, have been stunning masterpieces in that regard. Bleifuss: That said, do you have any ideas for a really scary reality TV show? Vonnegut: "C students from Yale." It would stand your hair on end. Bleifuss: What targets would you consider fair game for a satirist today? Vonnegut: Assholes.

"In These Times" Q & A - in response to above article:

What genuinely motivates al-Qaeda to kill and self-destruct? The president says, "They hate our freedoms-our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other," which surely is not what has been learned from the captives being held in Guantanamo, or what he is told in his briefings. Why do the communications industry and our elected politicians allow Bush to get away with such nonsense? And how can there ever be peace, and even trust in our leaders, if the American people aren't told the truth? One wishes that those who have taken over our federal government, and hence the world, by means of a Mickey Mouse coup d'etat, and who have disconnected all the burglar alarms prescribed by the Constitution, which is to say the House and Senate and the Supreme Court and We the People, were truly Christian. But as William Shakespeare told us long ago, "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." And what remains the best-kept secret from the Second World War, because it is so embarrassing, is that Hitler was a Christian, and that his swastika was a Christian cross made of axes, an apt symbol of a political party for Christians of the working class. And there were simpler, unambiguous crosses on all Hitler's tanks and planes. Again: One wishes, for the sake of the whole planet, that the people in and around the White House nowadays truly mean it when they say, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," and that they respect as children of God the losers, the nobodies so loved by Jesus in the Beatitudes, in His Sermon on the Mount: the poor in spirit, they that mourn, the meek, the merciful, the peace makers and so on. But such is obviously not the case. George W. Bush smirks and gloats unmercifully as he boasts of his readiness to loose more than a hundred cruise missiles, what I call "Timothy McVeighs," into the midst of the general population of Iraq, nearly half of whom are children, little boys and girls under the age of 15. His domestic policies, whose viciousness is peewee in comparison with what he is so eager to do to foreigners who don't look like him and talk like him, who don't have names like his, nonetheless inflict pain on those Americans of the sort enumerated in the Beatitudes, by depriving them of decent health care and educations, and of food, shelter and clothing when times are bad. It seems quite possible that his opinion of the American people has been formed while watching the Jerry Springer Show, which is Republican propaganda of the most pernicious kind. But America was certainly hated all around the world long before this coup d'etat. And we weren't hated, as George W. Bush would have it, because of our liberty and justice for all. We are hated because our corporations have been the principal deliverers and imposers of new technologies and economic schemes that have wrecked the self-respect, the cultures of men, women and children in so many other societies. It's that simple. What are we to do when confronted by such hatred? Respond to Code Red and runaround like chickens with their heads cut off. Keep in touch, Kurt Vonnegut

Po Tee Tweet. 4.8.03



Understatement of the Year

"Meanwhile, U.S. war planners may have miscalculated the strength and capability of paramilitary fighters in Iraq, a Pentagon official said Wednesday, as the first week of fighting came to an end."

From CNN 3.26.03



Freedom, Inc.

I've been quiet. I admit that can't help but be transfixed and dismayed by world events. George W. Bush has actually gone and started a war. A war. As in, the very definition of hell on earth. And don't dare trying to convince me that we're about to spend 100 million of our own dollars in the name of freedom. Think about it. It sounds so noble and so just, but why then have we not spent our money liberating the peoples of oppressed regimes over the years?

Sure, we kicked Hilter's ass, but little Adolf had taken over Poland and France and was advancing on Moscow, as well as bombing London on a regular basis. Not to mention the extermination camps filled with Jews and other "undesirables." It is simply not the same thing.

But to think that the leader of the world, poised high atop a Republican administration, is about to spend all this money in the name of freedom without banking on some kind of return is absurd. You're fooling yourself. All this talk about the people of Iraq and the inhumane atrocities committed by their ruthless leader. Do you honestly think it would matter if all those atrocities were taking place in a desert that wasn't floating on top of the third largest oil field in the world? Are we going to invade the entire continent of Africa and liberate those countless millions from the assortment of fascist dictators in place there?

Does anyone have any concept of the size of national debt bills Mr. Bush is running up? It is simply staggering. And he wants a tax cut on top of it all? In the face of war expenditures? I sure am glad that Dubya got such good grades in school. Oh wait.

Our government and media have created a climate of unbridled fear with Saddam propped up as the boogieman of the day. Shock jocks lament the position of the "liberal media." I regret to inform the conservatives that the media has been propagating your agenda all along. Now we're all terrified and something has got to be done.

You're going to be hearing a lot about companies like Halliburton in the near future. These are giant corporations who stand to make mountains of cash rebuilding the desert once we've had our "decisive victory." These are also corporations who have close monetary ties to people like Dick Cheney. Whoa! Surprise surprise!

Why do we keep hearing about our soldiers having to be flown out of battle with "non life threatening injuries?" Being shot with an AK-47 is not life threatening? Perhaps not immediately, but I would be willing to bet that your life would be irrevocably changed if you could no longer walk without a limp or use both hands to pick up your new baby. Everybody wants a quick war so we can bring our young men and women home. Bring them home? Get used to it. We've had troops in Korea for over 50 years now. Look it up.

And what of not showing the corpses of American servicemen lying dead in the road over the weekend? Everywhere else in the world saw those pictures on television. Go ahead. Say it. Think it. We are being discretionary about what the American public - and American children - sees. So, the truth is good enough for the rest of the world but not us? The ugly truth is that public sentiment changes when the dead bodies of American soldiers start showing up on the glowing tube in the living rooms across America. People start to disagree with the government who sent the troops far from home to die in full color. And we just can't have that.

Where are all the cheering masses of liberated Iraqis? What time does the dancing in the streets start? And when does Dick Cheney get his check?

Didn't we learn anything in Vietnam? Technology cannot break the human will. One word, my fellow Americans. Quagmire. 3.25.03



Saint Michael

God bless Michael Moore for making people feel uncomfortable. Somebody needs to. This war is too goddamn cushy. 3.24.03



Snake Eyes and Boxcars

It appears as if the fuse has been lit. Our "President," George W. Bush, has informed the human race that the clock is now ticking. In last night's televised address he flipped the top on his crude oil Zippo, lit a thousand dollar bill that he in turn used to light a 48-hour wick that is attached to the Greater Middle Eastern Powder Keg. As with most explosions, one does not always have a clear idea of what is going to happen when the powder begins to burn.

Mr. Bush is taking quite a risk - in empowering the United Nations by ignoring them - in changing U.S. foreign policy to include a preemptive war - in giving Islamic extremists more resolve of their own to promote their agenda with terrorist activity - in getting involved in the messy business of regime change - in putting American lives in harm's way - in killing what will assuredly be thousands of innocent citizens of another nation - and in involving the United States in a potential political, economic and military quagmire that could very well make Vietnam look like an Indianapolis suburb.

Dubya is a gambling man. He's betting his own career on success in Iraq. Along with waging war, he is wagering the future security of the world. I don't like the odds. The whole thing smacks of the typical double standard of American foreign policy.

Now that we can see the shadow of the hammer that is about to fall the typical bandwagon-jumping festival has commenced. I find it funny and sad that some of the same people who ring out my ears complaining about America playing the role of "World Cop" are now banging the war drum with blood in their eyes. I also find it disturbing that the Religious Right are so quick to throw out the moniker "just war." I am against this thing. Top to bottom. Back to front. Starboard to port.

Saddam Hussein is a lunatic. But he's just another lunatic in a long and sordid history of lunatics that the United States has supported over the years. Who did we support in the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980s? Saddam Hussein. Who did we support when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan? The Mujahudeen - who would grow up to become our new friends The Taliban.

When someone is convinced of their agenda enough to send other people into battle it behooves you to listen to what they might have to say. But, when someone is convinced of their agenda to the point that they are willing to sacrifice their own life in order to make their point you had really better pay attention. Does the American public really think that these people arbitrarily hate America? There are reasons for their discontent. Open your eyes and look them up.

Love begets love, hate begets hate and war begets war. My greatest concern is that we are merely escalating the situation onto a global level. The perpetual cycle of bombings and violence as exemplified in Israel could easily be brought to a grander and more horrific scale throughout the earth. I don't profess to have the answer. I don't agree with the current choices, however. Enjoy the calm before the storm, my fellow humans. Peace be with you. 3.18.03



It's Serious Now

This little arithmetic lesson was submitted by my attorney.

The Pentagon has stated that the estimated cost of the impending war is as much as $95 billion dollars, with a "huge reconstruction and occupation costs to come later" (see source #1 below). These estimates are based on the cost figures for the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which are $61.1 billion for the war, and $21.4 billion for reconstruction costs. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has offered a different total for the cost of the war, estimating only $50 billion for the actual hostilities. No matter which set of numbers you accept as the truth, President Bush will need to extend the legal debt limit of the United States, which has already reached $5.9 trillion dollars, jeopardizing his key piece of economic legislation thus far: the $1.35 trillion tax cut approved by Congress (see source #2 below). Hey Bush, what have you done for us lately? Source 1. Source 2.

Good thing we all have such great jobs these days. 3.17.03



Dubya in Wonderland

Peter Freundlich is a freelance writer in New York City. He recently contributed this to NPR's All Things Considered.

All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We are going to ignore the United Nations, in order to make clear to Saddam Hussein that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We're going to wage war to preserve the UN's ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that the UN's word must be taken seriously. And, if we have to subvert its word to see that it is, then, by gum, we will. Peace is too important not to take up arms to defend. Am I getting this right? Further, if the only way to bring democracy to Iraq is to vitiate the democracy of the Security Council then we are honor bound to do that too, because democracy as we define it is too important to be stopped by a little thing like democracy as they define it. Also, in dealing with a man who brooks no dissention at home we cannot afford dissention among ourselves. We must speak with one voice against Saddam Hussein's failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make the point that might does not make right, as Saddam Hussein seems to think it does, and we are twisting the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us oust a regime that twists the arms of the opposition. We cannot leave in power a dictator who ignores his own people. And if our people, and people elsewhere in the world, fail to understand that then we have no choice but to ignore them. Listen, don't misunderstand, I think it is a good thing that the members of the Bush Administration seem to have been reading Lewis Carroll. I only wish someone had pointed out that Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are meditations on paradox and puzzle and on the strangeness of things, not templates for foreign policy. It is amusing for The Mad Hatter to say something like "We must make war on him because he is a threat to peace," but not amusing for a man to actually commands an army to say that. As a collector of laughable arguments I'd be enjoying all this, were it not for the fact that I know - we all know - that lives are going to be lost in what amounts to a freak, circular reasoning accident.

Feed your head. 3.17.03



Getting Thick

I'd just like to remind everyone that the "American Way" is not the only way. Some of our duly elected representatives (Republicans - no surprises there) in Washington have changed the name of french fries and french toast in federal cafeterias to freedom fries and freedom toast, respectively. These people have time to think about things like this?

Here's something else to chew on:

Now, about changing all those stars to swastikas… 3.11.03



No New War in Iraq

I can't sit still any longer. I have begun to write letters to my elected officials about the current situation with Iraq. I will go on record and say that I am wholly in opposition to the current policies of the United States Government in regard to an impending war with Iraq. Their stated intent to disregard the United Nations disgusts me and makes me ashamed to be an American. The fleecing of the American public by the lack of production of implicating evidence is shameful. A dogma of "with us or against us" is an insult to the educated intellect. This sort of polarizing black and white rhetoric implies that those opposed to a war in Iraq are in support of the terrible regime currently in power in that country. Assuredly, if anything is unpatriotic it is the creation of a social environment in which this is the case.

Stating that war is inevitable portrays The United States of America as the bully and not a champion of freedom. Stating that protesting this situation is unpatriotic is an insult to the lives of those who died to ensure that we have the right to disagree with our governing body. That right is unique and hard won. Those who say that the detractors should be silenced risk becoming that which they so vehemently oppose.

I feel and fear that the current direction of leadership is taking will tear this country apart - from without and from within.

Below are some links to sites where you can voice your opinion - whatever it may be.


The President of the United States of America

Find your local representatives


Here is a letter posted on Dave Matthews' website. I hope that Dave won't mind my appropriation of his wise words.

Dave Matthews Speaks Out About the War I hope this letter finds you all well and that in these uncertain times you find moments to be joyful. I want to speak my mind about this war with Iraq, or I will choke on my conscience. What is the motivation? Regime change? Shouldn't that be up to the people of the region and the people of Iraq? The only real threat from Saddam Hussein is to his neighbors and none of them support a U.S. invasion. Is it to stabilize the Middle East? Wouldn't it only do the opposite by causing further death and suffering in a country that has had more than its share? Is it to weaken Al Qaeda? Saddam Hussein is a genocidal maniac but he is not Al Qaeda. He is certainly more visible though. Is he our target because he is easier to identify than the illusive terrorist network? Surely it is more likely that an attack on Iraq would only strengthen Al Qaeda by feeding Anti-American sentiment. Putting out the fire with gasoline, so to speak. It is certainly not to liberate the people of Iraq who suffer under Hussein's rule, unless we call killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis liberation. Saddam Hussein is a barbaric murderous dictator. I wish the world were free of him. But the answer is not to bomb this great culture of Iraq out of existence to stop him. Why must the children of Iraq die by the thousands to stop a tyrant? It is not justice. And if we kill him what will we achieve? We will have taken the most unpopular leader in the Middle East and turned him into the greatest martyr radical Islam has ever had. The U.N. weapons inspectors must be allowed to do their job thoroughly and any military action should be internationally agreed upon. We must not allow our government to turn us into a rogue nation. I fear that our true motivation is about oil and our own flailing economy; about the failure to destroy Al Qaeda and about revenge. It is criminal to put our servicemen and women in harm's way and to put the lives of so many civilians on the line for the misguided frustrations of the Bush administration. Bottom line: this war is wrong and this war is un-American. Peacefully submitted, Dave Matthews

So much to say. Indeed. 3.7.03



Oral Envy

Every time I attempt to discuss the current situation in Iraq with a right-winger they inevitably bring up Bill Clinton. What is the story here? I think the Republicans have a chip on their shoulder about the fact that September 11th, 2001 happened to fall during a Republican administration. I also think that they're jealous because they aren't having as much fun as Wild Bill. Perhaps if they had a little more fellatio of their own they wouldn't be so uptight and war mongering. 3.3.03



Han Solo

At long last, and with the aid of high speed Internet access, I have added some of my new solo acoustic songs to the jukebox page. I included four of the sixteen tracks I recently recorded live in the studio. There are two new songs, a rearranged old/new song and the solo acoustic version of Jeff Buckley's Lover, You Should've Come Over that I performed at last November's Jeff Buckley Tribute Concert. All for your aural pleasure. 3.2.03



Ho(ps) Ho(ps) Ho(ps)

Ladies and Gentlemen: That magical time of year is once again upon us. A time of peace and goodwill towards men. A time to watch the gleam of the moon on the crest of new fallen snow with sparked eyes filled with wonder. The Real Ale Festival has once again come to Chicago. In case you missed my touting of the Real Ale Festival in prior year's journals I shall once again sing its praises.

Real ale is a method of brewing and serving beer that provides the freshest, most vibrant flavor that it can have. If you don't like beer, kindly skip to the next journal entry and go about your business. The rich and complex character of real ale is derived from the fact that it is fermented and served (at cellar temperature) from the same cask without the use of extraneous gasses. The most common gasses used to dispense beer are carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Nitrogen yields smaller bubbles and a creamier pint, which is why most tap Guinness cascades when drawn.

There is something in the chemical make up of Real Ale that, when combined with my DNA, completes me. Just like Jerry Maguire. By Saturday night I just may be as complete as I have ever been. 2.24.03



Dr. Jones

The Grammy Awards take place tonight. By the time most of you read this we'll all know who got their names etched in stone. But for now the jury is still out and the chips are not in - at least for the people who don't work for that secretive committee that somehow warrants that verbose descriptive speech about the tallying every year. Following, you will find my "State of the Dung Heap" musings.

We've got Springsteen and Norah Jones. We've got a white rapper and an 18-year old girl in skater clothes. And as per usual I'd be willing to put money down that we've still got a Grammy voting cadre that is hopelessly out of touch. In case Jethro Tull's inexplicable Heavy Metal coup from a few years back and 2001's anachronistic Steely Dan victory weren't enough for you we all had last year's Academy President Michael Greene's anti peer-to-peer proselytizing to illustrate the extent of their delusion. Video might have killed the radio star but the next generation of peer-to-peer operations feeding on Napster's fertile corpse have sounded the death peal for the music industry as we have so lovingly known it. In case you missed the sarcasm I tend to view the "business" as a vile and stinking dung heap.

But I digress. My beloved Norah Jones is up for several awards. I'm not sure what the Vegas odds are for her taking home a victory or two. Springsteen is a virtual shoe-in, what with his post September 11th evangelical healing treatise. The diminutive Avril Lavigne started showing up on the glossy pages of my Rolling Stone magazines sometime over the last year or so, probably because she wasn't old enough to reach the mic before then. We can only hope that her arrival heralds an end to the Britney-Aguillera siege. Hard core troubadour Steve Earle has been nominated in the Best Contemporary Folk Album category - likely because they don't have a Best Genre Busting or Best Revelation of the Tearing of our Culture's Fabric award. The inherent problem in his category is the fact that he's up against Delbert McClinton's newest album. Delbert has been a Grammy favorite for years.

Is there really such a thing as Best New Artist? It's sort of like when an artist is "discovered." I'd wager that these artists have been hauling gear around in the rain for some time - some of them, anyway. A personal observation about Best New Artist nominee John Mayer… I liked him well enough until I figured out that he sounded akin to Dave Matthews. I don't have much against Matthews except that the world only needs one of him. But Mayer is fine. The Best New Artist nominees just might consider vying out of a win. The long term career averages of past winners in the category aren't all that impressive.

As for Eminem? Here we've got an artist who is potentially more socially relevant than the other choices - even if that happens to be to my personal chagrin. And therein lies the rub. Even though the foul-mouthed Mister Mathers has been Grammied before the people casting the votes are still out of touch with him. And it seems as if I am out of touch with everybody. But then O Brother, Where Art Thou? scored a major victory and proved that the cream really does rise to the top. I guess I own two out of the five albums nominated for 2002's Album of the Year. Maybe I'm not that out of touch after all? But I think I probably am. And the winner is… 2.23.03



One More for the Books

''I told the guys, I've got 28 games left; I'm going down with no bullets,'' Jordan said. ''I'm going all out. It's the end of my career, and I don't want to see it end in a negative way. I want to see it end positive. I want to have fun.''

- Michael Jordan - after becoming the first NBA player to score 40 or more points after their 40th birthday. I'm with Mike. 2.21.03



16 Tracks From A Thirty-Ought Six

I'm back. I now have sixteen solo tracks that I recorded live in the studio. I'll be ripping MP3s of some of them and posting them on the Jukebox page for your listening pleasure in short order. Since I am currently banished to a dialup connection perhaps I'll wait until I can borrow somebody's legitimate connection to do so. Before long I will also have press kits for my solo tour crisscrossing the country… parts of it at least. Included in this session were tracks by John Prine, Tom Waits and the solo version of Jeff Buckley's Lover, You Should've Come Over that I performed at last November's Buckley Tribute Concert.

I couldn't dream of holding a candle to Jeff Buckley in attempting to do anything akin to what he does in anything akin to the manner in which he does it - so as per my usual MO I did a radically different version. I did it on one mic and picked the best of a couple takes. It's not perfect but I think that I like it better that way. I tend to like my music a little unpolished. Not all the way to punk unpolished, but also not nearly as clean as Steely Dan and the rest of the guys who spend six years making an album. As for myself, I'd be on my third album by now if the bottom hadn't fallen out of my life in the last couple years. It is admittedly mostly a factor of money. So, if any of you out there would like to get into the Executive Producer business and fund our dig feel free to drop me a line.

Cursed Technology

This computer is making random and rather annoying beeping noises as I play my MP3s. It is exceedingly annoying. I am simply trying to enjoy Delbert McClinton's newest release. Is that too much to ask of you, you cursed Windows-based piece of crap? 2.21.03



Godspeed

Hey kids. I'm off to the studio to record some new songs. I'll be back shortly.

I can say that the events of February the 1st affected me heavily. I'm a longtime aficionado of the exploration of space. I even went to Space Camp. I saw the launch of Columbia's 4th mission back in 1982 - the 4th of all shuttle missions. It was the loudest and one of the most awesome things that I have ever seen. I recall sitting on a lawn chair in the Banana River near Cape Canaveral. The very water shook as the Columbia ascended atop a pillar of white smoke. I don't know what else to say about it right now - except that my heart aches for both the surviving families and the NASA community. It also burns to continue the noble endeavor of exploration and the quest for knowledge. 2.5.03



There are seven more stars in the sky tonight. 2.1.03



Change Water into Beer

I got a Jesus Action Figure for Christmas. It has "poseable arms" and "gliding action!" I checked online to see if I could find a Mohammed or Ras Tafari action figure that they might have adventures together but I couldn't find anything. I guess he'll have to fight crime and fly in the Millennium Falcon with my Lego Darth Vader and Murray the rubber octopus. The other thing I found funny about Jesus was that he is "not suitable for children under 3 years." 1.24.03

Stu, Stu, Studio

I'll be heading back into the recording studio in a couple weeks. I'm finally tracking some solo versions of my songs, both old and new. I need them to book a solo tour I'm working on for the spring. If you want me to play in your town, drop me an e-mail and I'll see if I can find a venue near you. I've got some new songs and some stripped down versions of full band tunes. I think it will be a great experience to do a solo tour while I'm deciding what zip code I might like to move to. It's a lot harder to play unaccompanied. There is more freedom but less of the interplay that makes ensemble playing so much fun. I'll have a new band when I get that zip code thing in line. The music industry is in a civil war these days but I intend to keep on doing what I do.

Just My Luck

I had an Internet job. Pool table. Free beer. Bean bags. The whole venture capital funded shebang. There was a pile of old PCs lying around and it was deemed that I could take one home. I was overjoyed to replace - or at least augment - my 300mhz machine that had served me so well over the years. So I took a "new" machine home and I've been fighting with it ever since. The operating system wasn't stable so I installed a new version of Windows, and to do that I had to reformat the hard drive. Reformatting ate the drivers for the USB buss, soundcard and other relatively necessary facets of the CPU. I eventually managed to contact the small company that assembled the PC Frankenstein-style and obtain drivers for the motherboard. Still with me?

I got the machine working, more or less. I had to purchase a new USB card. It still does strange things from time to time. As I sit here and type, the CD ROM drive is haplessly spinning a CD over and over again. Usually I have to pull the CD tray completely out of the machine and replace it before it decides to access any disc.

The monitor I chose from the stack looked like a looker as well. This was not to be the case. To this day I actually have to hit it in a certain place, sometimes rather forcefully, to get it to work. Two for two.

Tone Loc

A project that I produced for a longtime musical associate and friend is finally completed. Tony Piscotti's solo debut, Soapbox Parade, is back from the duping house. Check it out at Tony Piscotti's website. Before long there will be a CD release party of Biblical proportions coming to a venue near you. 1.22.03



There And Back Again

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world."

You'll find this passage on or about page 312 of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. I finally got around to reading The Hobbit over the past few days. I have started to read it several times over the past couple decades but I could never seem to get into it. One could chalk it up to my aversion to all things mystical - at least in the sense of faeries and wizards and goblins and such. I have enjoyed both the Lord of the Rings movies so far and decided once again to give The Hobbit a go. It was enjoyable. The inadvertent protagonist, Bilbo Baggins, reminded me of Winnie the Pooh - and that's not a bad thing.

Bio War 2003

It seems that I have driven the enemy from the field of battle. There are remnants of the cursed poison oak lingering on certain areas of my skin but it has been all but bested by my trusty immune system. What a horrific experience. I recommend to all of you that you NOT CONTRACT any form of poison ivy/oak/sumac/flower/weed/grass/ insect/vegetable/mineral/antimatter or any other such skin irritation. If you think you have gotten some of that stuff on your skin, thoroughly wash the area with soap and water and then climb the tallest tree you can find and jump off headfirst. Not necessarily to end your life - but to perhaps render yourself unconscious for the next several weeks as the infection runs its course.

Blue Genes

I just watched a PBS program called The Journey of Man. An enterprising gene researcher followed the origins of humankind and how it spread across the earth by tracing DNA markers. Apparently, the Y chromosome is passed down by males directly through the generations as the rest of the DNA gets combined more or less randomly. Using the minute differences in the Y chromosome - called markers - scientists can sample DNA from various peoples around the planet and trace them back to their origins.

Not surprisingly, the story started in Africa. There is a tribe there that has inhabited the same geographical area for the last 40,000 years. Everyone on earth has the genetic marker that leads to a group that left Africa for other parts of the world. The first group wound up in Australia, indicated by the DNA of Aboriginal tribes there. Another group split and wound up in the Middle East. The Middle East group traveled farther eastward towards Central Asia, and eventually some headed back west into Europe from there. The rest branched to the north and south of mountain ranges in what would eventually be China.

The program traced genetic markers to one man who was a direct genetic descendant of all people who would migrate north and east and eventually over the Bering Strait. The first wave to cross into the American continent was made up of ten to twenty individuals. DNA markers from this group turned up in modern day Native American Navajo tribes in Arizona.

What does all this gibberish mean? It means that this particular scientist racked up quite a few frequent flyer miles. It also means that each and every one of us is a descendant of Africa. Why can't we all just get along?

I know a few rampant racist types who adhere to some pretty ridiculous ideas about the origins of man. They need to be shown the markers in their DNA that compare to some distant cousins in southern Africa

I also know some Creationist types. I don't even want to address the topic with them. I just try not to bring it up when they're around. Give me a "D." Give me an "A." Give me an "R." Give me a "W." Give me an "I." Give me an "N." What's that spell?

I also saw a program on the Coelacanth. That's the prehistoric fish that was thought to have been several millions years gone until one showed up in a fisherman's net off the coast of South Africa in the late 1930s. Several have been caught and even observed in the wild since that time. Scientists have been debating whether or not the peculiar, almost tetrapod-like structure of the Coelacanth is part of the missing link between ocean life and life on land. I guess that all the good money is currently being put on the Lungfish. Give me a "D." 1.21.03



John Henry vs. Windows OS

Hey hi ho. I just spent the better part of the past 27 hours reworking this here website. Sadly, it doesn't look radically different from your end. To use an automobile analogy, from the back side I took out the 54 redundant turn signal levers, 14 tachometers, 34 cigarette lighters and 8 identical broken radios. I also replaced all the old parts and retooled them. wwwjoearmstrong.com is now a lean html machine. Last night at 4:am, as I was simultaneously working in Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer, my PC began to shut down programs on me. Eventually, it shut itself down entirely. I learned that I can outlast my PC. I beat that steam drill. John Henry would be proud.

In any case, there are new pictures in the photo gallery section, links to every other page at the top of every page, a much less lame-assed store and more e-mail links in case anyone would care to write me. It's a lot better. I'll be heading into the studio soon to do some solo recording and I'll be sure to put some new mp3s in the jukebox section. I can now leave this thing be and get back to finishing my sizable batch of new songs.

I started out as a musician. Along the way being a musician has entailed that I also become a bartender, web designer, waiter, promoter, administrative assistant, booking agent, recording studio engineer, technical director, graphic designer, manager, landlord, IT engineer, guitar luthier, casino dealer, box folder, truck driver, front of house engineer, label head, session musician, salesman, guitar teacher, office manager and other things that I'm not sure there is a definitive title for. What I'd like to do is play my guitar and sing. I've always heard that my generation can expect to have several careers. I've got a leg up on everybody.

My Mouth's Bleedin', Bert

The other day I finally received my DVD copy of It's a Wonderful Life that was ordered in time to be "guaranteed to arrive by Christmas." It was roughly three weeks late - just in time to watch it for Martin Luther (the) King Jr.'s birthday. I popped it to find that it was not letterboxed, much to my chagrin. I already have a non-letterboxed VHS version. I did a little research online to find out how I'd been hoodwinked and wound up learning something pretty interesting. There is no letterboxed version of It's a Wonderful Life. Nor is there a letterboxed version of virtually any movie filmed before 1956 or so. The aspect ratio of movies wasn't changed to the familiar elongated horizontal rectangle until the mid 1950s. Knowing is half the battle.

It's Poison, I Tell Ya, It's Poison

George Bailey had it right. It certainly is poison. This is my third week with the cursed weed poison ivy infection. It is good to know that my immune system is functioning properly. I still itch something fierce but I can tell that the tide is turning. And now to go stack some more firewood. 1.16.03



C is for Cookie

Lower the flags to half-mast, boys. Jennifer Connelly has given her hand in marriage… to someone other than myself. Was it something I said? Maybe it was the time she called the police and had my tent dragged off her lawn with me still in it. Perhaps it was the botched sky-written poem above the set of The Hulk. Maybe it's because she hasn't the slightest idea who I am. I guess now I'll never know.

El Dorado

Something became clear to me the other day. I was trying to think of somewhere warmer to live. Even though I'll probably wind up living in Austin for a while I still have issues with the Bush junta and the piles of dead former death row inmates on the State Capitol lawn. Florida is warm but full of ridiculous people; Caribbean drug shysters, retirees from New Jersey, rednecks in the panhandle, Canadians, carpetbaggers of all sorts and yet another Bush junta. I was dejectedly saying to myself… "If only I could find someplace warm and populated with a more liberal stock of American." Then it hit me. It was right in front of me the whole time.

California is a Garden of Eden. Perfect weather for any sort of person - from the sunny surf of the Southern coastal region to the misty sequoia forests to the snow capped Sierra Nevada. Cosmopolitan cities and every type of amenity imaginable. Cataclysmic natural disasters to keep you on your toes. And the girls. I've been to Los Angeles and I fell in love with every single waitress I saw. Even the ugly girls are beautiful in California. The way I see it I'm going to get my heart broken anyway. Why not get it broken by someone easy on the eyes? And they're not all fake, either. Beautiful, silicone-free girls from every State in the Union flock to California for any number of reasons. I saw the same girls when I lived in New York City, having flocked in from Iowa and Kentucky and Maine. It's just that in Manhattan they get so hardened by the grit and chafed by the same layers of winter clothes that I tried to leave in Chicago. The California Girls have no such encumbrances. Sure, Californians are different. So am I. When I get there I'll send you a note written in wasabi, suntan lotion and pale ale. It's a matter of time.

Two Six Strings and a Microphone

I played guitar all day yesterday. All day - like when I was fifteen. Nowadays the kids seem to take a greater interest in turntables, microphones and game controllers. Way back in the day turntables were for learning songs on our guitars and there was only so much you could do with one joystick and one button. Microphones we had, albeit crappy ones plugged into a spare guitar amp because nobody could afford a PA system. For gigs we used to rent one for $40 from the local music shop, which was run out of an old house by a trumpet player with lots of earrings. He used to tell us stories about the generation of musicians just older than us. They sounded a lot like the memories we were making day by day.

I used to turn on the radio and play along with every single song that came on, learning Zeppelin and Van Halen and Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix all at once. Hours would pass and songs would work their way under my fingers and into my head. I learned as much from David Gilmour and Joe Walsh as I learned from the guitar teacher I had at the other local music shop.

The trumpet guy didn't have a teacher on guitar so I had to learn from a somewhat square jazzer who taught at the local family owned music store. He happened to be the same guy I took lessons from several years prior when I first attempted to learn to play in 4th grade. It was all Mel Bay books and Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley. It wasn't all bad. Despite my aversion to the repertoire my teacher was musically legitimate. After enduring years of what seemed like useless exercises I talked him into teaching me Hotel California. To his credit he made sure I could comprehend what he was teaching me, at least partially so. I hate to think of that poor bastard now. Fifteen-year-old burgeoning guitarists must bring in crap like Korn and System of a Down for him to teach them on his sunburst Ibanez. When I finally got older and became a more legitimate player I wound up on the instructing end of the big black music stand. It was Metallica that made me stop teaching guitar.

I'm still in love with the long decay you hear when you stick your ear up to the sound hole on a steel string guitar. I'm just as enamored by the grind of a single coil pickup squawking out of a tube amp as I was when I was fourteen. And I can still sit in my room all day and play along with everything that comes on the radio. I might just do it again tomorrow.

Dammit, Bobby

I actually watched a little TV tonight. The Simpsons and King of the Hill are once again back-to-back on Fox. Funny stuff, but not funny enough for me to remember to turn on the TV. I saw some commercials for Fox's newest barrage of so called Reality TV. The thing that people seem to forget all too easily is that it is not reality if it's on television. I would rather watch a dog take a crap than watch any one of those shows. And then there are soap operas. I loathe those things with the burning passion of a thousand suns. I would rather have a dog crap on my forehead than watch any given episode of any given daytime soap opera.

Feed Me, Seymour

I am still wrestling with my outbreak of poison oak. I did some research and learned some important things about it. Only contact with the actual oil from the plant - called Urushiol oil - causes the allergic reaction. The oil is pretty strong stuff and can stay viable on other objects for months and months. In other words, you can get poison ivy from the oil that your dog left on the couch after a romp in the weeds back in August. I also learned that one cannot spread the condition to other people by contact with the blisters or irritated areas of skin. So, if you have someone willing to romp with you to help distract you from the symptoms you can romp at will. Make sure you wash anything you were wearing when you contracted it, along with anything that might have come into contact with those clothes. I read reports of many a mom picking it up by washing other people's clothes - botanical collateral damage.

I guess that once you get poison oak into your system you can have blisters on any part of your body as your circulatory system makes sure your whole body knows what's going on. I also learned that, unlike other conditions, your body's natural immunity to poison oak tends to be increasingly ineffectual as you repeatedly contract it over the course of your life. This means that it tends to get worse as you get it again and again - like the reverse of the chicken pox.

As for me, it is still uncomfortable to sit still and breathe. I have tried two different topical solutions and some oral allergy medication with varying levels of success. I coat myself in calamine lotion before bed and I awake looking like a leper, or as if I am snowing. I itch all over and I just try not to think about it. I admit that it's like trying not to think about the gorilla sitting on your chest.

Flying Carpet

Here we are in January of 2003. George W., the man who said, "It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas." is sending about 30,000 additional Americans to the Persian Gulf. Why doesn't he show us the supposed evidence that Iraq is making weapons of mass destruction? Because he doesn't have any.

Courage from an Unlikely Place

Illinois' lame duck governor, George Ryan, has done something courageous and almost unbelievably bold. Based on information researched by a Northwestern University law class he has commuted the sentences of every person sitting on Death Row in the State of Illinois. All but four now have life without parole. Apparently, the timing had less to do with Ryan's impending unemployment and more to do with results of the Northwestern study, which is that the justice system is in shambles. I'm not certain that the timing of his brazen decision matters. Justice has been served. More dead bodies simply does not solve the problem. It costs more to execute people than it does to house and feed them. "Prison reform!" you scream? Sure. I'm all for it. Let's fix the justice system while we're at it. "It won't bring back my son/daughter/mother/father/sister/brother!" the victim's relatives cry. So very true, and it's horrible what pain has been visited on them. But what does more pain and more loss and more death solve? My grandfather used to say that a dead man commits no further crimes. Again, true, but our society must bear the cost of more death and our hypocrisy in the face of the rest of the civilized world. America, and that's you and I, is the only of the world's civilized societies to implement capital punishment. I simply don't want to be part of a society who kills its own people as a solution to our own social problems. I'll raise a pint to you tonight, George Ryan. 1.12.03



Paterfamilias Rex

Arguing with my father about the death penalty. A scene no doubt played out generation after generation for the last 2000 or more years. The topics, languages and weather outside the window are the variables in this game. I love the man. He gave me life, and paid for it to boot. I was nine when he was my current age. He comes from a different time - and not just chronologically. He's from a strange place called Alabama.

Red of neck and red of soil. Neil Young wrote about Alabama. I'm not sure that anything happens there. People are born and people get married and people work and grow old and die in Alabama - just like the rest of the world. Life is slow in Alabama. Sometimes imperceptibly so.

Rosa Parks had had enough segregated bullshit in Alabama. Martin Luther King, Jr. wore out the soles of some shoes in Alabama. The postwar United States government found a new home for some German rocket scientists in Alabama. George Wallace tried to fight the future in Alabama. Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird in Alabama. Helen Keller never saw the red clay of Alabama where she was born. In August 1864 Admiral David Farragut said "Damn the torpedoes" in Mobile Bay, Alabama.

The Alabama county in which my parents live is a dry county. This means that the highways and rural roads have twice the rainwater-filled empties poking through the weeds as the wet counties do. This also means that people have to drive to the neighboring county to purchase their shitty beer. And drive they do - drinking shitty beer all the while. To balance out the rebel flag/pickup truck crowd there are legions of elderly female religious zealots. Luckily for me, I have representative from both camps in my extended family. But back to my father.

He didn't have enough opportunities to make a wage commensurate with his considerable skill with his hands and head in Alabama. So he headed north to Chicago - or thereabouts. There, he met my mother and they started their family. The five of us kids pretty much determined what he would spend the rest of his life doing - paying for diapers and cradles and food and cars and guitars and soccer balls. I owe him everything. I owe him my patient ear as he rants about his less-than-liberal views on the death penalty. What he owes me is the right to disagree with him.

A Stop Frame in Time

Songs take you back, sometimes farther than other times. That slightly out of tune guitar lick from the beginning of Coldplay's Yellow takes me back to a specific place in time. I used to have a keyboard player without a car. In a big city a harmonica player can get by without a car. Singers can get by without a car. Some guitarists can even get by without a car. I myself tried it in Manhattan for a year. Keyboard players, however, cannot. This particular keyboard player lived on the third floor of a cool loft building in Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood. There's nothing like loading out your own gear after a show in the snow in Chicago in February at 3:am. And there certainly isn't anything like loading someone else's gear out and into your car along with all your shit in the snow at 3:am. Then you get to drive him home and move all the stuff around to get the board, throne (For the uninitiated - drum seats are called thrones, perhaps the ultimate coup of percussion nomenclature.) and leslie cabinet out of your car and into the 6 inches of slushy snow. From the snow it goes to the freight elevator that was thankfully waiting for you. Then you pay him his cut of the whopping $60 you made for the gig and he tells you that he'll need more than $12 for gigs in the future. You bid him goodnight, rearrange your own cadre of guitars, amps and boxes of CDs and start your car for the weary drive home. Band members who ask for a guaranteed $50 cut of the take wind up playing in someone else's band so that's more than likely the last you'll be seeing of this carless guy and his keyboard gear. "For fifty bucks he can get himself to the goddamn show," you're thinking as you turn on the radio. Your tape deck hasn't worked in years. Just then an elevated train rumbles directly overhead and the screeching, rumbling sound overpowers even the ringing in your ears. Half melted snow and innocuous sparks rain down on your car, and as the noise passes and you pull away you hear the distorted string bending and falsetto melody of Yellow begin rise above the fading Blue Line train. A silent switch is thrown in your head and that moment is locked into your psyche forever. Just like that.

Austin Power

I just watched Beck perform on Austin City Limits. Damn. That was awesome. He's got the seemingly-eternally indie band The Flaming Lips playing as his back up band these days. I don't know that I'm necessarily a fan of the Lips but they sure do make Beck Hansen sound even cooler than he already is. I own a copy of Beck's CD, Mutations. It sits between The Beatles and Big Daddy in my collection. 1.12.03



Oisonpay Akoay

Here I am, a week in to 2003. I'm still fighting a biological war with Mother Nature. First it was the flu and canker sores. Now it's a cold and poison oak. I didn't even think that it was possible to get poison oak in the cursed month of January. As it turns out, hauling firewood for your grandparents will get you any time. Somehow, I managed to make it through all of 2002 without a catching a cold. As a result I avoided my hacking "permacough" that makes my life - and the lives of those around me - miserable from the onset of the cold until the weather breaks. Given all the other stress factors in my life last year it's staggering that I didn't cough myself into oblivion. This cold doesn't seem all that bad. From the onset of symptoms I drowned it in orange juice and stuffed it with pot pies. I had one night of the sweats and went straight to the phlegm phase.

The poison oak, on the other hand, has become something to be reckoned with. I actually picked it up before the flu outbreak of New Year's Eve - on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year's. Poison Ivy/Oak/Sumac has a gestation period like that chest burster from the Alien movies. By the time you know you have it it's too late. I thought I had a spider bite on my neck until I heard my dad and brother talking about poison oak. Naturally, I got the worst outbreak of the lot. So here I sit, covered in red blisters and a thick coating of calamine lotion. Don't tell Dubya about all the naturally-occuring bioweapons. He'll wage war on the planet more than he already is.

The Red Pill

The Matrix people have no less than two sequels due out this year. That's a lot of shiny leather and slow motion gunplay for any calendar year. I have to say that Trinity gives Dana Scully a run for her "sexy-smart" girl money. One has to wonder what sex would be like in The Matrix. Could I have my tech load in a room full of eager Carrie-Anne Moss and Gillian Anderson clones? If Neo and Trinity could run up walls and dodge bullets could I be some kind of group sex messiah or make myself immune to even the most banal sexually transmitted disease with a plug-in?

My Precious

I managed to catch the new Lord of the Rings movie over the holidays as well. Peter Jackson has done an admirable job keeping my wizard, troll and magic potion aversions at bay. And I really have to say that Gollum, the entirely computer generated character from The Two Towers was way more impressive than that CG character from George Lucas' Attack of the Clones. With all his virtually unlimited resources one would think that Lucas' CG Anakin Skywalker would have been a better actor than Tolkien/Jackson's Gollum. It was clever of them to give the Star Wars CG "actor" a name to make it seem more lifelike. Where did they come up with a name like Hayden Christensen anyways? I think that Gollum is a shoe-in for the CG character Oscar. He acted circles around Skywalker.

Take That, Bruckheimer

And then there's Band of Brothers. I managed to miss the actual airing of this show when it was on HBO - the same way that I missed every single Soprano's episode until Season 4. I prefer to watch such epic stories at my own pace that I might better appreciate and analyze what I'm viewing. Band of Brothers got into me. It got under, around and through me. I'm on my second start-to-finish viewing of the set and it has still got a hold of me. It doesn't smack of Hollywood's typically overdone style. It doesn't insult the intelligence of the viewer by depicting some sort of shit like FDR getting up out of his wheelchair or displaying a 50-star American flag over a period battlefield. It didn't even bank on the drawing power of big name/big dollar stars in its cast - save for the visionaries Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg who share the producer's credit. It is just a good story with good characters that looks good. It didn't even have a surprise ending or bizarre plot twist to get the people talking around the water cooler at the office on Monday morning. It is the story of the individual cells of America flexing her growing muscles when it was clear exactly why she was doing so. Band of Brothers simply resonates.

Art vs. Life

South Park is still funny and poignant in ways that a lot of Conservatives will never quite understand. Cartman, Stan and Kyle recently attempted to build a junkpile to heaven in order to find Kenny, to in turn ask him where he put the ticket stub entitling the foursome to a gratis shopping spree at a local candy store before he died. The Japanese join the race to heaven by building their own junkpile, Dubya decides that Saddam Hussein is building weapons of mass destruction in heaven and that we have to bomb heaven in order to stop him, and Alan Jackson exploits the whole thing by writing trite songs about each unfolding national tragedy. I won't bother asking how close that plotline is to reality.

One More for the Junk Heap

I recently ordered a new harmonica from an online music retailer. The service was exemplary and the price competitive. I was honestly impressed. Along with my order I received a free bonus harmonica holder. I figured that, given the cost, it couldn't be much of a harmonica holder. Boy was I right. I'm tempted to destroy this thing outright in order to save some poor musician the hassle of trying to get it to work properly. I can't stand under-engineered products. Those Goddamn dollar stores are bastions of crapola. Like bad relationships, I'd rather have nothing than a cheap one. 1.8.03



2002 - A Record Year

(WARNING - the following depicts a graphic description of my battle with a ruthless biotoxin.)

I survived the remainder of 2002 not entirely unscathed. Like the last tentacle of a vanquished giant squid reaching up to grab your leg as it plunges into the inky depths off the bow of the Nautilus, 2002 hit me with the most violent gastro-intestinal maelstrom I've ever experienced on it's way into the annals of history.

I awoke during the night on Monday night feeling as if I was a cocktail olive impaled on a giant skewer. I didn't sleep for the rest of the night. I was staying with my brother, so I managed to limp home around 8 and crawl into bed. Mom made the obligatory Sprite/7-Up sortie. Around 9 or 10am I began a cycle of vomiting that would outlast the final sundown of the year. It was a roughly 30 minute cycle - drink Sprite, violently vomit up the rapidly-decreasing contents of my stomach, writhe in pain, drink Sprite and repeat. It got to the point where I was drinking just so that there would be something to vomit about. This cycle repeated itself an estimated 15 times. I estimate because I lost track after 13 or so. This more than exceeds my previous record of 1-day vomiting spells, which totals in the lower-to-middle single digits. Until my scuba vomiting episode in Costa Rica I hadn't shifted my digestive system into reverse in years. And... never in my wildest, bile-soaked fantasies have I ever puked 15 times in one day. Unbelievable. The only thing that stopped the madness was a dire phone call from my mom to my brother's girlfriend's mom (a close friend of the family) - who happens to be a nurse and keeps a pharmaceutical arsenal at home that would make Hunter S. Thompson envious. She had these little white, bullet-shaped capsules for insertion into one's rear end that were reputed to be effective in cases such as mine. The way I was feeling I would have stuck a '72 Nova up my ass if it made me feel better and stopped the puking madness. After "fire one" I managed to last 15 minutes before I deposited it into the toilet (that which goes up...) and passed out due to the "may cause drowsiness" ingredient. I was hoping I'd get to drive my front loader before sleep overcame me but it was sadly not to be. When I awoke a couple hours later I felt "better" in a loose sense of the word. Now I only felt as if I'd been stabbed by a fencing sword.

I managed to slowly shuffle hunchback style to the front room and sit with my parents as they bickered about which of the 700-odd channels to watch for the rest of the year. Ah, the tranquility of 33 years of marriage. I watched the ball drop in Manhattan under blanket and fortified with Gatorade. It was a stretch to make it the hour to CST midnight - where there is no local station that counts down to midnight. We had to watch some kind of replayed tape from Atlanta from an hour earlier that involved the dropping of a giant peach and the ceremonious ribbon cutting for some kind of mall. Even with 700-plus channels we couldn't find a single Central Standard time zone New Year's countdown. There's an Onion article that depicts the discovery of the Mid-West by the North American continent's costal inhabitants but I couldn't tell you how to find it. Rumor has it that several hundred thousand people might live in this fabled "Mid-West." In any case, in lieu of a girl I once again kissed my Martin guitar at midnight at the turn of the year. I bid that stinking dung heap of a year a none-to-fond goodbye and good riddance and shuffled back off to bed.

Today I feel as if my stomach ran a marathon, which, in a sense, it did. I'm weak and dehydrated and ready to spend day number two in bed. The hard part is thankfully over and I can now focus on Gatorade and pot pies. I've managed to spend up to 20 minutes at a time out of bed before I have to go back and regain my strength. We can add 2002 to Dubya's touted "axis of evil" as it resorted to utilizing germ warfare on one of it's prime foes... namely yours truly. 1.2.03

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