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