Same sad songs

Same sad songs

The fear in your heart

the moment you know

it has slipped away

and nothing will

bring it back.

Kick scream and plead

knowing it is all for

nothing. Resigned,

naked, sigh,

another beer.

And another. The

same sad songs

you always play.

Cue them up

one more time.

Stars Fall Down Like I Am Writing Some Kind of Ryan Adams Song

Stars Fall Down Like I Am Writing Some Kind of Ryan Adams Song

The nights I slow my steps

to stare at the stars,

and think of the time,

and it was perfect -

with you - and you will

never know. And when

I am home, listening

to the same sad songs,

you lift me up, my

heart, for a moment,

my heart, it aches.

And it is perfect.

This was not like being John Cusak in that movie where Jack Black was still funny at all...

Yeah, I'm kind of a big deal. I worked in the music industry once. For three days. That's right, I wore the red vest of Strawberries Records and Tapes (even though there were definitely no records and very few tapes) for three entire shifts. And it was still only the second shortest job I ever had.

Now had I worked at a record store when I was 17 or 18, even one as steep of a crash course with irrelevance as Strawberries was at the time, I would have thought it was the greatest thing in the world, or at least nearly as great as getting paid to shotgun beers and provide in-depth annotated lists of the 30 greatest Ramones songs (which is still a search query I fire into monster.com every now and again, because, hey, you never know, sometimes dreams can come true).

By the time I did work at a music store, I was just a bit older than that, and had no illusions about it other than the fact that I needed a second job to help pay some bills. And, hey, music. Still could be a lot worse ways to work a few extra hours per week for short money, right?

(This is the part in the narrative where I am supposed to answer my own question above with Wrong! I was considering leaving it an implied wrong, but...)

Wrong!

Now, I freely admit I have worked a lot of jobs, and true, very few of them have involved operating heavy machinery or performing overly complicated surgery, but the one thing that linked all these jobs was that not one of them required me to piss in a cup. Except for the one where I wore a red vest and had to dust Creed CDs, obviously. Although I am typically opposed to drug testing, I am even more opposed to not having enough money to pay my bills. So I sucked it up and pissed into the cup. And since it wasn't 1989, I passed the drug test with flying yellow color.

So, day one, being appropriately drug free enough to operate a cash register, I began my second job. The first thing I noticed about my boss was that she did not have any eyebrows. I mean, there were those pencil mark things where eyebrows once may have been, but since she was under the age of 80, I was assuming the real eyebrows were lost in some kind of industrial Walkman type of accident, so I tried not to stare. The second thing I noticed about my boss was that she was not very bright. I also did not hold this against her, on the off chance that the accident that caused the eyebrow loss may have also caused some minor brain damage. She obviously had no plan for what to do with me as a new employee. I did get her lunch at the Pizza Hut next door. And I had to nod my head sympathetically as she babbled on about how before she worked at Strawberries she had never heard of bands like Puddle of Mudd, and since she had started working there, she had heard of bands like Puddle of Mudd. I should have stayed at Pizza Hut.

But at least my eyebrowless boss who was amazed by the existence of extremely crappy faux-metal bands talked to me, which was a step above what I got from, oh, every other asshole who worked in the store. But really, that was okay, them being assholes and all.

Other than making runs to Pizza Hut, my three days on the job consisted of me walking around the store, helping the confused masses locate the latest Celine Dion holiday CD. (Big display over near the register, ma'am. Big display over near the register, sir. Can I interest you in the new Puddle of Mudd Chanuakauh CD sir?)

This lasted for three days. Somehow, I was never put back on the schedule. Somehow, I did not raise a fuss about this.

But, before I end this tale of a short chapter in my working life, I will provide you with an actual transcript, from memory, more or less, of an actual exchange between one of my coworkers who did not speak to me and one of Saugus' finest musicophiles.

CULTURED SAUGUS MUSIC SHOPPER: Can you tell me where to find Da ZZ Top?

ASSHOLE COWORKER WHO DIDN'T SPEAK TO ME: Ummmm, what kind of music is that?

CULTURED SAUGUS MUSIC SHOPPER: You know, dose guys with da beards, Da ZZ Top.

ASSHOLE COWORKER WHO DIDN'T SPEAK TO ME: Oh, Da ZZ Top, well they must be under D.

Rocknroll show

I am old and creaky and have jobs and responsibilities and need naps and don't get out to the rocknroll shows as much as I did in my younger days. But that doesn't mean I don't get out at all.

Last week I took the trip into Allston Rock City to see the Biters, seven bucks, free parking, and all the sweat and leather and hooks and ringing guitars and ringing ears and denim and good times to make me once again believe that, yes, rock and roll is a living breathing thing that needs to be experienced on occasion up close and without earplugs and with amplifiers less than five feet from your ears.

If it had been a lesser band, it might have been a pleasant enough night that faded from memory after a day or two. But it was the Biters, most likely my favorite new band since the Exploding Hearts tragically met their end about five years ago (and major thanks to Greg Munroe for pointing  me in the direction of both the Hearts and the Biters).

In short, the Biters are everything that is eternal and good and loud and now about rocknroll. They are the '76 Ramones, the early Mats, Thin Lizzy, T. Rex, Cheap Trick at Budokan. And if you want to take off points for a lack of originality, then go home and listen to your radiohead bootleg demos on your headphones alone in your bedroom. Because real rocknroll is playing your ass off in front of 50 people in a corner bar on a Tuesday night, and knowing that at least 30 of those people have no fucking clue who you are. Real rocknroll is knowing that it doesn't matter if it is a basement or headlining Madison Square Garden. And the Biters were real rocknroll, god friggin' bless them.

Letter never sent

I have your address
with the exception of
the zip code. But I
can look that up.

And the envelope, I
may be out of
envelopes, but if I
find an envelope, the
stamps are behind
the bills in the front
hall.

And I had so much
to say, enough to easily
overcome the lack of the
zip code, but perhaps not
enough to find an envelope.

On the Road, again

I'm sorry, Jack. I gave it one more shot. When I was 20, I was convinced On the Road was one of the enduring testaments of American Literature. The freedom of the road, discovery, love laughs and bacchanalian days and nights. Since then, I have come back to the Road approximately once per decade. Around the time I was 30, I was convinced you were just not a very good writer. At the time, I feared the old Truman Capote axiom about you typing and not writing was true.If I made it more than halfway through on that go round, I would be surprised.

So here I am at 40, willing to give your tale of the Road one more try. The good news is, I believe you were a much more talented writer than I gave you credit for, for pages at a time it is easy to get lost in rush of the cross country journeys, the search for, the search for...

... well, this is where I fear I won't be signing up for this journey next decade. I can feel your yearning, your search for, for something, but I am convinced you were never really sure what it was, Jack. At the end of the day, you were searching for an America that had passed you by, just as in future decades, thousands of readers were searching for the America they though you represented. But you risked almost nothing. There was also another check for the Aunt to send cross country. Your love for Thomas Wolfe was established from the early days, but in On the Road, you always could go home again. You were a sad man, anyone who thinks On the Road is a joyous story hasn't taken a close look at. Maybe if you had done more to tap into that knowing sadness, the novel would have more resonance, but instead we are left on a journey with the you disguised as Sal Paradise, and you are a cipher, a not very interesting outlier in the stories of others.

Which leaves us with Dean Moriarity, the holy fool of the American Road. As the years go by, it's easier to see poor Dean as more fool than holy, an egotistical manchild only looking out for his own insatiable desires.The more Kerouac built up Moriarity as the spirit of the American road, the more I realize Kerouac may not have understood America at all.

The dorkiness of the long distance runner

—   For the love of god, they are not starting the boys and the girls race at the same time, are they? This is not going to look good, not one bit.

Long, long before I made my exercise bones as the dude at the walking track giving the head nod to the old-timers with canes, I was a high school runner of some modest, very, incredibly modest ability. Which means I could handle practice runs of varying lengths without much of a struggle and during races I could somehow manage to not embarrass myself by crossing in the middle-back of the pack.

Being the open-minded liberal guy I was, starting the boys and girls races at the same time wouldn’t have been that big of a deal. Sure, chances are some really fast girls would have finished ahead of me, but I could live with that as long as I could have crossed the finish line with a respectable contingent of similarly anorexic looking comrades.

But during the last race of my senior year, I knew damn well that me starting the same time of the girls was going to result in me finishing hand in hand with a gaggle of pint-sized ninth grade girls slowly shuffling along in their Hello Kitty sneakers.

Which means it is time for a flashback. I know, I know, I’m already in the fall of 1987, but I still need to flashback a month or two before that. To the slightly earlier fall of 1987. Hold on tight and try not to get motion sickness.

That’s when I suffered my one and only sports injury. I was running the loop behind the high school when I planted my ankle conveniently inside a tree stump as I turned my entire body, with the exception of my ankle and foot that were stuck in the tree stump.

It kinda hurt. I sat on the ground and watched my ankle assume the color, shape, and size of something in the eggplant family. Perhaps an eggplant. Several of my teammates ran by and asked if I was okay. I told them I was fine as long as I wanted to spend a pleasant fall day sitting under a tree behind the high school and didn’t need to walk anywhere. I asked them to let the coach know what happened, just for kicks. I sat under the tree. I waited for someone to give me a hand. No hand was forthcoming. I hobbled back to the high school on my eggplant ankle. Went to the hospital where the general consensus was that I had a sprained ankle which could prevent me from running for a while.

After a week or two, when the size of my ankle shrank to the size of pretty much your garden variety, noneggplant ankle, I started practicing again. During my first race back, I discovered that my normal moderate, not attracting any undue attention pace was replaced by a much slower, I’m making everyone wait in the bus while I finish the race type of pace.

Which brings me back to the final race of my senior year. Where I would be leaving the starting line at the same time as a bunch of 14-year-old girls wearing pink pom pom running socks. And the older girls who would have probably beaten me even on my best day.

Gun goes off, the first couple hundred yards is good, because I am using my typical race “strategy” …

Unfortunately though, for my three years on the cross country, I had just about the most asinine race strategy in the history of running. During practice runs where no one bothered to time me, I could keep up a healthy pace for six or seven miles, run side by side with the best runners on the team, and not feel like someone had taken a sledgehammer to my guts by the end of the race. Somehow, all this attention to pacing and stamina went out the window on race day. I’d hear the gun go off and automatically think I was a ‘roided up Ben Johnson trying to run the 100-yard dash in under seven seconds. I may have had the best 50-yard cross country splits in the history of MHS, head bobbing legs flying through the air as I took the early lead. By the 100-yard mark, I was neck and neck with the best runners, by the 200-yard mark, I was in the middle of the park, by the quarter-mile mark, I was usually doubled over in pain clutching my stomach as all but the most ploddingly of the plodders passed me by. After that, I would be able to pull myself together enough to get back in the race, actually pass a plodder or two, and find me back towards the back of a pack of skinny guys who at least looked like they were runners.


So, the big race, I sprint out and, much to my amazement, having a bum ankle does not improve the “Running like a drunken asshole from the police” cross country strategy. Within a quarter mile, I am doubled over in pain, clutching my stock with the added bonus of having a throbbing ankle and I am eating the dust kicked up by a half-dozen pairs of Hello Kitty pop pom socks.

I right myself enough to get going into a nice slow jog groove, cursing my ankle, cursing the damn stomach cramps I had never figured out how to avoid. (Which I know realize I may have been able to at least partly avoid had any of the coaches bothered to mention that — Hey, you might want to drink water and not coke from the soda machine before a race, staying hydrated could help you.)

Somehow, I finished the race not quite in last place. Despite having gotten off course and charging through the decorative hedges at the entrance of whatever high school we happened to be racing at that day and not on the official cross country course. At this point, the bus had been running for a while and the officials were probably just happy to have me off the course.

And so ended my glorious high school athletic career.