Who Asked Me?

The days are rocketing through November and I’m in the wine shop next door, radio starting to play Blue Christmas and announcer commenting on Elvis leading holiday sales again this year. “Jesus,” says the attractive thirty-something woman pricing Port beside me, recognizing neither King – Memphis nor Bethlehem – but the fact that it’s here again and she hasn’t even thought about Thanksgiving dinner.  I put my eight dollar bottle of Pucela red on the counter and the register jockey takes note in his thick Brooklynese: “We’re halfway through November, you’re wearin’ shorts, an they’re playin’ Christmas songs on da radio.” Try as I might, I couldn’t sum it up any better. I’ve just returned from a run up Henry, across Atlantic, down the Promenade and back up Court, and forty degrees doesn’t feel all that cold anymore. But time is passing and I’m admittedly struggling to get my head around the rest of it.

Jumping back a month, it’s a Tuesday morning in October and a classic example of one of those “why the hell did I move here?” days. Horizontal sheets of rain slap my front windows and my water-logged trek to the corner bakery produces only a soggy hoodie, lukewarm coffee and stale muffin.  Returning home I sip, chew, ponder, then make my break for the door and the station.  The train comes immediately and I find a seat and start scribbling on a yellow legal pad with an old Waterson fountain pen, like some kind of authentic scribe and poseur relic.  Soon I’m deep in, breaking only on occasion to note lack of connection and my soaked, tattered jeans hems. I push on about Charlie Brown, brown puddles of rain outside my second grade classroom window, and my mother’s warm kitchen back home. I look up once at the pierced lip girl observing and then again a moment later to note the station: Fifty-Seventh. I’ve overshot my stop by two. I put my earphones in and cross the platform to wait again.

This time it’s late and halfway through my wait I see the outline of a figure coming down the track from inside the tunnel. As he approaches I realize he isn’t an MTA employee but a homeless man, possibly one of those “mole people” I’ve read about. He makes his way off the track and is preoccupied with tearing the pages from a large, soiled fashion magazine he’s been carrying under one arm. His pants ride well below waist, revealing more crack than all that moved through Miami in the late 80’s. I’m listening to Dylan – Not Dark Yet – and along with a nattily dressed business dude am the only person observing this man. He hikes his pants to a more reasonable level and I refocus on a mariachi trio, also waiting for the train. It comes. Doors shut. They begin to play.

There is no less welcome train entertainment than mariachi, particularly on a day as rainy and downcast as this. Their unintelligible hi-yeeee’s, straight legged slacks with snakeskin boots, and loud slapping stand-up bass technique is unavoidable and inescapable. On the floor by the foot of the accordian player is half of a ripped dollar bill, lending itself in some inexplicably appropriate way to the scene. Passengers separate rain-glued pages of their dripping Posts, note their dampened attire, and generally do anything but make eye contact with the jubilant three whose music better reflects a far drier, sunnier Mexican day. Doors open. Music stops. Nobody tips.

Forward again to the present as I sip my surprisingly decent eight dollar Pucela and watch YouTube clips of the ’78 assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Sean Penn has a film coming out next week based on the events, but I have strong childhood memories. As I watch the small pop-up box on my laptop, the news footage is all in film and possesses a surreal, distant quality, almost as if it’s been dragged from someone’s memory and reorientated for the current era. They’ll probably figure that trick soon too, and I’ll take it for granted. Diane Feinstein announces the murders and suspect while hand held lights bounce around the dark interior of City Hall, allowing for passably reasonable exposure. Thirty years ago, the week after Thanksgiving.  Jesus Christ.

I had planned on dropping this election stuff after the results were in last week, but it remains too large to ignore. The country, and much of the free world, would appear to be in the grips of Obama-fever. Granted, it was an historical moment when America put a black guy in the top spot by a substantial margin. What it says about the country can be debated now that the election is over, but as far as the man himself goes, much remains to be seen. He’s intelligent, gives a great speech, and along with his team ran a nearly flawless campaign. But the national and international media has whipped itself into such an adulating love-fest, they can’t seem to distinguish between legitimate news and effusive gushing. Considering the praise bestowed upon this man months before he takes his first breath as President, I have to imagine he’s feeling some pressure. He comes off as a calm individual, but there must be some temptation to walk up to the podium and utter Harvey Keitel’s line as Mr. Wolf in “Pulp Fiction”: Well, let’s not start suckin’ each others’ d*cks quite yet.

You don’t have to be Tony Danza to realize we’re living in troubled times. We’ve got two wars going on and the incoming economic data is generating the cheering effect of a Todd Solondz film. But elevating George Bush to a moronic caricature responsible for all the country’s ills is a far easier task than solving these very real problems.  Obama didn’t even have to demonize Bush – the job had been taken care of well before he got the nomination. All he had to do is what seems to come naturally for him: remain level-headed and not make any serious gaffes. Now he’s got the job and people are already treating him like he’s single-handedly liberated France. My sense is that he’s a cool enough character to understand the premature expectations, and already acknowledged as much in his speech on election night in Chicago’s Grant Park when he expressed pointedly that it wasn’t about “him”.

Obama’s campaign mantra evolved around two vague but powerful concepts: hope and change. The ecstatic mood among his supporters and many non-supporters following the election was a result of the affirmation of hope. Perhaps this country isn’t as racist or single-minded as they’ve made us out to be. Maybe this idea that anything is possible here is still alive. But change – ay, there’s the rub. It probably isn’t quite as easy as putting the right guy in there. Incriminated and held to as much public ridicule as he’s been, George Bush could likely still tell the new President a thing or two about reality versus expectation, and even more pointedly, what to expect if and when the love runs out. It’s a lot to be put on any man’s shoulders, but particularly on one who is both young and setting new precedent by his very appearance. Let’s hope the good will continues in the years to come.

Spent some time feelin’ inferior – Rod Stewart / Ronnie Wood

They say that kids today are way ahead of those of my generation, and having a niece and nephew who are competent in both Japanese and English, I’m inclined to agree with them. But today’s kids are also missing something. This occurred to me the other night in the middle of watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. This animated show, along with the gold standard A Charlie Brown Christmas, set a realistic tone for adulthood pointedly absent from anything Zac Efron could ever deliver. (Actually, I’m too out of touch to even know if Zac Efron is a relative current example, but I do like writing his name.)

You couldn’t get away with a character like Charlie Brown today. His realistic appraisal of the world around him and repeated “I’m depressed” assertions would be seen as excessively negative and damaging. For Charlie Brown, depression was merely the by-product of an accurate assessment of his state of affairs; not a skewed view of the world and result of misfiring synapses and depleted serotonin levels. He sucked as a pitcher, couldn’t score with the Little Red Haired Girl, and was eliminated from the class spelling bee for misspelling the word “maze.” (And this only because of his singular focus on the greatest San Francisco Giant, and perhaps greatest baseball player to ever play the game.) At Halloween, his scissor skills were so poor that his ghost sheet more resembled Swiss cheese. When the kids compared their trick-or-treat haul, he always got a rock. Not just once, but at every door.

Still, I kind of liked the kid.

Which leads me to this year’s election. A basic principle of economics, as it was once explained to me, is the exchange of information. You know more about you than I do, and I know more about me. How well we come to understand or misunderstand each other is related to the exchange, accuracy and interpretation of these facts. By this standard, economics has a lot to do with words. This is likely why they’re chosen carefully when it comes time to talk about the state of economic affairs.  Both presidential campaigns reflect distorted verbal economic management. It’s absolutely intentional, misleading, and designed to attract the most votes possible. Obama associates with terrorists. There are no differences between McCain and Bush. These statements are easily challenged with even cursory examination, yet are leveled with repeated conviction. A friend much smarter than I once remarked that the problem with democracy is that everyone gets to vote. I know that I’m far from qualified, and a simple ride on the subway or flip through the channels provides ample evidence to suspect that I’m not alone. Despite this, the level of rancorous exchanges currently being tossed between those with opposing views has reached epic proportion. The weaker or more poorly-based the argument, it would seem, the stronger and more bitter the conviction.

If Charlie Brown could tell it like it is, why can’t the rest of us follow suit? Perhaps the price is too high to pay. Robert Burns wrote “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us, to see oursels as others see us” which, roughly translated, means: what a gift it would be to see ourselves as others do. It would also likely lead to years of therapy. Perhaps the more relevant quote comes from Walther Matthau as delivered to his troop of lovable losers in The Bad News Bears: “Never assume. When you assume, you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’.” If we’re able to make some small interpersonal gains with this one, we might be ready to move on to national elections.

For some time now, my computer-savvy pal Paul Theodoropoulos has suggested that I update the format of my web site to something more modern and interactive.  I value Paul’s input in these matters, but I continued to resist. I knew my reluctance was based largely in delusion, as these disjointed posts are one of the few things I’ve hung on to as a source of “identity”.  In truth I see myself as being aligned with those folks who prefer little to no web presence. Granted, there are cranks and shut-ins out there with an aggravated form of Internet paranoia akin to rifle heiress Sarah Winchester’s aversion to being photographed. I’m not in this group and at one time did strive to be the highest-ranking Rick Monaco on Google (which led to a long and embittered feud with the better-known Canadian drummer of the same name .. but I digress.)  I do write on occasion, and without these posts my words would likely end up on discarded binder paper or in lost files on my hard drive.  The point is, Paul had a point.

And still I stuck to my delusional guns. I feared any change in my grass-roots style, unformatted, non-linked, comment-free web page would send shock waves through the populace similar to those felt when Bob Dylan went electric. This despite the fact that by my best estimate, and outside of unknown stalkers and folks who really hate me, my entire readership could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and even that of the guy who runs the “Zipper” ride at the Corte Madera Carnival. But I wanted nothing to do with blogs, blogging, bloggers or anything relating to the word. Call it snobbish, misplaced, unwarranted superiority, but it was the position I took.

But today, somewhat reluctantly, all of this changes. Maybe it was the fact that I realized none of my objections made much difference anyway and all I’d really be doing is creating more consistently formatted paragraphs. Or perhaps it was the fact that Paul worked in the wet lab at my family’s company, which was literally the heart of the operation, the same place my dad started out, and an area that remained foreign to me through my entire, guilt-ridden tenure. I can’t say exactly, and it doesn’t really matter. I’ll still be a dinosaur and social outcast, only now I’ll also have a webpage that more closely resembles that guy with the Wilco For Life blog down the street. I suppose it’s about time.

Baby, the great sadness / you’ve got to let it all go
Live in the present / live in the future, Johnny – ain’t that so
-Van Morrison (with John Lee Hooker) “Wasted Years”

Here today and expected to stay
On and on and on ..
-Elliott Smith

Been looking at bits and pieces from the last five or six years and considering how they might fit together or remain apart. Either is equally valid, but at certain junctures it all lands in curious synchronicity. At times I’m completely perplexed by the nature of my thoughts or direction of my words, and then a day later it falls in place like some preordained production. This isn’t to say it’s necessarily or typically pleasant or palatable – just undeniable. Like what I wrote below. I’ve had these discussions with a wide range of folks, from the pragmatic to the just plain loopy. Most typically arrive at a similar conclusion – who knows? – and I guess that’s a question we’ve all got to address individually or be satisfied with leaving be. My dad told me recently that I think too much, but this has nothing to do with thought, and is likely the opposite. Besides, I never made it to trigonometry and as an English major couldn’t identify Hester Prynne in a lineup. But enough of this crap.

Standing in the middle of West Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue the other day I felt a gentle October breeze, glanced upward at the sun cutting a straight path through the buildings, and took in the varied New York foot traffic, many fashioned in seasonally adjusted attire and on course to getting somewhere else. Which is curious, because at some point a good percentage of them were bent on getting here, to the corner of West Fourth and Sixth on a perfect Fall afternoon. I was going somewhere myself, but had a minute to reflect on how I’d been in a Petaluma backyard just days earlier, reclining in an easy chair and staring upward at the starry sky. And only months prior it was Scotland, amid a late night Summer sunset, standing riverside and skimming stones across the Tay. In between there were plane trips, car rides, subway connections, train travel and a number of decent meals. The good fortune with which I’ve been blessed is undeniable, despite my fair share of disappointment, disillusionment, and dilapidated discourse. For the small handful concerned, this isn’t a eulogy – merely making a point while practicing my d’s. And for the few banking on the former, well, sorry.

To back up and end it with just yesterday, I made my way down to the Broadway-Lafayette Station, then over to Great Jones Street and The Great Jones. I was planning on getting a salad or maybe even a cheeseburger, but the bar was packed so I stood and sipped a draft. Almost immediately the guy sitting in front of me turned and began to chat. It could have something to do with gruff New York hospitality, but I like to imagine that my face has evolved into something softer and more approachable as the years have passed. “Good taps here,” he commented, in curious reference to the limited selection of beers. I took it as a friendly hello and nodded in agreement. He was a house painter, making the commute from Nyack and working on interiors in some of the more bucks-up dwellings on the Upper East Side. “Doing this job for an Italian woman – the paint work alone is costing her a hundred  and seventy grand. Good-looking broad for sixty .. well-preserved if you know what I mean. Must be spending three or four million on the place. Her father big game hunted with Hemingway – polar bears and stuff like that. I never got that, personally. Take a picture if you want their head on the wall..”

His coworker and underling showed up, a short thirty-something guy who switched the conversation to throat cancer. The Nyack Commuter gave the guy his seat and shook my hand on the way out. I scanned the bar in futility, looking for a potentially vacant spot, then gave up. I finished my beer and looked around the room – I have some history with this place. Outside it wasn’t yet dark and I took a picture for my cell phone’s wallpaper of the street, facing east to west. It’s one of my favorite settings in Manhattan. Shortly after and now dark, I compromised and bought a chicken roll in my hood, eating it as I walked home alone. Another disjointed piece of the puzzle, hopefully coming together at some point down the line. (10.04.08)