Come on baby make it hurt so good

Escaping pain is part of what America is about; rubbing your flesh with the ice cube of dreams before the rusty safety pin of momentary pain is jabbed through it. This leaves us with a nasty little hole called experience from which we hang things like personality and character. We go into debt to go to school, to get a job to pay back the debt. We to go into debt to buy a house that is paid for by working so much that we are never home.

This why we are taught to pray on our knees. Because it’s supposed to hurt.

We escape through our vices: through media, sex, prime time, Bowflex and red velvet cupcakes; through US Weekly, nightcaps, flirty text messages and submitting irrelevant socially analytical essays in the blogosphere. We become our vices; we begin to fantasize about sleeping with the cute new hostess instead of fantasizing about selling the script that is supposed to get us out of doing the job we are miserable in. Sitting through the pain works to keep us focused, while being numb only works to get us through the pain.
Through the process of evolution, those who were able to sit through the pain were those who lived long enough to spawn. Reproduction favors the numb. This could explain why we play such cold, indifferent love games or why the good girl always seems to chase the distant cold boy. Perhaps—instinctively--she understands his lack of vulnerability will make him the strongest provider because he is free from pull of momentary desires. The downside is this will also make him a boring asshole.
The body is designed to deal with momentary pain in a way that is so mechanically merciful; it is almost proof for god. When the feeling of pain is triggered, the brain instantly releases hormones through the blood stream. These hormones are called endorphins (the name actually means the morphine within). The body then is absolutely unaware of the physical trauma it is experiencing so that it may get through whatever has caused the pain.
The problem, of course, would be that if we are not aware of this pain (and are actually enjoying the dragon chasing sensation caused by it) what kind of damage are we capable of doing while blitzed out on pain juice? The question that comes to mind is, at what point does numbness become a vice of its own?
We deal with emotional discomfort in a similar way, we push it down until we do some kind of lasting damage like giving our soles a hernia. 51% of Americans feel that they are underpaid; only 27% are satisfied with the stress level of their jobs, yet nearly half (48%) say that they are satisfied with their jobs. What this means is that we are for the most part content with being uncomfortable (underpaid, over worked and over stressed) as long as we’re making dolla dolla bills, y’all.
My grandparents live differently; I do not. They have worked as farmers for the past 50 years. This is an industry that is the base for every overused metaphor about patience (don’t count your chickens before they hatch, you reap what you sow, the fruit is too ripe on the vine, the good farmer is patient while the city boy just wants to go to the damn 711, buy a cup of coffee and think about how hard his life is).
They are not a numb people. Every moment of their labor is filled with joy and passion regardless of the results. They don’t need to shield themselves from momentary pain, they hardly need to watch TV.
In contrast, I feel numb because I hurt; I hurt because something displeasing is happening; I am unaware of how displeasing something is because I am numb; I am numb because I hurt.
If America were a philosophy class this behavior would result in a C-. While the logic works, it is recursive and endlessly destructive. Unfortunately, America is far more like a history class where we must learn information only to unquestioningly regurgitate it. We die from hypertension and loneliness; from debt and regret. We die from our vices and often are not aware that we have been dying for years.

(all images on this post were stolen from Robert Frank's, The Americans...fucking brilliant)

The Sum Of Some Parts

When life hands me brain pudding, I make dehydrated coconut oil, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, gray matter, cocoa powder and tri-calcium phosphate out of it. It offers me a sense of control; if I can take something apart I can understand it and reconstruct it in a way that is more conducive to my interpretation of reality.
When I was a child I would pull apart my toys. I had boxes full of bike and skateboard parts never to roll again. The Dalai Lama takes watches apart to help him meditate on the vastness of the universe. American football fans systematically separate their favorite teams and gel them into “fantasy” leagues. Deconstruction is a good first step to reconstruction. High school anatomy classes use dissection because it is the most accurate way to explain muscular and skeletal structure.
There are of course many things that would be better left misunderstood and intact. The first few years of most presidencies, for example, are mostly devoted to picking apart the hard work of the previous administration. When Clinton left office with a $230 million surplus in 2000, the Bush administrations first response was to pick apart this progress to better understand what their financial strategy should be. Unfortunately had they “stayed the course” the national debt could have been paid off by 2012.
Many of the relationships I have had would probably have stood a better chance with out me picking at them. Most of my wounds would probably heal nicely had I not been so enamored with what happens when I unravel my sutures.
Questioning leaves nasty scars. I have been picking at a fresh scab for the last few weeks.
One of my oldest and dearest friends, a girl with whom I spent a substantial portion of my youth romantically involved with, was murdered while traveling the country conducting research for a project she called “collective autonomy” (living free and independently together) and I can’t help but ponder the what ifs.

If someone in New Orleans had been paid to counsel parents on the importance of physical interactions and reading out loud to their infants, if those parents took that advice to heart, if those parents made enough money to give their child every ounce of education, every sports uniform and every toy for every birthday if that kid never felt alone, awkward or deprived, if that kid didn’t turn into a desperate teenager who felt alienated and forgotten by a country hell-bent on neglecting its desperately impoverished, if that teenager was taught how to deal with anger and depression in a constructive way by someone sincere and reliable.
If there were better streetlights in the 9th ward.
If in 1965 when the Mississippi gulf outlet was completed, someone would have noticed that it intensified the power of hurricanes by more than 20%. If the levees didn’t break; if FEMA and the president hadn’t avoided and mismanaged every element of recovery.
If they had seen my friend’s smile when she used to hold my little sister, or when she talked about social equality.
If someone, anyone, along the way had seen this person and shown them a fraction of the love I felt for the woman they murdered, maybe there would have been a different outcome, and she would still be alive.
Deconstruction like this only works to reconstruct whatever trauma inspired it. Taking apart reality in this way leaves me with an unfortunate result; the world is laid out in front of me in nice pieces, each one detached and disassembled, and I can’t for the life of me remember how to put them back together in a way that works.
Controlling things has little to do with understanding them and even less to do with taking them apart. Football teams still lose regardless of a fantasy league. The Dalai Lama is still left with piles of springs and no answers, and I am left with one less friend and a thousand more questions.

Freedom Of Speech...what?

When did the definition of diplomacy change from being tactful to being vague and meaningless in order to dance around the truth? Why is it that elections have more to do with being polite than being poignant?
Politics would be so much better with a real vocabulary. Can you imagine how interested the populous would be if every time a member of the GOP said “maverick” they used the term “fucking bad ass” instead? Essentially “bad ass” is what they are implying and if they were truly “mavericks” they would have the balls to use the appropriate vernacular.
I respect Barack Obama’s positive attitude. His willingness to use terms like “change” and “hope” (when what he is implying that we need “change” from the past eight years of horrifyingly unprecedented “hope”-lessness) is a testament to his sincerity. Using uplifting language and double positives (“more good”) in place of heavy double negatives (“less bad”) is a thoughtful tactic employed by many high school guidance counselors and authors of books about quitting smoking. Unfortunately the results of this kind hearted illusory tend to be a lot of passive-aggressive pundits and a confused populous.
I would prefer my politics a bit more honest (wow, that is a ridiculous sentence). I sincerely feel that the way our country is run would be dramatically different if we allowed our politicians the freedom of speech.
I can remember vividly the day my world changed from one trapped behind a thick veil of miscommunication to one liberated by an open vocabulary. I am speaking of the day I was given the gift of swear words.
I was at my father’s house in Northridge; he had picked me up from daycare and had driven me back to the Valley. I was in the fourth grade. I had no friends. I was abnormal, and no one could determine if I had ADHD, or if I was so gifted that my classes bored me. I would be placed in a gifted program one week then a remedial program the next. My parents tried therapy and special education programs based in different learning styles. They tried private tutors and personally explaining every homework assignment. None of it worked. In all honesty, I was just really good at abhorring school.
My teacher, Mr. Johnson, did not feel that my troubles were anything but sheer stupidity. My parents had many a proper sit-down with Mr. Johnson, the principal, and my elementary school guidance counselor. Meetings where, I am told, tears were shed, threats of physical violence were exchanged and my divorced, young, embittered parents were absolutely civil with each for the first and last time in years.
Mr. Johnson smelled of English Leather and coffee; a stench that lingered through 20 years of bourbon and depression. He also did not have the patience and compassion that my parents and other teachers had.
Mr. Johnson’s solution, derived from more than two decades as a fourth grade teacher, was to place me and my desk in a big cardboard refrigerator box in the back of the room. He would hand me assignments at the beginning of the day and I would pick my nose and weight for the bells to signal recess, lunch and finally my release to afterschool care. The other kids called me “Box Boy”. I was not at all happy or more educated at the end of the year.
So when my father saw my frustration that night in Northridge he could empathize. He knew what was bothering me and he had been working hard to make it better. He asked me what was wrong; I told him that in order to truly express myself I would need to use words that were inappropriate for a child to be using with his father. He said there were no such words,
“Mr. Johnson is a fucking asshole,” I said. My father welled up, smiled and hugged me.
“Yes he is son, yes he is,” He replied.
In that moment I was freed. I still barely passed the fourth grade, Mr. Johnson was still an evil man, but no longer was I afraid to express myself appropriately or diplomatically. I could express myself accurately. Since that day I have been working hard to use every word I know to express exactly what I feel.
Can you imagine where politics would be if we suddenly liberated them from the mindless bureaucratic doublespeak and allowed them to tell us just how fucked up everything is and what specifically they’re going to do in order to get this country’s shit straight?

untitled

My girlfriend asked me this week if I considered myself to be a nostalgic person and the only thing I have been able to think of since is The Beatles. Wedged deeply into America’s soundtrack, they are like a bad political bumper sticker on the back of a VW bus that is so dated that it is ironic and suddenly hipper than ever.
America wants to like The Beatles like a high school freshmen wants to like the taste of beer; it would just make it so much easier to be cool. Unfortunately numbers speak louder than empty cans of Natty Ice and Americans don’t actually buy many Beatles albums. In fact just over 19 million copies of The White Album (The Beatles’ best selling record to date) have been purchased in America, thus making it the ninth most popular album of all time. Behind The Eagles, Michael Jackson and yes, Shania Twain, sales of The White Album look a bit gray.
For years I have wanted desperately to like The Beatles. I wanted to identify with the different emotional elements their songwriting captured. I want to be able to say things like “God, I feel like Paul’s blues phase this week,” or “I need some Ravi Shankar John today.”
I tried to like the Beatles like a chubby kid trying to like karate, pretending I didn’t mind being slapped in the face with their overplayed anthems filled with cliché and pretense. I had to con myself into it. Initially I created activities that incorporated their music into my routine. It was a practice in systemic desensitization that involved a lot of dishonesty with my friends, lovers and most shamefully myself. My attempts consumed my Sunday mornings, my late night drives and destroyed a lot of good writing. In the end I have learned to love The Beatles the way old people have learned to love war.
I recently lost an estranged friend to breast cancer. We were contemporaries in a spoken word poetry scene. We were romantic and we were wildly competitive in our writing. Our relationship was often fodder for feeding our performances into intense emotional outbursts. Oh yeah, it was uncomfortable, often unkind, childish and unbelievably fun.
She was a true Beatles fan. Not to be measured by an accumulation of obscure first edition pressings of side projects of side projects. Not the kind of fan whose walls are a paper mache of “Let It Be” posters and framed album covers. Not even the kind of fan who prides themselves on knowing who sang, wrote or recorded what song. She was what I like to call second generation Beatles; her need/love was something delivered by lineage. An indelibly sincere dependency bestowed upon her at birth by a crazy hippy mother and a youth full of balding love children that honestly believed “all they needed was love.” Unfortunately rent is not paid in lyrics.
Some children are the best of their parent’s bad habits. Bronwynn was platinum 19 times over in her mother’s “Hey Jude” (she made it a point to play this song for me every opportunity she could in hopes that I would eventually get it; I didn’t). When Bronwynn met adversity, she faced it with a confidence and calmness that I have rarely seen, often not appearing to understand the true severity of situations and often times emasculating them with her cool.
Some children are raised on bible verses; they use their faith in rote memorization of psalms and allegory to bend the world into paradigms of good and bad, of right and wrong. When reality diverges from their terms of reason we get things like sin, guilt and doubt. She saw the world in terms of love, revolution, LSD and octopus’s gardens. When reality unfairly bent away from this matrix she bent it back (often with alcohol and self destruction unfortunately) and my, what a ride she had. This also was paramount in creating one of the most sincerely agreeable dispositions of any human being I have ever met. Forgiveness, compassion, humor and, as trite as it sounds, unquestioning, unconditional relentless love. America wishes we could like The Beatles like that but we can’t, that’s what made Bronwynn. I am trying so hard to like them, but it is just so much harder to convince myself without her.

Innocence Costs

Oh, the cyclical nature of demystification; it’s as though growing up is as much about realizing your own capacity for stupidity as it is about overcoming said stupidity. Losing innocence is as much about realizing that you have something to lose as it is about rubbing mutual pink parts. The smartest people I know are not those who know the greatest number of things about stuff, rather those who know how much they don’t know. More than puberty, your first beer or your first “real” job, it seems that growing up is about figuring out what growing up is.
In 2008 there were 350,000 children under the age of 18 serving time in jail in the United States, there were more than 720,000 teen pregnancies (80% of which were unwanted or unintended) and over 5,000 drivers under the age of 20 were killed in car accidents. These are definitley severe examples, but American youth is about making stupid booboos that scar over into the calluses of adulthood.
However, it is a common misconception that one traumatic event is a eureka moment of everlasting maturity. Humans are habitual dunces, and bad ideas have a tendency to work like Jenga blocks. Cutting corners and taking risks becomes a test of creativity, until inevitably all the little wood blocks collapse(at which point we vow never to take such “immature” risks again whilst simultaneously setting the pieces up for another round). In this way, growing up is about learning how to eat crow, humble pie and shit, while still showing up to play again tomorrow.
I live in Los Angeles where there are roughly 3.2 million parking tickets issued a year. The city collects $113 million annually due to parking citations alone. In any given year I am responsible for at least a few thousand of those dollars.
This is not because I am a terrible parker or because I accumulate, say, fifty $40 meter violations in 12 months. No, no, this is the handy work of letting a handful of tickets double, then triple then go to collections where they accumulate a collector’s fee for a few months. Every time this happens and I inevitably cowboy up and head to the downtown courthouse checkbook in hand. I stand in line behind an army of angry, slighted, suffering Angelinos (just like me). I then cut a check for a few months rent or a down payment on a car or a few semesters at community college; enough to level my savings to a pancaked flat line. Every time I vow, I honestly commit to myself, “No way dude, never again. You’re a grown up now, man. Grown ups don’t do this.”
As the tickets pile up again the same unexplainable ridicules behavior piles up right along side. This is not growing up; this is just stupid.
If I changed my behavior I wouldn’t be any more “grown up”…just less broke. Growing up, it seems, is learning that no amount of assumed responsibility can suddenly propel you into the realm of adulthood. Its about coming to terms with your bone headed tendencies and moving past the ones that you can while enjoying the ever quickening momentum of mortality. Growing up is about taking what you get and going with it, as simple as that may seem. It’s about facing the day clueless with a handful of fellow hopefuls and being brave enough to pretend you are not all terrified.
It’s about yelling at the gods from the top of the mountain, “Yeah, I may have to push this rock up this hill for eternity, but I’d rather have balls than be an angel!”
There are plenty of people who move past their pitfalls and remain imbecilic teenage-minded thirtysomethings. There are plenty adult minded folk who are still crippled by repeated stupid investments (sub-prime mortgages, bad college loans, car notes). Do these tremendously overbearing mistakes automatically grant them the title of adult?
More than 5,000 small businesses declared bankruptcy last month. On average 56% of American entrepreneurs don’t make it past the first three years of commerce. Bad decisions are what the American dream is all about. Finding happiness regardless is what growing up is all about.

Welcome to the Working Weak

It’s hard to argue about jobs. Are you doing a good job? Do you have a good job? Does your job have an important social impact? If not, is your job worth doing? Who will be affected and in what way if you don’t do or have your job? What would happen if you lost your job? This kind of panic is what makes American capitalism.
Essentially there are two schools of thought: One, a job matters because you make money doing it, therefore allowing you the liberty to do things you want to do when not doing the job. In this school of thought a job’s worth is measured first by the amount of money you make (the larger and more outlandish the better), second by how much time the job takes up (the smaller and less painful the better) and lastly by the relative joy to suffering ratio that the job creates. He whose hearse has the flashiest rims wins. Bill Gates-one, Jesus-zero.
Two, a job matters because society benefits from the job, thus emasculating the almighty dollar, but allowing the worker no freedom from their work. By this edict, the importance of a job has nothing to do with the benefit to the worker. Most of us would like to fall into this category alongside the mothers, martyrs, social activists, and artists. We often fail to recognize, however, that this is also the category of public rest room sanitizers and community organizers. Barack Obama-one, Sarah Palin-zero. He whose hearse is a sea of ready weeping hands wins.
I am willing to say that nether of these ideals are remotely part of the average American’s nine to five. A Gallop poll released in late August showed that 48% of Americans are satisfied with their jobs, but only 28% are satisfied with the amount of money they make and only 45% are satisfied with the amount of recognition they receive for their accomplishments. People want to get paid and hugged, simple as that.
A waiter can depend on neither of these.
A maverick young restaurateur who is as devoted to my future as John McCain is devoted to the environment recently purchased the restaurant that employs me. I am comfortable in my job like a polar bear on an icecap, in the Gulf of Mexico, drifting next to a NRA cruise ship.
Every week a new apparatus gleaned from some productivity conference at a Four Seasons in the Midwest is introduced into my work. I then have to incorporate this piece of corporate handiwork into waiting tables. It’s kind of like an archeologist studying dinosaur shit in order to understand the Ming Dynasty.
Sometimes, it’s a new mantra flashing across every computer screen. Sometimes it’s a new “flow” for the dining room, to best intimidate customers into spending more money than they can appropriately tip on. My favorite was the introduction of handheld palm pilot devices that allowed me to send orders to the kitchen from the table. I felt like I was a waiter on the Starship Enterprise. My job matters, I don’t. However, slopping Chinese food to tourists does not exactly qualify me for martyr status; there is no larger impact of the service I provide other than the temporary experience of having a nice meal. Therefore I cannot count on the social impact of my work to keep my morale in check.
I work for a subjective monetary representation of gratitude, and I work hard. If I am exceptional at my job, the best waiter ever, what I walk home with is still completely unpredictable. I make a lot of money when compared to other service industry jobs especially considering the total hours I work. However when taking into consideration the median annual U.S. household income ($50,740) I don’t actually make much money at all. I cannot depend on the amount of money I make to keep my morale in check.
So what can I depend on to stick me through the shift? The recession! That’s right, in times of recession and high unemployment Americans’ job satisfaction usually experiences a bump. This is the same kind of logic that assures you that having your finger sawed off won’t hurt a bit because at least it’s not your leg. Hugs or tax cuts, social change or financial gain, it’s really all about fear of pain.

American pie; how rich?

You have to eat. Regardless of economic or educational hierarchy, regardless of physical or mental strength, regardless of will, want or wage, everyone has to eat. All are created equal in the eyes of the almighty apatite. What we eat defines us politically. Food on average travels 4,000 to 5,000 miles in America. Taking beef and dairy out of your diet can have the same effect as driving 8,000 less miles a year. The carbon dinner plate is adding a bitter flavor to the all-American comfort.
In America, the poor don’t have the convenience of guilt; pocket book voting is a privilege granted only to those with a pocket book. In Los Angeles, the poor don’t pine over ingredients to make their meal more eco friendly, they just don’t cook. The problem has gotten so bad city council created a moratorium on building fast food establishments in inner city communities. Nationwide, the highest rates of obesity and heart disease related to eating cheap calorically dense and fat rich fast foods lie in households making between $20,000 and $30,000 a year. In my neighborhood mercado they simply don’t sell fat-free anything.
Once on tour in Plattsburgh, New York, I met a kid named Blake working in a coffee shop. Plattsburgh is a tiny hippie college town with less than 19,000 people in upstate New York. In the winter, it’s cold; in the summer, it’s hot. Food there was something families did to ease the grip of the elements. Blake made his body a testament to his family’s comfort and tradition. He had a half stack of his mothers flapjacks tattooed on the inside of his left bicep. He had his family’s kitchen table tattooed on his rib cage. These were images in which he found comfort; they were the tools used to build tradition and solidarity.
The median income in Madera, California is less than $30,000 a year. Bye far Madera’s most successful and profitable export is Methamphetamine. It’s a sad dark place directly in the center of one of the richest, brightest states in America. The Fresno Methamphetamine Task Force regularly finds drug coffers in public housing filled with one-gallon Ziploc bags of crystal meth.
When my band stayed in Madera, we slept on the floor of a public provided apartment with three overweight sisters, one of their overweight daughters, one very irritated boyfriend and a fry daddy. No one in the house was over 20, and all of there lives were in some way intertwined with meth.
We met them at our show and they generously offered their home and food. As usual we were in no place to be picky, and we were grateful for their hospitality. On the road, some of the most generous were those with the least to give, those who can only afford to believe in things like music. These are the kinds of people that offer their homes to traveling nobodies but don’t make enough money to be concerned with buying organic. These are the kind of people that can be consumed by dreams of get rich quick schemes like Avon, Herbalife and slinging crystal.
The refrigerator was stocked with typical frozen food-stamp fare. The government had provided them with nutrition fit for a heart attack; taquitos, fried tacos, deep-fried frozen burritos, deep-fried chicken, fish and hamburger patties, Tampico and push-pops. We started the fry-daddy, we ate, we slept and we left. The family didn’t cook with passion; there were no traditions, no kitchen table, no seasonings defining the pallet of unity and love. Food took on a scary role in Madera, it was something the family was ashamed of, because of where it came from (welfare not a paycheck), something that alienated them.
In this country the rich are gladly accepting the alienation of healthy, eco-friendly eating. Eating Green is a welcome burden to those wealthy enough to swallow it, not only does it show a deeper consciousness but deeper pockets as well. Recipes are lost to ingredients, and thus the importance of family is lost to the shallow political statement a meal can make.
So here we have these two extremes. The impoverished, struck with heart disease and diabetes, losing family identity to convenience and subsidy. And the rich, flaunting the luxury to sacrifice for the political impact of their diet. Neither are identifying culturally with their food. Both starved for the substance behind their sustenance. The poor will never get a Big Mac tattooed to their ribs. The rich will never get an organic locally produced jar of hummus on theirs.
Eating is something you must do, but feeling full is something taught to you.

Getting your dollars worth...kinda

We often correlate value with rarity; if something is rare it must be valuable and if something is valuable it must be rare. Rare things are expensive; the first edition of Action Comics (June1938), in which Superman makes his first appearance is said to be worth $440,000, the last record John Lennon ever signed, a copy of Double Fantasy autographed five hours before Lennon was shot, is worth about $525,000.
Counter to this idea, rarely do we equate the things needed for survival with much value.
Is this the best Superman comic and will it most aid your ability to sustain? No, modern comics make this early attempt look like a tofu dog next to a rack of ribs and as far as getting you out of the woods alive one would be better suited with a plastic grocery bag. Is Double Fantasy the best Lennon album? Certainly not (half of the songs were written by Yoko which might actually be a detriment to your survival) but because of humanities desire to detach from the natural world we give irrational value to impractical objects.
In a survival situation two of the most valuable things, things that increase the chances of living exponentially, are not things at all. They are perspectives about the situation that cannot be strapped to a utility belt or bought at REI; a sense of humor and a sense of purpose.
A sense of purpose is manifested most effectively in an injured or near dead member of a group. In all logical terms this makes no sense. It is assumed that the injured should be left for dead. Only the strong survive, survival of the fittest, a bad apple spoils the bunch. But clichés are so cliché. You would never think to strap a martyr to your utility belt, but making a dying person live can make someone believe that their own death is not an option. A sense of purpose is valuable.
A sense of humor is valuable. When you can laugh at the ridiculousness of your situation you no longer are a victim of unreasonable chance and circumstance. It like saying, “Hey, fuck you god, you can take my legs but you can’t take my funny bone.” The heart rate slows and endorphins are released to ease physical pain. Interestingly the active element in your endorphins is morphine, no wonder laughter is so popular in rehab. No one would ever think to pack a whoopee cushion backpacking in the Andes, but the laughter could save your life.
I work in an insanely high volume Chinese restaurant, with a demanding clientele on a competitive slab of real estate. The pressures of this job can be so intense at times that I regularly have coworkers quit mid shift with a section full of hungry tables frothing out the jaws for an plate of crispy sugar meat. On average I train two new servers a week. On average about half of them show up for a second day of work.
I would call this a survival situation. Business usually comes all at once and hard, unpredictable, like a levy breaking or an engine failing. Then suddenly, you are free falling, tray loaded, fake smile cemented, running rapidly for the safety of the moment when all drinks are down, all food is rung in and finally when all checks are printed.
This moment usually resolves in what I call a “red light,” something that makes you stop and change your course of action because a weaker server needs your help. Sometimes they ask; usually they are too blindsided to realize that they even need it. In the dash of a salt shaker, suddenly five tables need refills, two tables need to pay, all of the food is taking an unreasonably long time to cook and a party of 15 (the new owner’s family) just went down. When I begin to fall in and help the drowning server all of the responsibilities to my tables no are longer as dramatically important, they become periphery. It becomes more important to save the dying member than to save my own ass.
When in the heat of a rush I mistakenly order a kung pao chicken “PLANE, NO SAUCE,” instead of “PLAIN, NO SAUCE,” and I have to explain this message to Chef who understands very little English. I am able to laugh at myself and in that moment all of the momentum, all of the pressure is put into perspective.
These pauses are so important to my survival I cannot understand why they are not marketed, traded and sold. They are illogical and common, and of great value to me. In my restaurant I honestly believe that my illiteracy is often my Action Comics #1. It is what is valuable to me, because it is what allows me to survive. My signed Double Fantasy is an empty glass on a co-worker’s table, not rare at all but I need it more than anything I can buy on Ebay.

Inflation and Fall of the U.S. Flower

Financially, America is starting to resemble a middle-aged ex-homecoming queen trying to squeeze back into her old cheerleading skirt for her wedding anniversary, just praying that she won’t bust a seam. She isn’t fooling anyone; things are bad and now it’s just about how you define it.
A recession, as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is a “significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP.” I define it as a period of time when daisies wilt in flower shops before people buy them.
In the month of May, inflation raised at a rate of .8%. That is the biggest monthly leap since 1981. Over the last three months the president gave $77.9 billion to (get this) normal people. Regulars in my restaurant are sharing $10 salads and drinking tap water.
National unemployment has been rising for the past seven months leaving us at a four year high of 5.7% California is currently at a 12 year high of 7.3% unemployment because of the gaping wound on the side of the housing/real-estate/construction beast. In the last two months my work has fired 7 servers.
Record stores are closing. Outlets like Ross and Marshal’s are reporting huge sales because people are not buying what they really want, just what they need. Socioeconomically, we are about a month away from drawing an eyeliner seam down the back of America’s legs and calling them a healthy economy.
In the years when people still bought things and hand-to-hand CD sales still had an impact on a band’s relevance, my band spent a lot of time standing in front of hardcore shows on the Sunset Strip. My hands usually full with stacks of hot Kinko’s flyers and CDs, I would wait until the shows let out into the streets, spewing bodies like a broken hydrant. Desperately we would compete with the flashing freakshow of the strip for a moment of attention. It was hard and frustrating then. I can’t imagine what it would be like now.
Some of our biggest competitors were a small group of Spanish speaking ladies carrying bundles of fresh flowers for five dollars apiece. They could burn through a bundle in about three clubs.
It was impressive to say the least.
I now work waiting tables in a little restaurant on Sunset Strip, about a mile east from where I used to hawk CDs. I have come to know one of these flower ladies, Anna, relatively well. She is patient and kind, placating my shoddy Spanglish. Anna tells me we are in a recession, not because of the GDP, but because of the flowers.
Sunset is a silly selfish pleasure for most people; A tourist destination for burnt out, sobered up butt rockers with bad tattoos and no coffee shops to go to. Flowers are things of temporary luxury, the impact of which only lasts a few days.
Flower wholesalers have been cutting staff due to a rapid decline in demand. Anna who has been in the business since I was 4 (she works at a flower shop in Culver City five days a week) used to spend Tuesday through Saturday nights from eight to three in the morning trolling the strip empting bundle after bundle of roses, now can hardly get through one a night.
Shipping of flowers by air cargo is down in some places 17% from this time last year. Anna has started scaling back her time in front of rock clubs and spends more time in restaurant patios.
“There is no one here anymore,” Anna tells me. “The money is bad, the people are cheap, and most of the other girls don’t want to try anymore.”
We have a game; I see her walking up to our patio at about a block’s distance I move to one of my tables, usually an affluent tourist couple looking for a chunk of 1989 rock nostalgia or at least a photo of the two of them wearing Guns and Roses shirts in front of the Whiskey. I bring up the topic of chivalry to the lady and ask her if she can remember the last time she met a true gentleman. At this point Anna is usually behind me. I then give a look to the prospective gentleman letting him know that this is all a set up for his benefit. I then turn to Anna, wink, point and watch her go in for the kill.
We can usually go through at least a half a bundle this way, but lately, gentlemen are hard to find. Anna sold a whole bundle last Wednesday to one guy for half of what she get selling them by flower. Chivalry is now more dead than ever and that is how Anna and I define a recession.

I Kinda Have Something That Might Kind of Maybe Like a Dream/I Hope No One In My Neighborhood Reads This or I Could Get Shot

In the post-college world it is becoming increasingly absurd to want to devote one’s life to a creative field of work. According to the Princeton Review of the top ten highest paying college majors, only one if them (Marketing/Marketing Management/Marketing Research) is remotely creative, half of them include the word “engineering,” and only one of the ten most popular majors is in the top ten highest paying. Dreaming for a living is dying in America.
Without perspective between what we have, what we want and the foresight to reach unreasonably far into the future for an intangible (a dream), we are essentially purposeless. Guitar Hero, The White Album, Cirque de Soleil, the Internet and this moment of journalistic insight are all results of a faithful devotion to a creative dream. These things give us purpose and make a life worth living.
In order to trust an idea/creative thought/dream you have got to be a little mad. Essentially all creative ideas, regardless of how practical, are based in faith. In order to commit to a dream you have to first believe in it. The dreamer must conceptualize an intangible, yet to be conceived thing. A writer sits down to start a script trusting that the script can exist, their task then becomes translating the script into tangible terms.
Perhaps this is all a little too ephemeral and reeking of patchouli to make sense of. Take for example my landlord’s son. This 19-year-old runs drugs out of my apartment building as a full time job. Up until about six months ago, he had a part time job as a sales associate for a large commercial retail establishment and he had a dream. The stress and labor of his part time job was offering him little sense of reward or accomplishment. In order to deal with the stress he often came home and self-medicated with copious amounts of beer and weed. With a little foresight and a lot of faith, he began scaling back his hours at his job and devoting more of his time to achieving his dream. His logic was simple; he found something that brought him joy, so he decided to devote his life to it, regardless of feasibility.
He had to trust in the existence of a way of life that had yet to exist for him in reality.
This is still a bit abstract, so let’s take one more example involving the same individual. In order for my landlord’s son to get out of plain view of police, competing drug dealers and unwanted clients he must be able to move quickly from the stoop in front of the apartment to behind the cast iron gate protecting it. This is a complicated task because the automated lock system is broken and will most likely remain so until God gives up and lets Satan get hammered off of communion wine. The keyhole is also quite difficult to maneuver and requires a good two minuets of feverish manipulating and handle shaking. If one wants fast access between the inside and outside some creativity is essential.
Many have devised intricate systems of folding of magazines, cigarette butts and coat hangers but none have been able to create a consistently successful method. The gate is heavy, and while logically many of these doorstoppers should work, it is nearly impossible to slow its momentum as it swings closed. The landlord’s son however had a creative dream. He discovered that crumpled up newspaper not only keeps the gate from fully closing it also works as a shock absorber killing the momentum rendering a space between the gates latch and the door frame.
Before he decided to try his method of door stopping he had to have faith that it would work. He had to have faith in an abstract concept, a dream. It is this faith in dreams that is responsible for society’s accomplishments. It is also this faith that is becoming increasingly rare.
Interestingly, only three of the ten highest paying majors appear on Princeton Review’s top ten recommended majors. The others are all open to dreaming. The point: Guitar Hero beats accounting, and dreaming beats running around in endless circles regardless of the paycheck. At least that’s what I’m banking on.

How I Learned Not to Screw Up in America

America boasts the sixth highest standard of living in the world. Every union strike and million-man march has lodged another carabineer into the face of liberty that we trust will hold us on our ascent to political perfection (excuse the Bushisms for a moment). We hold five percent of the world’s entire population but strangely; we also have 23% of its prisoners. That means that more than one in every 100 adults in America is in jail. The struggle towards freedom and rising incarceration exist in direct ideological conflict with each other. Thus a strange relationship exists between the rise of intangible political freedom and the decline of actual physical freedom. Free Americans are content with this relationship because the world of Un-free Americans is at a safe enough distance. This is the story of one of the Un-free.
Our first time in Provo, Utah, my band played at a club named The Starry Night after a mural on the inside that resembled what a 4 year olds fingerpaint impression of a Van Gogh would look like. There were holes in the stage. There were holes in the floor. The stage was the floor. The whole place sloped hard to the center, like a funnel, where there was a 3 by 4 foot rusted metal grate that regularly sent bands and kids to the hospital.
Brad was the soft, skinny 21-year-old doorman/soundman/promoter. He lived in a converted loft space behind the club; he had a tattoo of a good luck Indian shooting a star (the kind found on Tootsie Pop wrappers that were rumored to yield a free lollipop). I don’t know that he was ever paid or if he ever knew that he was supposed to run a show until a band pulled up and started knocking on his door (which was how we met Brad). He greeted us with a gentle smile and a firm handshake (rare), he talked to us (more rare) and showed a genuine concern for our well being (unheard of), especially considering the had never heard of or listened to our band. That night there may have been five people at the show including Brad. He bought a CD but I doubted he would ever listened to it.
Over the years we came to know Brad considerably well. He didn’t have much going on other than the club, a girlfriend, an outstanding record collection and an innocent whisky habit. He had a hand full of hipster drinking buddies and a small reputation in Provo for being a pretentious scenester. Most Provo high school girls had crushes on him and most Provo high school boys wanted to be him.
We talked about books, tattoos and the sad symptoms of small town citizenship; second layer conversations that are sewn in emotional investment and yield connections that are lasting. I felt a little guilty talking to people like Brad; good people raised in towns that were unfairly small in size and opportunities. The kind of towns where dreams never grow bigger than their cages. I could have easily been Brad.
On one of our trips Brad showed me a new tattoo. On his hip about the size of my hand was one of my drawings from the CD I sold him the first night we met; a girl in a dress dancing, arms outstretched with the words “hold me” below her.
The girlfriend became a fiancé, the record collection became a pregnant girlfriend and the whiskey habit lost its innocence. Brad stopped showing up every time we played and I would have to go find him at the bar next door to The Starry Night.
One night at the bar someone hit one of his friends. Brad’s friends were few and important to him. Brad, being drunk and loyal ended up putting his friends attacker in the hospital. This was the first time he had ever been in a fight.
A few weeks later I got a call from him while we were on the road. I didn’t recognize his voice. He told me he wasn’t going to be coming to our shows for a while and that there was a new doorman at the Starry Night. He told he was getting a new tattoo, the word “friendship,” across his chest. The guy he hit pressed charges and Brad was going to prison for assault. He wanted the word across his chest so that whenever anyone asked him or whenever he asked himself why he was in prison he had an indelible answer.
In America we have learned to imprison the convicted behind a safe stereotype. People don’t end up in jail, “those people” do. This has helped us to forget the severity of the 1/100 ratio as we become freer in ideology. We hide from recidivism statistics (63% with in the first three years) and a failed justice system ($60 billion annually) by removing ourselves from the individuals who are those statistics. Brad is not one of “those people,” and if he is, then I am too.

A Public Space

I have seen the kindest hearts reduced to irrational, fist wielding primates over parking spaces. Although it may seem negligible, parking lots have strongly influenced the course of architecture, sports, and rock and roll. While there is much to be said about “tail-gating” outside of a Judas Priest show or losing your virginity in the back seat of a Honda Civic after your junior prom, parking lots have a more subtle, and profound influence on our lives. They are a cultural and economic nexus where there is no written law governing order or etiquette; the way we act in parking lots is just who we are.
Parking lots have been pivotal in the development of the man that I have become. My parents are divorced. Until I was 18 my mother possessed primary custody of me. My parents talked through lawyers, fax machines and me (though they swear it was never their intention). Parking lots were neutral zones where my parents were contractually obligated to be civil. These desolate, disregarded chunks of land are set aside with the purpose of putting the things one needs (car, trailer, boat) when one doesn’t need them. For me however, this was the only place where I could see the things I needed (my family) in an important context; the dad world, the mom world and the kid world all at once. We had to stop the cars to do this and we had to put the cars somewhere where when they were stopped. When they stopped our worlds collided.
Weekly, my Dad would drive the 60 miles up the coast to have dinner with me. We would inevitably end up in a well-lit empty asphalt car lot. Homework was done, Frisbees were thrown, and important life talks were had. The only reason I graduated high school was because my Dad and I sat in his pickup in a parking lot every night for the last week of school as I did the work I blew off my senior year of high school.
As a skateboarder, I saw parking lots as a series of opportunities—a blank canvas. Every parking block and speed bump is another shade that could be used to in my picture. As a surfer, parking lots are a locker room where we strip off socioeconomic hierarchy, wrap in a towel and a wet suit and become the same kind of bohemians.
I can’t support Wal-Mart’s politics, labor policies or their heartless monopolization of small town economies, but I can’t say that the world would be better off with out them. On the road, parking lots take on a completely different form, for a broke band, the parking lot is a temporary home, a place to sleep, to eat and to recharge. The parking lot of a Wal-Mart super center at 4a.m. to a touring band is sweeter than any kind of deli platter guarantee a venue can offer. While I support their business practices, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and Harris Teeter have the most inhospitable and difficult parking situations that I have ever seen. No one looks twice when they see shirtless road-worn musicians hanging out of a tour van eating a cold can of Chef Boyardee outside of Wal-Mart, but security would certainly be called just about anywhere else.
As we begin to wise up to the greater impact of car culture on the environment, it is easy to forget the carbon footprints imbedded in our hearts. Its easy to resent all things associated with a car driving world because of the trouble it got us in, but we should also remember the fun we had before we got caught.
Frank Lloyd Wright had to rethink his understanding of human habitation as cars began to move into family’s everyday life. People began looking at his designs and asking, “It’s beautiful, but where do we put our car?” Wright went on to design some of the most famous and copied gas stations and parking lots the world has ever known. A world with fewer cars is beautiful, but where will we put our hearts?

But Burnout Sounds So Much Worse Than Fade Away

Waste deep in a blistering, fleeting summer tour my old band had two days off in New York City to see the sights on a punk rock budget. We jumped turn styles, drank $.99 Arizona iced tea tallboys and slept in the destitute McCibons lofts. This was six months before CBGS’s lost it’s lease and stories about its closing were making fount page print in the New York Times. For me, there was nothing more important to see.
America is an ignorant teenager in many ways, our leaders are actors, our actors are our leaders. All but few of our landmarks are more than some pop culture nexus. In Hollywood one goes to Man’s Chinese Theater and puts there hands in the bacteria bath handprints of the stars. In Nashville you go to the Grand Old Opry and buy a cowboy hat and an engraved flask. In Vegas you get married and buy a shot glass. Even our historical land marks are more notable for the celebrity events that took place there; the Alamo was where Ozzy was arrested for urinating in public, Bourbon Street is where they shoot Girls Gone Wild.
Taping into my hardcore sensibilities, I walked across half of the city refusing to pay for the subway. This was essentially a pilgrimage my teenage Mecca. Growing up, I watched the Filth and the Furry a few times a month, my room was wallpapered with a hand made Ramones collage, and although I listened primarily to contemporary hard-core I knew that the music I loved and wanted to play would never have come about without this edifice to defiance.
New York is mean; the only kind of place where a club like C.B.G.B.’s could survive. In all honesty, and I was a coy tourist, asking strangers for directions and getting lost in a big scary city.
I have done this other places and I’m ok with looking out of place in foreign countries, fumbling with unfamiliar syllables, usually resorting to the international sign language of point and nod. I have had unreasonable expectations of the beauty that I had traveled to see and been disappointed by the pile of rocks that was supposed to hold some profound spiritual significance.
In the end the culture of the new people I am encountering has so much more intrinsic worth than the picture taken of me in front of said pile of rocks, therefore the trip is worth it.
But this is New York, and New York is mean, and I had in fact traveled to see something that was the antithesis of beautiful.
As I turned the last corner my hands were clenched balls of anticipation. I was wearing my ugliest, most apathetic scowl prepared to encounter an army of syringe thin, spike studded crust punks talking about class war in an apathetic yet relevant way. I expected to see a loaded marquee and a road worn band loading in. I expected to smell piss, aggression, body odor and beer. I broke the cardinal rule of punk rock tourism; I expected what I had seen in the pictures.
Instead I was assaulted by consumerism; anarchy symbols turned dollar signs. From a block off every boutique and storefront was selling nock off chunks of punk rock memorabilia, CBGB’s coffee mugs, and New York Dolls shot glasses. Of course there is much to be said about the all out lack of sincerity in punk rock (that was the point rite?), but this was just kind of pretty, well organized and pleasant.

There was nothing on the marquee and the club was closed. However, the CBGB’s art gallery/coffee shop/gift store next door was open and it appeared to have a long list of “CBGB’s like” events in the coming week including book signings, wine tasting and poetry readings.
This was diet punk, the walls of the place looked like a low-budget Hard Rock Café. I didn’t buy a tee shirt or take a picture of me standing in front of a smashed guitar.

In order to motivate myself to finish the tour and to keep up the steal toe lifestyle I had entertained since I was a teenager I needed to remember this landmark as what it should have been, and not what it was. That is part of the beauty of America, our history my not be accurate, but since most of it was written by the same sweaty palms that built the entertainment industry (a business of putting a price on creativity) it certainly is cinematic enough to enjoy with some popcorn and ignorance.