Still Pathetic

Awkward. Twenty-fucking-three, and still awkward; physically, socially, and emotionally. One of my best friends was married - married, for Christ's sake - and the fact that I actually got along(at all) with a bridesmaid was cause for celebration. In the classic¹ film Little Giants, the titular team of misfits and outcasts manages to finally run a play that isn't a turnover or a huge loss, prompting one parent in the stand to yell "They gained a yard!". That was me, chatting up a tipsy bridesmaid; gaining only one yard, but maybe building some momentum. Fuck, I needed it.

While still working at HSA, I had a crush on a bookstore cashier. Every week I'd drive across the street to the Hunt Valley Mall, blunder around the store for a bit before finally buying ESPN the magazine, making sure at no point to actually make small talk or ask her out. After all, what good would come from that?

I actually went on a double-date with an old co-worker from the Loews Theater. The double-date was with my brother and his girlfriend - my younger brother was giving me dating advice while the girls were in the bathroom(writing this makes me cringe). Despite my horrible lack of dating experience, dinner went pretty well. However, due to my horrible lack of dating experience(combined with insecurity and an insatiable need for outside validation), I called her many times after(despite not getting calls back), before finally going over to Loews to ask her out again, in person. Instead, I was publicly(but sweetly) rejected.

So, there I was, twenty-three, convinced I'd be girlfriendless forever. I'd been working as the web master at a small government contractor for a few months. My father had gotten me the job; he worked there installing security and fire alarm systems. It was a shitty job, but these were shitty times - for me, the economy, the country. Enron, Robert Hanssen, the fresh memory of 9/11, the DC Sniper; if Peter Jennings had announced on the evening news that the apocalypse was officially starting in ten minutes, I think most of us would have thought 'Yeah, that sounds about right'.

But ANYWAY, while working at my shitty job(in addition to web master, I was in charge of shipping and receiving in the warehouse) I managed to get a date with a friend of a friend. Up to this point in my life, getting a date was like finding a goddamn Leprechaun. We met at a party, I got her number, and we agreed to go out the next Saturday. I could hear Al Micheal's voice screaming 'Do you believe in miracles?'.

The girl bore a slight resemblance, in a fuzzy-photo kind of way, to Julianna Marguiles. So let's call her Julianna(though I guess you can refer to her however you want, call her Susan if it makes you happy). She drove to my parents house, as I had moved back in during my time in-between working at HSA and my new job².  I still remember the expression on my mother's face when she saw what I was going to be doing that afternoon: finally, praise the fucking lord, finally.

Julianna and I went to an Egyptian Art³ exhibit at the Smithsonian⁴. For the first time, my awkwardness faded to the background as our conversation came easily. She laughed at my jokes, we both said (seemingly)interesting things. Somehow my date was going really, really well.

The only snag came later, when we talked about music. After the museum, we'd gone to Arundel Mills Mall to wander around(a real high school thing to do, but I didn't know any better). In a music store, Julianna went through CD after CD and asked if I liked them. I'd never even heard of most of them. My HSA musical education had not included any of her bands: The Me First and The Gimme Gimmes, Ben Folds Five, the Dave Matthews Band, and Better Than Ezra. If it wasn't metal or hard rock, I didn't know it(with the Insane Clown Posse being one of the only exceptions, because my younger brothers had somehow become obsessed with them - but even I knew not to bring up ICP on a date). Her bands were college bands, the soundtrack to smoking in quads and drinking too much at Lit parties. My soundtrack was from a different generation, handed down by co-workers.

The only common ground we found were The White Stripes, and that was only because I had stumbled upon "Hotel Yorba" on MTV2 before.

Anyone who goes through a "metal" or "hard rock" phase will tell you that, in the midst of their power-chord obsession, they had convinced themselves that anything that wasn't sufficiently "hard" was pure, pussified crap(often these same people go through a phase of reading nothing but science fiction novels, only buying Marvel comics, and other nerd-elitisms that keep them virgins until college).  Then they'll tell you about the song that broke them out of that muddled, constipated way of thinking. For me, that song was "Hotel Yorba."



The song was catchy, raw, and earnest(he sings about being "tired of acting tough/and I'm gonna do what I please"). It felt "real" in the same way Guns N Roses felt real, while sounding so completely different. Still, I don't know if I would have taken to the Stripes as much as I did if it wasn't for "Fell In Love With A Girl." That two-ton heavy riff and Meg White's attacking drums melted my face and flattened my eardrums. Going between the Stripes and my other CDs, a lot of my metal records started to sounded sluggish, old and tired. They were "heavier", but Jack White was out-rocking them with only one fucking guitar.



Still, I wasn't yet the kind of music consumer who bought lots of albums, even if I liked the singles - but I was the kind of pathetic, never-really-dated, virginal man-child who would gladly lay down a twenty at the Best Buy to get a CD he thought would make a girl like him. Christ, how pathetic.

I bought "White Blood Cells", listened to it, called Julianna to talk to her about it and ended up leaving a message saying I was listening to it. I paced my room wondering why she never called back. Chris, so pathetic.

Julianna disappeared. No return calls. Nothing. I hung out with our mutual friends(my best friend and his wife), and in the pretense of hanging out with them for a weekend tried to get the bottom of this sudden reversal of affection. They offered the usual niceties: she had a history of erratic behavior; she has just got out of a relationship; I may have come on too strong; universally, though, my neediness was not sexy. My friend's wife summed things up with the best advice about women I've ever received:

"Kris, sometimes, girls are just bitches."



So, I listened to "Cells" alone. Luckily for me songs like "Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground", "Hotel Yorba", "I'm Finding It Harder To Be Gentleman", "The Union Forever" and "The Same Boy You've Always Known" are perfect listening for a broken heart. Well, in as much a heart can be broken after one date. I listened to that album all the way through every night, over and over again. A new love for music was born. I started to explore, a little, and discovered another garage-rock band, some new outfit from New York called The Strokes...

Around that same time, a couple months later, Julianna actually called me back. She wanted to apologize, explain herself.

But by then, I was dating my future first wife.

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¹I'm using the word classic in the loosest sense.
²Explaining to potential dates why I lived at home while not going to school was a lot of fun.
³I impressed her with a bit of Egyptian history I had gleamed from a recent episode of Gargoyles.
⁴I'll always regret not using the Smithsonian for more dates while I lived in DC. A lost opportunity.

Start Me Up

The drive was longer than I remembered from my interview¹, maybe because my head felt like a block of concrete threatening to topple off my shoulders. No sleep the night before my first day at my first real(meaning salaried) job had me hoping new-experience adrenaline would rocket me through the day. Counting down until five - one day and already a typical office drone.

High Speed Internet Access was a start-up partly funded by Paul Allen, one of the original Microsoft founders and lover of recreational submarines(a venture of his I wish I had worked on instead). Befitting a start-up, there were only six other people in the office. Steve, the lead web developer, Mike the copywriter, a visual designer whose name I don't recall(let's call him the guy who got caught looking at Blacks On Blondes), a manic and unstoppably moronic middle-manager whose name I also don't recall(let's call her Cathy), RJ the tech lead with the fantastically deep voice, and our boss, another woman whose name has been replaced in my memory by my gym locker combination(probably).

They were very friendly people. Steve, in addition to being a web developer, was a very talented visual designer as well². He was the only Mac guy in the office, in the time before the iPod and Justin Long would convince many Americans to join him. Blonde and balding, he was a cool, grown-up nerd - a glimpse, maybe, into a possible future. Steve was also a musician, recording his own songs, mainly heavy metal. He gave me shit(partly deserved) for liking Metallica's Black album after knowing me for all of two weeks.

Mike wore leather jackets, listened to Danzig and Iron Maiden, acted in plays, had a super-cute red-headed girlfriend and generally seemed like the coolest guy I had ever met. It's a little embarrassing how I became his sidekick; a kid brother trying to tag along and emulate his superior, older sibling. One day RJ left a repeating loop on my computer playing 'Hey Mike' because that phrase came out my mouth at least a dozen times a day.

Fuck RJ.

To my credit, Mike and I became friends pretty quickly. He was into a lot of the same nerdy things I was, like Mystery Science Theater 3000, comics, sci-fi and horror movies, and heavy metal. He gave me tips on working out(which I had just started doing), women, and most importantly, music.

I was ignorant. A nit, dweeb, poser, whatever you want to call it, my musical canon rarely went past the radio dial.

One morning, I came in and overheard Mike and Steve discussing a new record. I awkwardly came over and offered that the new Live album was pretty awesome(basing my opinion solely on the fact that the single on the radio, "The Dolphins Cry", sounded pretty bad-ass³ to me).

The Dolphin's Cry (Album Versi...

Mike offered a polite "Really? Cool..." while Steve ripped into Live and told me they sucked back when they were called Public Affection and played small clubs in New York City(coincidentally, while Steve's band also played those clubs).

I was shocked. How could this band - played heavily on WHFS, the station the cool kids in high school and college listened to - suck? My brain had trouble accepting that anyone into rock music could hold such an opinion. Of course to this day I'm still struggling with building the courage and self-identifying will to not care so much about other people's opinions(without carelessly discarding them, though), and I'm getting better at it. Getting divorced helps.

Later that day, Steve played Kid Rock's Devil Without A Cause, which was getting a lot of attention in 1999 after languishing around for almost a year. "Rap Metal", or whatever you want to call it, was still nu(sorry, I couldn't help myself). The novelty of what Kid Rock was doing was fascinating(and yes it was novel, even if you consider Faith No More's "Epic" or Anthrax's "Bring Tha Noize" the first "rap metal" songs, because neither meshed rock music and rap the way Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, Korn or Linkin Park did - Mike Patton's vocal stylings over a pretty great alternative rock song and Chuck D rapping over a metal song are basically a chocolate bar dipped in peanut butter, and while looking back at the origins of a Peanut Butter Cup may be more interesting than a Peanut Butter Cup, it still doesn't make it a Peanut Butter Cup⁴. Plus, no one but rock critics(and I guess Scott Ian) consider them rap metal in any conventional sense).

Even a decade later, the record holds up, certainly much better than most rap metal. I don't think it's a coincidence Kid Rock remains, at least commercially(and culturally, if you aren't a stick-in-the-ass snob) relevant, while Fred Durst⁵ and whoever the fuck was in Crazy Town have become musical footnotes.



The Kid's use of hard rock, country and blues is probably why Mike and Steve could listen to Devil but still mock Live. Kid Rock was an unserious theatrical hard rocker, much like a band both Mike and Steve loved, KISS.

I'd never really been exposed to KISS. Mike - appalled - played "Christine Sixteen"(a favorite because his girlfriend's name was Christine, though she was not sixteen). KISS had a constant presence in our office soundtrack after that.

Christine Sixteen - Kiss

I can't imagine an office as loud as ours was, and I'm surprised we got away with it as long as we did. Mike played Danzig⁶, Iron Maiden, and pre-Black-Album Metallica. Steve played Megadeth, Guns N Roses and even some Slayer. Cathy's office shared one wall with our space, as did RJ's. I think the breaking point was when I cranked Metallica's S&M one day, in attempt to prove to Mike and Steve that Metallica could still kick ass(not sure how I thought exhibiting Metallica's willingness to play with an orchestra would accomplish this goal). "Master Of Puppets", live with a string section, was apparently all the non-metal faction of the office could take. We were asked to use headphones from that point on(though Cathy still got to play the soundtrack from The Lion King - the only album she seemed to own - whenever and as loud as she wanted).

Dirty Black Summer - Danzig

The Wicker Man - Iron Maiden

Peace Sells - Megadeth

We (mostly) obeyed the headphones rule, until we go the idea to move all of our cubicles into the unused, far end of the office. HSA originally envisioned twenty plus developers working at the Hunt Valley location, so we had a lot of empty space. In a room meant for a dozen or more Ron Livingstons, the three of us took up residence and resumed playing our music.

After we ran through everyone's CDs, we discovered something that would make spending the summer of 1999 stuck behind a desk much more bearable: Napster.

In the (barely) pre-iPod days, Napster was a godsend. All of a sudden, Metal, Pop, Hip-Hop, R&B, Soul, Punk, Oldies, whatever the hell Wesley Willis was doing; all of it was bouncing off our cheap cubicle walls. Almost any song we wanted, instantly(and being 1999, the office was the only source of broadband for most of us, making it a privilege unique to work).

We put the "any song" aspect of Napster to the test, downloading obscure one-hit wonders, commercial jingles, themes from 70s sitcoms, and the demented spoken-word of William Shatner. One afternoon, we did all cartoons and I played the theme from Ducktales to trump Mike's Chip N Dale's Rescue Rangers. Steve followed with Alvin and the Chipmunks, and Mike countered with GI-Joe. I think it ended with me playing the opening song from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

On another afternoon(we must have been very productive in the morning) we had a contest to see who could download a song so bad, so offensive to the ears that the rest of the office would crack. It started off with annoying but bearable pop like "Pass the Dutiche" and "Ninja Rap", before Mike went to the nuclear option and played Color Me Badd's "I Wanna Sex You Up".

Steve bounded from his desk to behind Mike's and violently snatched the power cord of Mike's speakers out of the socket, almost pulling the twin units down off the desk. Mimicking an umpire calling a runner safe, Steve said "You win dude, you win! NEVER, EVER play that again!"







Looking back, I can see the RIAA's point of view - Napster made digital thievery incredibly easy. Within days, every one of us had a library of music on our hard drives that was at least as big as our CD collections at home. And, befitting the times, none of us really saw a problem with this. Record labels gouged us on CDs, TicketMaster held a monopoly on concerts(despite Eddie Vedder's best, mumbling efforts), and out of all this greed Shawn Fanning appeared and offered us a way to stick it back to the man. The faceless, damnable man.

Still, I think we all knew, deep down, that it was just like going into Tower Records and walking out the door with the A-L Rock section one day, then coming back for the box sets(and some Blues, why not?) the next. Which is why, when Metallica(and Dr. Dre) announced their lawsuit, I sided with the band. I was the only one in the office to do this.

Now, I hadn't downloaded any Metallica, so that made my cognitive dissonance a little easier to ignore. Mike and Steve had, however, and they mocked me endlessly for my (albeit, mostly hypocritical)position. They already considered Metallica a past-their-prime, lame mainstream version of the former glorious eighties incarnation. The lawsuit only gave them more ammunition⁷.

Ironically, I was the only person whose Napster account was banned after Metallica turned over a list of users they said had illegally downloaded their music. So, for the five minutes it took to set up a new Napster account, Metallica had prevented me from doing something I hadn't done anyway.



Being my first office job, adjusting to the nine to five world was a little awkward. The Commute didn't help. And it deserves proper noun status, as The Commute was epic. From my apartment in College Park, getting to HSA in Hunt Valley required going through not only the Capitol Beltway(the suicide circle around DC, also known as 495) but also the Baltimore Beltway before finally ending(sort of) north of Baltimore, just before the border with Pennsylvania(in fact, Steve lived in Pennsylvania, and had a shorter commute than me). My drive could be anywhere from 45 minutes to over two hours. As such, getting to work "on time" became very subjective, at least from my point of view. As long as my work got done, who really cared?

Unfortunately, that's not how the working world(even at a start-up, apparently) works⁸. One morning I overslept, and combined with a slower-than-usual Beltway made me very, very late. RJ lit into me when I got into the office. At first I didn't think he was serious(I'm not used to people being mad at me, so when someone is, I assume they're joking), but then he threatened to have security escort me out.

In peril of being escorted to my Saturn by the short, balding and elderly security guard, I left. That was Friday. I went straight to UMCP and re-enrolled, thinking that it was something I could now afford to do. My family seemed(relatively) better. Monday, I quit.

Looking back, I needed that. RJ's humiliation of me in front of my co-workers taught me that, no matter what, don't give the boss a reason to be mad at you. Learn what time you are expected to be somewhere, and be there. No excuses. The fact that I was getting all of my work done didn't matter in the work-world context; the fact that I wasn't at my desk at nine(consistently) did. I still had, largely, a school-work mentality that doesn't cut it in the real world. I see it a lot at work today in some of the recent graduates we hire - some are notoriously unreliable when it comes to deadlines(some are notorious ass-kissers, and I'm not sure which is worse). The experience helped turn me into a more mature worker(depending on who you ask).

My academic come-back attempt didn't last long, though. My rash decision proved ill-informed: working part-time wasn't going to cut it as my family still needed a full-time income. So, a few months later, I was back at HSA asking RJ for my job back. I didn't get it.

I actually did well most of that quarter, but when I realized I wouldn't be back, I stopped showing up to classes. My father begged me to keep going, to gut it out for the grades(that I didn't think would ever matter) - maybe he did it out of guilt. Young, angry, and stupid, I just didn't care. Like cutting yourself to show someone how much they are hurting you, failing all of my classes was an adolescent, fucked-up way to get back at my parents.

I don't totally regret it, but it definitely wasn't the smartest thing I ever did. Eventually, I found another job.

Working with my father.

¹My interview and the accompanying test I took to get the job was laughable by today's web standards: Table-based layout, Netscape was still a force, Internet Explorer was just beginning to take a foothold and FireFox didn't exist. We barely used CSS. JS took a backseat to Perl and other CGi-based scripting. People thought ColdFusion would be the next big thing. We were dancing without music.

²This is a rarity in the industry these days, as roles have become more specialized. At least outside of freelance work.

³"Bad-ass" usually means it has a crunching power-chord filled riff.

⁴I obviously wrote this while either a)hungry and/or b) stoned. I leave it up to the reader's imagination.

⁵For all the beatings Fred Durst has taken since Rap Metal imploded, at his peak, he was cool enough to have the Wu Tang Clan(an act with an abundance of credibility) guest on "Rolling (Urban Assault Vehicle)" on Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water. I listen to this track when I exercise, it's a real heart-pumper. DMX also makes an appearance. I wonder if Fred ever hears from any of them anymore.

⁶This was before the first X-Men movie, and Mike and I loved to speculate on a "dream cast". Patrick Stewart had already been mentioned as Professor Xavier, but no one had ever heard of Hugh Jackman. Mel Gibson was a popular fanboy Wolverine pick, but after seeing pictures of a ripped Danzig, I agreed with Mike that the runty, stocky and scary looking former Misfit was a perfect Logan.

⁷I've written about the Metallica/Napster debacle in my review of Death Magnetic, so I won't get into it here

⁸Except it does, at least in advertising, where I now work. When I first started, I showed up at 8:30 for a week before I realized hardly anyone came in before 10.

This One Isn't That Funny

I was supposed to have finished this before my thirtieth birthday - I turn 31 in a little over two months. Despite that sad commentary on my ability to meet personal deadlines, I am determined to stick it out and finish this damn thing(even as it gets harder). Looking back should, you would think, help me in the present.

There are murky times in our lives. Confused, chaotic times that leave us shaking our heads trying to piece together what happened, and why. My 'college years' are among my murkiest. That said, here we go.

---

Something definitely true: I double-majored in Journalism and Computer Science at the University of Maryland at College Park.

Something maybe true: I was in Journalism because I helped layout the newspaper in high school and I liked to write. I was in Computer Science because...well I'm not exactly sure. I liked it enough, and I figured it was good to have a backup plan in case Journalism didn't work out.

Wait, what? Is that what you were really thinking back then? I know for a fact you weren't thinking that far ahead.

That's true. OK, the real reason I added Computer Science to Journalism was I foresaw the rise of online journalism, blogs, and what not and I wanted to be at the forefront of it all and...

You are full of shit.

...I was a nerd. Still, sadly, sulkily a nerd. College didn't change that. I didn't fit in at Journalism orientation¹. Sitting among the other new journalism majors, I listened to a red-headed guy dressed in khaki shorts and sandals go on about how he wanted to work at an ad agency² or newspaper where he could dress like he was that day and just kick around ideas while 'chilling'(journalism, as a major, also included advertising). He seemed friendly, the kind of person I wanted to be friends with; the entire place just felt like what I thought college would be like, free of my high school reputation and free of small-minded people - until he started making fun of me and telling his buddy how gay I looked. During the safe-sex part of the orientation they handed me the LGBTA pamphlets and asked me how much I liked golden showers. Typical, enlightened college students. I hadn't changed, life hadn't changed. People hadn't changed.

They never do. So Computer Science was an escape, wasn't it?

Computer Science was full of fellow nerds. Guys who didn't score at prom; girls who didn't cheerlead. In programming and math classes, I felt a little safer. Comfortable. The guy sitting next to me in Calculus II was unlikely to call me a four-eyed faggot or jokingly ask if I was still a virgin(no and yes).

Still, even in CS, I never was completely comfortable. I didn't love it the way some kids did.

And you weren't as good at it, either. Despite your outer nerd-trappings you didn't really give a shit about programming, and it showed.

I did well in the early classes in both majors(grade-wise, anyway). The first semester I got straight As, something that had never happened in high school. Still, the big change I had expected, the clean slate - it remained a dream. Everything felt like high school, but without direction or purpose. Why was I trying to be a journalist or a computer programmer? I had just aimlessly floated into them.

I didn't make any new college friends. And I mean that literally, to this day I have no friends from UMCP who were not also my friends before I attended UMCP. Pathetic. I couldn't fit in. In my journalism classes I was the nerd, in my CS classes I was an impostor waiting to be found out.

Commuting to campus instead of living there made things difficult. Driving to classes everyday, missing the "dorm" life experience, it felt like I was missing out on a big part of what college life was supposed to be. I drove, I went to class, I came back home.

Well, you could have made more of an effort - joined a campus club, talked to people at the Student Union, done more than go to class, get Roy Rogers for lunch by yourself, fending off the guy with the Jews For Jesus flyers before driving home.

And things at home were getting worse. As my father struggled more and more with depression, my family's money problems worsened. My Mom was angry and exasperated. Two of my brothers were too young to really understand what was happening, but the next eldest, in the middle of high school, took the brunt of seeing my father and mother change. He struggled with going to school, despite being popular and (being a Teehan) smart. Still, I thought things would get better(despite having no logical reason to believe so, a habit I still have).

I needed to make money, so I took a student job as a janitor on campus, but it only lasted a week before I quit because the schedule wasn't flexible.

You quit because you felt ashamed to be cleaning up your college-mate's trash on the weekend while they recovered from the parties you were never invited to.

I started working at a nearby movie theater. I only ran into a classmate once there, selling him a ticket to Godzilla(I think, plus the schedule was flexible). The people I worked with were also college-aged for the most part(there were some high school kids, of course). I was the only person who went to UMCP, though - everyone else was either just working, going to Prince George's Community College or another two-year school.

The thing was, a lot of them were smarter than my UMCP classmates. They worked harder, and made do with less. But their parents couldn't afford tuition, and they couldn't all get student loans, scholarships, or grants to go to a four-year school. It was enlightening and infuriating at the same time.

I worked there one summer, before landing another job at UMCP, this time managing the web site of one of the honor programs. It paid a little better than cleaning bathrooms at the Student Union. I had lucked into a web internship during the summer and had learned all the basics I needed to do the job. There wasn't that much to it, and while working I started learning Perl, JavaScript, ColdFusion  and CSS. I didn't realize at the time how important it would be, later in life, that I fooled around with those things because I was bored.

Anyway, I did that job for a while, and continued doing respectably well in my classes. I knew I would eventually have to choose between Journalism and Computer Science, because I was struggling to do both, and work.

Failing a required math class probably didn't help.

I was doing fine until the final. The last couple months of that semester, though, I lost motivation. I didn't really care. Something terrible had happened at home(can't really say what), and after that, I was convinced I had to drop out of school and get a full-time job. My father was unemployed, my parents were having trouble with the mortgage, and I had three younger brothers still at home. I was the oldest, I could work, I could help get us out of the hole. Things at home would improve, my parents would be happier, no broken home, no brothers growing up in separate apartments or with Aunts or whoeverthefuck, they would do better in school and not have to worry about this shit when they were ready to go to college and I wouldn't have to ask anyone for a place to live. I could do it.

Honestly, I was also depressed. Seeing my father reduced to a shell of who he used to be, hearing my mother scream at him and us every morning, looking at how my brothers were being robbed of a happy childhood - it got to me. Life wasn't fun, so college wasn't fun. Least I could do was get paid for not having much fun. Plus, it wasn't a recession, or an unexpected financial crisis that was sinking us. It was just...weakness, in my mind. My father's weakness; a genetic legacy that every male in the family shared(I remember my mom yelling that down the hall one morning, frustrated beyond belief with the men in her family). That weakness was why my family was facing losing their home, and maybe I could redeem my father, myself, and my family name.

So I dropped out, after a little under two years. It took less than a month for me to parlay my web internship skills into a job at an Internet start-up. I started working as a web developer, and I've been doing it ever since(except during a brief period right after the first Internet bubble burst). I was making money, not great money, but good money. I was 20 going on 21; the first time I went with my co-workers for after-work drinks I had to stick to Coke.

You know, some people work full-time and go to school. Maybe they aren't supporting their family, maybe they are, but they still do it. You could have worked harder.

I did my best; the best I could get out of myself at the time. I've thought about going back, but at this point, over a decade later, I don't see the point. I don't need a degree in what I do, and I don't really want a Journalism degree. Don't, don't, don't.

And part of you doesn't want to go back as a final fuck you to the circumstances that led you to drop out in the first place.

Still, it would have been nice to get a degree. I was supposed to be the first in my family to do it. Ironically, my father had dropped out of Georgetown two years in to join the Army(to piss his father off). My mother dropped out to be a mom. Guess I was following in their footsteps, in my own strange way.

Watching my friends graduate was hard. I was ashamed; ashamed to have failed, to have been too weak to get through everything and still have a diploma waiting for me at the end. I was paranoid their parents saw me as a bad influence. The kid from the bad, irresponsible family. And I still have shades of that, no matter how good my job is or what high-profile account I work on.

I would visit them, go to their parties, and pretend to be one of them. I remember the first time I had to leave something early because I had to get up to go to work the next day - is there a word for feeling grown-up and a failure that same time? Failturity? There should be.

When I think of music from this period of my life, a couple songs come to mind. Both remind me of my brother: "Keep Ya Head Up" by Tupac Shukar, and "Only God Knows Why" by Kid Rock. My brother was a huge Tupac fan(his two heroes are Tupac and Cal Ripken Jr., which to me, sums up growing up in PG Country), and he suggested I listen the Kid Rock tune because he knew I'd like it. When I hear them, I remember our hard times and trying to get through them, together.



"You can't complain you was dealt this
hell of a hand without a man, feelin helpless
Because there's too many things for you to deal with
Dying inside, but outside you're looking fearless
While tears, is rollin down your cheeks
Ya steady hopin things don't all down this week
Cause if it did, you couldn't take it, and don't blame me
I was given this world I didn't make it"



Anyway, that was the end of college, and it was on to being a working man. The next few years were nothing if not interesting: I worked at the start-up until the bubble burst sometime after Y2K, I started online dating(of course), working out, went from glasses to contacts, found myself painting pipes in a Civil-War era barn in the middle of Antietam, worked building a terminal at Ronald Reagan National Airport(wearing a hard-hat is kinda cool), installed security systems all over Baltimore and DC(and lived in some of the worst areas of both cities), got progressively better jobs in web development as the field recovered from the dot-com crash, met a girl who would one day write a song about how much of an asshole I was, and at some point, got married.

But I'll get to all that later.

---

¹One detail I'll never forget about freshmen orientation was hearing a girl gush about a new show called South Park that I'd never heard of. She loved the cursing little children and that a character named Kenny died every episode. God, I'm old..er.

²Strangely enough, I now work at an ad agency. So fuck that guy.

I Won't Do That

Part of the Turning 30 series.

"Look at all the tiny people!" exclaimed a puffy-faced girl who became, as soon her pimple-rimmed lips finished 'tiny', someone I would hate for the rest of my life(I never saw her again).

The 'tiny people' were filling the hallways after their first class of their first day at Laurel High School, and I - a pasty bug-eyed ghost of a kid - was among them. I scurried from class to class, my middle-school honed nerd-survival techniques urging me to lay low and keep quiet. Scan the classroom, look for signs of possible allies: Metallica sticker on a notebook, comic doodling(the Marvel kind, not the newspaper kind), a copy of Dungeons and Dragons hanging out of backpack; any marker that might lead me to another teenage misfit.

Eventually, I found a set of friends - two, actually. Set one were three friends from my neighborhood who were all a year ahead of me. Theoretically, having three established sophomores as friends should have been an advantage, but they were all geeks like me(well, to be fair Joel wasn't really that geeky, just all of his friends were - which is basically the same thing). It was like knowing the prison bitches before you get off the county van; it only helps in as much you know how badly you are going to get fucked.

My other set of friends were a couple of guys that I'll refer to as SuperFresh. One half of SuperFresh was like me(all nerd), but the other was an anomaly. He was in incredible shape from karate, wrestling, and gymnastics. He earned straight As, he was a member of TV Production, and was generally well liked by everyone. Yet, he doesn't remember being popular. I'm convinced this is because he was best friends with me and the other half of SuperFresh. Our geek-worldview rubbed off on him. If it wasn't for us, he'd probably have dated cheerleaders and scored at Prom(sorry dude).

Unlike Superfresh, my other set of friends were a little sinister. Hanging out with them, I'd have my first taste of alcohol, porn, satanic metal, drugs and LARPing¹(the worst of all). I'll call them the Axis of Evil.

The Axis of Evil had Joel, Larry and Robert. Joel I've already discussed.

Larry was a chubby devil's child. He was smart - too smart for high school. His parents were Wiccans. His older brother was banging the cashier at the local record store. We would have amazingly deep conversations about life, science, and philosophy on the bus ride home(at least I remember them being very deep, but my teenage perspective might have warped what I considered 'deep').

Robert was tall. Really tall. He was an only child, and routinely tried to break into his friend's houses, just for practice(I think he thought of himself as a fantasy-like thief).

Together, we would spend our high-school years playing video games, D&D, looking at porn-mags, watching Headbanger's Ball and Beavis & Butthead. A typical mid-nineties, white teenage existence. Often we'd do this in someones' basement(shit, I didn't realize how much of this was so fucking cliched), but almost never mine. My parent's were still pretty strict then, and would make us go to bed eventually. At certain friend's houses, this policy was very relaxed(eventually my house became the spot for friends to congregate thanks to 'chill' parents, but that wasn't until it was my younger brothers and their friends doing the chilling²).

Even with friends, though, high school was rough. Dating was out of the question. I tried to fit in by being a kind of class clown, channeling my beloved George Carlin albums. This worked with some people, but blatantly ripping Carlin off never gained me wide-spread acceptance. Despite being a nerd, my grades were never that great, at least during freshman and sophomore years. Depressed, I didn't see the point in some of the work. Not being one of the beautiful people can hurt.

I listened to a lot of Metallica. I didn't have a lot of money for CDs, so I taped songs off the radio. I preferred dark, brooding songs, so naturally I listened to the local alternative station, 99.1 WHFS³. Late at night, long after I was supposed to have gone to bed(just like I was supposed to have studied), I'd lie in bed with my headphones on and listen - it was a gateway to another world, though it only offered a fleeting glimpse of the rooms, basements and parking lots where the cool "alternative" kids listened to the same music. I was still too nerdy, even for them.

I remember one kid who sat in front of me in freshman English. He tormented me in middle school, and over the summer he had obviously become a huge fan of Grunge: flannel shirt, longer(and greasier) hair, and an anarchy symbol sketched in black marker on his backpack. This kid, the same kid who once tortured for me wearing high-watered pants one day(hey, it was fucking seventh grade for Christ's sake) and loved making fun of me on the bus ride home, this kid had written something else besides his pseudo-approval of an anarchist society on his backpack: 'Mean People Suck'.

Mean people suck? Well, kiss my nerdy-white ass.

When I wasn't listening to the radio, there was one album I was constantly listening to, and believe me I sometimes I wish it was something really cool like Let It Be by The Replacements(who I wouldn't discover for almost a decade), Jeff Buckley's Grace or even Stone Temple Pilot's Purple. No, instead I would stare bleary-eyed at the red digits of the alarm clock listening and re-listening to Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell by Meatloaf.

Just like you don't get to choose your family, sometimes you don't get to choose the music that ends up meaning something to you. An awkward teenager looking for something, anything, that helps you make sense of the world doesn't have the benefit of wondering if what they like will be "important" when they are exiting their twenties. And even though in some circles Bat II is considered a great rock-opera album, it's hard to find another Meatloaf fan when you play "I'll Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)" on the bar jukebox. Especially if that bar is in Brooklyn.

But you fucking love that song, don't you? Don't deny it - it's "Bohemian Rhapsody" epic mixed with high-drama, gloriously long and overblown as only Jim Steinman can do it. Fierce electric guitars and beautiful piano licks crash , and not just Meatloaf wailing as only Meatloaf can, but after nine minutes we get another vocalist, the mysterious woman who is the object of Meatloaf's affection. It's a mini-movie⁴; Beauty and The Beast condensed into 12 minutes(six for the radio version).

To me, it was unrequited love; the only kind of love nerds get to know in high school. I'm a beast, I love you and I'll do anything for you - but none of it will matter. Plus, the beast is mysterious, gothic and reclusive, but in a cool way. When you're getting called a dork on a daily basis, you may have some aura of mystery about you, but it definitely isn't the cool kind of mystery. No, it's mysterious like a two-headed kitten or unidentified meat; you'd rather just not know.



I loved the angst of the album, and being so over-the-top in it's production and homage to rock-opera, it really stood out from my Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains records. I still listened to them plenty too, but Bat II will always have a special place in my heart.

Today, if I had to pick one song to perfectly sum up my high school experience, it would be this one(even if it was released almost a decade after I graduated).

---

¹LARPing, or 'Live-Action Role Playing', is highly advanced geekery - not for the faint of heart, or anyone wishing to engage in regular sex.

²Lotta fucking good that did me(I'm not bitter).

³Sadly, WHFS no longer exists. It's format was abruptly changed to Tropical Latin music in 2005.

⁴Although I've listened to the song plenty, I hadn't watched the video for it in years until I wrote this post. Looking at it now, some things are just bizarre: It starts with Meatloaf/the Beast inadvertently killing a cop with his motorcycle. Why the cops are chasing the LoafBeast is never explained(but as in most music videos, it's heavily implied it's because cops are inherently evil), but they are bringing everything, cars, helicopters, to get him. The LoafBeast flees in the woods(away from his safe haven mansion?) and discovers a beautiful woman washing by a fountain, the way nobody does. She follows him back to his mansion, through the previously mentioned woods, where there is in an incredibly hot, almost softcore scene between her and what I guess are the LoafBeast's sexy muses. How could have I forgotten that?

Ramblings, Death Cab, and Guilt

Skip to thoughts on Death Cab.

I am lost.

No, I'm not lost. I'm directionless. Searching for meaning. Fulfillment. But where? From what?

Work? Why don't I feel fulfillment from work? Whenever I try to build my identity(yes, that's the word - knowing yourself is important, I've heard) through work I feel foolish. Isn't it common knowledge that most work is bullshit? Who will remember you for the extra time you put in the office? Is that what you want your family and friends to think of? Yes, I do remember hearing this message - mostly from Hollywood millionaires pretending to be middle-class men who should be content with their place in life. Lost family men who've betrayed their families by missing a Little League game or a piano recital(don't kids do anything interesting? fuck, no wonder pretend Dads and Moms don't want to show up to this shit). Men doing their dream jobs telling us to be content without our dream jobs.

Perhaps if your work is your dream(and therefore important to you), it's OK. From Children's Magician to CEO, I bet both know themselves pretty good through their work. It's part of who they are. Is my job part of who I am?

Maybe there is a problem with my assumptions(which are always dangerous); maybe when you go looking for work that is meaningful you actually rob it of any chance of giving you fulfillment. You can't get by on the "idea' of important work, because you've abstracted it too much. It should just come naturally; what you would be doing anyway.

And if that's true, then what would be important, fulfilling work to me would be reading, writing, watching movies, and doing whatever comes next...

...that's not a fucking job! That doesn't sound like doing anything, let alone an occupation. It's just hanging out.

So yeah, I won't find fulfillment -- at least not total, zen level fulfillment -- through work. At least not yet. That doesn't mean I can't find a certain kind of satisfaction. Hard work can be it's own reward, if you don't take it too seriously. That lesson only took twenty-nine years to learn...

...I'll bet women respond to men who don't do this kind of over-thinking; men who just get things done without wondering what does it all mean?

Is that what the red-head¹ was trying to tell me?

"I'm attracted to a guy who is in control..."

I could tell from the tone of her voice what she meant. I could take that tone and march it around New York and it would match frequencies with the vibes those men put out, buzzing in attraction. And even if one was a children's clown, they would be in control. More control than I'm in, that's for sure.

Like I said, I'm directionless. Each morning I start being tossed about by myself, wondering where I'll bounce myself to next. I have no control over myself - and what else should I be controlling? Maybe this lack of control is why I listened to that damn Death Cab for Cutie album more than once...

I'll admit, I don't particularly care for the last Death Cab album(or the band itself, for that matter). Sure, "I Will Possess Your Heart" is a decent song but I prefer the radio edit version, not the rambling, pointlessly long album cut. I tried, believe me I tried to like them but after a while the lead singer's whiny chirp of a voice grates on my nerves. See, I don't even know his name! Yet I feel compelled to have an opinion about his band, or face losing my music credibility. So I listened to that last album(something to do with stairs), and I listened, and I kept listening even though I strongly disliked what I was hearing. And then, for the last track, someone reads the fucking credits. That's the soundtrack to a hipster circle jerk. Who the fuck thought anyone would want to listen to the album credits? If I like your band, I'll read the fucking liner notes, OK? Christ people, have some faith.

ANYWAY, control, direction..how do I right a rudderless ship? Stop making obvious metaphorical writing choices? Couldn't hurt.

I'm reading more, listening to more music, trying to find out what I like, what I am like and in the end, trying to become someone I would like to meet, hang out with, shoot the shit, invite to a party, and possibly meet up for a late night fuck. Who knows?

And it feels a little wrong. Hasn't Judd Apatow and Zach Braff saturated the market with this crap? Isn't this whiny-white-male-disillusioned-and-lost bullshit been done to death? It's so out. And, unfortunately for me, manic pixie dream girls don't really exist. They're just manic.

Well, even if it's out of fashion, it's still where I am. And it's probably why I liked "Definitely, Maybe"², watch How I Met Your Mother, and listen to Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over"³ late at night like it's a profound act.

Still, I feel a little guilty that if I had a vagina I'd have much less shit in popular culture to identify with.

Could I identify with "Stay Positive", the latest from Hold Steady? Are Craig Finn's lyrics gender-crossing? He does sing about Boys and Girls in America, after all, not just boys. And it would be really easy to say "Here's One For The Cutters" should resonate with women(thought it feels dirty). Still, they are heavily classic-rock influenced, not the most popular genre of music among women(I actually had one girl tell me she wouldn't date a man who listened to Lynrd Skynrd). But that's all based on stupid stereotypes. I'm the only person I know who cut themselves and I didn't even listen to Bruce Springsteen until a girl got me into him.

You know what, to hell with feeling ashamed of what I like.

¹The red-head isn't actually red-headed, technically. But my mind plays tricks on my eyes.

²My man-crush on Ryan Reynolds is also a factor.

³In a true sign of being able to bullshit, I know that Crowded House is supposed to be an underrated 80s band with a worthy catalog that goes way beyond this one hit single. And I'll say that. But this is still the only song of theirs I've heard.

A Reoccuring Dream

A Reoccurring Dream: I'm a little boy, at the age when first memories begin to form...the youngest I ever was. Not yet fully aware of myself. I'm sitting in front of a television. A commercial comes on - for what, it doesn't matter - starring another little boy. He's blonde. He's handsome. I know because my babysitter says so.

A little boy thought: I'm blonde! So I am handsome!

I run to the bathroom to look at myself. I see the boy in the mirror.

A little boy thought: I don't look like the boy on TV...

...I must not be handsome.

My first memory; my first disappointment.

There is an element of this dream in every day that's happened since.

Getting Over It, Part II

Some people never got over Vietnam, or the night their band opened for Nirvana. I'm still not over my first marriage(or ripping off Nick Hornby). In this series, I'll detail my attempts to get over a part of my life that lasted less than three years, but seemingly encompassed all of my soon to be over twenties. For some reason, moving to New York was one of these attempts. Whenever I declare myself officially "over it", maybe I'll have a huge party in Vegas - but I'll probably just have brunch.

Getting Over It, Part II: Watching America's Next Top Model

Let me get this out of the way: I know it sounds like bragging¹ when I say my ex-wife used to be a model(the runway type, not plastic-car-kit or Sears swimsuit type). Wow, you used to date an ex-model, whoop-dee shit dude. However, that doesn't change the fallout from the divorce. Especially since she made it abundantly clear that she didn't feel I was good looking enough to be with her. So any confidence I was supposed to gain from fucking a mainstream, magazine approved version of female beauty was destroyed, defiled and turned into an irrational hatred² of Tyra Banks.

Recently, though, I've turned away from the dark side to...well, another dark side: watching America's Next Top Model and The Tyra Banks Show. Anything even remotely related to modeling used to be avoided like the plague. However, the crazy ego trips of Tyra are such a spectacle, I can't turn away. It's like watching a six-year old girl get her own talk show.

I remember one episode where the topic was girls who are unsafe daters. Now, Tyra made some good points with her little stake-outs of women who gave away too much info to strangers at bars, followed men alone to their cars, and did other generally unsafe things that twenty-somethings do because they assume they are immortal(I still assume this, at least for another year).

However, Tyra left the realm of reality when, after ambushing a poor girl who had followed her fake-date down to his fake-SUV, she lit into the girl and showed her what was stored in the fake-trunk: a fake baseball bat, and fake bundle of rope. She would have been fake-beaten to death and fake-tied up. Once the charade had been revealed, what was the point of showing the girl these things? They didn't shock her, they made her laugh - staring in wonderment at crazy-eyed Tyra, marveling at the talk-show host's need to have every inch of reality defined by herself. She had constructed a perfect date-rape diorama, and goddammit, you were going to see it all.

But anyway, yeah, modeling. ANTM. Avoiding this just seemed like common sense. For one thing, there was at least one contestant every year who reminded me in some way of my ex-wife(most recently some combination of Lisa and Ebony from cycle 9). For another...it's America's Next Top Model. Why would any man watch it, if he wasn't being forced to by a girlfriend?

Oh yeah. My girlfriend watches ANTM(of course), and I've watched it with her. Well, not at first. I made it clear I didn't care for the show, though I never said why(it probably didn't need to be said).

Eventually, though, time dulled my sensitivity to all things modeling and Tyra(living in New York probably helps, with those ridiculous money-shot photos of Tyra that were everywhere a few months ago, promoting her talk show's move to the city. The ones that were titled things like "Gabologist" and "Conversationista". On my walk to work, I noticed someone had finally doctored one with the ink-drawn cock it sorely needed).

Watching now, all I think of are the ridiculous challenges, photo-shoots, and Tyra's bat-shit crazy antics(like the intro to the current season, or how when Ebony quit during last season - I'm sorry, cycle nine - the background music was as mournful as a dirge, since to Tyra, Ebony had died).

Even though this only involves television, I still feel like it's progress: disassociating things from an ex, and enjoying - or enduring - them again.

¹Though, since I've moved to New York, I assume every New York man has dated at least one "model", so it can't be counted as bragging anymore. It's par for the course.

²Yes, Tyra is the target because my ex-wife being a)black and b)model makes c)Tyra her idol. Or at least, her old idol.

My Weekend Apart

I think I grew up a little this weekend when, instead of ordering a second tall hot chocolate at Starbucks, I ordered a tall mocha instead. When I mentioned this change to my girlfriend she confirmed I was firmly into teenager-level maturity when it comes to caffeinated beverages.

--

Lately, it's become obvious that I've had a hard time adjusting to New York. When I first arrived, I was so consumed by work that I never settled in. Neveracclimated. Now I find myself, almost a year later, without much of a social circle outside of my girlfriend(without much means zero).

At work, I have mostly solo projects to work on, which combined with my natural introverted nature makes socializing there difficult. Plus, I haven't shaken the feeling that I don't fit in. To quote High Fidelity, I feel like one of those people who shaved their heads and said they'd always been punk: I'm a fraud, and I'll be discovered at any second. Everyone at the office is so...New York. They are all at least four of the following: young, hip, smart, worldly, and attractive. This isn't what I'm used to: for past five years I've worked for the government. I went from shirt, ties and blue blazers to a daily fashion show.

What to do, what to do.

So my girlfriend had an idea: spend a Saturday apart. The idea was to force me to explore the city on my own. To grow.

---

I'm not sure what growing in NYC entails, but I hope it involves a lot of drinking at coffee houses. That's where I've ended up early Saturday afternoon after my morning workout, sipping...mocha. I miss my hot chocolate, but the world wants me to grow. In honor of eMusic adding the Rolling Stones(64-70) to their catalog, the soundtrack to my Saturday apart will be the Stone's three best albums: Aftermath, Beggars Banquet, and Let It Bleed. So I sit back, and start Aftermath on my new iPod¹.

"Paint It Black"

The girls aren't in their summer clothes, but I do see something else that happens everyday: a Starbucks full of young go-getters. Every day a group of young men and women in suits takes over all the seating. They look like actors auditioning for a role in a commercial about a community college. They have PDAs, Blackberrys, cellphones, and they scribble things onto yellow legal pads with one apparent goal: recruiting. Other not-so-dressed-for-success young adults wander in, and they interview them. For what, I don't know. I'm guessing it's some sort of cult. Or real estate related.

I've kept the gym habit up, surprisingly, for the last couple of months. I think I've grown addicted to the post-workout feeling of renewed confidence, and on Saturday that feeling lasts until the end of the weekend. It's a penance to avoid feeling wretched. I live in Harlem, but I trek to the gym near my office in Times Square. It's an "office" gym, which means it's practically empty on the weekend. My "home" gym is always over crowded on the weekend, and I'm tired of making up excuses for the trainer there as to why I haven't started a program with him yet. For some reason, though, I want him to know I still workout. I'm no slacker, Chris. I just can't afford you, you big-smiling top-heavy bastard!

"Going Home"

Aftermath is a quick album; I'm already on the last track. Sorry Mick, I can't go home to see my girl. I need to make this city my new home. Get used to it.

I take a break from the Stones to listen to the new Raconteurs album, Consolers of The Lonely, only now realizing the coincidental title. It's brilliant. Hopefully my totally untrained thoughts on music will be published again. Regardless, it's fun to write about it. Pick it up if you like rock music.

I decide to read for a while. In my bag I have Angela's Ashes by Frank McGourt, The Gathering by Anne Enright, and How To Be A Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood by Thomas beller. I pull out the Beller. It's a great read, immersing me in New York in a way I've so far been unable to duplicate in real life. I briefly imagine a pretty girl coming up to talk to me, but then realize I'm reading a book titled How To Be A Man. Women would probably prefer someone who doesn't need directions in masculinity. Besides, my attention-whoring doesn't need to be fanned today.

I take a break, and call my brother. I have to tell him I can't co-sign on his first apartment, because if for no other reason, my credit is horrible. Plus, isn't that what parents are for? After I get off the phone, I realize that the next time I visit home, none of my three younger brothers will be there. They'll have their own places. Weird.

I call my three best friends(they live back in Maryland). One is busy, so I leave a message. I talk to the other two for a couple hours. In a true display of guydom, during one conversation we manage to reenact an obscure scene from Lethal Weapon, following a loosely-related bit about giant eighties cellphones. The awesomeness of RoboCop 2(which he is watching) and the craptasticness of RoboCop 3 are discussed. I learn Peter Weller is a professor of ancient history, and very popular at Syracuse. And baseball, we talk a lot of baseball. I discover that the evils of Walmart can be forgiven, temporarily, if they deliver your Wii a day earlier than expected. I should call these guys more often.

I'm hungry. Next door is pretty decent pizza place, that - thanks to the reality of NYC rent - has to subsidize itself with a Subway Sandwiches shop. I get a nice, big slice of pepperoni and a - sigh - Diet Coke. Nothing says I've been forever changed by New York to my friends back home than the fact that I now drink Diet Coke. It's almost like handing over my penis.

I decide to go see a movie, the pinnacle of social activities. It's a great opportunity to meet new people see movies my girlfriend doesn't want to see. Clearly, this social thing will be a long process. I have some time to kill before Run Fatboy Run starts, so I wander Times Square. On comes Beggars Banquet...

"Sympathy For The Devil"

If I was going to meet the devil, the lights and chaos of Times Square would be an appropriate place to do so. This is a city, after all, where I'm pretty sure the most beautiful woman I've seen all night was a man. Or maybe I'm just bisexual. And hell can't be anymore crowded than the tourist-filled² streets are tonight.

I'm briefly surrounded by a group of three friends whose average height is - I swear - 7'6". Don't these guys know the traditional dynamics of North American males? One tall guy, one fat guy, one cute/girly guy and some assorted adorable average men(the kind who end up with Drew Berrymore at the end of the movie). No, these guys have bonded over being giants.

Walking by the theater where A Chorus Line is playing, I notice the headlining quote from Michelle Bennett: "Dedicated to anyone who has ever danced in a chorus...or marched in step - anywhere."

I briefly march in step, and retroactively have a Broadway musical dedicated to me. I feel like I'm having a productive weekend.

"Street Fighting Man"

The sound of marching feet, and there is nothing for a poor boy to do but...well I could see Shine A Light, the Rolling Stones concert movie, but that seems a little ridiculous. Instead, I decide to see The Bank Job. Afterwards, it's three in the morning. I've been out, I've seen a couple movies, read some books, listened to some great music, and had a lot of Starbucks. Not a bad weekend; not the one I was probably supposed to have, but a step in the right direction(this is probably not true, and is instead an example of cognitive dissonance).

"Gimme Shelter"

If ever there was a perfect song for walking the streets at night, this is it. Combined with neon lights and towering steel expanses of Manhattan, the haunting rhythm guitar and Merry Clayton's howl become even more foreboding. I should head home, but I walk some more. I decide to walk up to 72nd street, and catch the train home from there. It's a nice enough night for walking.

"Midnight Rambler"

It's not too cold. With the light breeze, the night just feels perfect. It adds a crispness to every moment, enhancing the sensation of being alive. Drunken revelers are on every corner. A homeless vet scares the shit out of me when he materializes out of nowhere when I pass a stoop. The city is alive, humming, and oblivious to my presence. I'm at 72nd.

By this time, Let It Bleed has run it's course and I'm ending my Saturday to "You Can't Always Get What You Want", a song both revered and reviled by rock and roll fans. I can only assume it's detractors hate The Big Chill and boys choirs(probably a fear of castration). I didn't get exactly what I wanted out of this, but then again, I haven't really tried the way I should have yet. But I will.

--

It just occurred to me that I've been walking around with my gym bag all day. I must have looked like an ax-murderer carrying around the heads of his victims.

¹This clearly illustrates my life priorities: I now own more iPods than long-sleeve shirts.

²I feel like an asshole complaining about tourists in a city I've lived in less than a year, but then again, maybe that helps me fit in better.

Getting Over It, Part One

Some people never got over Vietnam, or the night their band opened for Nirvana. I'm still not over my first marriage(or ripping off Nick Hornby). In this series, I'll detail my attempts to get over a part of my life that lasted less than three years, but seemingly encompassed all of my soon to be over twenties. For some reason, moving to New York was one of these attempts.

Buying Damien Rice's Debut Album O

I've always had a peculiar relationship with Damien Rice. I usually feel a kinship with any Irish artist (I'm Irish-American - this largely involves treating my drinking like some kind of cultural imperative), but I have actively avoided Rice for the past three years. The peculiar thing, though, is that for those same three years I have absolutely adored two of the songs from his album O, despite never owning the record, hearing the songs in their entirety, or even knowing their names. This is because O was the album my ex-wife listened to repeatedly the week before she told me she wanted a divorce.

She loved singer-songwriters, particularly extremely fuckable ones with foreign accents. Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, Duncan Shiek, David Gray, Van Morrison and John Lennon all found places on her CD rack. My memory wants to place Ryan Adams there, too -- right next to my copy of Kind Of Blue that she stole and never gave back -- to round out the American presence, but I'm pretty sure she didn't have anything by him(though I'm sure she loved the Elizabethtown soundtrack).

Rice was the soundtrack to my last memories of my ex-wife without the "ex" part, though I didn't know it at the time. That week I was just happy for her. She seemed to be coming out of a funk. She had long complained that she used to consume new music; that she sought it, loved it, lived it and that something had stifled that part of her. So this someone new in her life, this Damien Rice singing hauntingly beautiful songs seemed like a good thing. A corner had been turned.

Like most hurts, it's a fresh memory: I see her, hair up(weave thankfully gone), lips painted, eyes big and brown, typing away on my laptop while singing along. Our apartment would have been, finally, respectably furnished at this point. A sectional, a black coffee table, and the computer desk she sits at. The walls are the warm colors she had painted them one night while I was visiting my brother in the hospital. It's only a one bedroom in Foggy Bottom, but it's our home. Her voice, though beautiful, is just a few notes away from being a great singing voice. She sounds happy, but in a sad way. Hell, that's what the song sounds like - mournful, but hopeful.

She sings the chorus, over and over:

"I can't take my eyes off of you
I can't take my eyes off you"

Hopefully, foolishly, I imagine she thinks of me when she sings this. Sadly, I was probably right. Now that -- three years later -- I own the album, I know the song is called "The Blower's Daughter". The lyrics continue:

"I can't take my mind off you
I can't take my mind...
My mind...my mind...
'Til I find somebody new "

Damien whispers that last part. I'll bet she did, too.

I'm not sure why I finally decided to buy O; I guess avoiding Damien(my ex-wife) had become too tiresome. I almost missed out on a wonderful collection of covers from Sounds Eclectic because Rice had covered Radiohead's "Creep". And one day, there was O staring at me from the rack. An eight-dollar "classic" buy at the Virgin Mega-Store. It seemed like a step; a tiny one, but a step nonetheless: confront your demons by buying and endlessly listening to the album and artist that represents the most painful part of your life. OK, somethings don't sound like such a hot idea once you write them down.

O is a good album. At least, the first half is. I can never get past "Old Chests", the fifth track. You see, track three is "Blower's Daughter", and track four is "Cannonball", the other song she sang repeatedly. Past that, the album fails to hold any significance to me. I'm sure there are some good songs there, but none of them connect me to that very personal moment, which was the hole point of buying the album in the first place.

"Cannonball", now that I have the benefit of a close examination, is rich with foreshadowing:

"there’s still a little bit of your taste in my mouth
there’s still a little bit of you laced with my doubt
it’s still a little hard to say what's going on"

and the one part I remember her singing:

"love taught me to lie"

Damien, you don't know the fucking half of it.

So why do I love these songs so much? I only knew small parts of both(for a while I thought they were just different parts of the same song). Yet in memory, they both seemed like perfect, beautiful songs. Songs that I would never listen to again, and for good reason: it hurt too much. Rice, unwittingly, captured the last happy memory I had of her, of us. All in songs that having nothing to do with love as a happy concept. "Can't take my eyes off of you" was all I could remember...it was how we used to feel about each other.

I'm at the point now where O, "The Blower's Daughter", and "Cannonball" still hold special meaning, but I can enjoy them without automatically thinking about "happier" times in a small apartment in DC. So I guess that's some sort of progress, right?

In a bizarre twist, for the past three years I have also refused to watch the movie Closer, because we watched that movie the Saturday before she told me she was leaving. Since then, I've hated that movie. It's a bunch of people cheating and leaving each other. I didn't know -- or blocked out the fact -- that the Closer soundtrack contains both "The Blower's Daughter" and "Cannonball". Both of these pieces of media I have avoided, one because it reminded me of being happy, and the other because it reminded me of being hurt. Why? Why not hate both; why does Damien get a free pass, while the movie that uses his songs to soundtrack infidelity, broken hearts, and the general fucked-up nature of love end up reviled?

For that matter, why do I not hate her favorite band, The Strokes? She adored them, hung out with Julian Casablancas when she lived in New York during her modeling days. Why then, when I see him in a video or listen to Room On Fire do I still think "hey, cool dude" instead of "hey, fuck you poser who probably banged my ex-wife"?

Yet MySpace, who made her the "feature" profile that week, I can't stand. I almost bought the infamous "MySpace Ruined My Life" t-shirt. Seriously, the sudden surge in popularity seemed to play a major part in her decision to pack her bags. At least to me it did, and I haven't been on the site since then.

Obviously, I have issues. This series should have many parts.