Silver Dreams

Tight blue, silver eyes drop

onto my shoulder

past the pavement unseen.

Thirst borne of wanting

for things long forgotten

burns in the afterglow

of peptic slow dances,

churns in the left behind

of feckless dull hatred.

Idiocy cracking wise

cuts smoldering through my doldrums

while backwash borne of benders past

weighs heavy on my breath.

I step out into tree lined landscaped

boxes owned by corporate corpses,

as I drop stoned out of daylight

into nightscapes caged in Walmart.

Walmart, the one true equalizer!

Walmart, home to the great unwashed!

Walmart, sanitary evil incarnate!

Walmart, from womb to tomb to drunken temperance.

Walmart, you make difficult misery effortless.

The cinematic black horizon

lightens onto morning

while silver blinded like minded

neophytes creep naked.

Bruised brown splotches layered

onto concrete pouring

into ragged potholes

consecrating my religion.

Suburban dreams melt to urban blight

as I walk toward a night draped sullen.

Walmart fades to steel and glass

lit cavalcades sky scraping,

a demographic born of gridlock

block after block after shocking,

as I step out into traffic

riddled yellow taxi madness,

insane asylums piled on top

of hallucinating lovely.

Gone, vanilla sadness.

Gone.

New Year

Existence is a tingle, an itch,

a silly, persistence cacophony.

Too often, life is but waiting for itself,

reeking of recursive regret,

the lonely eying 'if only' in jealous frozen fury.

*****

I'm standing mid December

on a breeze blown bitter Sunday,

contemplating New Year,

with a gimpy psyche broken.

*****

Sweet sweat of horror

creeps needles up my spine.

Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas,

drifting snow cold through my mind.

*****

Sweet twist of sadness

falls forlorn down my back.

Happy Holidays, Season's Greetings,

as life shoots up the dropper's neck.

*****

Auld Lang Syne is everywhere muddled,

toward resolutions torn asunder,

as Chinese New Year looms to catch them,

a safety net through January

until the dragons dance.

*****

And after all the promises

melt into March,

she's still softly sour

but not bittersweet,

caught in a storm

of nerve ends dying

caught in that place twixt

self loathing and writhing

in the New Year.

Ally, Ally, All Come Free

I'm having a very surreal and oddly enjoyable time watching a Hallmark TV Movie staring Ally Sheedy and Meatloaf. It's a "drama," so they say: Citizen Jane.  No relation to Citizen Kane.

Meatloaf is god awful and brilliant in this. He's a detective on the trail of the person who murdered Ally's niece. At first, he's just painfully bad. But then something strange happens ... his performance grows on you (sort of like a fungus). A half hour into it, you're transfixed by the monotone delivery. The ssssllllloowww manner in which he walks and speaks and reacts.

And. Then. You're. Hooked.

This just might be the best performance by an 'actor' in the history of the art form. Still, through all that, it remains horrible. I can't explain the paradox. Then again, I could never explain the existence of Meatloaf period. Stop right there! Before you go any further ... He was wonderful in Fight Club as the Testicular Cancer Guy with Breasts, so there you have your precedence.  And in the Paradise video.  Can't forget Rocky Horror.  What about Roadie? Damn, the guy's a regular thespian.  Inside the Actor's Studio material for sure.

And Ally? She's the reason I rode this wave on a channel surfing Saturday night. You see, Ms. Sheedy rocked my world in the 1980s. Her one-two punch of Breakfast Club goth-chick and St. Elmo's Fire Alex/Kevin girlfriend had me reeling.

I identified with Andrew McCarthy's Kevin in St. Elmo's more than any movie character to that point in my young life: he was almost exactly my age, he was a (wannabe) writer, everyone thought he was gay because he didn't have any recent conquests, and he was secretly in love with Ally (well, with her character, but let's not quibble).

For me it started and ended with her eyes.  Then continued with her voice and her mannerisms. Her ... everything.

She knocked me for a loop all over again as John Candy's love in Only the Lonely in 1991. But there were danger signs ahead, I knew even then. Certain features you knew wouldn't stand the test of time. The softness was, just a touch, harder than in her brat packing days.  Pointy features pointing a bit more.

Fast forward eighteen years and not much has changed with my life. I might as well have been put into suspended animation, waiting for something to snap me out of it.

But I think our 'romance' is over.

The danger signs were justified. The years have not been kind to her, with a hard edge where only sweetness once lived. Now to be fair, it could be the shrew of a character she's playing here. And the years have not been kind to most of us as we drift into our late forties (they were never all that sweet to me to begin with).  But it's not her looks that have soured (it was never really her looks that got to me, so much as her aura, that glow).

Oh well, we'll always have Georgetown.  Here's looking at you, kid.


Still, the ravages of age have been more than kind to some.  My #1 top dog, big cheese Hollywood I-gotta-have-her gal, Mary Louise Parker, 45, looks WAY better than she did when I discovered her in Fried Green Tomatoes (the only thing good about that flick, in my eyes). And that movie was released in 1991, the same year as ... Only the Lonely.


As Paul Harvey would say, "And that's the rest of the Story ..."

The paint is no longer sticky for sure.  For those that made it this far, hope you enjoyed watching it dry with me.

Bringing It All Back Home

Some days - like today - I feel just like Martin Blank.  As though I've been out in the world lo these many years doing something at odds with who I thought I'd be (in his case, hit man; in mine, software development) and now I have the need to find my way back home.

That the killing is metaphorical for me rather than literal is a minor nitpick; that my wandering in the wilderness has been a helluva lot longer than Martin's 10 years means little more.  His ambivalence (and paradoxically, his compulsion) about the return home feels like me in a way few movie characters and circumstances have to my mind.

The assassin stuff is a just a distraction, it is 'home' itself that's the core conceit and consequently the piece I wrestle with. He's quite literally returning home and I don't even know what that means for me, since I don't think I've ever had one. Not the way he did.  Or rather the way he thinks he did. Still, having never been there doesn't mean I can't yearn to go back.

Maybe returning 'home' is simply getting back to who I wanted to be. Meaning it's okay now to be that person. Maybe that's the point.  Grosse Pointe Blank is nothing if not one metaphor wrapped in another.  In fact, Martin is not 'literally' doing anything (there's at least one subtext and ulterior meaning to every scene).

Reading this over, I see nothing but more of my navel-gazing psycho-babble bullshit.

In the end, maybe it's just a decent shoot-em-up/high school reunion/'love reunited at last' dark romantic comedy.  Plus it has an excellent soundtrack.

Welcome back Pointers.

Moonless Fade

The night wind cuts hard as diamond

in through the corner of his eye,

bleeding salty tears warmer

than anything the evening offers.

-----

The streets spill into a squalid beauty

past hungry shadows hiding from themselves,

the lost who cast forlorn reflections

off sightless puddles in surrender.

-----

He stumbles bent by this rain swept congregation

in damp and damaged spastic kicks,

enslaved to the madness pouring out from within,

down past cavalcades of vanity and steel -

-----

with their ragged jacked current coursing through his aspirations,

with their ragged jacked current ungrounded through his short hairs,

with their ragged jacked current draining his best intentions,

with their ragged jacked current now blown only for him.

-----

Cold now.

Quiet.

Then it's gone into one last diamond point of light,

leaving only the moonless fade.

The Outcome

Autumn has shed its skin

to winter's dark embrace again;

oblivious to the seasonal myopathy,

I contemplate her absence stretched to perpetuity.

The Philadelphia evenings fester

as daylight drains to ebony.

Boathouse Row shimmers like endless Christmas

reflecting damp off the Schuylkill, absorbed by the sick of me.

I stagger down Bainbridge, numb

to South Street's Saturday revelry.

Their faces enraptured, so happy in the moment

and so utterly alien to all I'll ever be.

I feel the outcome, as certain as yesterday's rage,

as grim as an undertaker gone to seed.

I inhabit the outcome and then simply wait.

To go.

To be gone.

Really, really gone.

Daddy-o.

Freed.

Ketchup on Champagne (Last Year's Fever Dream)

I am floating on a giant pair of scissors, cutting smoothly through a boiling ocean of Listerine. I didn't realize scissors were buoyant but damn it they are in this adventure through the looking glass.

How, you might ask, do I know I am navigating through mouthwash (and how in particular am I certain it is Listerine and not, say, Scope)? It's a good question. All I can tell you is that in this dream the substance and brand are givens, as sure as the air we breathe. Several of my shipmates, it should be noted, are regularly dunking little cups into the antiseptic waves as they crest across the scissor blades, gargling with the stuff before spitting it back into the deep.

I am clearly captain of this fine vessel and I have the best crew you could hope for. Well ... not exactly ... My USS Scissors is manned with an odd assortment of team mascots (Phillie Phanatic and San Diego Chicken), Krofft characters of yore (H.R. Pufnsuf and Sigmund the Sea Monster) and Sesame Street regulars (Big Bird and Snuffleupagus).

This felt-heavy menagerie is fortified by the addition of Sally Struthers, a gaggle of Christian Children's Fund (CCF) kids (presumably tagging along with Ms. 'Gloria' Ginormasaur), and Rob Reiner, his Meathead 'stache glued to his upper lip and 70's wig covering his chrome dome. Archie Bunker's chair is tied down to one of the scissor handles for some reason but no Archie or Carroll O'Connor accompanies it.

Maybe the CCF kids are mine. I've been sponsoring them for some time now (no thanks to Ms. Struthers and her voracious appetite; in fact, visions of her grinning girth among the starving almost made me renege on my pledge, suspicious that at least a portion of my monthly offering went to feed her Pizza Hut jones). Mainly, that kindly grandpa looking guy in the TV spots shamed me into it. And I wanted to prove that some of us non-Christians can nevertheless sometimes act more in line with the teachings of that lean clean Nazarene than the supposed true believers.


Anyway, back to the nightmare recap, already in progress ....

The dream started out pleasant enough, as we sailed through the boiling mouthwash under clear skies and relatively calm seas. We were all singing ABBA's Fernando and eating from apple and pear trees that rise just above the tops of the gingivitis-fighting waves. I kept having to slap Sally's hands away as she repeatedly attempted to steal fruit the CCF kids had already picked and gathered for themselves. Get off your fat ass, reach out and pick your own, lady! But all-in-all, things were going "swimmingly" (in fact, the Phanatic was a bit drunk having swallowed too much Listerine during a brief anchorage taken to let the gang dive into the "wash" for a few laps around the scissors, mainly to rinse the stink off their hides).

But then the skies darkened and the seas grew rough, the clouds arrived blood red and the driving rain a blindingly bright day-glo yellow.

And now we are no longer alone in this aquatic wonderland.

Now there are wild Pterodactyl-style prehistoric birds of prey filling the hemorrhaging sky as they circle our craft, shiny from the banana-hued sheets of rain hammering down on us from the heavens. The mascots, Ms. Stivic, her CCF toddlers, the Meathead and I sit back on the scissor handles, raising our blades up into the sky to stab at them, opening the spears and cutting them shut as those filthy birds move in for the kill, dive-bomb style. We clip off a wing here, a head there - blood splashing into the Listerine like ketchup on champagne. (There's a picture - but that's the analogy my crew keeps muttering over and over: "like ketchup on champagne.")

Sally/Gloria loses an arm in this bird/scissor battle before it's all over and Rob/Meathead is stabbed in the eye by a Pterodactyl beak, knocking him back into Archie's chair. The San Diego Chicken is taken by the neck and spirited away, up into the clouds, never to be seen again.

Then suddenly, in the midst of this maelstrom, the bubbly greenish clear ocean turns thick and brown. A horrific smell slowly arises from its depths and permeates my nasal passages, finally enveloping my entire being. Listerine has morphed into shit. I take a whiff and get sick. And then I wake up, sick.

I make it to the bathroom, thankfully, and greet the porcelain receptacle with an early morning technicolor yawn. I often pine for the times I'm able to make regular and "productive" visits to my favorite "reading chair" given my increasingly severe "blockage"; however, it's a different cheek resting on the cold white ring with the flu 'round my throat. Nobody I know wants that (apologies to any bulimics reading this who might take offense; your company is excepted).

For a long time thereafter, I tried and failed to shake the dream. No tidy ending, no resolution, no reason for being.

It just was.

A Toilet of Beauty

My father grows old in the toilet,

a desolate room

with the air thick as mold.

----

He works life there in perpetual sweat,

a captain of industry

building factories of sick.

----

Little bits of wonder found in claustrophobic vistas

often linger in his melancholy,

kissing the linoleum.

(even when repugnant to his hesitant eye -

even as the porcelain drains his dreams bone dry.)

----

The mirror blissfully out of reach,

my father hugs his friend,

wrapping his arms 'round the cold white wet.

----

Yes, my father grows old in the toilet

amidst his softly sour splatter,

the holy cracking plaster,

and half finished caulking consecrating his divine.

----

So many contemplations,

so many toilets of my own

since a childhood spent listening to my father pray.

The eternally pungent confessional,

with a compassion beyond religion,

kneeling, catharsis, release ...

Until a trembling tug of the handle

flushes the misery for a moment from his mind.

And from mine.

Watercolor Oil

She reveals herself in water color

dripping off the faucet -

As for me, I look away

bent shaking broken naked.

She's brushing rushing sidelong

through the throng bug eyed nightly -

As for me, I find my gaze

drawn downward weakly, softly sadly.

She lives serenely in the moment;

there is no time for her but now -

As for me, I see 'now' rarely;

revisionist schisms consuming all my doldrums.

She dines at fashionable notable eateries -

I lick clean the floorboards of dive bars and state stores -

She's snow light dancing madly aching,

drunk with wit at Prince and Thompson -

As for me, I sit in silence

afraid of going comically melding mad into television.

Or, in the end, is it television off its rails

melding headlong into me?

Baby She Lied

Baby, I lied. This is the title of a song country singer Deborah Allen released in 1983. It was apparently a hit and although I was never aware of this, the song nonetheless had a profound effect on me in the mid-80s. The rendition I knew was by some local VA Beach gal named Diana Ray. I was familiar with the tearjerker having watched this gal perform it on several occasions circa '84/'85 at Michael's, a tidewater area country-western two-step shitkicker dance club. I'm pretty sure Baby I Lied was the only number Diana Ray sang, offered up as an estrogen-infused change of pace to the male house band's otherwise Good Ol' Boy set.

Thinking back on it now, I don't believe I'd even heard the name Deborah Allen until yesterday when I googled the tune after experiencing a strange nocturnal flashback from this period in my life. I didn't follow the top 40 back then, happy to collect most of my music from the bottom of the discount bins in an era when punk and new wave had, for the most part, not yet found a footing with the public in the US (the "poppier" stylings of Blondie, Joe Jackson and U2 aside). My preferences weren't yet classified "alternative" by the marketing machine (that didn't happen until "alternative" was popular enough for them to bother and by that time it meant mostly "mainstream"). My favorite type of music wouldn't be rescued from the bargain bin until Nirvana's sonic success nearly a decade further on down the road.

Given my musical proclivities, I was about as far from a country music fan as could be in the mid-80s so you might ask why I darkened the door of this yee-haw establishment even once to get out of the rain let alone repeatedly on purpose as a specific destination. It's a good question and one I'm not completely sure I can answer. I can tell you that it most certainly wasn't thanks to the crew I accompanied to the joint: I loathed those vermin one and all. They were merely my transportation. You see, these were my Navy days and I didn't have any means for getting around save for buses, taxis and my own two legs, which often posed a problem: mass transit took an ungodly long time to get anywhere and cabs were usually out of my price range on a sailor's salary unless it was a relatively short jaunt. As for my legs? Well, I wore down my fair share of shoe leather but it only gets you so far. The fuck-sticks with the all-important car were among my "shipmates," living and working in the same spaces on the same floating prison (a.k.a USS Dwight D. Eisenhower) but I couldn't have less in common with this particular group of charmers, made up as they were of equals parts racism, sadism, and abject idiocy. In other words, real sweethearts.

The first time I decided purely on whim to accompany them to Michael's, reasoning I could get drunk on the cheap, goof on the hillbillies - including my "buddies" - and gawk at the hot chicks that congregated at such establishments in southeastern Virginia back then (probably now too). But I went mainly because I thought it might kill the overpowering boredom I was mired in. I think I wore an Iggy and the Stooges shirt to my inaugural two-step dosey doe. Or maybe one that read, "fuck country music." Nah, it had to be the Stooges: I wasn't that ballsy. Certainly I wasn't decked out in the stetson, big belt buckle and cowboy boots my fellow travelers wore like a second skin.

I was vaguely aware that there was a chance I was gonna get my ass kicked courtesy of my dress and antics (shouting out requests for the Clash and B-52s, muttering "country sucks" and other such witticisms under my breath, attempting to pogo during a two-step; you get the idea). Maybe that was the point (I was and am nothing if not a masochist). And then Diana Ray sang that song and I was transfixed, my goofs melting away. All subsequent visits had one sole purpose: Diana Ray and "her" song. I'm not sure what it was that lit my fire: the song itself is a sub-par weeper and DRay was no great shakes in either the looks or talent department from what I recall. Together, though, it was magical to me. Ours is not to wonder why (well, of course it is but I can't for the life of me come up with a satisfactory answer). Where o' where are you now, Sister Ray? (Apologies to Lou Reed and the Velvets)

I immediately downloaded Baby I Lied from iTunes once I discovered it was in fact an actual hit my girl had been covering and not her own composition since lost to time. Hearing the original for the first time tonight brings back strangely powerful feelings. The song is now comfortably ensconced in my "80's Sense Memory Dreck" playlist, taking its rightful place alongside such charmers as Don't Stop Believin', Islands In the Stream, Hold On, Sister Christian and other slightly brighter dim bulbs I hate to love but can't quite hate: I adore the memories they invoke.

(Postscript: I've actually since overcome my own prejudices against country music and very much like some of it today, particularly the roots stuff that - along with R&B - helped to fuel what became rock and roll: I love the darker Hank Williams stuff, though I have little use for his son or most of the pop-gloss reactionary slop that passes for the genre these days. I also dig a lot of late forties/early fifties bluegrass and its drunken cousin, rockabilly. Of the contemporary variety, Rosanne Cash does it for me (and I'd be remiss if I didn't give a shout out to her father, Johnny). Thanks to the Elvises Costello and Presley with turning me around on this subject. It still might constitute a fairly small slice of my listening pie but at least I don't reject the whole spectrum out of hand when something I'd otherwise classify as "good" pops up on the menu.)

Krofft cruft

Thoughts of the Land of the Lost on Saturday mornings past bring back memories of all my favorite like-minded shows in the early 70s:

• H.R. PufnStuf
• Sigmund and the Sea Monsters
• The Bugaloos
• Lidsville

All were the work of Sid and Marty Krofft.  Sort of the Joel and Ethan Cohen of the 70's children's fantasy puppet genre.  God bless those guys.

In keeping with Hollywood's complete lack of originality, I see that a movie version of H.R. Pufnstuf is coming out in 2011.  More interesting is a 2007 horror-spoof of the show, H.R. Puffnsnuf.  I'll have to hunt that one down (though it might fuck with some relatively rare positive memories of childhood in disturbing ways).

Looking on IMDB, I discovered that Mama Cass Eliott played Witch Hazel in a 1970 movie version of Pufnstuf, though she wasn't on the series.





No sign of Papas Denny or John or Mama Michelle.  John would have been picture perfect as the father of the protagonist, little Jimmie.  He could have shown him how to smoke black-tar heroin from his talking flute.

Speaking of Jimmie and his flute, Jack Wild (who played our young English lad among puppets in Pufnstuf land) died of Tongue and Throat cancer just a couple of years ago.  There was no mention as to whether his magical talking flute had anything to do with his demise, though that thing was no doubt filled with all sorts of toxic pixie dust (all the reason why Witchiepoo was forever trying to get her hands on it).  I wonder if Witchiepoo or Mayor Pufnstuf made it to the funeral.  That would be a great premise for a reunion show!

Finally, for no particular reason, I'm left with memories of the show Shazam.  It was on, I believe, in prime time rather than Saturday morning and had no relation to the Kroffts (it was a live action show).  But my jumbled up memories scoop this into the Krofft pile.  I distinctly recall 7-11 coming out with Shazam Plastic Specialty cups when you got a large Slurpie.  There were several to choose from and I was determined to get them all.  I think, in fact, that I did.

Toyz in da Hood

This time of year - which seems to begin earlier every autumn - puts me into a nostalgic frame of mind. Up with the birds this morning, I was able to catch a bit of Saturday morning TV fare with the very first flush of the upcoming holiday season's toy advertisements already breaking bread. Now to be sure, my toys of yore were a bit different. We're talking toys circa late 60s/early 70s. I think the most "high tech" item I ever owned was Hasbro's Lite-brite.

Hot Wheels were my longest running passion. I remember a few Christmases with them, and they're still alive-n-kicking in the 21st Century; in fact, they are one of Mattel's premiere brands to this day. Of course today Hot Wheels is all fancy and whatnot. Back in the olden times it was just a bunch of orange plastic strips of miniature road connected together in sundry ways (loops and ramps and so), with little metal cars you dropped onto said tracks. Gravity did the rest of the work, no electricity required. It didn't take long for the day-glo tangerine strips to outlive their usefulness as race tracks, but they went on to new lives as play weapons (whips, swords, etc.). I can still feel the sting those three foot hunks of rubbery plastic exacted when used in pretend anger.

Slot-cars. They were right up there in the pantheon of toy Christmas pleasures, along with Big Wheel and my black Sears Spyder five-speed "muscle" bike. I could be getting some of my Yuletide memories jumbled with birthdays here but I remember the slot-cars distinctly on Christmas, racing them all day long under the tree.

Looking back now, my favorite time of Christmas wasn't rushing out of bed to see what the unkempt fat man and his mangy venison chauffeurs had delivered but rather putting things together afterward. My parents - and later, sister - were often up until the wee hours stitching together my Kris Kringle loot but there were several items still wrapped come morning and many required assembly once opened. This was the shit "Santa" hadn't delivered (presents from people living south of the North Pole). Dad and I often set to work on this task together and it was one of the few father/son moments I remember fondly. The other was Sunday mornings with the paper and powered donuts. After that it drops off into the abyss.

Other items of note:

• Unicycle. Not sure why my friend Brian and I learned to maneuver these things but I can tell you it's not like a bike: you do in fact "forget" how to ride as I found out not too long ago in a painful display.
  
• Remote-controlled model car
• Rock'em Sock'em Robots
• Barrel full of Monkeys
  
• Electric Football Game. Electricity vibrated the little players around the "field" - perhaps this was my highest tech toy.
• Various Play-Doh toys (mainly used to carve up said play-doh into numerous shapes and sizes). My Mom used to make homemade "play-doh" as well, of wildly varying color and quality.

Man, reading all this now I see this kid was really spoiled as a child with all manner of crap. Somehow my parents came through with the goods come Christmas and birthdays, regardless of our financial straits. If only there were but two days in the year then things would have been golden all around. Damn Gregorians.

Oh yeah - I nearly forgot perhaps my favorite toy of all: Mattel's VaRoom! ...

Varoom by Mattel
Uploaded by kmail.

A Bouquet of Dampness

She gives pause to his spiral toward the never ending bottom,

balance to his topsy turvy,

respite from his jaded worldview of faded black and blue.

She smells of lavender optimism,

drifting on a deviant humor,

leaving a drizzle of pleasure he drops sick along the stairs.

-----

She is the first flush of autumn and the pep rally romance,

She is a heavenly gallop toward a bouquet of dampness.

She is a wrong turn 'round winding, twisting straight into nothing.

She is fall.

And he tumbles.

The Skin of my Mind

I'm unclear the influence

of ravenous coffee

as pumpkin spiced muffins

bleed jack-o lantern orange.

I'm dying of sweatshirts

and muted autumn headlights

shining slick afterthoughts

of flannel umber frost.

-----

I nose the wheel down

an endless glassine impasse,

with the rain swept viscous undercurrent

of history on my tail.

The mid-semester ministry

smells of campus pub crawl heresy;

too gradient, I graduate

past blinding hate and faithlessness,

while raking piles of bonfire lightning

burst to flames of desolation.

-----

I fester on the done unyielding

and linger on shit maelstroms raging,

picking at bygone theoretical equations

predicting all my fuck ups to come.

-----

And always the here and always the now

and always the heart of this moment

peel forever lost

off the skin of my mind.

Darkness on the Edge of Life

My favorite album has remained constant since 1978 and likely will stay on top until I go down under (that doesn't mean a trip to Australia). Or perhaps not. One can only hope it'll change. Why hope for a change? Well, in a very real way this choice is a barometer of my growth as an individual. Or rather, in this case, a lack thereof.

I'm talking about my 'favorite album' and not 'favorite collections of songs,' so that counts out greatest hits and other compilations like The Jam's Snap!, Elvis Presley's Golden Records and Sun Sessions, Beach Boys' Endless Summer, Psychedelic Furs' All This and Nothing and Elvis Costello's Girls, Girls, Girls.

There are lots of #2s for me, many of which are #1 on a given day:

• Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, Nebraska, Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils and Dust
  
• The Clash's London Calling and Sandinista!
• Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom, Get Happy!!, Armed Forces, This Year's Model, Trust and My Aim is True, and Spike - Elvis wins the consistency prize - he has the most albums on my favorites list.
  
• Velvet Underground's Velvet Underground and Nico
• Ramones' Self-titled debut
• B-52's Self-titled debut
• Jim Carroll's Catholic Boy
• John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band
  
• Billy Joel's 52nd Street and Turnstiles
• The Beatles' Rubber Soul, Help!, With The Beatles and Revolver
• Beach Boy's Pet Sounds
  
• The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers, Let it Bleed and Exile on Main Street
• Elvis Presley's From Elvis in Memphis
  
• Bob Dylan's Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing it all Back Home, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan  and Blood on the Tracks
• Patti Smith's Horses
  
• Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks
• Gang of Four's Entertainment
  
• Kristin Hersh's Murder, Misery and then Goodnight
• X's Los Angeles
• U2's October and War
• Graham Parker's Squeezing out Sparks
• Nirvana's Nevermind and MTV Unplugged in New York
• Pearl Jam's Ten
  
• Green Day's American Idiot
• Steve Forbert's Alive on Arrival
• Throwing Muses' Red Heaven
• The Stooges' Raw Power
• Violent Femmes' Hallowed Ground
• Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate and Songs of Leonard Cohen
  

But my number #1 has always been Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town.

It might seem a strange choice for me.

"Geez," you could say, "you seem to be a pretty cynical guy with a decidedly dark sense of humor. There nothing funny going on here. It's deadly, even stridently, serious. And no cynicism to be found. You don't seem to have any religious faith, something that seems to permeate each of these songs. What gives? Dylan, Costello, Stones, Green Day, and most of the others, they make sense. But Springsteen? Darkness?"

True, there's not a shred of humor on this record. It might be one of the most bleak albums ever made, unceasingly so. Yet it is filled with optimism and faith. There is plenty of religious imagery. It's core to the people whose stories are being told. In the end, though, that's just imagery and metaphor. This faith - these songs - are all about a fundamental belief in yourself. Faith in you. Faith held even in the most horrifying situations, and through the most numbingly mundane.

And there is not an ounce of sentiment on this album. Nothing to escape the dark heart of humanity. The words are basic, overly redundant, devoid of the purple prose Bruce was known for up to that point and fell back to again afterward. Some of the songs are almost unlistenable taken by themselves - they build on Lennon's Plastic Ono Band Primal Scream foundation, ratcheting it up several notches with blood curdling contortions - yet they fit into this world perfectly. Conversely, many of the tunes are my favorites even outside the context of the whole: Racing in the Street, Badlands, Adam Raised a Cane, Candy. All would be in my personal top forty.

Darkness is not a 'concept' album. Yet it is. A series of small moments, events that occur in small towns and cities across America. Rich and poor and middle class, they're all affected by the dissolution of hope and dreams and faith in yourself and in others. The bonds and chains of family.

It was released in the hey day of the first punk explosion and shares a lot with the best of that lot (especially the Clash, though they focused on the political element of faith perhaps more than they did the personal).

I look at Darkness as the first of a quartet of albums Springsteen recorded in this same vein, the others being Nebraska, Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils & Dust. These albums share a similar core, a common conceit, but it is not a musical one; rather, it is thematic, and it is attitude. Sure, it might be fair to say Bruce covers this same turf on everything he's recorded. There's at least some truth to that. But the hard, unflinching, bleak, bare, milk-all-the-sentimentality-out-of-it attitude exists for me only on these Springsteen records, and not many others, of any artist. It lives for me on Darkness most of all. (Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate and the Velvet Underground and Nico live in this world for me as well. There were seeds of it on Born to Run in Thunder Road and Backstreets but I love that album for wholly different reasons.)

In the end, all of what I've written here is just a big load of pretentious bullshit.

None of this explains why I've been coming back to this record time and time again since 1978. Why I invariably play the thing from beginning to end each time. Why it's never just background music when I do. The whole thing can be explained by two verses on the record. They come from different characters and different songs at wildly different tempos and moods. One from the point of view of the protagonist's loved one (in this case, his girlfriend) and the other describing the protagonist himself (first person). They perhaps sum up two different, warring, sides of my being better than anything else I've found in art. The first pokes at my core, borne of my upbringing, and the second is aspirational, what I've been striving to get to ever since:

1. Racing in the Street: She sits on the porch of her daddy's house, but all her pretty dreams are torn. She stares off alone into the night with the eyes of one who hates for just being born.
2. Badlands: For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside, that it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive, I wanna find one face that ain't looking through me, I want to find one place, I want to spit in the face of these badlands.

The protagonist of each song on Darkness is always striving to live life, not satisfied merely to exist. Even in the face of devastation. Even when all of the others around him have given up.

I want to identify with those protagonists but I know I can't, not really. In the same way Jules wants to believe he's the Shepherd at the end of Pulp Fiction but knows he's still the 'Tyranny of Evil Men.' But I'm trying, Ringo, real hard, to be the Shepherd. Maybe if and when I finally make it, this record will fall by the wayside.

Until then, "Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland. Got a head-on collision smashing in my guts, man. I'm caught in a crossfire that I don't understand."

Autumn Saturday

I lay in a pool of insomnia,

my thoughts swimming lost to the tides of my mind.

---

The quiet continuum of this bedroom

turns the bile 'round my belly and phantom pliers 'round my spine.

---

Just before dawn, shivering to dreamscapes,

bleeding out sheets of flop sweat in the nightmare I've become.

---

I awaken to the words of a prophet,

television from the maelstrom of the corpse Billy Mays.

---

I stumble cold to the window and its noises,

as the church corner lot fills with swap meet malaise.

---

Philly's first flush of fall and I grimace

to autumn's death luminescence caught subsuming summer green.

---

And after all that, to paraphrase a wiser man,

"there ain't no cure for the summertime blues."

South Philly Delirium '89

The sunshine burns sallow over Passyunk delirium,

pouring from the taps of Pollacks and Philadium.

Our liquid lunch libations at the shipyard club of chieftains

fueled afternoons spent swimming through the neighborhood asylums.

Untwisting the logic of pretzel frayed nostalgia,

with shots fired down throats chased by the lukewarm piss of lager.

Frozen into black and white smoked spider web cloaked still-frames

melting to barstool xenophobes nearly jaundiced to cirrhosis.

These were pub crawls for the ages, beyond deja vu ad nauseum;

from the Melrose to the apocalypse to Centerfolds to nausea.

Looking back I feel a tinge of longing with the sickness.

Mostly ill.

Absolute regret.

But there is that tickle -

and it itches.

From time to time.

Remembrances (outside the Peculiar Pub, NYC '01)

-----

The concrete seas melt to sunflower sour

as junkies fix on the tides.

Sweetened smells off sulfur ghosts

light small talk piss on ash and steel

with a sickness black to white to brown to gasoline combustion.

-----

She can seldom know why it's never ending

as refusal licks clean the remains.

Darkened stains of abandoned thoughts

spread soft and steady down Bleecker

until it flowers green to gray to grime to through and through corrosion.

-----

The Land of Endless Benderville

She didn't move much, having no patience for locomotion. He had no appetite for 'bon voyage' himself anymore, even if it simply meant stumbling to his precious toilet to "pray" (mixing bowls were now the exclusive receptacle for his reverence). A couple truly in harmony as they drifted into the third decade of marriage. Mom and Dad.

To be fair, each of these two frozen peas in their bath robed pods were crippled with disabilities by that point in their lives, he with the effects of prolonged alcoholism and she the aftermath of a stroke (followed by some sustained hard drinking of her own). As such, getting around was tricky for them, especially as the day wore on and their wheels got greasier. What's one to do when travel turns the stomach? Why take up camp in our living room, of course! Poised catty corner from one another on their respective sofa/caskets, they floated amidst a rich nicotine cloud while swilling their livers into banana cream pie.

Each day, the stench of death wrapped its gums further around those front room walls as I passed through, a kid just crawling into his teens made to play the proactive undertaker, prepping these cadavers perhaps a bit early. As it turns out, 35 years and counting too soon for her; only a handful of months for him. (His banana cream pie exploded relatively quickly thanks to the extreme temperatures of the distilled fuel cooking it; hers continues slower roasting on hops, barley and grape of the vine.) Of course, the difference between the two is just semantics to me: she's been dead nearly as long as he has, the body just hasn't played its part quickly enough for my liking. That reads harsher than it's meant to: I wish the woman no harm but simply yearn for the sort of closure I can only imagine her passing might bring. She's lived in Ireland pretty much since the early 80s and I've had no contact with her since that time. My sister keeps in touch and regularly sends her money even as Mom continues to needle her in ways she thinks are so sly yet are jackhammer brutal, about as subtle as a chainsaw to the chest. I can picture her smirk across 25 years apart as if I'd just seen it five minutes ago. Mother dearest is a hard person to like but challenging to forget.

I must admit I have a burning anger and resentment toward my mother that knows no bounds; that much is patently obvious to you, I'm sure. It goes well beyond the rational and as an adult I should be able to put it behind me. I know rationally that she did the best she thought she could and wasn't equipped emotionally or physically to do more. I'm aware factually that she had one helluva drunk for a husband and life certainly slipped her a mickey in the form of a debilitating stroke smack dab in the prime of her life. But the emotions I feel are nonetheless very real and rawly primal. I am trying to exorcise these demons in therapy - and on the pages of this blog - but they remain fresh as ever some 30 years after they first consciously surfaced (and some 48 years after they began to germinate in the recesses of my psyche).

Anyway, let's get back to the main stage: our living room circa 1975. I've illustrated the details of its ambience elsewhere on these pages so we'll focus instead on the corpses themselves; in particular, let's perform a sort of sociological autopsy, making our 'Y' incision back into time, circumstance, and personality. Of course, with my faulty memory full of mostly holes and well defended barriers, we won't be traveling all that far. Nor will I be reeling off facts like so many baseball box scores. The best I can hope for is "truthiness."

I've written elsewhere that my parents wanted more than anything for us to at least appear to be a successful family. You know the image for the time: Don and Betty Draper, before their divorce. Dad certainly drank like Don (and then some). Mom often dolled herself up Betty-style, if only in case she was seen by the neighbors. Of course, this was in the fifties and sixties when they were still mobile and made the occasional social call, back when they still had visitors over to the house who weren't necessarily also raging alcoholics stopping by for a taste of free booze.

My folks liked to fancy our brood a modern spin on Father Knows Best but internally we were more a precursor to Rodney Dangerfield's family in Natural Born Killers. And by the time the 70s boogied on in things were unraveling despite our best efforts at juggling shiny "we're normal" props to keep outsiders distracted from the spreading chaos. Mom was still socially active in the neighborhood at the dawn of 1972, going so far as to act the role of Den Mother for my Cub Scouts troop. But it was a taut-to-tearing tension-filled facade around a rotting core.

Then June of that year rolled around when the facade came crashing down and the rot permeated through to the surface, smothering us all.

June of 1972 rushed steaming into the Seattle area, unusual for early summer in the Pacific northwest. The first day of the month found my mother spending a number of hours out in the swelter, planting flowers or pruning shrubs; I clearly remember that she was pretty tuckered out that evening. Sometime in the pre-dawn hours of the next morning an errant clot which had formed broke free from its bonds and drifted up the blood stream until it lodged into a main artery neck-high, blocking off a good bit of oxygen to her brain as she slept. No one is sure exactly when this process began or how long her grey matter had been deprived of life's necessities but the condition wasn't noticed until my Dad awoke to her flailing about and turning blue. I remember the ambulance arriving and the subsequent panic I felt as they raced her away. It would be several weeks before she was back home again, after a lengthy stay at Northwest Hospital for physical therapy. She'd go back for several additional extended stays over the next couple of years.

The stroke took its toll on my mother physically (she was partially paralyzed down her right side and had to learn to speak and walk again). Had she stuck with physical therapy she'd probably have made a near complete recovery over time but she preferred to wallow in her misery. Certainly understandable initially, but she never made the swim back up to the surface again. The negative tendencies of her personality that had tinged the edges of her being - selfishness, vindictiveness, paranoia - were magnified by the stroke, making their way front and center. Her positive qualities - humor, streaks of generosity - seemingly disappeared, never to be seen again (well, her humor re-surfaced, curdled into viciously hateful jabs at whomever happened to wander into her sights). She always drank socially but that changed once she came back from the hospital: she took a nose dive into a gallon jug of table vino and has remained forever offshore in this noxious red sea. Well, that's likely not true; probably she's switched swimming pools out of necessity living in the land of the shamrock shakes, plunging instead into the black sea that is Guinness. She doesn't consider this drinking because beer and wine don't count (the mathematics of denial at work; I myself earned a Ph.D in the field). Mom eventually got somewhat better physically, though she seemingly fought any recovery tooth and nail and has herself refused to acknowledge progress. She can walk with a cane, but prefers - in fact, relishes - using a wheel chair. I liken her in this regard to a less funny variation on SCTV's Guy Caballero, who openly used a wheelchair "for respect!"

On the paternal side of the house, my mother's stroke could have sent Dad down one of two paths: 1.) toward the enlightened siren of sobriety so that he could deal with all the additional responsibilities something like this brings to bear on a family or 2.) down the tubes into the Land of Endless Benderville. Wanna guess which direction ol' Dad chose? Well, in the beginning he tried reaching for the summit of sobriety's semblance before very quickly slipping off the crevice into his own personal bottled abyss for good, putting the onus of family obligations on my sister's shoulders while I ran and hid in my head (a very dark cavern indeed but my mind's eye has since grown used to the perpetual twilight within).

My sister was 17 when Mom had her stroke and I was a few months shy of 10. Sis had just finished her junior year of high school and yet was thrust into very adult responsibilities, not that this type of thing was new to her: as soon as she got her driver's license on her sweet sixteenth, Mom started sending her off to go drag Dad out of the bar and drive his ass back home. She was just a kid but was nonetheless the only one in the family with a steady job (working the register after school at a local pharmacy). My sister did her best to live in two worlds, one where she could be a typical early 70's teenager spending as much time out of the house as she could and the other where she acted as a sort of caregiver to parents still in their forties and a nearly psychotic baby brother.

Some parental background:

Dad was born in 1924 to an English mother and Irish father. Like me, he was raised with an older sister. We visited my aunt quite a bit growing up and I both liked and feared her (she had a caustic personality that held nothing back). Dad's father died just six months after his birth, so he ended up being raised by his Mom and step father. Pop apparently had quite the contentious relationship with his "new dad" (so it seems did most everyone else from all I've heard about the SOB). I have vague memories of visiting with my paternal grandmother and her husband once or twice as a kid (we weren't allowed to call him grandfather, which gives you a clue to his makeup). This grandmother (we referred to her as "Seattle Grandma") died when I was fairly young, though I don't recall exactly when. Dad married very young and had twin daughters, a son and a third girl with his first wife. His heavy boozing was already well underway even as a teenager and it left deep scars through this family just as it would the sequel I was to be part of. Marriage take 1 ended in large part because of an affair my father had begun with the woman who would become my mother. Mom and Dad married in June of 1952 and my sister was born 3 years later, followed 7 years hence by yours truly. I wasn't to learn of my half brother and sisters from his first marriage until I was older because of the circumstances surrounding ... well everything.

Mom was born in 1929 to a Norwegian couple who had recently immigrated from off the fjords outside Bergen (in fact, I believe my mother was conceived in the 'old country' though she was born here). Mom had a brother nine years her senior and by all accounts as the baby of the family, she was spoiled by the folks and big bro. I got the feeling my mother was quite embarrassed by her foreign-born parents: she always had a burning need to fit in and they were "different." My maternal grandfather died before I was born and my uncle passed away from a heart attack when I was not yet 3, so I have no first hand memories of them, but word is that both were fun loving guys. I did have a chance to get to know my grandmother as a child and visited her often. She was a very old fashioned woman but very warm. She most definitely disapproved of my father and of my parents' lifestyle in general (drinking, smoking, etc.). She had definite ideas on the concepts of heaven and hell and made it clear to me as to the direction Mom and Dad were headed. This was sort of disconcerting to a seven year old kid and I really didn't know how to take it (I had started formulating my own opinions on matters of religion which didn't jive with grandma's but I wisely kept them to myself around her). She terrified my father on several levels, I think. I'm told that Dad was on a several days in the making bender at a local dive hotel when my mom went into labor with me, so Grandma marched down to this fine establishment and dragged him out and up to the hospital by his ear like a naughty schoolboy. Or at least something to that effect. Grandma died of bone cancer in 1971.

Mom converted to Catholicism not long after the stroke. Actually, this process might have started before then, probably around the time my grandmother died (she would have had a fit over such a thing, a staunch Norwegian Lutheran turned born-again Jehovah's Witness; Catholics were barely above Satan Worshippers in her "enlightened" worldview). My mother was obsessed with all things Irish and the stroke accentuated these compulsions. In the end, once Dad died, she went the rest of the route in this transformation: changing her last name to Finnegan and moving to the far western edges of the Emerald Isle, attempting to live out the stories in her favorite novels. More power to her. Her dream was to become a writer herself, and she did pound out a good chunk of a novel back in the 70s that I imagine is still "in progress." It was a pretty funny read from the pages I had a chance to see, though sadly that was not the intent. Mom had been a "homemaker" most of her life, with some minor bookkeeping work here and there - in fact, she'd never even learned to drive - so how did she/does she make ends meet? Between my father's social security, whatever she's managed to wring from the Irish government, the charity of the families she's "rented" rooms from over the years, and my sister's contribution to the cause, she makes do. The fact that she's still alive at 81 years of age given close to 40 years of chronic alcoholism and chain smoking is a minor medical miracle and demonstrates the sheer power of denial over physics and biology. I learned at the knee of the master.

I realize I've been going on and on here without much of a point. Which means the post fits in with the rest of my "stories." And so, dear reader, with that I bid you adieu.