Losers

I'm one. You're one, too. Everyone at one time or another has been a loser. Over the past several years, though, there has been a movement, I guess I'll call it, of parents insistent on shielding their children from losing. This is a horrible error on their parts.Two things should be noted here: I am not a parent and this phenomenon has been covered in the media quite a bit so maybe my take won't be groundbreaking, I just have to get it off my chest.

When you shield a person from the painful things in life (death, coming in second, racism, etc.) you do your child a great disservice. They do not grow up to be well-adjusted. I was not one of these people growing up, and maybe I'm not well-adjusted either, but I learned that losing was "a part of life" as my parents said, and while it's no fun to lose when you are seven years old, it happens and I am better for it, now. I have met these people, however, the people who have never lost and they walk around with a sense of entitlement, like they are better than others. As adults, though, instead of whining, they file lawsuits against anything and everything when something doesn't go their way. They have never participated in an activity without being rewarded for it. If they lose now, somebody else is at fault and the person who was wronged is entitled to a cash payout as compensation. These are the types of people that get my blood boiling.

In my freshman year of college, I took a Sociology class in which we watched Menace II Society. After we viewed it there was a discussion about the social ramifications, reasons driving the characters actions, etc. There was a girl in my class who I had some contact with outside of the class at parties, etc. She was from a very small town in southern Minnesota and thought she knew everything, including being absolutely sure that the "big city" (which I had told the class I was from, immediately causing her to view me with suspicion) was a Godless cesspool of evil, even though she had never been there and claimed she never would go. Which made her reaction to the movie even more confusing. The discussion went around the room and after a few minutes, she piped up, "Why are we talking about this like it's real? This is totally made up, this does not happen." All eyes turned to me and another girl in my class who grew up in South Minneapolis (in the smaller classes my freshman year, we would go around the room and introduce ourselves briefly--people always took note of the kids from "the cities", everyone always knew who we were that first year.) Now, neither St. Paul or South Minneapolis are South Central Los Angeles, but it was close enough for the discussion, I suppose. "Of course this happens," I replied "I went to high school with people in gangs and not all of them graduated for a variety of reasons, reasons that are portrayed here." She refused to believe me--she had never been told she was wrong before, never been challenged, had always won and besides being a know-it-all, she was a bully. The girl from South Minneapolis echoed my statement and the small town girl announced she wouldn't listen to nonsense, that we were lying to her and left the class. She never returned to that class and I heard later she filed a formal complaint with the Sociology department that went nowhere, of course. I'm sure there were more formal complaints after that, I don't know. This is what you get when you don't let your child lose however: your child assumes he is always right, and when they are wrong it is somebody else's fault. "I can't lose," they think, "I have always been right."

I also hear about the parents who complain when their child comes in eighth in a competition and is not awarded a medal or ribbon or whatever. Does it occur to anyone there are many other children who may not have even been accepted into the competition? Should those kids be awarded medals, too? Should I get to play third base for the Twins and be awarded a gold glove just because I like baseball? Sure, I might not be the best but I really like baseball, that's fair, right?

When I finally realized that I was not going to be a standout baseball player, I focused on what I was good at and it made me a better person. Sure, maybe I haven't won awards for any of the things I am good at, but I enjoy them and they are rewarding nonetheless. I don't need a medal to prove I'm a competitor or that I excel at any particular activity. Sometimes I compete and I don't win, but I don't complain about it, I try harder next time. That's the way it should be. If everyone's a winner all the time mediocrity prevails, because then nobody has to try to improve, they are guaranteed recognition no matter what their performance and thus don't have to apply themselves at all. I don't think parents see what a disservice it is to their children to demand recognition for participation in anything and everything. Besides it breeding mediocrity, it makes it more difficult to identify what the kids are truly good at, because they have a roomful of medals and awards just because they signed up to compete, not necessarily because they excel at any one thing. More importantly, they don't learn how to lose and that is a skill everyone needs to have. Learning that you can't win all the time makes you more well-adjusted, less spoiled and much more fun to be around (ever been around an adult that hates to lose? Amusing aren't they?)

Sure, it's painful to get passed up, come in third or fall down during competition, but if more parents insisted that their children pick themselves up and try again, rather than cry foul or demand recognition even in defeat, ultimately it would make them and their children better people.

Koren Zailckas Is Kind Of A Liar. She's Really Pretentious, Too.

I'm reading Smashed by Koren Zailckas for the second time. I had a weird reaction to it the first time and I couldn't figure out why. I thought, at the time, it was because a lot of memoirists works, like James Frey's and Augusten Burroughs's had been called into question with regard to their honesty, and that maybe I had just been reading too many of them, but that wasn't the problem at all.

The story is about her being a "problem drinker" in high school and college. Certainly, she illustrates this well, but she stops short of calling herself an alcoholic and, in fact denies that she actually became one at several points along the way. It's clear to me (and everyone else I know who read the book) that she in fact is a recovering alcoholic, no question. She would binge drink each and every time she consumed alcohol. She ended up in several perilous situations and once ended up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. She sort of romanticizes these things as indescretions of youth and mistakes that everyone makes along the way. I disagree. I drank to get drunk each and every time I drank during the same time frame in my life, as well. I never ended up in the hospital and was never in the types of peril that she put herself in even once. She was colossally irresponsible when drunk but doesn't see it, I guess. She seems to view it as what's it's like to be a woman in the modern age, seems to feel like she needed to "compete with the boys" when she was on the town and that is utter bullshit.

That isn't the real problem here, however. It's apparent that she believes that she was above all of this, even while she was doing it. The book has this pretentious holier-than-thou tone that is stomach-churning. She was "stuck" at Syracuse while her friends went off to the Ivy League and her sorority sisters were bitchy and shallow but they drank and she needed friends to drink with. She takes herself out of the narrative, as if she's a spectator in her own life who has no control over what happens and it's so utterly ridiculous I can hardly describe it. She accepts no responsibility for any of it. "I drank too much, therefore I stopped, but I certainly wasn't an alcoholic. Those people don't grow up in the Boston suburbs." is how she comes across on each and every page.

So, to Koren Zailckas: Get over yourself. You were an alcoholic, which means you still are one, you just don't drink anymore and for that I commend you. But, you have done a great disservice to your readers in denying any culpability for your actions. People read memoirs to learn something and maybe to encourage themselves to get help for any problem they may be having, but all we learned from you is that you thought you were better than everyone you ever hung out with in high school and college. You view your book and the fact that you now live in New York City--which you bring up several times for no apparent reason--as proof of that. In not taking responsibility, you by proxy think you are better than your readers as well, so none of it rings true. It reads only as a snotty 24-year-old who thinks she's unbelievably cool because she managed to get a book published. Shame on you.

With Teeth

Damn.

Two nights ago I had a dream that my teeth were falling out, which isn't too weird in itself, because I have dreams that my teeth fall out all the time. Everyone always offers up Psych 101 answers as to what it means, but for me it really is just a dream about my teeth falling out. I have a terrible fear that they will fall out even while I'm awake. What I can't get over, though, is how terribly gory and disgusting this one was.

Usually when my teeth fall out in dreams, there is no blood, I always, always look into a mirror right after they do to look at my mouth while this feeling that is a mix of dread and wonderment comes over me. Most often it's just my two front teeth that fall out while I'm eating something (usually a burrito for some reason.), but the other night it was really detailed and bloody. I'm freaked out about a lot of the things my subconscious makes me view during my slumber but this might take the cake (aside from the time when I was ten and dreamed my body was a big ice cube that then melted so I was just a head.)

This time it was totally different, though. I was driving to my parents' house and sneezed while I was driving. One of my teeth came out and I panicked but kept it together until I got into the house. I immediately ran inside and had blood running down my lip and my mom thought I had been in a fight (this must stem from the fact that I came home bloodied from fistfights fairly often in high school.) and I ran up to the bathroom to look in the mirror, of course. I lifted my head back to see what the problem was and I had this contraption that was a mix of string, wire and what looked like miniature pieces of the bio-armor the aliens wore in Independence Day (this is highly nerdy, I know.) wedged into mouth. There were visible holes in my gums and my teeth were being held into my mouth by this structure, but not well. When I shifted my head forward several of them would fall out but were tied to the string so they would hang there. And the taste in my mouth was like rotten Jagermeister. It was horrible. "Why did you let your teeth get this bad?" my dad inqured. "I didn't know they were, they seemed fine this morning." I replied.

Then I woke up. I was bathed in sweat and immediately reached for mouth. My teeth, as always, were fine. Dreams always fascinate me, but I marvel at the ability of someone's subconscious to turn on it's owner like a rabid animal. What did I ever do to it?

The Bum List

Ten years ago, I was a very different person. You were too, of course, even if you don't know it or won't admit it. However, I would wager that I was a vastly different person than I am today, not just the kind of different that comes without having gained any knowledge just by simply aging and picking up on how life works.

In 1998 I was a fourth-year junior (yeah, that's right) going nowhere fast. I was ostensibly a graphic design student at a state college but really, I was just a raging alcoholic who was afraid of himself, afraid of any ability he may have possessed, secretly disliked (and was disliked by) most of his friends, who didn't attend class much and drank to extreme excess at least four nights a week. I was extremely overweight and unhappy about it, and really was unhappy about everything most of the time. Instead of being outwardly sad all the time, though, I was outwardly mean. Really mean. Also fairly racist, pretty homophobic, and just generally unpleasant to be around. Eventually, I found a close friend in BT, who brought out the worst in me to that end and I in him. We were horrible to everyone and everything. I once made a girl who had turned me down for a second date cry in front of an entire basement full of people solely for his entertainment. Yeah, that's what kind of a guy I was. No remorse, a sharp, bitter tongue always primed for use. People, especially girls, avoided us and I always figured it was because the girls knew we were "badass city kids" but the truth is painfully obvious.

BT and I had our own language much of which revolved around quotes from "The Simpsons" and various movies. Everyone would know what the line was from, but only we knew what it really meant--we always assigned a double meaning to each quote. In addition to that, if something sucked we would often say "You can slap a rainbow sticker on this.", be it a movie, party, long drive, anything. We also assigned "alternative" derogatory names to many minority cultures, but they weren't "offensive" so much as "funny" to us, since they were our terms (and if you're hoping I'll list any of them here, you're out of luck). Yeah, we were a great guys, you would have loved us.

For years we and a large group of our friends would attend "Edgefest" which then morphed into "X-Fest" which was put on by a local radio station (the radio station changed formats at one point leading to a name change.) during Memorial Day weekend every year. Two days of concerts, thousands of people camping, thousands of people that we deemed "white trash" drinking and camping around us. We managed to nearly ruin an entire day for everyone there, too. A beautiful day that found almost everyone else we were with heading down to a nearby river to get some sun and wash off the previous night's detritus and that morning's hangover. BT and I quickly pooh-poohed that idea, grabbed lawn chairs, planted ourselves under a tree and played "Count The Mullet" for about five hours, drinking beer after beer after beer. I don't remember the final count, mostly because I'm mortified that I wasted most of a perfectly good day doing this. We then spent the afternoon constantly referring to a friend's older brother, who drank two entire bottles of cheap tequila straight from the bottle during the course of the day, as Mankind, and could not figure out why he was pissed off at us, because it was hilarious. Now granted, he looked like him, but, to be honest, he showed great restraint after two bottles of cheap tequila in not beating us both senseless. We were just pointlessly mean, to anybody and anything we could be mean to and the most amazing thing about it was that we didn't see it, we thought we were the two funniest people alive.

However, chief among the things that we did on a near-constant basis that were just all around negative was managing The Bum List. This was an ongoing, ever-shifting list of people, famous or not so, that we decided were bums (we--thankfully--never wrote this list down, even ten years later it would have been just too much to bear to know I had done it) and it was was added to almost daily. This wasn't the meanest thing we did but it gives the best idea of who we were, I think. It all started one night when were were watching 48 Hrs. and realized that Nick Nolte, in nearly every film he is in, gets fed up and utters something along the lines of "Awww, God dammit!" We decided he was a huge bum right on the spot. The list never stopped, we added so many people to it I can't even remember half of them, I'd bet. More importantly, I would never try. It was such a waste of time and such a mammoth exercise in negativity there are hardly words. You couldn't go anywhere with us and not hear "Dude, that guy is a such a bum!" at least once while you were with us. After a while, to add people to the list all one of us would have to utter was "Aww, God dammit!" and The Bum List had grown. Eventually, like all relationships forged in negativity like this, we turned on each other and we very quickly grew apart. Realtionships like this often have a limited shelf life, they sour, get old. I was not as sorry as I thought I would be to see him go.

I got married a couple of weeks ago and my one remaining college friend, The Scribe, came in for the event. Nine months ago I watched him tie the knot in L.A. We have spoken not less than once a month since we reconnected via MySpace about three years ago (when people say social networking sites are useless, I use this an example of why they are not). He is one of my favorite people ever. We didn't hang around in college as much as we should have and I could never figure out why, but he told me while he was here that it was because of BT, he couldn't stand him. The negativity, the way I changed around him, how we just picked on people for virtually nothing. He knew I was better than that, but didn't know how to help the situation, either. He finally let it go and went West. Nothing makes him happier (happier for me, at least) than the fact that BT isn't around anymore and that I am a good guy (these are his words, more or less).

I knew I had become a better person, but in the process I had to shed not only BT but most of my other college friends, too--none of them were the cat's pajamas, really. Nobody was around to corroborate my story, though, as it were, but now I have proof. I am not a racist, homophobic, generally unpleasant asshole any longer and it feels good. It feels good to be a nice guy and feels good to have people tell me so often that I am a genuinely fun person to be around. I never used to hear that before and it never gets old. Ten years ago nobody ever said those things to or about me. But, then again, ten years ago I should have been on The Bum List, too.

Huey Lewis Has Ruined My Life

Something strange is afoot in Minneapolis. I thought this was a countrywide phenomenon, but as it turns out it's just here and I can't figure it out. If you are often referred to as a "hipster" by your family, friends, neighbors, strangers on the street, etc. (and I don't want to argue about hipster/non-hipster crap today and yes, I'm including myself in the "accused hipster" camp.) you are then required as a Minneapolitan or St. Paulite to then ignore sports entirely if you want any sort of credibility, possibly by throwing out the sports section while digging up the New York Times crossword puzzle in the back of the paper, just so you are not tempted to see what is happening with the Twins or if the Vikings are making any off-season deals. This is ludicrous, inane, elitist and just really dumb.

Now, I am not necessarily a true Sports Guy. I don't know who has the highest batting average on the Twins right now or who has the most home runs. I know who is going to the All-Star Game (Mauer, Morneau and Nathan) and I can give semi-informed opinions on two of our four "major" sports teams (I don't like hockey much and I despise the NBA as an entity), I am admittedly more of a Music Guy, I can rattle off all kinds of useless information about many, many different bands and I will argue this is akin to knowing what Wade Boggs batted in 1986 (an astonishing .357 for those who really need to know). These "guys" aren't mutually exclusive, however. You can be both. You can like your local baseball or football team and still like Clinic and Tokyo Police Club. I know, because I do. In Minneapolis, though, being a Music Guy and liking sports, however mildly, is akin to admitting that you own a vast array child porn or are eagerly awaiting a Huey Lewis And The News reunion. Suddenly, you're suspect at best.

Speaking of Huey, I think Mr. "I Want A New Drug" is sort of responsible for this. First of all, these guys were painfully dorky. Not geeky or nerdy, just dorky, the way your Uncle Sal is, with his lame jokes about 12-inch pianists and his polyester plaid pants, where everyone just sort of groans and goes "Well, that's Uncle Sal!". Sure, they had several hits but Lewis singing about wanting drugs was about as convincing as if, say, Frank Sinatra had released a rap album and wanted us to take him seriously. Secondly, Lewis & Co. admitted to loving sports on a near constant basis (indeed, two of their albums are named Sports and Fore!), and were a little defensive about it if I remember correctly. Even though the wore the facts that they golfed a lot and were, I think, 49ers fans like a badge of honor, they were aware it made them a little unhip. People that were hip in the 80s (i.e. people with bleach blond hair who dressed like extras from Tron) immediately hated them and it wasn't just the bad music (while I love Back To The Future more than an adult man should, they singlehandedly ruin the soundtrack for me). They just sucked. If you admitted you liked them, you were admitting you sucked, too. Hipsters however, hated them just upon looking at an album cover with a golf reference for a title--Lewis didn't have a chance. I don't think it was this way B.H. (Before Huey).

When I was in high school I worked for a now-defunct company called Suncoast Pictures (they were owned by Sam Goody) at the Mall of America. We sold movies (this was the mid-90s so it was just VHS tapes but then during my senior year we started carrying laserdiscs, which were the size of an LP and were the coolest fucking things I had ever seen--The Godfather was issued on four discs, had a behind-the-scenes documentary with it and cost something like $150. Surely, nothing would ever be more awesome. The machines that played them cost somewhere in the neighborhood of the asking price for a 5,000 square foot condo on New York's Upper East Side. Awesome.) and it was a rag-tag bunch. One of the people I worked with this guy whose given name was Francis but insisted everyone call him Fritz (I just realized this now: he had to have done this in "honor" of Fritz Lang, but I didn't know Metropolis was required hipster viewing back then.) He was an art student at the University of Minnesota and he was the first hipster I had ever met, even though I didn't know what a hipster was at the time. He was 22, knew more about movies (or "films" as he always called them) than I did, would do awesome things like ask for "yellow soda" at restaurants because, as he informed me, the servers would never say "We have Mello Yello" if you ask for Mountain Dew like they do with Coke and Pepsi and it pissed him off (by the way he would also order "cola" from time to time and this was more confusing to the server than just ordering a Coke and being informed they only had Pepsi.) He also loudly, actively hated sports. If sports came up he would always say "I don't watch sports, dude. They're boring." and stomp off (looking back on this, he was so over-the-top anti-sports it was insane. He was also the kind of guy who thought Krzysztof Kieślowski's Trois Couleurs Trilogy was too commercial--never heard of it? My point exactly.) I never had the occasion to ask Fritz if he liked "The Power Of Love", but it's safe to say he loathed everything Huey Lewis stood for, except for maybe new drugs. If you haven't put this together yet, Fritz was clearly a douchebag. But at the time he was the coolest person I had ever met (this is more telling than I'd like it to be, for the record) and I immediately stopped following sports because it was cool to do so. This lasted until oh, the second day of my freshman year of college when I realized that: a) I would never have anyone to hang out with on Sunday afternoons if I didn't watch the Vikes and b) I could accurately be described as "a douchebag".

People that could be described as hipsters in other cities don't do this. My friend Tipsy St. Swingsteen has some friends in Philly and she once said they are just like her friends here except they are also rabid Phillies, Eagles, Sixers and Flyers fans. My friend The Displaced Yankee currently lives in Durham, NC and works and an ad agency chock full of hipsters and pseudo-hipsters. Sometimes they go to truck pulls(!) and something called "mud rallies"(!!) on the weekends and follow Duke basketball religiously. In New York if you are hip, you like the Mets (never the hated Bronx Bombers) or go to the minor league Brooklyn Cyclones games. But here if you say you are doing something sports-related it's met with people making faces like someone might have shit on the bottom of their shoe and/or a possible tirade about the insane amount of money paid to athletes. Yes, they are overpaid, so are Radiohead, it doesn't make me like them any less.

There was a time B.H. that people liked sports and music and it wasn't a problem. When I was little, there were older kids in my neighborhood that would talk about the Twins, North Stars, etc. and also talk about The Police, who had that song about the magic lady, and some band called Devo, that I had never heard of. One kid talked about Devo all the time and then when I finally heard "Whip It" when I was about eight, they were the coolest guys on the planet, until I saw them. Devo were geeks, I mean really geeks. Even though I was only eight, when I saw a picture of Devo I asked the older neighbor kid, who was borrowing me his copy of Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, "Are these guys nerds?" I remember this clearly because the other older kids laughed and it was the first time I had made older people laugh at something I had said (without one of them saying, "Oh, how cute!") and not something I had done. But none of it mattered. Devo were geeks, he was a North Stars fan and a Devo fan and being a fan of one didn't draw suspicions as to his allegiance to the other. He didn't need to look like a fan of either by wearing a hockey jersey (of which the North Stars had one of the finest of all-time) or by wearing an upside down flower pot on his head (which would have resulted in a pummeling at the hands of his friends, most likely.) he just looked like a 14-year-old kid looked in 1984-- ringer t-shirt, Levi's and Adidas Top Ten high top sneakers. His clothing betrayed nothing about him, and somehow that was a lot more endearing than walking into a place, looking around and seeing that the guy in the corner is a D-Backs fan because of his Randy Johnson jersey and immediately knowing that the girl dressed in all black with the cat's-eye glasses listens to Bright Eyes while she cries herself to sleep at night (note: I don't know exactly what "place" these two people would be in at the same time, really, unless it was an AA meeting.)

Before Huey came along and started to turn the tide things were simpler. A.H. (After Huey), if you liked sports and music both, everyone assumed that you liked "If This Is It" and yacht rock--not "real" music, the kind of music that also requires a wardrobe so you can easily be identified as a "serious" music fan, which is indescribably pretentious. You couldn't possibly like The Cure and the Twins, could you?. If you watched the North Stars, it was assumed you were also going to see Foreigner when they played the Met Center the following night--even if you had a fever of 103. But I'm here to try to shift the tide back. I like sports and I am a "serious" music fan (admittedly--and embarrassingly--I have what could be described as an "indie rocker" wardrobe--lots of t-shirts, plaid western shirts, slim fit jeans, black Chuck Taylors, etc.) You don't have to pick one, you can pick both and if anybody gives you shit tell them to come talk to me. We'll watch the Trois Couleurs Trilogy, listen to some music and then we'll watch a Vikings game and so help me God, if they say the movies and the music are more entertaining than the game (barring a blowout, so maybe we'll watch a Vikes-Packers game at Lambeau in December--those are always nail-biters) I'll strangle them with my bare hands.

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, Don't Play A Song For Me

I've alluded to this before but I write for a couple of publications based in town here. I write about music and, for the most part, I write about local music. On Saturday night though, I revealed a secret to a friend of mine who happens to be a local musician. I try to keep this secret from everyone (until now, I suppose) but every once in awhile it slips out and honestly, I'm just sick of carrying it around with me, because it shouldn't have any impact on my credibility as a music critic/writer: I don't like Bob Dylan.

Oh, I know, "But, he's Minnesota's most famous musician!", "But, he's a genius!", "Jesus, you are an moron!" I've heard them all, but nothing can convince me. This isn't to say he's untalented, because he is. I have not and will not disparage his fans in any way--I get why people like him, I just don't. But he, like Led Zeppelin, is one of those artists that it seems you are required to like if you work within or around the music industry in any capacity. I don't like Zep much, either, by the way.

I know what you are thinking: that I am a stuck-up, elitist, hipster douchebag who only listens to bands that are not or never were hugely popular because it's "cool" to do so. That is mostly untrue. I have respect for Dylan and Zeppelin both. They influenced tons of bands that I like and listen to all the time. Dylan, in fact, largely influenced the friend that I had this little exchange with on Saturday and I like his music quite a bit, regardless of our friendship.

Why is this? Why if you identify yourself as a music writer are you then required to like certain bands? Dylan and Zeppelin are two. The Who is another (I do like them) and, for some reason, Elvis Costello is one as well (I like him quite a bit, also.) and The Beatles (duh.)

I'm not being ultra-elitist when I say I don't like Dylan. In fact, I do enjoy several of his songs every so often, but as a whole his work doesn't speak to me. I'm drawn to some of the music, however, sometimes I find the lyrics not revolutionary but just kind of insipid and ham-fisted, though I have never appreciated a lot of the '60s counterculture icons (Morrison, Grace Slick, etc.). I was born after "the revolution" happened and by the time I understood what "counterculture" meant, Dylan didn't seem like he could have been a poster boy for it at all. Maybe I just have a problem with baby boomers.

I know there are people that will want to string me up for this, but I can't help what I feel. I'm not trying to stir up trouble or be a jerk, I just don't like Bob Dylan, and I'm pretty sure that doesn't make me a bad person.

Only In Dreams

I have weird dreams. I know, I know, "everyone has weird dreams" is always the response I get but seriously, I have really bizarre dreams, more bizarre than most everyone else I know. I don't have vivid, strange dreams all the time but when I do they are always memorable and detailed, even if those details make little or no sense when I awake--I'm always amazed at what my subconscious brain allows itself to interpret as real and plausible.

Last night I dreamed that I was repeatedly traveling through time. But I wasn't helping to solve anyone's problems like Quantum Leap or Journeyman or even trying to solve my own problems. I was mostly traveling back to 2004 and 2005, visiting a lot of my current friends that I was not friends with then-- essentially doing a background check, I suppose. I attended a show at First Avenue and ran into several of my friends that I go to and document shows with now. They, of course, did not know me (and most of them didn't know each other) but, strangely (or predictably, since it was my dream), I had conversations with all of them. They weren't about anything substantive it was simply "Hi, good show." etc. and then I had to act like I did not know who they were, but seemed to not be doing a very good job of pretending--I would probably be a terrible candidate for actual time travel, I would approach people that didn't know me yet and somehow tear a hole in space-time continuum, ruining everyone's lives. I don't remember who was playing but I do remember hearing "A Punk" from Vampire Weekend being played in between sets and thinking "Wow, someone is way ahead of the curve here." Yeah, even my dreams are sort of pretentious sometimes.

After a little while at the show, I left and somehow ended up at a party at the building where I used to live in Minneapolis' Uptown neighborhood. It was 2005 and the party was attended by people from my high school days, college and now. They all knew each other in that weird dream way where all of your friends from the span of your life just know each other and seem to hang out all the time while you aren't around. I am always surprised when all of these people know each other, but just accept it and continue on with whatever weird-ass situation I am in. At this party everyone seemed to have been waiting for me to show up (the future me, mind you not the 2005--or, in the dream, "current" me), but when I showed up they all just kind of ignored me or didn't see me. I was also dating some girl who was not my now-wife who in 2005 was my then-girlfriend. I was talking with a current friend of mine who was also a friend then--he was the only one talking to me--and I explained I was really from the future and it was ok that I was dating someone here because I was actually "future me" and not "current me", I also rattled off some time travel mumbo jumbo that sounded an awful lot like a mix the time travel premises from The Terminator and Back To The Future but he didn't seem to notice. At one point the party guests all gathered on some rickety wooden bleachers that were set up in the alley to take a group picture, but everyone was actively avoiding eye contact with me and I was avoiding being in the picture because of the space-time continuum, again. I decided I needed to get back to 2008 but had no idea how I had been time traveling in the first place, so I seemed to be stuck there. I had been jumping through time suddenly, randomly, by just opening doors and "ending up" in a different place but now I couldn't get it to work, and finally, anti-climatically like all dreams I simply woke up and wondered, "What the hell did that all mean?"

Keep Your Eyes Ahead

This album is a couple of years old, and Cursive fans sort of denounced it, but it resonated with me for whatever reason and I was listening to it earlier today. I think it has to do with the fact that besides writing for bunch of different places around town here (i.e. my dream job, basically--though for now it qualifies as just a hobby mostly), my day job/career (i.e. what I do to pay the bills) revolves around construction and that is a central theme on Happy Hollow: your work and your life are not the same thing. Just in case you don't know, this is a concept album (sort of) about a fictional Midwestern town called Happy Hollow and some of it's residents, one of whom is the now-adult Dorothy Gale (from The Wizard Of Oz.) We find her with her dreams broken and evaporated. She is working for a living, trapped in an unhappy marriage.

There are other things at play here, a secretly gay clergyman, a young woman having an affair--conceiving a child as a result--while her soldier husband is at war, along with several others and much of it reads as an indictment of small towns and the secrets and closemindedness that often go with living in one. I grew up in the city and still live there, but I know many people from small towns and they have just as many scandalous stories from their towns as I do. They are no better or worse than I am.

There is a work ethic native to the Midwest that gets a lot done but leaves little time for leisure. You work and sweat and work some more, that is all. If you are not sweating, you are not working, you are screwing around. This seems silly to a lot of people but it's the truth. There is little or no time for dreams or ideas or anything like that. Just do what you are told and go home at the end of the day. This is a central theme to this album, too. Your dreams aren't worthless, they give you something to live for. Nobody lives for work, everyone has to have a job, but your job is not (or at least should not be) your life.

Hypocrisy is present everywhere not just the city, people are fallible and, well, human. People cheat even though it's bad and there are gay people in small towns, too. You get the sense that a lot of these issues had bothered Cursive's lead singer, Tim Kasher, for some time. Things like this bother me, too.

I grew up in a blue-collar family. My dad worked his ass off for us when I was little. He came home dirty and frozen in the winter, dirty and sweat-stained in the summer. We led a good life that had been gleaned from his sweat, but sometimes he forgets there is more than one way to make a living and that following your dreams in an attempt to make a living isn't stupid or childish or a waste of time--it's what keeps many people going. As great as I think my dad is, I often think he let his dreams die somewhere along the line and even he doesn't realize it. He is a generally happy guy, but sometimes I think, "Does he ever wonder 'what if?' about a dream, any dream he once had?"

I think ultimately this is what I love about this album, it's about people with broken dreams and shattered lives, inner conflict and the devastation that can be reaped by simply settling for "good enough" but it doesn't celebrate these things, it plays as a warning: "Don't become these people, and it's as easy not to be as it is to become them."

When I get discouraged I listen to Happy Hollow and promise myself, "I will not become them, keep doing what you are doing and you will do just fine. Dream big and don't settle. 'Good enough' is never good enough."

My Bathroom Has Never Been This Dirty -or- Why I Am Not A Serial Killer

I am fascinated by serial killers. Not fascinated in a way that makes me want to emulate them at all, but fascinated most specifically in the nonchalant manner in which they describe the violence and depravity they have engaged in, like it was just part of a normal day--"Well, I woke up in the morning, made breakfast, combed my hair and repeatedly sodomized the corpse stuffed in my closet. Just a usual Tuesday." I can never quite get my head around how a person can operate like that, undetected, for what is often close to a decade or more. This general mentality of serial killers as a whole is what draws me in. That and the fact they look like run-of-the-mill citizens whose neighbors and friends are always nearly in shock when a serial killer gets caught (Ted Bundy had girlfriends and attended law school; Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, worked for his church, was married, etc.) They almost invariably had Dickensian-like upbringings rife with violence and horrible abuse, often at the hands of a family member. You want to feel sorry for them (or at least I do, initially) but many people are raised like this and turn out to be ok, or at least don't grow up and slice prostitutes to ribbons in their spare time, so it's impossible to have any empathy for them at all.

I suppose admitting this says more about me than I would like it to, I contend it doesn't mean anything but the dozen or so books on serial killers I own might say differently, "Some people read Danielle Steele, it's not what I like to read." is a standard argument but that doesn't leave me as much in the clear as I'd like it to, I don't think. Other people aren't fascinated by these people like I am, unless they study them for a living and one person that does has his own TV show. He is a forensic psychologist named Michael Stone and the way he talks about these people and their actions, he seems like a serial killer himself. He's detached and clinical, I suppose he needs to be in order to be good at his job, though.

I happened to be watching it today and child killer Westley Allan Dodd was featured among others. Then they got to Dahmer. You and I have seen plenty about this man, I'm sure. Just in case, here's a quick recap: he operated in Milwaukee during the early 1990s. He kidnapped somewhere in the neighborhood of two dozen people, tried to turn them into zombies by drugging them, drilling holes in their heads and pouring acid into their skulls. Inevitably, they died or he finished them off. He often ate parts of them including their genitals. Disgusted yet? Yeah, it's harsh stuff. Even within this breed of people, Dahmer is pretty outer limits. There are killers who behaved worse, to be sure, but the sheer luridness, for lack of a better word, of his crimes is what makes them so memorable. It made for great copy in newspapers the world over. He just wanted a companion, he said, but that desire, along with being a guilt-ridden, self-loathing homosexual and having a pretty terrible upbringing (sexual abuse by a family friend, picked on mercilessly at school, etc.) all converged and created a monster.

None of the details of his crimes, save for one, stuck out this time, though. I had heard about all of them and am sort of unfazed when they are listed off at this point, having read several books with him featured in a chapter or two and one that was specifically about him that somehow missed this little tidbit. In the context of the rest of the gore he was responsible for, it seems relatively innocuous and sort of logical, really. Toward the end of his little reign of terror he would shower with two or three corpses in his tub. This is possibly the most disgusting thing I have ever heard and, luckily this time, this says more about me than I want it to. I am a fairly clean person. I am also a compassionate person, I think. Among all of the other serial killer-associated behaviors I am not capable of (assaulting women, animal torture, necrophilia, etc.) I just could not shower with a corpse and I'm glad that this says something about me. Sure, I read about and watch shows about serial killers more than your average person does. Acting out or emulating any of their crimes is out of the question, though, and chief among these things is showering with dead people. Among all of the disgusting acts that serial killers engage in, this one is almost too much too handle. The rest of it I can separate myself from a little when I read or hear about it and am able to digest the details without getting sick, but the thought of cleaning myself while two or three pairs of dead eyes look on is just too horrifying to dwell on. You have nothing to worry about, I promise not to kill you.

What I Learned On Halloween

I'll stop doing this so often, but this photo, along with the one from ninth grade that's two or three entries previous to this one, amuses me. It anchors me to a specific time more than most other photos from my past do and while it's sort of amusing to show people, for me it is also sort of painful for me to look at. This is obviously Halloween and though I wore this costume again two years later, there aren't any pictures of it and it was with a completely different group of people. So, despite this picture not having a date on it, I know this is the Saturday of Halloween weekend, 1998--exactly October 31. This photo was taken in St. Cloud, MN, at our friend Stephanie's place. We arrived Friday night and there were no Halloween activities that we participated in that evening. We simply went to this bar called The Red Carpet, made fun of all the people dressed up a day early (something I do all the time, if need be, now so as not to be hungover for work) and drank ourselves into oblivion. We always drank ourselves into oblivion on road trips. We did the same in our homebase of Mankato, but pulled out all the stops away from there, it was really quite something to witness, to be honest.

The reason I am posting this is because of a story that goes along with it. About a half hour after it was taken we were sitting in the St. Cloud franchise of The Green Mill. That particular Green Mill is attached to the St. Cloud VFW and there happened to be a large number of retired Korean War veterans wandering back and forth from the VFW into the restaurant as there was some sort of banquet going on. They were, obviously, giving me funny looks as they walked by, but they did understand it was Halloween and everyone else was dressed up for the most part, too. My friend whom we referred to as Roof, as in Roofless (ruthless), the guy with the shaved head behind me to the right in the picture, had a Holstein cow suit on, so I certainly wasn't the only one looking completely asinine. Most of the vets just sort of snickered or their eyes got real wide as they passed us and said "Happy Halloween, guys".

We had been there for a couple of hours and I kept looking at the men passing me in their dress uniforms. Many were highly decorated and more than a few had Purple Hearts. They fought for our country once and now they were older, many were frail beyond belief, some limped, one guy only had seven fingers. I had had several beers and I decided I need to thank at least one of these men. Every single one of the other people sitting with me protested. "You are in a fucking pink dress, Muji. Don't, it's disrespectful." they kept saying. ("Muji" was me, I had acquired that name my freshman year in college but the story is too long to go into here.) "That's the point," I argued "they fought for this country so I could do this." (I mentioned the beers, right?) After several minutes of this, I stood up and tapped one of the vets who happened to be talking to a buddy. He turned and took maybe a half-step back and said "Yes, sir?" I made no qualification about my dress or my obvious drunkenness and blurted, "Thanks for defending our country, I appreciate it very much." He stared at me for what seemed like a long time, but was probably less than ten seconds. "You in college, son?" he finally asked. "Yes." I replied. "Good, good for you," he continued, sort of laughing, "You know, I didn't get to go, grew up on a farm, my parents were real poor. I chose the service because it was a way out, not because I wanted to necessarily, but that was the option. This is one of the strangest conversations I've ever had, but you're very welcome." and with that he walked away (his buddy had checked out as soon as he saw me.) Back when he was young, everyone was required to serve at least two years in the military, remember, so I assumed he used the words "I chose the service" because he was a career man and proud of it, he had done something with his life.

I don't know why that conversation has stuck with me all these years, but it has. It was the first and last time I have thanked a veteran for defending the country. I can't even see the man's face in my head anymore but I can still hear his voice. If you read between the lines of what he was saying he was calling me spoiled brat, too, a fool for wearing a pink dress in public, Halloween or no Halloween.

Every time I look at this picture that exchange is the first thing I think about. I hardly remember any other specific details about the night at all, and it's not because I drank too much. What I do remember is telling, however. We went to a house party after we left the bar, guys kept "hilariously" grabbing my ass all night and at one point Roof threw up the kitchen sink. When we came home to Stephanie's apartment, my friend Travis and I decided to make a frozen pizza, that was Stephanie's roommate's and not ours, and promptly passed out. When we woke up the next morning, one of the burners on the range was on full heat and the pizza was in the oven (which we hadn't ever managed to turn on, hence the burner being on--it was an electric range so we didn't notice), upside down with the plastic wrap and label still in place. We had a good laugh about it only because of how dangerous it was and that we were unhurt, but looking back on it now, that old veteran knew more about me than I had thought. I was a ridiculous, drunken, irresponsible spoiled asshole in a pink dress. He said so, gently, but it was years before I knew what he really meant and more years still until I knew he had been right. I was an arrogant, disrespectful prick with an inflated sense of entitlement and nothing more for much of my time in college. I talk to exactly zero people I went to college with on any sort of regular basis and that isn't everyone else's fault. Sure, I'm absolved of any guilt for some of it, for the most, though, part fault lies with me, I just didn't see it. That old man was trying to tell me something, maybe, but I was too drunk to listen or, more importantly, care.

So Long To The Salad Days

Yeah.

Remember? Remember how awesome this album was when it first came out (and still is today)? It was critically reviled at first (even though all the kids loved it), but even the most jaded ones eventually came around. They sounded like KISS should have, but better and they didn't have the stupid kabuki makeup, either--they looked like me and you. Saint Kurt had been been in the ground a scant month when this was released and for the weeks leading up to its release (it should be noted that I didn't pay attention to album street dates much back then, but "Undone [The Sweater Song]" had been played on MTV quite a bit so I knew about this one), me and my grunge-entrenched friends would often talk about music being "lost" which is a stupid thing to say, but 17-year-old boys aren't known for their insight or impeccable view of the big picture. This album along with, ironically, this one, released that fall, showed everyone that it was going to be okay. They were the final two nails in the grunge coffin and it was actually a welcome change. The sludgy grunge sound was already getting tired and The Blue Album, as it has become known, with it's clear, hearty, thundering riffs and ironic, self-effacing lyrics about embracing your inner nerd were just what everyone needed, it seemed, to lighten the general mood.

When I got ahold of this album, I listened to it non-stop. I went to college that fall and continued to listen to it non-stop. I still listen to this album a lot. Music has shaped my life a bit more than I like to admit and this record recalls a very specific time in my life where I was very happy. I'm happy now, too, but my life isn't changing as fast as it was back then and this album in particular is the soundtrack to me growing up a lot that first year away from my parents. I had never asked a girl out on a date until I was in college and the first time I did (and got shot down, mind you), I was at a party where they were playing this album in it's entirety. I specifically remember "The World Has Turned And Left Me Here" playing in the background (I swear) as she said "I really like you as a friend, but..." It hurt, but I laughed it off (plus she was way out of my league) and it wasn't so bad. I would get shot down many more times, but I would succeed once in a while, too, just like Rivers. He was a lovable loser who got it right sometimes. He replaced Kurt Cobain as my music idol for a few years in there and he didn't seem like the type to kill himself, either, so I knew I was safe. Pinkerton confused me at first and I didn't really like it, it seemed whiny and he talked about his feelings too much. A few years later, though, I fell in love with an Asian girl and though she was 100% Chinese and not a "half-Japanese girl" I would sing the intro to "El Scorcho" to her often and we would laugh. Pinkerton crept up on me while Rivers was at Harvard. The wait for a new album was agonizing and, ultimately, anti-climactic.

The stuff released post-Ivy league just doesn't have it. Sure, The Green Album is pretty good and Maladroit has some good riffs but they don't hold up. I'm not mad, just disappointed.

What happened?

Rivers Cuomo: Giant Douche

Really?

I'll probably get into this more in the coming days but is this seriously how far Weezer has fallen? C'mon guys, Make Believe was so bad it was painful for me to admit how much I loved you at first and while I've only heard maybe three tracks from this one, those songs combined with this insipid "are they being ironic or aren't they?" album cover is nearly enough to make me remove my copies of The Blue Album and Pinkerton (both of which rank among my 50 favorite albums of all-time) from my collection, throw them into my alley, run them over with my car and set them on fire. In short, you have released an album that makes Make Believe look like Magical Mystery Tour by comparison (which would make The Green Album The White Album, I think.)

So this is what it's like to watch your idols slowly fall from grace. You might have been better off OD'ing in about 1999. I finally agree with Neil Young on this point: it really is better to burn out than to fade away.

I Ran (So Far Away)

I'm not bragging here, but I know this is one of the funniest things you have ever seen. The hideous paisley shirt buttoned to the top is just icing on the cake. The haircut I have an explanation for, but the answer doesn't make it any clearer as to why I had it or it's successor which was just the epic bangs with a buzzcut.The answer to "Why?" is: I was a skater. In accordance with the times (this was 1991) I had, HAD to have long bangs to easily be identified as one. My uncle Mike dubbed this haircut The Flying Wedge and still laughs uncontrollably at it's mere mention. Were he to see this picture he would be howling, as I'm sure you are right now. It somehow made me look more like a reject from A Flock Of Seagulls instead of a skater, since I felt the need to use what looks to be about four cans of hairspray instead of just letting it flop around wildly, which would have been more advisable (without the hairspray my bangs went a good 1/2" past my chin.) You'll be seeing more idiotic pictures of me in the future I'm sure, but I figured I'd get this one out of the way first.

Oh, Boy.

I recently discovered that "Quantum Leap" is back on the air in syndication. It's on local channel 41 at 8PM.

I loved this show when it was first on the air and while some it hasn't aged well (it often was too heavy-handed with it's "confrontation" of the general racial and social climates of the 1950's and 1960's American south, but their hearts were in the right place) I still watch it often. It was the first sci-fi TV show I liked, as previous to "QL" I always equated sci-fi with "Star Trek" which I despise. Though, it should be noted that "QL" star Scott Bakula later appeared in a "Star Trek" series (I think it was called "The New Power Generation", or maybe it was "Morris Day and The Time", I can't be sure.) Anyway, the special effects are sort of lame now, but for the most part this show stands up and I was sad to see it go. I remember watching the last episode and being supremely bummed out that it was going off the air (and kind of annoyed that it was a semi-bad series finale), and even more aggravated when a couple of years later then-NBC President (and then-living human being) Brandon Tartikoff publicly admitted canceling it was a mistake.

You can go ahead and make fun, but watch this and tell me that you won't watch it tonight.

Okay, Fine.

After much (MUCH) resistance (I'm always compelled to nerd out and quote Star Trek: The Next Generation--"Resistance is futile!"--God, I'm a dork, you hate me already, don't you?), much time spent poking gentle fun at blogging, and generally thinking it's sort of odd to spill your guts for any and all to stumble across, I have started a blog.

And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin? Oh, wait...nevermind. I'm meandering again. I write about music about 98% of the time that I am writing anything (excluding e-mails, posting idiotic shit on people's Facebook/MySpace pages, etc.) and I want to write about other things I guess. Stuff about my life, or for what passes as my life. I watch bad TV a lot and sometimes I'll write about that, I go out with my friends and my friends do funny shit. A lot. This isn't going to be about just a few things though. I'm going to treat this thing as my therapist because at least when you say "Well, I can't help you, you're overly neurotic and just plain nuts." I can't hear you. So, it's going to be like every other blog you've read probably, just more self-involved, I suppose. I'll try to entertain you, but we'll see how well I do.

This is what I'll leave you with today: My friend JP revels in torturing me about my "obsession" with Hollywood, even though I swear to God I don't have one, it's just her perception, honest. But asking her gets you a different story and we constantly argue about this, which makes the rest of our friends sort of uncomfortable because we argue like siblings about everything and this particular disagreement can get semi-heated (we say needlessly mean things to one another, loudly tell each other to "shut the fuck up" often, claim the other one is adopted, etc.) One time this guy who we both sort of know but don't know real well (we both see him at a weekly coffeehouse gig, so there isn't a ton of audience interaction and we're at first-name-only status) asked me if we were in fact related and it was in direct response to the way we speak to each other. The point of all of this is Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, or whatever the hell that goddamn kid's name is. Late last week it was reported that Angelina Jolie had her twins, then all of the news sources backpedaled when it became obvious that there was still only one white kid present in that ever-growing brood that is starting to resemble the collective offspring of Cletus The Slack-Jawed Yokel from "The Simpsons". There was a report on Yahoo! today that "Entertainment Tonight" still had not retracted their report. For some reason the editor in chief of OK! Magazine, Sarah Ivens, was interviewed for the story about why ET had not retracted their story and she had this to say: "Essentially you have two of the most beautiful, famous people in the world. We've all seen they've had one baby, Shiloh, and it is the coolest, most adorable baby on the planet. And this time they're having two? It can't get any better." Hmm, I have a couple of questions. Firstly, is this Sarah Ivens person possibly fifteen years old? Shiloh is "the coolest, most adorable baby on the planet"? You have to be fucking kidding me. Yeah, ok the kid's cute or whatever and her tiny track jacket probably cost half as much as my car, but that kid is not any cooler that any other two-year-old. A two-year-old is a two-year-old. She still throws temper tantrums and probably wets the bed every so often--definitely not cool things to do. No two-year-old is cool. Oh, I know what you're thinking: that I'm anti-kid and that's not true. But kids are kids, none of them are "cool", they're just kids, they aren't supposed to be. She probably can't even spell "Shiloh" for Christ's sake, I can barely spell it. And there lies the rub: Yeah, I pay more attention to Hollywood than I would care to admit, but Hollywood sort of pisses me off. People that say things in public about two-year-olds being the "coolest, most adorable baby on the planet" are awarded editor in chief positions at magazines and my buddy, The Doctor, who's a screenwriter out there, writes whip-smart, affecting, sometimes funny scripts and you don't know his name. So while I am paying attention to it, I'm really paying attention to it, if you follow me.