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.