"baby wrangler": actual profession

The windows are all open and the sounds from some do out at Telus Field are drifting over the river valley. All the hicks are out on their balconies because the band that's playing is covering Tragically Hip and the Trews (imagine covering the Trews! it's like wearing a McDonald's uniform at Denny's. Or that shot in "Citizen Kane" where Orson walks through the mirrored hallway, except with shitty expensive draft beer.) I've been feeling a bit Sid Vicious all day so I yelled out the window at some whooping jocks from the Masters Games to shut up. Not that I really wanted them to, I just felt like yelling at someone. Luckily I was ignored.

My old band once played a festival in the parking lot of a brand new Bo Diddley's Steakhouse or whatever the fuck. There were Bud girls and a car you could pay five bucks to smash with a mallet. I (you know, I was the singer) told the crowd that if we wanted to we could secede from the nation and start our own country.

"We could totally do it. We have local industry -"

- points at the car -

"- we have a fully functional correctional system already in place -"

- gestures at the dunk tank -

"- and we have law enforcement."

- points at a Bud girl.

Nobody laughed. Maybe I'd started some gears spinning in those Harley-Davidson heads. Maybe the place was a powder keg waiting for a match. Maybe I was seconds away from a riot-incitement rap to beat.

Now they're playing the song about the guy seeing his smiling face on the cover of the Rolling Stone. The singer asks if everyone is ready for the big ending, and the band proceeds to whomp on the same chord five, maybe six times. No applause.

Things are still tough out there, I see.

It's hard to entertain the jocks. Now it's Sweet Home Alabama.

How do Alabamanians feel when they're abroad and they hear that song? Do they feel flush with stately pride, or are they a little perturbed that someone is claiming their turf for the purpose of shilling some insanely dumb three-chord albatross onto an apathetic baseball field of hemorrhoid sufferers? I'd feel weird about it if I were them. Plus now that we know who Deep Throat is, is that Watergate-does-not-bother-me line really appropriate? Was it ever? Don't you want to just hit somebody when you hear them sing that line? Karaoke, anything?

God knows I do.

Read Seymour Hersh's piece about Mark Felt in the new Harpers. Hersh's tone is so despondent he almost makes me laugh except I know he's serious like melanoma.

Okay, maybe this'll help. The Metro is running a festival of Nicholas Ray films (the guy who made Rebel Without a Cause.) I watched something called In a Lonely Place with Humphrey Bogart, one of Ray's earlier films. Bogart's character's name is Dixon Steele, I swear to you. Wasn't too bad, really. But that name, man. I wanna get it printed up on a banner and stretch it across our balcony.

In the movie, Bogart plays a screenwriter who hasn't had a hit for awhile. One night at a bar he's offered a chance to adapt a best-selling book he hasn't read, and gets the bar's hat check girl (who has read it) to come over to his place and tell him the story. Later that night the hat check girl is murdered and Steele's the prime suspect. While all this is happening, he meets and falls in love with the woman whose apartment faces his, as played by Gloria Grahame, with a lot of Maidenform stuff going on. At first the relationship is great, lots of snappy old-movie banter going on. But as the investigation escalates, their relationship is tested. She - and we- begin to seriously doubt his innocence as his violent tendencies start to show. It's an interesting take on the noir form - it focuses more on the strained romance than on the investigation that sets it all in motion.

Hersh's basic point is - wait. Why do cover bands always save "I Wanna Rock and Roll all Night" for the last song of the night? It's like if my drinking buddies met me at the bar and grabbed me by the shoulders and yelled into my ear "Hey, dude, let's drink our faces off tonight! See you later!"

Hersh's point is that what Nixon and his cronies were brought down for is comparatively tame as held up to today's administration's records. He's flummoxed, you can tell by his language - absolutely flummoxed at the apathy towards the Bush gang's making shit up to entangle the U.S. in an illegitimate war. That was the public's main problem with Nixon, he posits. The taping, the espionage, all that kind of stuff had been done in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. It was the massive loss of life in Vietnam that sped the plow of the impeachment. People were angry that the man who'd made the decision to escalate American presence was an amoral bloodthirsty paranoiac. Someone like that, they felt, should not be in charge.

So why, knowing what we do about this year's model, are we putting up with them? Why is it okay for Bush to enlarge the American presence to violent effect in Iraq when it wasn't for Nixon thirty-some years ago?

Of course this is a pretty ham-fisted paraphrasing (read the thing) but what it's leading me to is this. Dig:

Dixon Steele's public displays of aggression are at first presented as possibly defensible because the persons he visits them upon are instigators. He nearly beats a belligerent motorist to death for almost running him off the road. He slaps his agent in the face over a restaurant table for taking his script without permission. But when he faces the fact that Laurel is running away from him, he threatens her - and the phone call that clears his name in the murder comes too late to salvage her love for him.

What got Nixon up the creek with his electorate wasn't the fact that he dug in the military's heels in a train wreck of a war and decimated a countryside with napalm, it was more that he did so much of it clandestinely, and also clandestinely sought to discredit anyone who dared to say it was a horrible thing to do. It wasn't the violence. It was the secrecy of the violence that lent it the colour of illegitimacy. The American people felt they'd been disrespected.

Laurel leaves Dixon not for beating a guy's face to a pulp with his fists and nearly finishing the job with a rock - come on, girls, you'd be gone about then - but waits until she is the object upon which he's going to let loose next. One grimacing bearhug from ol' snaggletooth and that's the last dog hung, thank you very much.

What is it about violence that is acceptable in broad daylight, when the rumours of violence are so damaging? What finally ends Laurel's feelings for Dixon isn't so much the actual verifiable evidence of antisocial assholity as it is the lingering doubt - did he kill that girl? Nixon, too, went down not in the swirling maelstrom of napalm and Da Nang, but in the jacuzzi of the suspicion of those who were supposed to be in his corner, or at least in the same business as he was.

Bush is untouchable because everyone knows everything. When every unspeakable thing is public domain, there is no dirt to get on the guy. Hersh did his part by breaking Abu Ghraib, but (and here's where I understand his despondency) it seems like there's not enough people left who want to care about stuff like that. Because what we want is dirt. And the only dirt left is Brangelina.

raise high the boom cylinder, waste handler operators

Tonight's jammy session thing (I think Henry Rollins or somebody said that you should call your band sessions "practises", and I don't put any stock in him, but it makes sense) was pretty good. In fact it was the first real time Greg and I made sounds that I would have been happy to have people hear.

I don't care how good a musician you are. Or your friends. Or what ever kind of chemistry you have with them, in either sense of that word. When you get your little musical outfit together, it is going to take you at least three months to get to the point where your level of suck is not turned up full blast every moment you are playing.

Greg and I are past that now. We still suck, but it's finally down to intermittent. Which means every once in awhile we are capable of playing something that almost sounds like something you might like if you don't know anything about music.

To get to the point where people who do know things about music like some of what you play takes a year. And talent and luck and work, but mostly a year. Longer for different kinds of music, but for our kind, a year.

I've decided to keep my paragraphs short. This is part of a strategy to gain readership for this blog, to which I now post twice a month. It won't work.

Another strategy I'm going to use is to end every post with a question. That won't work either.

I don't even care, actually.

Fuck you too.

I am going to take a vacation now. I haven't ever had one before. I've been unemployed, sure. Though not for awhile.

I will vacation, next week. I will vacation and try not to entertain paranoid fantasies about accidentally backing the loader over a tip floor labourer who got behind me at the wrong time. I will vacation and try to forget the giant dent in the loader's bucket that I don't even remember putting there, though I apparently did. Put it there.

I will vacation as hard as I fucking can. And when it's over I'll still have a week I can take later this year.

Come on. Someone out there has to be jealous. It's better than jail, right?

or, don't blog at all.

I am being absolutely killed with overtime. These days they ask me to stay late, later, later. I stay a couple of hours and it's like I'm spitting in their faces. This is the busy season, and we're understaffed. I have a responsibility. Everyone else is depending on me.

I hope, someday, to have a real job.

The kick of it is that I need the money. No, I know this is boring. I know it. But this is my blog, fucker, and I can't make it be something it doesn't want to be. Right now it is money and work and bills and overdraft charges and paycheques that cannot get big enough.

Do I have something to say about all of this? Anything at all that is interesting? Or am I already stuck with this goddamn cycle until I'm too old to salvage something of myself, of my mind? My body? I do have, incidentally, this body, that I've beaten the shit out of with hard labour to get a cushy loader job, a job where I can sit and stress and panic and drive and that's about it. Sits and thinks and thinks and thinks and thinks and THINKS about its olive drab drab. Doesn't know. That it is about to be named. Colour of the YEAR. By those with the nose for the new. By the passionate few. Yeah. Olive! Is definitely! In! Everything that can posibly mean anything, anywhere, at least for a year, has got to be olive! Didja hear that, olive, didja? Know what it means? Oh. Olive! There'll be olive cars and olive trucks and olive chickens and olive ducks and olive socks and olive garters and olive brakes and olive starters. Olive sorry! Olive please! Olive whatnots and olive trees! Huh! What a quaint notion. Olive trees.

Well, Ken, I hope so. I fucking hope so. I hope that all of this is actually for something, you know? Of course you do. You made your thing in spoken word jazz. You must have had moments, maybe enough to make up a youth and middle age, where it just felt like you were doing just nothing. Going nowhere. And somewhere in the middle of life's crushing down, of degradation and wallowing, or the struggle with the soft wet bag of mu shu pork that is the music industry, or the quotidian necessities of cooking to shit and sleeping to drive and working to pay and spending to die, in Orpheus, in Sisyphus, in Tantalus, in all of it, you rolled out of bed and said to your nightstand and your hat rack:

Hey fellas, let's make a word jazz album about colours!

Well, that's just the next step that I need to take, buddy. I need a goddamn idea, and I need one soon.

don't blog angry

It's ten to four in the morning.

Motherfucking cat wakes me up with a good clawing session on the part of the boxspring closest to my head again, and I am so overwhelmed with ill feelings that I can't unclench my fists and fall back asleep. Every little thing is a stinging betrayal. The fridge is crammed full of shit and there is nothing to eat. I am exhausted from overwork at the tail end of the longest stretch of time off work I've had in forever. I cannot find my fucking robe anywhere; I have to sit here in these sweatpants that don't breathe so I can type this shit that noone will read, probably because even though I try so hard to use original language I still find ways to use stupid, overworked phrases like "stinging betrayal".

I'm drinking the last few swallows of water from a bottle I bought at the cineplex concession stand the day we went to see Palindromes, and even it is a talisman of my blockheadedness, as in: Why do I have to buy three-dollar bottles of water? Why can't I be smart enough to sneak my own in? Just because I saw a Todd Solondz movie instead of Mr. & Mrs. Smith doesn't make me any less of a boring person. Does it?

I'm trying to apply myself to art, to find space in my life that isn't devoted to driving the loader or dealing with the house or going out and buying things so I can write and play music, but I can't seem to live my life artfully. I see people in cars, like yesterday I saw this red-and-black Mustang GT convertible with a guy in it about my age, or I also saw some car that looked like it was made of nothing but stainless steel and acute angles, no idea what it even was. Like a DeLorean but boxy. I see these cars, or even the Benz Smart cars, and I think, well, these people must be living artful lives to be able to afford such things.

That weird? Not just successful lives. Artful ones. Interesting people get rewarded with exciting automobiles. They're chefs, microbrewers, web designers, hash dealers. I drive an '89 Tempo, therefore I am the most boring motherfucker around. What happened to the world that it's now safe, de rigeur even, to judge people's character on the basis of their ride? Or did it not happen to the world, but just to me?

I am not able to live my life artfully. I can't afford car payments. I do not get unsolicited letters in the mail from my bank promising lines of credit at no interest for one year. My Diesel shoes and my varsity tee shirt do not go together. The few times I tried to make a painting it looked like shit. My books don't say the right things about me. I am not running my own business in artifacts from economically endangered parts of the world. There is no drafting table to the left of this Ikea computer desk.

I don't even have anything, really, to be so goddamned angry about.

It's dawn. The apartment is clogged with dirty clothes, some of them disguising the length of coaxial cable running diagonally across our bedroom, waiting to catch my tired foot on the way back for the last dregs of sleep.