TheMikeDuBose

what they sang decades ago

2012-01-31T12:15:00.002-05:00

One of the many changes having a child in the house has caused is the conscious effort I have to make to not have a television playing. Lest you get the idea that I ever had an array of "afternoon programs," let me assure you I did not. But background noise is good. And I usually try to avoid music as background noise...because I just end up listening to the music instead of doing my work. I understand people who listen to tunes as they write not at all.

But while I am not one of those people who think of television as evil (I used to be a media scholar, after all), I don't want my daughter too overwhelmed by television. My wife has caught her staring at it several times...even when it's turned off. On the other hand, the sound of an empty house has always struck me as kind of creepy. My compromise? I have the tv on the 60s Digital Music channel a lot. But as always, my mind refuses to shut off completely when it's on...so I now have a list of things I know beyond a shadow of a doubt about the sixties...at least in terms of music.

A huge portion of the music made by whites (particularly in the beginning of the decade) is horrific. Frankie Avalon? Frankie Valli? Gawdawful. People who think today's pop is bland and generic should listen to the pop of the past. Pop music has always been bland and generic.
On the other hand, the more I listen to this channel, the larger my appreciation for The Funk Brothers (the awesome backing group of Motown) grows. Is everything Motown awesome? Of course not, but this band might have the best arrangements of anyone. Whenever I hear Jack Ashford's tambourine play, I get happy.
There is a huge difference between The Beach Boys when they were really firing on all cylinders ("Sloop John B." or "Wouldn't It Be Nice?") and when they were playing half-heartedly (their awful cover of "Rock and Roll Music"). They really could've been one of the best bands in the world (if you doubt this, you should go now to listen to "Help Me, Rhonda"), but drugs? egos? something stopped them from being at all consistent.
I often wish I would've been a musician back during this time...because the state of the art (particularly in the beginning of the decade) was not all that good and I would look like a genius by comparison. Early rock and roll guitar solos were often (if not regularly) just the song's melody line. Anyone nowadays could do better. Hey, maybe that's why people used to think Clapton was good.
The state of the art, though, really did improve as the decade came to an end. While they weren't all brilliant, I will argue that drummers were generally better at the end of the sixties (particularly in heavy blues rock) than they are now. Really: John Bonham, Mitch Mitchell, Bill Ward, Keith Moon, and so forth. What the hell happened to drummers? Why have they become in general so unadventuresome?
I've realized that although I prefer the later Beatles, I still kinda like their early bubblegum stuff. The early work of the Rolling Stones, though...much less convincing. They don't do good hippie stuff. Their 70s material more than makes up for it, though.
One final certainty: Vanilla Fudge's version of "You Keep Me Hanging On" is the heaviest object in existence.

As usual, I will probably fight to the death defending any of these claims...particularly if you catch me in a bar.

Another Damn Monday

2012-01-30T22:02:00.002-05:00

Tired after sending tons of "you haven't done any work in three weeks so you probably won't pass" e-mails? Wondering if anyone will ever call you and ask you to go to a bar? Feeling sorry for yourself? Fearful of how much your daughter will turn into a demon child from the netherworld throughout the night? It's time for a new drink! I call this one the "Another Damn Monday":

Place some ice in a pint glass
Fill the glass 1/4 up with vodka
Fill to the halfway mark with white grape juice
Top off the glass with ginger beer
Try not to think of it only being the beginning of the week

on genocide and dry eyes

2012-01-26T22:48:00.003-05:00

Today, I spent entirely too much time in front of the computer, and as a result, my eyes got a little bloodshot. I tore the house apart, but I couldn't find the eye drops anywhere...so although I was in utterly no pain, I had no choice but to go around looking like I either had pink eye or had consumed a large amount of various illegal substances.

Later in the night, I found watching television on the couch with my wife when the following conversation occurred more or less verbatim:

"You know, I think I have a solution."

"To your ugly eye?"

"Yeah. It just occurred to me that I have a kitchen...and a knife...and an onion."

"Oh, no, Mike, you don't want to do that."

"Why not? It would make me cry."

"Yes, but it would inflame the membranes."

"Oh."

"You should just try and think of something sad...like the Holocaust."

This is why, by the way, my life is completely awesome.

an anniversary tale

2012-01-25T11:58:00.003-05:00

Me and my beautiful spousal unit got married in January of 2003. We met at the mayor's office and were officially hitched in the city counsel chambers. Actually, I sat outside the mayor's office waiting for her to show up, and she waited outside in her car for me to show up. There was a tense few minutes there where I worried she might've returned to her senses and taken off for North Dakota or parts unknown.

But she came in and, against all logic, married me anyway. While I don't understand this, I am eternally grateful...particularly every January 24th. While we try to do something nice, we suffer the setback of being dead-ass broke, so rather than the traditional gifts, we just settle on a modest meal somewhere. This year, though, I mad a serious effort to do things properly.

First, I went and opened our firebox to look at the certificate...and with a quick glance at the form, I saw "2002." Hah, I thought, I could've sworn we were at nine years...not ten. I was happy I discovered the mistake in advance, though...nothing like avoiding looking like an idiot, particularly when anniversary dates are concerned.

I really had no idea what the standard gifts were for the tenth year. So I did what people in the 21st century: I googled it. The traditional gift was aluminum. This didn't really help. They offered gift suggestions, but I didn't think an anodized saute pan would really say "thanks for being married to me"...particularly as I'm the one who does the cooking.

They did list a modern gift equivalent, though, and it was...pewter. This didn't really help; I live in a small town where House of Pewter has yet to open up a franchise. I sent an e-mail to a local jeweler asking for suggestions. They wrote back, saying they didn't have any pewter jewelry, but (of course) diamonds were a perfectly acceptable substitute! I did some browsing online, and I did find a diamond ring I could afford...which had a genuine 1/20th of a carat rock. I could afford the ring, but the magnifying glass it would require to see the thing would put me over budget. I wrote and explained this to my wife, but she rejected my alternative offer to do origami out of aluminum foil.

When I recounted the full story to my wife after she returned from work, she told me we had in fact been married in 2003, not 2002. I went back to the form, and the "2002" I was was when we got our marriage application. I then googled the ninth anniversary, and the appropriate gift was leather. That I could've done.

However, I would've felt weird giving her a leather gift in front of our 7 month old.

my changing relationship to music

2012-01-23T17:44:00.003-05:00

(first in a series)

I've been trying (in some respects) to be a proactive parent. So, not too long after we learned my wife was preggers, I realized I was going to have to rethink my relationship to music.

Bear with me. While like most parents I had no true idea what I was getting myself into, I did know that we were going to have a little person roaming around the house. This naturally means baby-proofing. I knew I would have to move electrical cords and lock up household chemicals (which we used to just keep in the liquor cabinet). What scared me, though, was learning the DuBose-to-be would be mobile at some point...and while I really couldn't picture my child at the time, I would picture this potential infant learning to crawl, heading over to my wall of cd cabinets, pulling cds out at random, pulling the disks out of the cases, and hurling them all into a giant, jagged pile.

I didn't want to have to decide between my love for my child-to-be and my love for music, so I spent hours online searching for good storage options. New cd shelves with doors, though, were quite costly...and since we can't even afford to move out of our two room wooden shack with dirt floors, I realized quickly that purchasing expensive storage shelves with doors was not the solution. I considered then rejected making my own doors, because I really didn't want to count myself among the ranks of those home repair and woodworking enthusiasts who have lopped off fingers. I briefly thought about rigging up some kind of strap system to lash the cds into place but rejected each plan as being too Goldbergian.

It was clear there were no other options. I had to get rid of my cds.

I spent about two months sorting cds and ripping them to mp3. I would take my time, gazing at the prisms of light reflecting off the disk as I poured over the packaging for the last time, all while trying to remember where I bought the disk in the first place. Music ripped, I would then file the disk away in a big plastic tub for easy transport to a relative for safe-keeping.

It all seemed too big to me, the end-of-an-era-type event. I remembered getting my first cd player...one of those portable units which skipped whenever you tripped or stumbled. I found my way to a pawn shop and bought a dozen used disks, two dollars apiece. I then joined one of those music clubs to jump-start my collection. They outgrew my shelf. Then my collection outgrew the carousel storage unit. Then I bought my first shelf...then another...then another...until I had seven shelves and a few thousand disks. Now, though, I would have an empty wall and a number of used bytes on my computer. It seemed...inadequate.

Moreover, it was unprecedented. I never really liked cassettes all that much...they were too disposable of a medium, and if a tape was of an album I really enjoyed, I would most certainly go through three or four copies...so getting rid of them was no big deal. I liked records, particularly because of the artwork, but my stereo receiver died a few years before I finally divested myself of all my vinyl. Besides, all of these were a move from one media to another. The end of cds was a larger event in that it meant the end of artifacts. Yeah, I still had the songs, but there was no "thing" attached to them. For the first time in my music-consuming life, it was impossible for me to sit and hold my favorite album.

I moped for a while. Abandoning my cds was a move I had to make. I knew that. A child, my very own child, was much more important. I knew that. I couldn't, however, stop myself from being a little sad from thinking of the empty spaces where my racks of cds once stood as standing for something more...a hole within me, perhaps.

Then my daughter came...and I found myself not thinking very much of my cds at all.

Christmastime came. Me and my wife knew we wouldn't really need to buy each other piles of gifts. We were broke, yes, but my wife has long insisted on having at least some level of presents, so she could tear open wrapping paper with her hands...because she is, as she feels free to tell you, a little kid. Christmas is (and will increasingly become) all about our daughter. But we agreed to still give each other at least a token gift.

We decided on on the massively sentimental and romantic present of gift cards...and, as the actual holiday hour approached and our lives as a result became more frazzled, we didn't even put them in envelopes.

I got a gift card to Amazon. First thing I did was buy a couple of albums I'd been wanting...but as I had no more cds, as there were no more artifacts of music, I found the downloads to be cheaper...so instead of two cds, I could get five albums! Furthermore, as I wasn't getting anything physical, I didn't have to wait to get my music. In five minutes, all of my new albums were sitting on my hard drive, ready for consumption.

Yes, I no longer had the artifacts. I did, however, have increased access to the music.

Realizing this is a bit of a game-changer for me. How long before my Kindle renders my bookshelves moot? Should I get a streaming service and do away with my dvds? What is next? I dream of a future where I buy a fiber optic tee shirt and download its graphics directly from the bands.

Why not? It's the end of the artifact. Let's hope it makes content more important.

envoi to silence

2012-01-23T17:26:00.003-05:00

There were parental and in-law visits. There was the crush of holiday planning. There was an urchin in the midst of a perfect storm of cold, then unexpectedly early teething, then a growth spurt. There was class prep (after way too long away from work). There was a mild case of seasonal affective disorder. There was playoff football. There was a long-delayed and ultimately surprisingly inconsequential visit to a mental health professional. There were new albums to digest. And then, just as everything seemed to clear, there was a computer unexpectedly dying...which of course necessitated pulling all the data from the old computer, shopping for a new computer, purchasing a new computer, trying to figure out how to afford a new computer, removing bloatware from the new computer, installing needed software onto the new computer, and transferring all my files over from the old to the new computer. And then was my quite successful attempt at making mushroom and onion soup.

Suffice to say: I'm back...and I got a lot of stuff to say.

don't wanna be...

2011-11-28T19:13:00.002-05:00

Fatherhood has brought me many unexpected circumstances, attributes, and attitudes. One I really was not expecting, though, was the loneliness.

I love my daughter wholeheartedly. Her smile makes me melt, and her laughter makes my heart explode. But, despite my best efforts, she's not speaking yet...damn lazy five and a half month old. So when I spend time with her, there's very little variety of interaction. She can only ask for a few things, and she really only has one preferred way of asking for anything...namely, screaming at the top of her lungs. She screams as if stabbed when she gets hungry. She screams as if stabbed when she's had enough to eat. She screams as if stabbed when she wants to sleep, be changed...you get the idea. And yes, I realize she gets the drama from my side of the family. She also grunts, groans, and occasionally bursts out into peals of laughter (a sound which is all too rare...not that she's an unhappy kid, but this is the greatest sound in the world, and I just don't hear it nearly enough). The majority of our interactions, though, are me talking to her and her either grunting, groaning, or yelling...which, while I love her dearly, can be isolating.

I don't see my beautiful wife as much as I would like. When she gets home, she takes care of our daughter...which means her attention is (quite naturally and understandably) on our kid, not on me. My wife also puts our daughter to bed...but as our kid, as a result of her 3-4 hour "go to bed" process, might very well be renamed "She Who Will Not Sleep," this means we get very little husband/wife time. So even when she's under the same roof as I, I miss her.

I also don't get to see my friends all that much. Of course, I knew I would not be going out nightly, so this was one for which I could kinda prepare. And I do get to practice on Tuesdays, hang out afterward, and maybe escape one weekend night. Still, people tend to think more of me as "new father" rather than anything, and the new father is not the one people think to call and invite out. I can really only remember one time in the last couple of months where a friend specifically contacted me to ask me out. People don't come by the house, either...I guess the possibility of encountering a potentially loud kid doesn't entice visitors. All understandable, I guess, but it doesn't help the loneliness all that much.

But now I have a cold...and this means I can't hug my wife. It means I cannot hold my daughter. So, even though I am in the same house as the two people I love more than anyone, I still feel isolated.

When I was single, I'd often get lonely. At this stage of my life, though, I wasn't expecting more loneliness.

misery without company

2011-11-27T19:04:00.004-05:00

I'm a terrible sick person.

Whenever I get ill, I feel like the world's biggest wimp. I cannot handle being sick in any way. I whine, I moan, I become horribly neurotic and high maintenance. Yes, I know many may claim I am that way all the time...it's one of the side-effects of having perpetually low self-esteem. I honestly do strive toward self-sufficiency, and I try to be a good man, a strong man, a worthy man. But when I'm ill, I lose any of the resiliency and cheer to which I aspire. I become a sad, pathetic little man.

I'm always astounded when I accidentally give my wife a cold. I will go through my death-throe convalescence. Then my wife starts to display my symptoms of a few days earlier, and I leap over myself to apologize for infecting her with my death-cold. I promise to be as good to her as she was to me. Then, as her cold progresses, I compare her stages to mine...and I wonder if she just picked up some lesser-variant virus or if I'm as bad of a patient as I suspect. Where I was aching, moaning, holding onto walls, chugging cough syrup, she is light, sprightly, and tough beyond ken.

Now, though, it's infinitely worse. I still ache. I still have to stop my head from spinning when I get up. I still surround myself with a siege-worthy cache of tissues, cough syrup, and canned soup. But instead of just swelling in misery, I'm now dwelling in misery, watching my gorgeous wife care for my gorgeous child, immensely sad that I can't touch either of them, can't kiss either of them, can only love them from afar. The two people I love most are next to me, but I have to keep them at arms (or virus's)-length
.
Sad and lonely indeed.

illness and time

2011-11-26T23:12:00.004-05:00

How much is time worth?

Where's the point of no return?

I'm wondering this for several reasons. First, I'm sick and on cough medicine, and that brings back memories. I make it a point to record interesting-looking films from time to time..I want a backlog of them on my dvr for a rainy day...for sick days and such. A few illnesses ago, I watched the classic Soviet science fiction film Solaris. It wasn't particularly wonderful. It looked good, but to call it slow would be an understatement (particularly the massive/eternal/never-ending "driving to the airport" scene). But it had been talked up so much, I felt I had to finish it. Maybe I missed something that further viewing would clarify. Maybe perseverance was the key. Maybe there was some ultimate grand payoff which would bring enlightenment. So I watched.

I finished the film. There didn't seem to be anything with which I could connect. I chalked it down to a difference in cultural attitudes...and the cold and its corresponding medications.

Today, I again have a cold. I went to bed last night with the slight tingling in the throat. I woke up feeling bad. As the day progressed, I felt progressively worse. After my wife went to put my child to sleep for the third time tonight, I was searching my dvr for something to watch. I had already plowed through whatever light, frivolous material I had. I had watched the Bogie-starring vehicle Sahara (which started out with grand pretensions yet ended up not able to become as notable as it dared). I came down to the 2002 Clooney remake of Solaris.

Clooney is one of my favorite actors. I had the relevant cultural context. I was, as when I watched the original, dazzled by the direction, the photography. The film, though was still exceedingly slow. It was like the song which refused to kick into the power chorus. It never improved. Still, I watched. Was it the cold which was doing it? Or did I just consider my illness-addled time to be so valuable as to not waste the thirty minutes or so I had invested?

Is it because my sick time is just not all that valuable? Feeling rotten, apparently, just is not enough.

an apology

2011-11-14T12:32:00.004-05:00

I would like to officially offer this formal apology:

To anyone I've engaged in conversation with about the future of academics, I would like to formally apologize for the tone and content of my interactions. The last thing I want to do is to let my poisoned mood infect anyone who still believes and still has faith.

The problem? I used to be a believer. I used to believe in the power of thought, the power of thinking, the power of discussion, the power of learning. And while I never thought I would be a superstar in academics, I always thought there was at least a place for me within the ranks of thinkers. Over the last six months, I am starting to fully realize the extent to which all of this was wrong...at least for me.

And there's a lot of reasons why I think I failed. I am, for the record, fully willing to admit blame for much of my academic failure. There was always more I could do; in the words of one of my favorite songs, I definitely "could've been stronger, could've been smarter"...and I know this. I still feel overwhelmed by the structural roots behind my personal failures, but I am going to try to quit bringing them up...as they are probably news to no one (particularly anyone who's read this blog).

I am, for the record, trying to work on it. I realize I've been dwelling on all this way too much, and I realize it is one of the major (although not the only) reason behind my current slide toward depression, a slide I am trying desperately to halt and to not share.

So here's what I'm going to do. I promise only to participate in academic discussion when someone specifically asks me to do so. I promise to blow by scholarly links, discussions of the job market, blanket invitations for interactions. If you post something somewhere that raises my gloom, I will do everything I can to look the other way...and I will by no means indulge in an effort to spread my gloom. As it's clear the academic world really doesn't consider me a member, I'm going to try and quit bemoaning that fact or dwelling on it in any way. I would really hate it if my own bad attitude got into someone else.

Let me make clear that I do in fact envy all of my academic believer friends...more than you can know. For those whose career has worked out or is steadily progressing, I salute you. But more importantly, for all those who still get excited by ideas and think there's a future in pursuing them, I covet your faith and your optimism and wish you the greatest success imaginable. The life of the mind is a truly noble goal...and I wish you better luck than I experienced.

on kids and definitions.

2011-10-31T12:39:00.002-04:00

A couple weeks ago, I realized that I didn't know how many weeks old my daughter was. Moreover, I started to think of her age in months rather than weeks. Eventually, I'll start thinking of her age in fractions of years...then years. I will probably think of her grade as her age for a little while. Then it will go back to years.

Right now, my daughter is still X inches long. At some point, that will become "tall" instead of "long." Then feet will be added to the equation.

Right now, I think of my daughter as weighing X pounds Y ounces. Pretty soon, ounces will no longer be a consideration.

I never guessed how much fatherhood would make me aware of definitional terms.

fallen metal

2011-10-31T10:10:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow, the most anticipated (by comedians, anyway) album of the year comes out: Lou Reed and Metallica. Yeah. We know. But it does put me in the mind to reflect upon the Metallica I used to know.

The first time I heard Metallica, Ride the Lightning was still an indy record. I was used to heavy...after all, I listened to Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. Nothing, though, could've prepared me for my first listen of the bay area thrash band. A friend of my brother's made a cassette, and I remember him telling me I "had to hear this." "Fight Fire with Fire" came on, and I stopped in my tracks. Could you even DO that? Could music actually sound like that? They seemed to be breaking rule after rule...and it worked! Over the course of the next year, I utterly devoured that album.

Later, I went to a record store (remember those?) to try and find Metallica's first album. When I went up to the counter to pay, the clerk complemented me on my taste and told me their new album was coming out the next day...did I want it? Hell, yes, I wanted it. When album four came out, I would throw the cassette in my car radio, drive around endlessly, and turn up the volume until my windows shook.

Then Metallica's fifth album (The Black Album) came out. I bought it on my way to work. Heard the commercial polish and sheen. Got through the first six songs. With each song, my heart dropped. Quoting nursery rhymes? Ballads? Why on earth was the most innovative band on earth (or at least in my (admittedly limited) listening experience) moving closer to the mainstream? Why did they sell out...after hitting it big? I sold the cassette to someone at work that very day.

Ever since, Metallica has dropped further and further away from my attention. The only real time I think of them is when I find a student wearing a Metallica shirt. What does Metallica sound like to them? I have tried to explain to a few what hearing "Fight Fire With Fire" (or any song off their debut) was like, but I know I'm never going to come close. What was once the most exciting band in the world to me has become classic rock....and rather lame classic rock at that. When they announced the Lou Reed collaboration, my only thought was "of course they'd try something so obviously stupid."

I used to love Metallica...and the saddest thing is I know I will never think of them in quite the same way. But at least I still have their old...their REAL music.

the baby headache silencer

2011-10-20T20:49:00.002-04:00

Have the most beautiful girl in the world, but she loves spending days being (how shall we say) grumpy? Why, you need a mixed drink! I call this one "the baby headache silencer":

make one glass of cocoa
- note: while you can use any cocoa you like, home-made is best. here's a recipe:
  - combine 2 cups powdered sugar, 1 cup Dutch-process cocoa, 2 1/2 cup powdered milk, 1 tsp salt, 2 tsp cornstarch, 1/4 tsp ground chipotle
  - mix well, store in a sealed container
  - use 1/4 cup of this mix for each cocoa mug
add one splash of peppermint schnapps
add one splash of wild strawberry liqueur
stir
take painkiller of your choice
enjoy while trying to remember what it was like to be pain-free
apply heating pad to shoulders

final frozen food fantasy

2011-10-20T16:35:00.002-04:00

For those of you keeping track of such things, I decided to give my frozen food thing one more try. I was planning to do steakums, but one box now costs over $11...which, if you follow the math, means a full cow would retail for the price of a small house in a quiet suburb. Instead, I got a box of frozen chicken cordon bleus.

I've been trying to figure out a good metaphor. White board eraser? A cross between cardboard and packing foam? All I know all the moisture was cooked out around it...along with all the cheese.

I have come to two ultimate conclusions. First, frozen food might've actually gotten worse in the last few decades. Second, there's utterly no way I'm going to eat any more of it than absolutely necessary.

a post about competing songs

2011-10-20T13:30:00.002-04:00

One of the reasons I love my wife is that she understands my need for release. She understands that I love her and my kid entirely...but I still gotta have something else. And since that day I bought my first guitar (a Chicago-brand Les Paul copy) with saved-up lunch money, that thing I need most is music. It is my sanity, my release...and possibly the the only thing keeping me sane at this point.

Last Friday, my band played a show in Bowling Green. Things went rather well. Several friends showed up (more than for my first Black Swamp Rats gig. The other acts (Mark Hutchins and The Half Hearts) were both awesome. I only moderately aggravated my bad shoulders loading my gear in and out of the bar (via the fire escape, mind you). And if my friends are to be believed, I even played well. Well, hell, don't take my word for it:

I would be lying, though, if I said I didn't feel guilty about leaving the wife and kids to play...but experience has taught me that it's much worse, though, for everyone involved if I don't have music as my outlet. In spite of shoulder pain and slightly ringing ears, I was a much better person after this night than before. Still, though, as I made my way into my house and crawled into bed, a song popped into my head:

Yeah. It's just like that...except Kenny was a rich man singing about someone who's poor but still thinks he might possibly be able to make it. I, on the other hand, am poor and hold no illusions of ever being otherwise. The need for what we do, though, is the same.

Oh yeah, our song is better.

in perfect harmony

2011-10-20T11:13:00.006-04:00

should've been smarter

should've been stronger

When I sing, my girl is my audience...and she's the best audience in the world.

She doesn't judge me. She doesn't, upon hearing my voice, break into wild laughter as did one former band member. She doesn't leave the room as has my wife (to be fair, though, as she's only four months old, she doesn't walk yet and thus couldn't walk out...but I like to think she'd listen to me even if she had the option of leaving). She finds my voice calming, soothing...as much, that is, as her mood, health, and general disposition allow her to find anything soothing.

Nevertheless, I find myself undergoing a crisis of songs, of singing.

I have a pretty good vocabulary of songs I can sing. I generally, while singing my girl to sleep, last about an hour ten before having to repeat myself...and this is, mind you, just the lyrics...it excludes instrumental breaks and the like. But I need more...because so many songs are, the more I think about it, just not suitable for the occasion.

Some are just too peppy or weird for sleep time. Can you imagine, for instance, falling asleep to Hendrix's "Manic Depression?" Others seem inappropriate. The first time I performed the Rolling Stones song "Dead Flowers" for her, I caught myself before I got to the line about being "in my basement room with a needle and a spoon"...because their first year of life is just a itty bit too early for heroin references. There are a few Wilco songs which got pushed out right away for having poetic lyrics which get a bit too close to spousal abuse for my taste...and while I understand irony and metaphor (and thus understand what Tweedy was getting at), it will be at least a year before my girl reaches that level of lyrical sophistication.

I mentioned earlier that my girl likes the Eagles. Therein lies another problem, though, because most of their songs are of the "trials of men and women in relationships." This is what most of all songs are about, though...which adds an additional level of difficulty.

I am worried about my daughter getting (on some level) the idea that people are only defined by their status in relationships. I have seen this happen to many people, and it is sad--someone walking around the earth, desperate for someone to "complete them." I am also worried about the normalization of drug use, the damage to self-worth, the use of violence (ironic or not) as a metaphor for...well, anything. There are a lot of ideas in music which, if one is not prepared to take them in context...or see them with irony...or understand them as metaphors...well, they have the potential to wreak havoc.

None of these reasons, however, are why I'm having a crisis of songs.

I have, as of late, found myself singing Two Cow Garage (my favorite band in the world) to my girl. I love Two Cow wholeheartedly, unreservedly. I love them for many reasons, but one of the chief ones is that they are fully aware of what it means to be a non-major band. They sing quite often about what you do when all hope of ultimate success is gone. What if you knew you would never achieve your dreams? What would you do? How would you act? Would you fight?

This is all well and good for me. Hell, many of the bands I listen to have similar lyrical concerns. I have known for ages that I'd never be a star, never be a success, never be a mover and shaker. First I gave up hope of being a professional musician. Then I gave up hope of being a scholar. I am, in the end, used to giving up hope....and I need art which speaks to my personal needs, my personal disappiontments.

I don't, however, need or want that for my child. Instead, I want her to see a world of possibilities. I want her to discount limits. I want her to ignore barriers. I want her to dream big.

How, though, do I do this when I myself have essentially quit dreaming? How can I help her hope when I can't make myself hope? When I don't believe in hope? How can I inspire her towards something I don't believe anymore exists?

What songs can I sing?

a dialog about whining

2011-10-19T11:12:00.003-04:00

background: My darling kiddo hasn't been sleeping well, and that makes her cranky...and while I know a baby's only real method of communication is to yell, our girl seems to take this to the extreme. She gets a little hungry? Yell as if one is being stabbed by a porcupine and drug over salt flats. I realized, in some ways this reminded me of myself.

So last night, I went up to my darling wife.

Me: I'd just like you to know that if our girl ends up being overly dramatic or becomes a whiner, it's probably my fault...and I'm sorry.

Wife [after face drops]: Mike, have people on Facebook been mean to you again?

frozen food week two: pot pie

2011-10-14T11:36:00.004-04:00

Hey, remember when I promised to write about my frozen food of the week experience? Well, yesterday's lunch was a frozen pot pie. The damn thing required a 35 minute bake time. I could've used the microwave directions, but I, dunno, like browning. I then let the thing rest for ten rather than the instructed five minutes...not by choice, but by screaming kid. When I finally got to it, I noticed:

As frozen food is now designed for microwave rather than conventional oven use (the real oven directions are even in smaller print), they contain weird elements...such as a paper pie plate? Really?
The crust, as it's also designed for a microwave, burns quite handily along the outer edges. Yum....blackened pastry!
Ten minutes of resting is not nearly enough. One day later, I can still feel the scars in my mouth from the lava flow within.
While the product doesn't taste bad by any means, it also didn't really taste good...or like anything you'd ever go out of your way to eat ever again...even if one was a vulture.
For a pie which is supposedly beef, there's very little actual beef in it. What is there is rather stringy. Okay, everyone...please quit baking with round...in fact, if you use round beef for anything other than cube steak, you will be shot.
A quick perusal of the ingredients shows hydrolyzed soy protein and garlic juice to be key ingredients. They also list "beef flavor," which includes autolyzed yeast extract....mmmm, just like mommy used to make!
This "single serving" is about half the size of an actual single serving of food...by anyone's measure.
It also contains 50% of a day's saturated fat, along with 800mg of sodium. Healthy!

I'm now reconsidering actually continuing with the frozen food of the week...because I want to live and be unscarred.

life twists

2011-10-14T10:31:00.004-04:00

Get ready...the 21st century

is when everything changes

--Capt. Jack Harkness

When I found out I was gonna be a dad, I make one simple vow: to not change too drastically into a slobbering moron. Some people become parents and can then only talk about everything their kids do in glowing terms. "Oh, he let out the cutest toot today!"--that kind of stuff. An infant walks into someone's life, and their IQ drops thirty points. That, I swore, would never be me.

While I would like to think I am, at my core, the same person, it is in fact true that fatherhood has changed me in quantifiable ways. How so?

I have a permanent glassy look to my eyes...because I'm never quite sure what the hell is going on.
Although I am not on night duty (my wife, as the Milk Producer, has the late shift, while I work primarily days), I am usually called upon to spring into action immediately after awakening...usually in the middle of a cool dream. As a result of never being allowed to awake organically, I'm usually walking around in a zombie state.
As the result of the point above, my per capita coffee consumption has skyrocketed.
I find myself doing strange things with my morning...like taking my kid to the...chiropractor? It actually helped, by the way...and she giggles while being adjusted.
What free time I used to have (which I would've used for, say, showering) is now taken up by endlessly buying and replacing batteries...which now require a screwdriver to get to. Seriously, are there no kiddie toys that don't require batteries? And every one is a different size. I now have a reserve of A, AA, C, D, AND 9volt. Now that I think of it, I kind of miss the B size.
What income I used to consider disposable is now taken up by either hospital bills, doctor bills, or battery bills.
I notice myself violating my oath "I will never do baby babble." Hell, half the time I speak, it seems I start lisping and using a sing-song voice. I sound like a Disney reject, actually.
I also find myself talking in the third person an awful lot...doing things like saying "that's why Daddy really needs to drink tonight." Maybe this is how The Rock got started.
I've become slightly immune to medicine stains, droll stains, milk stains on my clothing. I actually have to stop and ask myself "do I look presentable?" before leaving the house...and I also find myself caring about the answer a lot less.
I still carry ear plugs with me everywhere, but now they're for my daughter, not my drummer.

doom and burritos

2011-10-13T12:50:00.002-04:00

I've been having writing issues as of late...and it's all due to my current crisis of faith. So naturally, the solution is frozen food.

First, to be completely accurate, I'm really having crises (plural) of faith, not just a single crisis. Although I know I haven't had a future as an academic for years, it is, for reasons I would really rather not discuss, hitting particularly hard as of late. This adds to my crisis in my scholarship (namely: why do any?), crisis in identity (if I'm not a scholar or an academic, what exactly am I?), crisis in hope, friends, life, television viewing, you name it. However, if you've been paying any attention to this blog whatsoever, then none of this should be a surprise.

I've started to write several blog posts about said crises, but I generally get three long paragraphs and four re-writes into them before realizing I don't really have anything new to add to what I've already written. It's a shame, really, because writing always helps me work out my issues, but if I can't say anything original about the issues, what, really, can I work out? How can I improve?

Compounded with all this is the fact that I really don't wanna be that guy who always complains about the same stuff. Complaining is, I admit, an essential part of my identity. I still remember when one of my old bosses, while smoking cigarettes with me before work, had a dawning look of comprehension and said "Mike, you sure do like to complain." I just looked at him with one of those "thanks for stating the obvious" glares. None of this means I like being the complaining guy, though...at least not as a primary identity, that is. Moreover, I don't want to lose the friends I have who still actually wanna hang out with me. I also don't want any normal readers of this blog to feel like they're eavesdropping on a therapy session.

I know I have to expand my level of thinking. I gotta hit new subjects. I need to broaden my scope. What, you ask, might be the solution?

Strangely enough, it hit me when I was grocery shopping. There was a logjam of idiots in the aisle I wanted to travel, so I instead cut through the frozen food aisle. As someone who is proud of turning himself into a pretty good home cook, I was a little surprised at the variety of food-objects for sale. Many were of the "oh, holy hell, people actually pay for something that looks this bad on the actual box?" Others, though, were updates of things I ate occasionally growing up. Glitzier packaging, more "extreme" flavors maybe, but in the end, pizza rolls are still definitely recognizable.

My mission suddenly became clear: I would relive the frozen food of my youth, one meal a week (as to not die from chemical intake). It would make blog fodder!

Week one was frozen burritos. As a teen, I would occasionally grab one for lunch...pile on some cheddar, nuke until the burrito was hot and the cheese had plasticized on the plate, douse with salsa, and you're done! My brand was Patio. My flavor was beef and bean. Authentic? Of course not, but it was pretty tasty.

They don't sell Patio up here. In fact, I couldn't even find a beef and bean burrito in the freezer case. Everything had gotten all gourmet-looking, particularly in terms of flavors. Frozen burrito makers in the eighties had no clue what chorizo was, for instance...but now it shared a wrap with eggs. Funky.

I settled on a steak and cheese burrito. The next day, I nuked it. I tried to eat it. It was awful. I know memory plays tricks on us, and I definitely know my tastes have changed...but this had the consistency and taste (I presume) of dog food. The ends were spackle-like, the middle was gross and paste-like. There is no way my teen burritos were this bad.

Score one against nostalgia, one against current food trends, one for my frozen food memories over the reality. One would hope this week's attempt (the frozen pot pie, currently in the oven) fares better. If not, it might be a sign that the bitterness in my life is poisoning even the mass market frozen food conglomerates.

up, up, and away

2011-09-29T13:16:00.003-04:00

I have come to realize as of late that my daughter is a superhero. My evidence? She:

is able to eat more than her body weight in a single sitting!
has a piercing cry with the power to cripple any parents in 1.2 miles!
can fight nap and bed time with an intensity belied by her diminutive size!
is able to bend time to her own purposes! She can make a simple diaper change seemingly take an hour.
can squirm with the strength of ten babies (see above point).
can cause intermittent memory loss in outside observers! Yesterday, for instance, five minutes of laughter while the two of us were playing "hoot" made up for all the yelling and screaming of the entire grumpy day.

...but then again, I always expected she would be special.

update...or why academics is doomed

2011-09-27T16:41:00.005-04:00

Hey, remember the post the other day about my bad attitude towards scholarship? Well, there's been developments.

Remember how I mentioned two papers I've had trouble placing? Remember the one I called a "massive leap forward in terms of both theory and writing" and considered the best thing I ever did? Well, the essay was under review by an appropriate journal. When I sent them the submission, the journal required I print off three hard copies and mail them to the editors. At the time, I presumed the journal had yet to hear of e-mail, fax, or even teletype. Well, I just got a rejection....via e-mail. I am highly tempted to drop them a line reminding them that all rejections must be sent via hard copy....or, barring that, they need to send me a check to reimburse my shipping costs.

Secondly, the text of the rejection itself is enough to drive one up the wall. After explaining how their decision process works, they list their criteria for rejecting (not publishing, mind you...they only quantify why they don't like something) submissions. An exact quote:

The subject matter or approach is not suitable for the interests and readership of [journal name redacted];
The argument was deemed unconvincing; or,
The argument fails to distinguish its contribution to existing literature on the topic.

Wow. That certainly clears up things. Gee, thanks.

brain trying to kill me yet again

2011-09-24T13:31:00.003-04:00

When I was still a scholar, I used to plan my work based on fairly logical assumptions. I tried to see where the academic world was, what was the focus of most culture studies scholarship, and I used this information to try and find myself a niche, some place where I could do what was most needed, do work which both filled a gap and precipitated curves in the scholarly world. I thought my work would come out right as a new big trend came, I would ride the crest of this new scholarly wave, and that I would come off as a leader, a pioneer.

I was, however, pretty much universally wrong in my predictions.

When I started doctoral work, I noticed how everyone in culture studies seemingly was obsessed by the race/class/gender triad. Surely, I thought, identity has to be more than just these three...so I avoided doing race, class, or gender. The scholarly world, however, still really loves race, class or gender...and shows no sign of changing. Moreover, my idea that our concept of "mainstream" is both under-formulated yet still drastically important seems to only draw the wrath of most academics. Strike one.

When searching for a dissertation topic, I noticed that no one was doing 1980s studies. In general, I realized, people think of history as something that only starts fifty years in the past. So you are either current, historical, or in some kind of limbo. However, the eighties seemed to be an especially important decade, one where a lot of current trends and crises have their roots...the credit crunch and real estate bust, for instance, must be connected in some way to the Reagan "deficits? who cares about deficits?" angle. And time and time again, the eighties seemed increasingly relevant and ready to break as a new subject of analysis. So I started doing eighties studies in hopes of being at the front of that scholarly wave. However, in spite of multiple possible Eighties Studies-launching event after event (reinvading Iraq, the Reagan legacy project, Reagan being mentioned again and again in every presidential election (by both sides in 2008)), academics never started caring about the eighties. No one wanted to hire an Eighties scholar. Where did that leave me, who wrote a dissertation on the intersection of 1980s politics and popular culture? Facing strike two.

My job market failures made me realize I had to reinvent myself. There were, I noticed, tons of film studies jobs...but in order to land one, one had to hold a film studies degree. Television, I reasoned, was a different land...one with more possibilities. Hell, TV, with the likes of Deadwood, The Sopranos, The Shield, The Wire, and tons of other great programs had become the creatively dominant medium. So why not refocus myself as a television scholar? This is what I did. I wrote several great articles on television, with the highlight being a publication in Television & New Media. I gained some level of prestige (or at least a minimal presence in the field). However, 97% of every television-oriented job I've seen requires production skills. I have none. My refocus as a television scholar leaves me still unemployable. Strike three.

Planning has gotten me nowhere...except out.

Lest you think all my moves (to paraphrase Clouseau) are carefully planned, I have also experimented with just letting my muse direct my writing. A few years back, I was watching the first post-Katrina New Orleans Saints home game. The broadcast, in spite of covering post-Katrina quite thoroughly as a matter of design, meticulously avoided mentioning race. It was a paper I just had to write. I still can't place it. Later, at the beginning of one of my summers, I found myself unable to sleep at night because my mind was deconstructing the traditional notions of political economy in relation to television production. My mind immediately started thinking of the then-still-in-production show Dollhouse, and, as a result, I ditched the two articles and book revision I had planned and focused on this new, "I can't get it out of my head" paper. It took me seven weeks to write. It was good, thorough, a massive leap forward in terms of both theory and writing. I still can't place it.

Following my heart didn't work out any better than following my head. This is one of the reasons I've pretty much abandoned scholarship and thinking of myself as an academic. Now, I'm trying very hard to look for nothing out of my popular culture experiences other than just killing time and occupying maybe 3% of my mind.

Today, while watching Bones (my new television addiction), I figured out a way to tie in the research from my abandoned CSI: paper with my understanding of both NCIS and Bones. It would be very doable. It would even incorporate much of my research on hierarchical authority structures, and of nerds. I even have a thesis statement in mind: "the concept of liberalism within contemporary media and society is dependent on the social positioning of geeks, nerds, and experts."

It would, in short, be good. However, it would also, if past experience is any indication, be completely pointless. No one would care. And even if a few readers liked it, cited it, used it in classes (as has happened with my scholarship in the past), it would do utterly nothing to add to my infinitesimal chances of ever finding a tenure-track job. Moreover, I don't have any time whatsoever to immerse myself in the necessary research, let alone chain myself to the computer's word processor to write the damn thing.

So why won't this idea just go away? Why did it come into my mind to begin with? Why can't I quit thinking, accept where I am, and just be?

then and now

2011-09-23T23:30:00.004-04:00

Back when I used to think of myself as a scholar, a day without class would generally mean getting up around 8, eating while browsing the web, writing until lunch, watching a half hour of television while eating, and trying to continue to write until 4ish. I would then cook, hang out with my beautiful wife, and climb into bed around midnight. My main regret would be avoiding my guitars.

Things are different now.

Today, I woke up at 7:30 to the sound of my beautiful daughter giving us her "good morning" scream. I hugged her, changed her, and fed her. We then played "hoot" for a little bit, she hit a whale and octopus on her play mat, and then we did TummyTime. While the kiddo was napping, I checked my mail, avoided a few Facebook academic arguments, and just finished lunch when I heard the "I'm done napping" scream. When I went to get my daughter, though, she was smiling. We fed, did a trip to a produce stand, and tried to keep everyone (meaning her) happy while stuck waiting on a train (both on the way there and back). My wife came home from work, and I immediately hit the chiropractor (to get relief from hauling around my kid), hit the grocery store (to get kid supplies), picked up dinner, got to hang with my wife for an hour before she started the "get Mighty sleeping" routine and I started housecleaning. Currently, "get Mighty sleeping" is in phase two while I unwind with a vodka and apple cider.

Oh, I also avoided playing guitar again.

night is weird

2011-09-19T09:52:00.003-04:00

I have an infant. I love her dearly. It does precipitate several lifestyle adjustments...the main one being an adjustment to irregular sleep patterns.

While I have always been a light sleeper (no doubt in response to my inherent paranoia), I don't sleep anywhere as deeply as I once did. This is probably because of the increased likelihood that either I or my lovely wife might be called into action at 3am. To be perfectly honest, it would most likely be my wife as I, after all, am not personally a food source. Furthermore, our kiddo has actually been sleeping through the night for a little while. However, I still expect her to wake up, and those expectations keep me up. Moreover, I often hear phantom kiddo sounds...I think I hear her move, cry out, hiccup...but it always turns out to be the television, a passing car, (most puzzlingly) an extraction fan, or something similar.

There is a plus side to never getting deep sleep, though: I have more vivid and rememberable dreams! Here's two from Friday night:

I thought I was the last survivor of a zombie apocalypse. It was, though, a pretty wimpy zombie apocalypse, because the dead only became reanimated for about two days...so, by the time of the dream, I was more bored than scared. After a few weeks of boredom (told in dream-montage), I met another living person! And it was....either a girl from high school I used to have a huge crush on or the brunette from That 70s Show...I'm not sure which. However, the only other survivor, whomever she was? She didn't want to have anything to do with me...because I personally bored her.
Later that night, I dreamed I found out Sylvester Stallone was a major historian of 1980s video games. For this reason, he was called in as a consultant for Jersey Shore. He quickly became a friend of everyone in the cast. For this reason, I was called in to write an article for Esquire on him. When I got to New Jersey, I went to the beach, and there was Stallone, sitting on a weight bench in the sand, pumping iron. Only he wasn't using weights...he was bench-pressing a car axle with two tires on each side.

I'm just happy I've given up on finding meaning in anything.

my shiny weekend

2011-09-12T12:24:00.009-04:00

Much of last week was dominated by my darling Progeny Unit's case of being illin'. The poor little kiddo has acid reflux, so we have her on a drug and off the natural BoobJuice and onto a special formula (cost as if made from ground gold, awkward to construct, makes poo smell horrific). What's worse is the little tyke is still obviously in pain...it might be getting better, but it ain't there yet, and she ain't comfortable.

I don't want to minimize her discomfort, and I know she must be feeling terrible. I cannot, however, shake my personal viewpoint. Namely, I feel horrible and useless. She's not happy, and there's utterly nothing I can do about. My knowledge goes to feeding, to diapers, to rocking her, and to singing Eagles songs in my limited, creaky voice, and when all those fail me, it's frustrating. It generally puts a black cloud over my mood.

This is where I was when my Spousal Unit came home from work on Friday. She took one look at me and told me "you need to get out tonight. No, it's okay...you really need to get out."

Luckily, there were entertainment options. I live in an awesome town, and it was the weekend of the Black Swamp Arts Festival...which is truly one of the greatest weekends of the Bowling Green social calender. This year, it caused the clouds to lift.

Because of the BSAF, everything became shiny.

I walked downtown, hit the Thai food vendor (chicken on a stick, fried rice, and a noodle dish), and headed toward the parking-lot-turned-beer-garden. The chicken particularly is awesome and shiny...I half suspect they baste it in butter. Halfway through my meal, I saw my former bass player. In spite of her duties as festival chair, she sat down with me, hung out, and, as I shoveled delicious Thai food into my gullet, we had a great talk about our former band and our changing relationship to music. She was called away for festival duties/hobnobbing, but then some other friends came by...then some more...then some more. Eventually, some of us got close to the stage to watch the very cool Stone Foxes play before I had to head home.

Next morning, my Spousal Unit had to work, so I was back on kiddie duty...but, far from being uncomfortable, the kiddo was in a positively bright mood. The Progeny Unit woke up just fine. She was happy when I woke her, happy when I changed her, happy when I fed her, and happy afterward. She fell asleep in my arms, and she was calm when I was able, with very little effort, to get her back asleep in her crib. She had a good nap, during which my spousal unit returned bearing carry-out.

After a meal/brief conversation, we got a call from an awesome friend who asked, "would you like me to come over and babysit your daughter so you two can go to the art festival?" So, an hour later, my darling Spousal Unit and I were walking hand in hand down main street, sun shining on our faces, looking at art, meeting friends, sharing an order of freshly cut french fries, and just having a wonderful time being a married couple again after a few months of being parents only. The art was even shinier this year...lotsa new artists, really cool and inventive stuff. Spousal Unit bought a postcard from this local artist who did watercolors of Halloween-esque stuff and interpretations of The Wizard of Oz. I saw about thirty seven things I just really needed to have and vowed to become a millionaire by next year's fest.

We got home, and our kiddo was just fine...beaming, even. After a good afternoon and dinner, I had to go back downtown as my new band The Black Swamp Rats was playing a show at the auxiliary rock stage.

I got there a bit early and loaded my stuff into the bar. For some reason which escapes me, they had some hip-hop guy playing in the rock club, so I jetted out of there and went back to the main stage. I ran into my new bass player, we met my old bass player, and went to the front of the stage to see Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears. The band was, for some reason, all wearing matching black pants and shiny white (albeit not matching) shirts...but in spite of the pseudo-costumes, they utterly rocked. Joe Lewis in particular played guitar as if he was strangling the thing...which is the way it should be.

When my bassist and I got back to Howards, there was (again, for reasons which escape me) a trio playing. There was a guy on a computer. There was a guy playing death metal guitar (albeit with less melody). There was a drummer who was wearing a gas mask. They weren't as good as they sound as if they'd be, and we were to follow them. Luckily, though, the room filled back up as we set up. It was a new experience for me...playing in a new band (with whom I haven't had a full band practice), without a set list. It went fine, though. Actually, better than fine. There was a packed room. There was fairly raucous applause. There was dancing...I first noticed the woman in the shiny red dress swaying, but there were multiple dancers in the crowd.

I did a few screw-ups during the set, but they were the kind that, unless you knew my parts, you wouldn't really notice. Fortunately, I'm really the only one who knows my parts, and in general, my playing--particularly in my solos--was shiny. I think I passed the audition, because as I was getting my stuff off stage, my bassist came over, shook my hand, and thanked me for joining the band.

I got a good audience reaction as well. Although there weren't a lot of my friends in the bar (two of my closest were there for the set, but my gig lined up with someone else's birthday), I did receive several compliments. My singer told me [name redacted-local rock star] was checking out my guitar, and the singer for a cool band (with whom Analog Revolution played our first gig) told me I sounded really good in The Black Swamp Rats. Later, I got further confirmation that I did alright when, as I was hauling my equipment out of the bar, [name redacted-local rock star] (with whom I've never talked) bounded over, shook my hand, and told me I did "an excellent job."

The next morning, my Spousal Unit told me the Progeny Unit went to bed around 9 and slept through the night. When the kiddo woke up, she was again happy. After the feeding, I put her down on her play mat, and she was smacking the hanging octopus and giggling...generally in a bright mood.

Strangely enough, right about the time The Black Swamp Arts Festival was over, my daughter turned cranky again. The only real lesson from all this? Art festivals make everything glow.

D2D

2011-09-02T22:38:00.003-04:00

Sitting at home on a Friday night? Watching your spousal unit feed your progeny unit while others are at the bar? Why, you need a drink! I call this one the "Drinker to Daddy":

four ice cubes go into a highball glass
add one measure of dark rum to remind yourself of the exotic life you used to lead
add a half measure of peppermint schnapps for the zest your drinking friends are no doubt experiencing
add a half measure of strawberry liquor for sweetness to rival the smile of your kiddo
top with cran-grape and stir

road trip!

2011-09-01T10:07:00.001-04:00

I'm on a music mailing list, where, for the last few days, people have been sharing stories of their most notable concert roadtrips. Here's my entry:

I was not, at first, a big fan of the Black Crowes. They came to my hometown of Jacksonville, FL on the Southern Harmony and Musical Companion tour. I heard them occasionally on MTV and our otherwise Classic Rock-obsessed radio station (which, to this day, has a playlist which is 95% stolen from 1986), but none of their stuff really bowled me over...so I decided not to go. Day of the show, I'm sitting at my computer doing homework (be fair and honest: I was probably playing solitaire), and the retro rock radio channel, in honor of the show, decides to play two straight hours of the Black Crowes. The more I listen, the more I'm getting into them. After about an hour, I decide I really wanna go see them...just as the dj announces the show has sold out.

Grrr. I decide to instead do what anyone disappointed in life would do...go to the bar. On the way home, I get pulled over. I'm driving a 1973 Plymouth Duster that is, without a doubt, the worst car in the world (passenger door only opens from the inside, driver's door only opens from the outside, the roof leaks so much holes got punched in the floorboard to drain the car, there's an ecosystem of some unkillable alien mold, and there's no foam padding in the front seat...only a folded rain coat prevents me from having a metal enema whenever I drive), and it's about 30 outside, and my heater doesn't work...so, in spite of me going relatively light on the beer, I'm shaking from the cold and can't pass the field sobriety test.

I head to jail. I pass the breathalizer test, but the technician decides to book me anyway, telling me that, under Florida law, if the arresting officer thinks I'm drunk, my blood alcohol level only has to be relatively close. Legal precision! Nice!

They put me in the holding cell. One of the cellmates was convinced the skin around his...um...reproductive organs was peeling, so he was walking around with his pants around his ankles, scratching himself (that is, until the nice officers came in, grabbed him, slammed him against the wall, and moved him into an isolation cell). Another gentleman was cold and kept trying to steal people's jackets...but everyone just basically told him to screw himself. An intimidator, he was not. Then he took to yelling at the guards, saying he had a health condition. Then he started to insulate himself by wrapping himself up with toilet paper. Then they moved me into a cell block, where my cellmate was a crack dealer.

All this because I didn't go to a show. It was a mistake, I vowed, which I would never repeat. So, when the Black Crowes toured again in our area, I decided to go. Problem one: it was in Gainesville, roughly two and a half hours away. Solution: get a bunch of friends to go with. Problem two: I got suckered into driving, which was an issue because, by that time, the Duster had died (threw a rod the day after I gave it to my brother), and I was in a not-all-that-spacious-bordering-on-microscopic Honda Prelude. Solution: cram a total of eight people inside as if using a clown car. Problem three: tickets were pricey. Solution: wait until band put special $3 "crowes nest" tickets"...because we were all cheap/broke.

We somehow got to Gainesville and untangled everyone in the car. It was at the arena where University of Florida plays basketball, which seats roughly eight thousand or so. There were about two hundred people on the floor, and the rest of the arena was pretty much empty...except for these "crowes nest" cheap seats, which were fairly full but as far away as humanly possible from the stage. I sat down as The Dirty Dozen Brass Band (the openers...who were awesome) started...at least I think it was them and not a bunch of ants with miniature tubas. Then a guy next to me asked me if I wanted a hit...not off his joint, but off his two foot tall water bong. The security guard in the area just shook his head. I politely declined the offer, by the way.

The Black Crowes came on, played for exactly one hour and fifteen minutes, were fairly lame, and then the lights came on. We left the arena and lubed everyone up to squeeze into my Hot Wheels-esque car for the ride home. Our travel time was longer than the show itself...which, itself, was fairly unimpressive.

At least, though, I didn't get arrested this time.

bone creak

2011-08-26T08:56:00.002-04:00

(warning: whining content ahead)

I feel old.

It hasn't always been this way. Until recently, I never really thought of my age. Now, though, I feel it in my bones.

Physically, I'm worn out. On top of my right shoulder pains, I now also have something pulled/torn/silly puttied in my left shoulder...which means my good shoulder now has the unmitigated audacity to hurt more than my bad shoulder. To add a hilarious twist, the exercises which keep my right shoulder at bay seem to exacerbate my left. Do the exercised and increase the pain on one side, or take an exercise break and increase the pain on the other side? Hum.

I'm tired. My progeny unit's erratic sleep schedule is starting to get to me, in spite of my spousal unit taking care of most of the night stuff. Night before last, the progeny unit slept through the night. This is only the second time this has happened. The first time led to about 4 hours of sleep the following night. Yesterday, the pattern of not wanting to sleep at all after a full night's sleep held true, and I fear I might have to tell my daughter she's doing it wrong. Additionally, the erratic sleeping on her part means it was a particularly bad time for my insomnia to return. Moreover, I can't even start on the coffee until she finally wakes up because my burr bean grinder sounds like a jet engine...and I have definitely learned not to wake up an under-rested baby as to not unleash her fury.

Work-wise, I'm disconnected. Summers are normally the time to do writing, reading, research...basically remember why I became an academic. This summer, I have only read thirty pages of one of the dozen scholarly books I brought home from the office, have spent a few hours finding a possible place to submit one of my two unpublished papers (which still required I mail in three physical copies; I resisted the urge to introduce them to e-mail or the 21st century) and failed completely to find a home for the other. Furthermore, I have more or less abandoned my closest-to-being-ready-to-write essay as being too far removed from events to be relevant...much like myself.

Job-wise, I'm stagnant. Yes, I should be thankful to even have a job, but this year, a record number of friends and accomplices found work...in their field...with possible futures. More than one have had encouraging news from book publishers. Me? It has been, unless my memory fails, about four years since I've received anything other than a form rejection from anywhere I've applied. I am at a dead end. I am trying to come to terms with the fact that I will never be anything other than what I am, that there is essentially no longer an upside to my career, but it's hard; in spite of having really known this for years, to have your failure finally driven home? It is wearying. A while back, I used to tell my students that the difference between me and some much smarter MA colleagues was that I was a better worker, which is why I went on to get my PhD and they did not. However, these people do the exact same job as I and started doing so immediately after getting their MA. So the real difference? I have earned less, have higher credit card and student loan bills, yet we have the exact same career path. At least the world respects my highest of academic degrees....right? Right?

Life-wise, I feel I've missed out on so much. Why, I've been asking myself lately, did I not take the two years I took off between getting my two year and four year degree and do something interesting, like move to Colorado? Why did I not follow the lead of some friends and move into some career which would've allowed me to have a house, a new car, a pool table, something that would've meant I'd never have to life in the student ghetto for a decade? It's gotten to the point where I've quit watching any and all home improvement television out of the sheer jealousy and class hatred it evokes.

Socially, I feel isolated. A new crop of faces has entered our college town, and I've met none of them. Several people left our town without having a chance to say goodbye. And the people that are still here? The holdovers? Well, I rarely see anyone. I have one weeknight where I can go out--the Tuesdays at Howards, and this was the first time in weeks I've seen a few of my friends. Others, I haven't seen in close to a month. One friend called me several days last week to invite me out after I told him I couldn't go out anymore.

Yeah, I know. I'm whining again. Moreover, I'm ignoring all the wonderful things that are happening in my life, especially my beautiful spousal unit, my awesome progeny unit, my cool new band. However, I said a while ago I was going to be honest and open...and if you know me, you know whining is part of that honesty.

Last night, I took the second of what turned out to be many attempts to put my daughter to sleep. I picked her up, took her to the bedroom, swaddled her, and she started to scream, to flail. It was one of those times where she just would not be placated, where all of my (normally successful) tricks abandoned me. It's hard enough emotionally to bear her screams in the best of times. She yells with her whole body, her bottom lip starts to quiver, and she gains an Exorcist-esque pitch and timbre. Factor in my flaring shoulders, the mounting insomnia, and I came close to weeping myself.

Please tell me it will get better. Barring that, please tell me I will get tougher.

The Heating Pad

2011-08-25T21:53:00.003-04:00

Have two types of tendinitis in one shoulder...and a pulled muscle in the other (which actually hurts worse)? Still working on recovering from the insomnia which had the bad timing to ruin for you a rare sleep-through-the-night session from your progeny unit? Afraid to say too much about your afflictions in fear of having friends call you a whiner? Why, you need a drink:

take a double dose of some generic ibuprofen variety
place three ice cubes in a cocktail glass
add one measure of Tennessee whiskey (although rye or bourbon would do in a pinch)
add one half measure of triple sec
top with a good ginger beer
hope the concoction quells the aches in your torso

addendum

For the second go-round (hey, the recipe only uses half of the ginger beer...I have to make another!), as the original drink used up all my Tennessee whiskey, I was moving to rye....although I wasn't singing "this will be the day that I die" or indeed anything else. I decided to similarly replace the triple sec with some strawberry liqueur. The resulting variation? I call it The Ice Pack.

The Urchin Sabbatical

2011-08-22T22:20:00.003-04:00

Contemplating a semester with no student contact? Had a long day being parental/homemaker/cooking unit? Need a pick-me-up? Well, then, you're in luck...because it's time for a new drink! I call this one The Urchin Sabbatical:

put a few ice cubes into a highball glass to remind yourself what a cold, lonely world it can be
add a measure of vodka in honor of all the drunken undergrads you will never meet
add a half measure of raspberry schnapps in salute to the fruity comrades who are taking your classes while you wash diapers
top with a good ginger beer...because you're a zesty guy, damnit
stir, sip, enjoy, while contemplating late night feedings

a conversation

2011-08-20T09:37:00.002-04:00

An exchange:

"Sorry you didn't get much sleep last night. I tried to get her to go down, but she was fighting it."

"Don't worry. You tried hard. You're a marvelous daddy."

"It's just so aggravating. I just want her to sleep, and she's regressing. She's sleeping like a two week old again."

"It'll get better. Remember, our doctor said some babies start to sleep regularly in two months, some take four..."

"Yeah, I know, but it just seems to be getting worse. Honestly, I'm just really exhausted...and you're getting less sleep than I am."

"Well, don't take this the wrong way, but I'm just a less cranky person than you."

"Duh. The only person I know who is more cranky is [name redacted]. Honestly, I'm so cranky, I'm surprised no one's offered me my own talk show."

on bad ideas

2011-08-19T08:59:00.004-04:00

Do you ever have one of those thought which you just know is a horrible and rotten idea, the kind of thing which no one in their right mind would do or even condone, yet the idea persists nonetheless? My latest experience with such thoughts centered around my daughter.

Tuesday and Wednesday nights were not exactly quiet and peaceful in the TheMikeDuBose household. The progeny unit, for reasons which will remain a mystery until she learns how to talk (which should be some time next week, right?) decided that sleep was for chumps. Furthermore, she also decided that if she had to sleep, there was no point falling off unless she had spent an average of six hours, seventeen minutes actively fighting sleep...mostly by screaming and flailing. Now, for the record, I love the little bugger wholeheartedly, but the sleep ... um, difficulties ... did not have a positive effect on household morale in general.

Wednesday night, we gave her the supposedly calming and soothing bath, and by 9:30, my darling spousal unit went to put the progeny unit to sleep. I was catching up on chores, so I don't know exactly what was happening. Enough was clear, though, to realize that whatever was going on in the nursery, it didn't involve slumber, rest, or anything else we parental units might actively desire.

A half hour till midnight, I took over get-thee-to-rest duty so the spousal unit could lay down. The progeny unit, however, had no intention of doing anything of the sort, and she made this very clear in an extremely voluminous manner. She's a darlng girl, but if she's not happy or doesn't want to do something, she will let you and your ear drums know. Things got incrementally worse if I had the gall to, say, try sitting or even leaning against something. Somewhere after an hour of holding my darling, wonderful girl who insisted on flailing, screaming, and generally acting like a stunt double for The Exorcist, I had an idea.

What, I pondered, would happen if I matched her scream-for-blood-curdling-scream? If every time she yelled in my face, I yelled back in hers? If every time she flailed her body, I did likewise? It would, I decided, be tremendously stress-relieving (and, by this point, I had more than a little stress). It would be therapeutic in that it might take my mind off my tendinitis-weakened shoulder and inflamed back, both glowing after a few hours of pacing and rocking the little bundle of hellion-esque joy. Moreover, it would, to an outside observer, probably be pretty funny...imagine walking into a room and seeing a father holding his screaming daughter, leaning into her face, matching her scream-for-scream, decibel-for-decibel. Kid lets out an "EEERRRGGGGHHHKK?" Parent leans over, looks on in pride, and then lets out an even louder "EEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!"

Even in my mentally weak state, though, I realized such an action, while cathartic and possibly entertaining, very well might not be in anyone's best interest. Luckily, somewhere around 1:47, the progeny unit calmed down on her own and fell asleep. I kissed her, laid her down in her crib, and told her that I loved her in spite of any demonic fits she might display. I then crawled into bed for some blissful, restorative slumber, my thoughts of screaming directly in my daughter's face receding.

In case you're wondering: the benefit of this particular struggle/yelling session? A little over an hour sleep on each side.

somebody get me a doctor

2011-08-16T10:29:00.003-04:00

A little over two months ago, me and the spousal unit welcomed our progeny unit into the world. Ever since then, it has been landmark after landmark: first time rolling over by herself (which actually happened her first night home), first sleep through the night (which hasn't happened since), first word (which sounded like "BBBBBRRRAAAWWWAAAGGGHHHH!!!" ... but very loud), first unbelievably scary diaper (the less said, the better), and first stock market tip (for a cryogenics company). This week, we have hit another landmark: first hospital bill.

Frankly, I'm glad. That means only a few more payments, and we'll own that kid outright.

They would've started rolling in earlier, but there were, of course, insurance mix-ups and bureaucratic snafus. At the hospital, they insisted our darling kiddo have the spousal unit's last name on all paperwork even though we were giving her my last name in real life. Of course, this led to rejected insurance claims, and I had to make separate calls to straighten out the mess with the facility's billing and the hospital's billing...which apparently are separate corporations in spite of occupying the same space/time coordinates. Stephen Hawking should be consulted on this anomaly.

We got the first actual bills yesterday. Honestly, they weren't as scary as I was expecting (which cannot, incidentally, be said about placenta). Unlike many of my fellow countrymen, I actually have pretty good insurance...which is one of the reasons I urge all you to join me in a rousting chorus:

The bills are, however, still curious. Both of them are from companies which label themselves "consultants," and this is frankly something I don't understand. If it's just a name thing, okay...hell, trucking companies are now "logistics corporations," so if a fancy title makes you sleep at night, I, as a former asphalt pigmentation application specialist, certainly understand. However, now when I see a statement from "Anesthesiology Consultants," I have to start wondering if it was an actual anesthesiologist whose services we used. Did the person who delivered my spousal unit's drugs really need to consult with someone? Will we get a bill for both actual and theoretical anesthetic services? How many medical people does it take to deliver an epidural?

Now...when is that damn diaper consultant gonna show up?

the second band

2011-08-13T22:28:00.002-04:00

Time for a new mixed drink? Why, yes, it is!

Fill a highball glass half full of ice
Add one measure of cheap Scotch
Add one half measure of Raspberry Schnapps
Top with Seven Up
Drink, enjoy, and wonder how you're going to learn a full set in one week before your debut in a new band

life in the swamp

2011-08-12T08:42:00.004-04:00

Ripple effects. They're everywhere. Even, it seems, in rock and roll.

Way back at the start of the night, when my old band Analog Revolution played our first show, I remember being on stage, nervous as all hell, setting up my equipment. As I was running wires to my effects pedals, the guitarist from the third band started hauling his equipment through the stage door. He stopped and said, "Hey, cool homemade pedalboard, man!" Partway through the set, said guitarist hung out on the side of the stage for a song or two to watch me play. After we finished, said guitarist was the first person to come up to me to tell me we sounded good.

So went my first introduction to Sr. Bob Wobbly.

Bob started showing up to most of our shows...it was a sure bet that if I would look off the stage, I would see his ball cap. When his first band started not playing out frequently enough for him, he started another. When he got bored, he recruited my awesome singer and bassist for a third band. And when he found out Analog Revolution was breaking up, he asked me if I wanted to join him in what would be his fourth band. The man, it must be said, really likes music.

A few months ago, when his second band (the awesomely named Black Swamp Rats) were opening for Analog, I realized they were (in all deference to Kitty Glitter and , both of which I like) my favorite band of his. When I booked Analog's final gig, they were the first band I asked to play with us. And during that final gig, I ended up dancing/fake moshing/hurting myself when they were blasting on stage...all the while thinking "man, I'd love to play with them."

Now, Bob and I had already decided to play together, and I had thought long and hard about the new band...how we would sound, what we would do, what the theory behind our approach would be. I wrote about 11 songs, recorded eight demos, and had been (sort-of) working on lyrics. Only one problem: we had nowhere to practice. I would've offered my house, but there's not enough space...plus rock band rehearsals and 2 month old kiddies don't mix. We couldn't play at Bob's place, because he now lives above a pizza joint. While the band had good songs, a good approach, and would itself have a lot of up-side, it was also looking like that potential would take ages to reach...and it might be up to a year before we could actually play out.

Wednesday night, I got a call from Bob asking me if, rather than start a new band, I would rather just join the Black Swamp Rats as a second guitarist.

I thought about it for about half a nano-second before saying yes. I told him (honestly) I was honored. If he would've asked, I would've told him I would've rather played with the Swamp Rats than anyone else around...particularly since The Hold Steady continues to not call for my services.

So it's official: I am now a Black Swamp Rat. So we're going to meet Monday and discuss strategy. I know not all of the songs we wrote for the 4th Bob band project (which, incidentally, was gonna be called The Bombastics) will work for the Black Swamp Rats...but hell, I don't care. They have a definite sound, and it's one in which I think I can easily fit and even enhance. Plus, I know they kick ass...so it should be really, really fun. Hell, the drummer's already sent me a "welcome to the band" e-mail.

Ever since the call, I have been slightly giddy. The last two nights, I've had problems getting to sleep because my mind won't quit working on guitar parts. It's gonna be good.

empty houses

2011-08-09T12:28:00.004-04:00

It's just a line from your old town

where we're still drinking to the times

when you were around

Last night, I told a friend that we were at what was both the best and the worst party I've been to in a while. The two of us were on the front porch swing, as friends inside listened to music, talked, and drank to our friends who were leaving the state in the morning.

One of my friends got an awesome tenure-track job in Washington state, so both of them decided to hold an empty house party last night before getting up this morning for their cross-country trek to their new home, to their new lives. Naturally, I am truly happy for them both. You gotta love new adventures, and you particularly have to love when someone's career path/dream pans out...because that is increasingly rare nowadays. So a large part of me is thrilled that life was going in a good direction for them.

I also realize how greatly enriched my life has been by knowing both of them. Without these two, I wouldn't have played in a band, got to know several other people, had so many fun nights listening to music together, talking at the bar, hanging out on our back porch, discussing new (to me) ideas, generally and genuinely connecting with two wonderful people.

So there is a lot of good here. Yet they're still leaving my life. That street, that house, they will now just be another addition to the increasingly long list of places where friends of mine used to live.

I've mentioned before that my father was in the military. Even though he made great efforts to try and give us as close to a normal life as he could, there was still a lot out of his control. He might keep us at one base for five years, but our friends would still regularly move out. Starting school each year was starting over. Who would be here this time? That person who you used to talk to during recess? They were now in Guam, or on the west coast, or somewhere else...it didn't really matter where, because the only real important thing was that they were far from where you lived.

When my Dad retired, we moved to his hometown of Jacksonville. The first immediate difference I noticed (apart from the hellish heat and humidity) was that when I went to school that first day, there weren't a bunch of people who were looking for new friends because their best friend's dad just got transferred to the other side of the world. No, everybody had a full array of friends, because they had known the same people all their lives. That, it seemed, was the big difference between being the kid of a military man and being the child of a civilian.

I lived in Florida for fourteen years, and I kinda got used to knowing the same people for years on end. When I entered my doctoral program, though, it flung me back into the realm of short-term friends. Although the people I have met up here are the best friends I've ever had, I still have to brace myself for their eventual departure.

Each year, the list of places where friends used to live grows, and simple strolls around town become an exercise in mental three dimensional archeology. I walk down this street, where my friend is now in Minnesota. This house is one a few people I know shared; now they are in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Maryland respectively. I turn down another street. My friend from Romania used to live in this apartment complex. I walk past another house, and I have no idea if the dear friend who used to live here is permanently a resident of Michigan or of Norway. I head home and pass the complex where my friend used to live who died unexpectedly this past year.

It's wearying.

I had these thoughts last night, as my soon-to-be-departing friends were holding what was admittedly a righteous party...good music, good friends, good food, good drink, good conversation...yet it was already a prelude to an empty place where yet more departed friends used to live.

late night realizations

2011-08-03T09:36:00.003-04:00

One of the awesome gifts someone got my progeny unit in one of her thirteen baby showers is a stuffed bear which plays sounds designed to calm or keep a child asleep. Choices include waves crashing on the beach, rain, a mother's heartbeat (recorded in utero), and whale songs. It's honestly pretty cool...you push a button, and it provides an hour of sounds while you (supposedly) get your urchin to sleep.

Last night/way too early this morning, my progeny unit woke up. Spousal unit fed progeny unit and then handed her off to me (seeing as I am the daytime caretaker unit and she has to work). Progeny unit, though, was decidedly un-tired. I had every trick in the book (literally; someone just recommended The Happiest Baby on the Block, and I was pulling out every bit of advice, to relatively decent effect), but that little kid was fighting sleep with all she got.

After three hours, several sleep sound machine re-sets, and two failed feeding attempts, she finally went back down to la-la land...and in her crib, no less! I then collapsed in my own bed. As I lay there trying to shut off my mind, I could still hear the whale sounds playing from down the hall. They say whale songs are language of a sort. This immediately set me thinking: what exactly are these particular whales saying? What if these whales are trying to corrupt my kiddo? What kind of insidious whale-messages exactly am I unwittingly piping into my daughter's room?

What if these whales are terrorists? Drug addicts? RIAA supporters? Karaoke singers? Tea partiers? Baseball fans? What if they're evil in some other way, like maybe being Rachel Ray fans? You see? We really have no idea what they're saying...and this is something I never considered until I became a father...more specifically, a father awake at 5am, running on two hours of sleep.

Yeah, sure, they're probably just talking about plankton availability...but can we really take that chance? What about the children? Won't someone think of the children????.

I am, by the way, realizing exactly how much I now need coffee.

sing and scream

2011-08-02T11:00:00.005-04:00

I have a seven week old child who, in spite of being loving, lovely, loved, and generally sweet, also in fact...well, she's a seven week old child. This means that, no matter how awesome she might be the vast majority of the time, there will inevitably be anywhere from 1-7 daily screaming fits/meltdown periods lasting anywhere from five minutes to three hours apiece.

I was, on some level, prepared for this. People, particularly pernicious parents, went out of their way to describe the screams I would face. Our parenting classes even had a video about this called The Blue Period...which inexorably built to the moral: no matter how much your kid might scream, don't shake them. Somehow, they left out telling us we should not drop-kick our kid, put said child in the microwave, slip in vodka into her bottles, or so forth (which, I guess, were inferred to just be common sense, unlike the shaking thing).

The thing is, though, as much as one can intellectually prepare for events, sometimes there is no substitute for actual experience. When my lovely, beautiful, exceptional-in-every-way child started to get upset, I expected screams. I did not, however, expect Exorcist-level wails...or, for that matter, the accompanying spinning head.

I do all the standard things to calm her down. I cuddle, talk in reassuring tones, pace around, perform a sacred hoop dance. The thing that tends to have the most effect is (to the extent anything actually helps, that is) singing to her. I sing Wilco songs. I dive into Son Volt, Neil Young, classic rock, indy rock, all kinds of things. But what, you might ask, has the highest "soothing loud babies" quotient? What artist works the most wonders on my kiddo?

It's The Eagles.

Seriously. My kid is, more often than not, soothed most effectively when I sing Eagles songs to her. My progeny unit finds The Eagles's Their Greatest Hits: 1971-1975 to be both calming and relaxing. She seems to like "Take It to the Limit," "Lying Eyes," "Desperado," and "Take It Easy" above the others. While I'm not saying they're the key to Magical Sleeping Baby Moment, more often than not, if my girl starts to come down from a meltdown, I've been singing one of these four songs to her.

This is actually fine by me. While I know how fashionable it is to utterly hate The Eagles, I've always kinda liked them...and I am now old enough, secure in my identity, and generally don't give enough of a rat's tuchus to feel bad about admitting that in public. I know this puts me at odds with many of my friends (including my old bandmates, who, when I suggested doing a punk version of "Lying Eyes," looked at me like I just suggested adding cannibalism to our stage show). I can't tell you why they hate them so much--probably something to do with irrational country music hatred--but ultimately, I don't care.

As long as their songs help my daughter take it easy and dry her crying eyes, thus giving her a peaceful, easy feeling, I don't care if The Eagles give my friends a heartache tonight. I will continue to like The Eagles and encourage my daughter to do the same. If my daughter is crying as if suffering from a heartache tonight, I will sing, sing, thus, in some small way, giving her the best of my love.

Although, if the singing quits working, one of you might need to bring me a tequila sunrise or something.

time keeps on slippin'

2011-08-01T11:40:00.003-04:00

A few months before the "blessed event," I was in my office during the last week of classes, clearing up some last minute tasks...damning students, filling out paperwork, and the like. One of my former bosses (who, once upon a time, had the temerity to actually hire me) stopped by, and we briefly chatted...the "brief" bit being a necessity, as former boss's new position has her transferring from being merely busy to being one of the busiest humanoid beings in existence, apparently. She asked, among other things, how the (then still in-progress) pregnancy was going.

Eventually, she got that demonic look on her face (I know it well; she was my boss) and asked "Do you know what they call the first six weeks after delivery? The worst part of the pregnancy!" She then vacated, leaving me alone to face this portent of doom (as she is want to do).

For the longest of time, I would hear similar warnings about the first six weeks of life as being hell-like. I would, it seems, never sleep, never see anyone, never have a moment of sanity. We were bombarded with warnings, threats, hellacious laughter. This taught me, as I recounted earlier, that parenthood tends to turn parents into sadists...at least when around parents-to-be.

But there was always that time element. Six weeks. A month and a half. Conquer that, the implied message of hope claimed, and you can conquer anything.

Yesterday, our progeny unit hit the seven week mark...and I've been noticing that, for the last few weeks, the words of warning from prior parents have been changing as our baby ages. First there was one simple "oh, if you get through the first two months, you will be fine." Then someone claimed 2-3 months. Next, I heard "half a year, and it will get easy." Some other well(?)-wisher told me it would be the first year.

What are you bastards doing to me? Enough with the threats! Just come on out, tell me it gets easier after the 22nd year, and get it over with!

daytime caretaker unit diary

2011-08-01T10:30:00.003-04:00

Today, I move from just being a paternal unit to being...(pause here for dramatic tension)...a sole daytime progeny caretaker unit. It is an awesome amount of responsibility...not to mention being a lot longer to type.

For the first seven weeks after d-day, the maternal unit was here with me, and we shared the joyous act of caring for the progeny unit. Unfortunately, maternal unit had to go back to work. We would've loved to have her here longer, but she's part time and therefor doesn't get paid when she doesn't work...and we are not, unfortunately, independently wealthy. While I perfectly understand the "you gotta work to get money" thing, I don't really get the whole "parenthood is blessed, but you don't deserve time with your new urchin unless you're rich" thing. A while back, I found out (via this post on the awesome Sociological Images) that the US is one of only six countries worldwide that don't require employers to offer paid maternity leave (go US!). I guess we, as a country, think it's either work or parenthood, but not both. I will agree with my female brethren: this just don't seem fair.

Fortunately, though, I have a good job. Yes, it's outside my field; yes, I have to read a lot of papers (of the "welcome to college" student quality level); and yes, I'm pretty just a worker bee/university slave, but there are real benefits...the chief one (relevant to this conversation, anyway) is my semester of paid parenthood leave...hence me being the daytime daddy.

Naturally, this is gonna dominate my thinking for a little while. However, I promise not to go all "oooh, you should see the adorable thing my kiddie did today" on you. No one wants to read that. Besides, without the accompanying possibility of spit-up, you would only be getting half the story anyway.

But it does mean a few things relevant to our time together, mainly: in between the feedings (one so far today), diaper changes (several, with one in particular bordering on "great googly-moogly" territory), meltdowns (one so far, but that was solved by me rocking her while singing The Eagles), and diaper washing (in progress as we speak...all hail the high efficiency machine...as I would really hate to drag these suckers to the creek and beat them between two rocks), I will finally find time to blog again. This will likely happen mostly, I suspect, during naps (hers, not mine).

Now I just gotta learn to type quietly.

The Sleeping Baby

2011-06-23T23:40:00.003-04:00

You know what it's time for? Yepper, a new drink! I call this one "The Sleeping Baby":

take a highball glass/juice glass/sippie cup and put in a few ice cubes
add one measure of vodka while thinking of the gulags
add one measure of wild strawberry liqueur while thinking of the forests
add a half measure of raspberry schnapps while wondering why "raspberry" has a "p" in the name
top off with orange juice
stir, drink, relax, and watch your formerly sleeping child squirm

on establishing a permanent record

2011-06-22T09:33:00.003-04:00

Because of the blessed nature of being in a really good band, I am and can fully conceive of myself as a musician. One of the things that musicians do (other than annoying their family, friends, passers-by; put on the facade of a monster ego to cover up mass insecurities; and make a lot of noise in loud venues populated by intoxicated people, some of whom would rather be either dancing or playing bar-top trivia games) is record. Hell, even if it wasn't part of the standard musician playbook, I'd want to establish a permanent record of my music if just for the "I must live on forever! MWAHAHAHA!" part of my personality alone.

So, how is the recording process? Surely, you are thinking, it must be fabulous getting the chance to finally document your material. How could it be anything other than interesting taking sounds in your heat, moving them from your fingers, into steel strings, through magnets, wire, effects, tubes, speakers...all in concert with other musicians who you love and trust? How could this not be utterly and completely fascinating? Enthralling? Transcendent?

Well...

I still want to eventually do good professional recordings one day, to have on tape (or some digital facsimile thereof) a version of one of my songs which approaches the version in my head. But, if my experiences are typical in any way whatsoever, I am not sure how bands can spend more than a few weeks in the studio and come out with their sanity. How, perchance, might someone be a member of Boston or Guns N' Roses? How could you survive multiple years in the studio working on the same damn collection of ten songs?

The above, though, was my current band's attempt to just do some raw, mic-in-the-room recordings, and there are occasional technical hiccups in any situation which have to be addressed...so, for the record, we are not usually sitting around, reading, or passed out while someone twists knobs and hits things. We are, however, responsible for each other's feelings, attitudes, and opinions, so we have to give each other a lot of space...which means, rather than a "let's bust out our set in an hour" session, recording tends to be play once, wait while people listen and judge the take, and play again...albeit twenty minutes after the previous take. I understand the lack of flow, but it is still an issue for my level of playing and of interest.

Doing it on your own, though, is not really any quicker or less aggravating.

I have mentioned before that, after Analog Revolution goes away, I have another project in the works. In this new band-to-be, I will be shouldering a decent amount of the conceptual and songwriting load. Well, in the week before the progeny unit showed up, I decided to assemble some rough demos at home...so the other band members would (1) be able to hear the riffs again (since, while I was in the final stages of urchin-readiness, we haven't been practicing) and (2) have a good idea of the structure and overall sound floating in my head.

Stage one was to find a drum machine program...as I possess neither the massively expensive drum set nor the coordination required to play one. There are tons of good programs out there, and some came very highly recommended....but they all cost money, and I am, if nothing else, relatively broke. So I did some arduous searching (well...I googled it) and settled on a nice open-source program.

I then had to learn the program. Operating the software was not really the issues...the program I found is relatively intuitive. No, the difficulty is simply I don't know how to play drums. True, I have listened to drums all my life, and I have known many drummers. Apparently, though, I only gained a slight theoretical knowledge of their craft in the process of hanging out with them. Osmosis, I guess, only gets you so far. Ultimately, I learned the biggest thing to be gleaned by hanging out with drummers is an increased proficiency with profanities.

It took a few days of messing with the program, but eventually, I attained a certain proficiency programming drums. More than anything else, I was amazed by the innate mathematics involved in drumming. Fractions in particular. One song in particular tripped me up for a full day before I realized the drum part needed to be in triplets...which changed the mathematics considerably. This is all funny, because I never really saw any of my drummer friends as math savants...but I guess there's also some intuition at work.

After the drums were programmed, I then set out to record the guitars...which, as I have been playing guitar since 8th grade and had written all the songs in question...well, this should be no problem, huh? Should be "I'm gonna knock out ten guitar tracks, assemble a guitar army, be the envy of Brian May," right? Not the case. When we were doing the Analog Revolution recordings, I was chagrined to find we would only end up with three songs recorded in a three hour session. Why, I wondered, couldn't we speed up the whole process? Hell, Black Sabbath recorded their entire first album in twelve hours.

Wrong again, idiot self. When I recorded on my own, I still did about three songs in a three hour session. I'm not sure if the recording process makes me over-think everything, or if I'm really just that tremendously sloppy/imprecise of a guitar player...probably the latter, which is a tremendous blow to my ego. Even though I was in control of all aspects of these fledgling demos, it still took me forever to do a job that was simply...good enough. Sigh.

I'm now realizing that I need to get back to the live element. I'm much better when there's immediacy between myself and the band, between the band and the audience, when we can get locked into the energy, the emotion, the pure awesome sound, and just let the music take us where it needs to go.

That our audience is drinking and, as a result, has lowered expectations is just a bonus. Yeah...that's what it is.

delayed notification

2011-06-18T11:24:00.005-04:00

I've been understandably busy, or I would've posted about this earlier, but in case you haven't heard from other sources:

World, please say hello to Sylvia Emily DuBose. She arrived on Sunday, 6/12, at 3:35pm, weighing in at 8 pounds, 14 ounces, measuring in at 22". Please be good to her and help her develop into the awesome person she is destined to become.

bugs redux

2011-06-18T11:14:00.003-04:00

Remember the Great Bee Invasion of aught-ten? Well, last night, as I was gaining a few brief hours of passing-out, the spousal unit, hauling the progeny unit, came in exclaiming "bugs!"

I wasn't sure if this was deja vu or flashback. I also suspected sleep psychosis, as the progeny unit, who had been on her best behavior until 11ish, decided to forget how to sleep, rest, or be quiet.

I stumbled out to the living room and saw a few ants with wings on the corner. I grabbed our eco "safe for kids and pets but still stinky" bug killer and returned. I killed the little buggers. I looked down. There were twenty to thirty more. Assassination. Looked around. Thirty ants on the door. Similarly dispatched. I then went outside and soaked the porch, the window frames, and pretty much the corner of the building.

This AM, after finishing the morning pass-out session, I called the landlord, who, after hearing the word "newborn," responded with due haste. I then went into severe clean-up mode...and when I moved our corner lamp, I found even more bugs, this time with ugly-ass bug eggs.

First the bees...then the ants. I'm wondering if I have watched so many fifties monster movies, I've unwittingly entered one.

(Yah, I know. I'm brimming with news, but there is no time/amount of consciousness to tell the accompanying stories. Soon, though...and if you're on Facebook, follow "Sylvia Emily DuBose"...I will be posting videos and photos before too long.)

waiting, art, and science

2011-06-10T11:50:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, I learned about the limits of both art and science.

As y'all undoubtedly know, the spousal unit and I are expecting an urchin. Said urchin was actually due Wednesday. Mighty isn't here yet, though. We're hoping that urchin's lack of punctuality doesn't carry over into the high school years.

Yesterday afternoon, I was introducing the spousal unit to the under-appreciated pleasures of The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr. when she started to feel...it was less a cramp and more a contraction. Eureka! Mighty might actually be beginning preparations for the debut appearance!

So, having read all the books, website feeds, and such, we knew, in order to figure out when we needed the services of our birthing professionals, we had to start the counting, the collection and collating of data. Everything, including the advice of doctors, told us to head to the hospital when contractions hit five minutes apart. I grabbed a pad of paper and pen, and I started writing down times. Contraction one: 1:45 pm. Contraction two: 2:06. Interval: 21 minutes. We stayed at around the 20 minute mark for a few cycles. The 15 minute gap lasted about two hours. Then 10 minutes...then 7 minutes. When we had a couple of consistent 5 minute marks, we made some notification calls & texts, got dressed, and went to the car to start the voyage.

After getting the car parked, getting up to the third floor, and finding the maternity ward (we've been there before, but it's a hospital...it's not tremendously diverse in decor, so the hallways have the distinctiveness of Jeffrey's Tubes), we found out that the female population of Toledo (or at least a significant portion thereof) must've decided last night was the perfect time to spit out a child...the maternity nurses were slammed busy. There was no room at the Inn, so to speak (well, no bed in the triage), so we were pointed to the waiting room. The spousal unit read, I watched NCIS...that is, when we weren't pacing around the waiting room, spousal unit panting, me trying to be kind and sympathetic (as well as anyone who will never personally experience a contraction can be).

After seven hours of contractions and an hour and a half in the waiting room, we were finally shown to triage...which was nowhere near as cool as even MASH made it appear (either the show or the superior movie). They had a radio playing. The song was "How Long Has This Been Going On?" I found this hilarious, but I was very unsure if I should or should not point out the humor to the contracting spousal unit. Score one, though, against the power of art to uplift.

After monitoring, checking, waiting, testing, more monitoring and checking, our doctor (who happened to be on hospital duty) came in to see the spousal unit and immediately declared the spousal unit looked too good, calm, and restful to actually be in labor. We were given a choice: we could either wander around the halls, hoping that a few hours of walking would spur true rather than false labor...or we could go home and wait for the actual labor to start. I innocently asked how we would know when we (well, the spousal unit) had real contractions, real labor if the counting obviously didn't work (as we did the 5-minute-between-contraction thing, which did not lead us to delivery as advertised). Our doc said the spousal unit would just know. I wasn't sure if this was an appeal to the sacred mystery of female intuition (of which men will never understand) or a Yoda reference. Score one, though, against science and procedure.

Yeah, I know it's still early in the process...but this pregnancy/delivery thingie is, to this point, confounding. Oh, well...I'm sure it will just get easier.

infants and mad scientists

2011-06-03T14:48:00.005-04:00

It all started off with technical incompetence. It ends with mad scientist laughter.

When the spousal unit and I got our ultrasound photos of our impending bundle of joy, we decided we wanted to share our images of the little urchin with our friends...never mind that they looked mostly like blobs at that state. Figuring e-mail would be the easiest (not to mention most science-fictiony) way to share the shots, I took the images with me to work. I scanned the photos, tried a whole bunch of settings, but I guess I suck, because the scans were blurry...I mean, even blurrier than ultrasound photos of a few-month-old fetus normally would be. While the department's copier/scanner is great for making pdfs, it's apparently not up to image scanning....or, what is far more likely, I'm just a bit of an idiot when it comes to using it.

So, on the advice of our department secretaries, I hunted down the building's IT guy, and he was happy to scan the ultrasound shots for me. He also heartily congratulated me and told me how happy he's been after having a daughter. He treated me, a complete stranger, in a way which was, upon further reflection, almost like being welcomed into an exclusive group.

Unfortunately, out of those people I've told about Mighty who have their own kids, he's one of the few who've responded in this way.

Usually, I will tell my parent friend that the spousal unit is expecting. Then the lights will dim. Color will seep out of the room. Thunder will crack while lightning flickers simultaneously. And my friend will get that specific evil look in their eye. "Congratulations," they will say, and, following an ominous pause, "your life is going to change in ways you've never suspected."

They warm to their subject. As Tesla coils begin to flash, as the air fills up with the smell of burning ozone, the vibrations of ancient vacuum-tube fueled machinery, the unearthly whine of aertherphones fills my ears. A subtle vibrato creeps into their voice. "You will never get a good night's sleep again. You will hear crying, screaming, gnashing of teeth..."

"um, I don't think my urchin will come out with too many teeth."

They ignore my appeal to logic. "Your child will most certainly be colicky...the crying will never stop. There's nothing you can do. Waaaah. WWWWAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH!!! It's all you will ever hear. It will permanently implant itself in the deepest recesses of your brain."

"Um..."

"And then there's the future. Have you planned for the future? Do you have a good daycare lined up? Have you started on pre-school applications? Do you know in what your kid will major in college?"

"I think I have a little time to..."

"And the money. Did you realize how much babies cost? There's food...clothes...furniture...diapers...office supplies...workout equipment...drum sets...dictaphones....All this costs money, you know."

"Gee, really?"

"And then there's the time. Kids take time. You have to be with them. They always need something. They demand your attention. This means your life as you know it is over. You will have no more social life. No one outside of your work will ever see you. You will have no time to go to bars, see movies, talk to strangers, eat food, use the bathroom."

"Have you considered decaf?"

"It's changing! Everything in your entire world is over. It's all changing. It's all about the kid. This means there's no more room for you...in anything...ever...BBBWWWWWAAAAAHHHHAAAAAAHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!"

At least this has been my experience.

heading out to the country

2011-06-02T14:07:00.004-04:00

Whenever I ask my classes about music, I have at least one (and often many more) who claim "I like every form of music...except country."

I don't believe them, of course. They cannot possibly like absolutely everything. For that matter, they cannot even have experienced a significant sampling of every form of music. My first response is to ask them "Everything? Cool...well, who's your favorite Klezmer artist?" They usually look at me stupidly. I'm expecting that, though, as the whole point of the exercise (and in my class, pretty much everything is an exercise of sorts) is to get them to recognize labels....which, since I annually have students try to convince me there are no genres, is a worthwhile endeavor.

I then slam them on the "country" label. What exactly do they mean by "country?" Do they mean every single artist performing every single variety? Do they include (or have even heard of) alt-country? Bluegrass? Breaking down the country label is important, because it works as a perfect counterpoint to their supposition that there are--or at least, they do not subscribe to--any notion of labels.

Thing is, though, in regard to their distrust of country music, I kinda know how they feel.

I grew up in the South. This means that, for me, there was an influx of Hank Williams Jr. and Garth Brooks (although, to be fair, the latter was probably not geographically limited), and there was something about the music from these two which struck me as...well, formulaic, with a particularly pungent example one being Brooks's song "Rodeo." New Country (so it was called) just hit me wrong. Later, during year one in Ohio, I was riding the off-campus shuttle, and the driver had the radio on a New Country (which, by this time, had achieved such a level of saturation that it was just plain "Country") station, and I finally was able to narrow down exactly the contrived nature of the genre: take out the steel guitar and fiddle, insert a distorted electric, and you would have a hair metal power ballad (which I also loathed). You would, though, have to add a higher level of lyrical obnoxiousness to reach the depths of "She Never Cried When Ole Yeller Died," for which the offending lyricist should be sent to the iron maiden (the medieval torture device, not the band...nah, hell, to one than the other).

It wasn't until I gained a roommate who listened to old-school country (Johnny Cash, Jerry Jeff Walker, Tom T. Hall) where I started to get country, to understand its diversity. Moreover, Cash alone struck me as exponentially more honest than any New Country I've heard. If more people knew this was country, I suspected that maybe the genre wouldn't have such a bad name. In fact, now that I think of it, if I really wanted to get to my students, maybe I could just play them "Sangria Wine" or "Pancho & Lefty."

Most people, though, only have the negative/hokey/cheddar connotations with country music, and so, if they hear anything country-ish, tend to tune out. This includes accents (many Southerners I know hate anything where the singer has a drawl) and instrumentation (fiddle or steel guitar? must be hick!). Hell, I know more than one person who will dismiss a band's whole output if they have one acoustic-based G-C-D song...even if that band happens to be, say, Australian.

This all comes to mind because a few days ago, when I was sorting through my cd collection, I ran across my copy of Billy Squire's Don't Say No and decided to rip it to mp3 for nostalgia's sake. Earlier today, right before lunch, I played the album and live-tweeted my reactions under the hash-tag "isBillySquireStillListenable?" While I found myself still ultimately liking the album (after skipping over a few cheez-puff tracks such as "The Stroke" and ignoring the gloppy production), I kept finding myself thinking of the ineffable connection between country music and arena rock.

There was the obvious one where Squire is, on the cover, playing a Telecaster...which is typically considered a country guitar (though not always; it was in fact their use by the Jacksonville rock bands Radio Berlin and Piewackit which made me want one). There are country chord progressions all over the album, particularly in "I Need You, "My Kinda Lover," and "Don't Say No." True, this is still definitively a rock and roll album, but that doesn't mean country is forgotten. It might even be the nods to country which often contribute to its sing-a-long nature.

Moreover, this is significant in a historical sense. Rock and roll was originally the mad bastard stepchild of a marriage between blues and country music. If you trace rock back to Chuck Berry (as you should), you find yourself with an artist whose songs were remarkably close to country. Slowly, however, in the heavier and more extreme, the familiar country chord structure has been jettisoned, to the point where, in the rare instances we are open to its perception, we don't even recognize it.

Is country now passe? Permanently the land of stereotypes and hicks? Can one even hint at its presence in rock and roll without being castigated, tied to bales of hay and beaten with an old pair of chaps while wearing a crown of tumbleweed?

These are questions I now need to answer.

an evening in the dark

2011-05-31T15:49:00.005-04:00

I will always be alone...to some degree

--Jesse Malin

I am, I hate to admit, a deeply insecure person at heart.

I wish I was brave. I wish I was self-assured. I wish I exuded a certain confidence, a certain flair, a certain panache, where my pure awesomeness drew people to me...only so I would always know I had friends.

I doubt myself constantly. I say goofy things to have something to say and do goofy things (such as order customized guitar picks) to give people some reason to remember me....because without a gimmick, who would pay attention? My darling spousal unit repeatedly tells me my fears are uncalled for, that I'm plenty good enough on my own, and at some level, I guess I believe her...yet I have doubts.

Yesterday, I joked in the morning with my 39-week-pregnant spousal unit that we should hold a massive cook-out/party/bash with everyone we know for Memorial Day. She gave me a look of...I don't actually wanna call it "withering contempt," but the term is in fact kinda accurate. However, about a half hour before band practice, she changed her mind. We had my band over for post-rehearsal hot dogs...and then a few additional friends joined us. We went outside to the back porch, a few of us lit cigars, and we hung out until all hours of the night talking about all kinds of random stuff...from pet ownership, to television shows, to critical theory.

It was awesome.

There's something about a dimly lit area, where friends can gather, hang out with no pressure to perform, see what conversational directions come up. Cigars and beer help...they act as a certain kind of social lubricant, an excuse for us to spend time together, to explore ourselves and each other, to look for points of connection...and often, this is exactly what I need.

An evening at the bar, at the porch, or somewhere similar always gives me a better outlook. It doesn't erase the doubts...hell, I have enough of them to last several lifetimes...but if I can have these friends, experience this level of connection, a night like last night will at least take those "you're not worthy" voices in my head down a notch...which is sometimes all for which a paranoid self-doubter like myself can hope.

academic belonging

2011-05-23T12:52:00.003-04:00

I just read through the last two months of The Chronicle of Higher Education, and I'm angry.

When I first entered the job market, online notifications were not as omnipresent as they are today, so a Chronicle subscription was a necessity if just for the massive job listings...so I subscribed. Along with the job listings, though, the Chronicle offers enough good entry-level primers for key debates in many fields of study, and some of these are, quite frankly, awesome. It was because of Duncan Watts 's piece in the Chronicle, for instance, that I discovered Six Degrees, one of my favorite books. And of course, when my job search did not go as expected, the paper's "Career" section kept me sane by letting me know that I was not alone in my struggles.

It's different now. When I started reading the Chronicle, I was certain it would be nothing but a matter of time until I moved on to a good job, one which would allow me to write more articles, get that book out, generally create and share new knowledge, maybe even make a difference. Now, however, I frankly know better...and that changes everything.

I'm angry at the job posts...even if I was able to apply for them, they would just lead to more depersonalized rejection. I'm angry at the narratives and analyses of the job market, of the state of academia, because they are all stories and takes that are that much more removed from my personal reality. Most of all, however, I'm angry at the overviews of disciplinary debates, the profiles of scholars, all those think-pieces. They just act as reminders that, not only is no one really interested in what I have to say, I will never have time to expand what I have to say into any form which people might eventually find notable.

The Chronicle of Higher Education used to inspire me and make me feel like a professional. Now, it's more a reminder that it's for academics, for scholars...and I really can't count myself amongst their ranks.

bringing the arena into the club

2011-05-19T12:24:00.006-04:00

All of these moves are carefully planned

--Inspector Clouseau

Lately, I've been thinking about space...in particular, arenas.

For the record, I am currently in what might I humbly consider a kick-ass band, with a great singer/guitarist, drummer, and bassist. Clubs are our environment...we've played pretty much everywhere there is to play in this town and made three forays into Toledo, playing with acts both national and local. Over the year plus three months we've been playing out, we've assembled a nice baker's dozen of pretty awesome original songs (three of which you can sample via the video clips on the right) and a few recurring covers. Our drummer, though, is leaving town, so our days are numbered (make sure to come to our farewell show on July 30th at Howard's after you buy some merchandise, end of plug).

Which begs the question: what next?

Once Analog Revolution is gone, I initially pictured myself just sitting on the couch, plunking on guitars while absent-mindedly reminiscing on past glory. Maybe, I supposed, I would record the occasional psychotic instrumental. It would be a far cry from playing on a cramped, sweaty stage, but the year plus in the band has miraculously made me conceive of myself as a guitar player again, and that's something I refuse to give up.

Life, though, has a habit of happening. Rather than reverting to a couch guitarist, I have instead been recruited by a friend to start a new band. My friend is in three other bands, but I guess that's not enough for this madman...he seems to like my playing enough to want to play with me, which is nice. Additionally, as he seems to like my songwriting and has so many other commitments, he has also given me free reign over much of the songwriting. This is perfect, because I have always loved writing as much as playing, and since Analog Revolution hasn't (for some reason) been using any of my stuff for a while, I have a backlog of material ready and waiting. It's even kind of thrilling, knowing I will get to hear my new songs finally performed.

What is most different about my new, yet-unnamed band, though, is that we have time to plan, plot, and scheme. I still have a few months of Analog Revolution, and my friend has his other three bands, so we're not hurting for outlets. Also, I have urchin on the way, so I have other commitments for the immediate future at any rate. We might as well take our time figuring out what our band is going to be. This means that while Analog Revolution was an example of evolution (we never really had a plan and just kinda grew into our identity), this band will be closer to intelligent design.

So, how does space fit into this?

A few sessions ago, we were blasting through a song (okay, more its skeletal framework than its complete structure, but you get the point), and, when we ended, we spontaneously broke into the endless bashing chords with solo guitar over top which is so common in many of the more self-indulgent forms of heavy music which I dearly appreciate. We both laughed, and my friend immediately suggested we end all our songs this way...which made me realize how much I'm gonna love this band. I then quipped that, when people ask us what we play, we needed to call ourselves "alternative arena rock."

This, however, let me into a tough mission. I then had to figure out what exactly "arena rock" meant...and then figure out a way we could possibly be an alternative to it.

I polled friends. I had cigar-based discussions. I drank and thought. Most people seem to tie arena rock to (surprise, surprise) rock and roll played in arenas...but this didn't really work as a set of conventions for me. When asked to get more specific, some people brought up theatrics, some brought up pyro, some brought up commercialism. One online friend said all our songs have to be about "beer and boobs." Others listed possible arena rock bands as including Foghat (which I can see), REO Speedwagon (sure), Styx (maybe early stuff), Motley Crue (hah?), Queen (nah), and WASP (ooooookay). Most people seemed to think a "corporate stooge" label was essential.

There were a lot of qualifications others brought up which I just didn't buy, of course. But through all the debate, I came away with this definition: loud, guitar-based rock and roll, with songs based on simplified (often blues-based) chordal structures containing big/catchy/sing-a-long choruses. This I can do. That arena rock tended to take place in arenas is evident, but I think it could also work in a club environment. Moreover, I know of many cool bands (The Hold Steady on a national level, and the Matt Truman Ego Trip here in Toledo) who are already doing this kind of stuff.

But I doubt they are doing it quite as weirdly as will we.

This means, though, I have to start figuring out how to apply this to the riffs which I have stockpiled. To this end, I have tried several approaches. I have started carrying around a notebook to record cool-sounding lyrical ideas. I have started to keep a recorder near my guitar for any riffs which might present themselves. I have started to, when plunking on riffs, figure out what bits sound more "chorus-y." I have started to try and sing along to said chorus-sounding bits...mostly in a "na-na-na" kinda voice, because I figure anyone can sing nonsense syllables. I have learned drum machine software so that I might construct structured demos. In short, I have been thinking about how to take the "we want everyone to feel the power" attitude of arena rock and translate that into something that will blast people off their barstools.

Moreover, I have been thinking about space: where to fill it, where to leave it open, how to slowly build. People might get crammed into arenas, but they don't need the entire space to be filled. No one wants to be in wall-to-wall humanity and get hit with a million beats. After all, if the band never shuts up, how will the crowd ever participate? It is, I feel, about strategically filling the space...knowing when to hit the damn instrument and when to simply let its vibrations ring out.

I'm still not 100% sure I know how we're gonna do this...but I got a feeling it's gonna be good.

why box stores suck

2011-05-18T10:57:00.004-04:00

When I got my full-time gig, I decided that I wanted to decorate my shiny new office with adult-level art. I didn't want to use Dali prints, movie posters, Christmas lights, or anything that would be at home in a college dorm...no, I had a full-time job, so I was now an "adult" (whatever that means). I went to a few art fairs, but the only things that were even remotely affordable were of the "horse" genre, "barn" genre, or the more experimental "horse in front of barn" school of photography....and while I wanted an adult space, I didn't want that space to be reminiscent of adult farmers.

Frankly, I felt I could do better. So, rather than return to my early love of fingerpainting, I decided my quest to take control of my artwork would be better served by buying a digital camera and learning more about photography via first-person experimentation. I got a decent point-and-shoot, started messing around, and eventually, I think I got pretty good for a hobbyist (although you can judge for yourself). My office, in addition to the "wall of band flyers" (of which I'm very proud), has some very cool shots, and my oft-oblivious and next-to-impossible-to-impress students have even complemented me on occasion.

For a fairly old (6 years at this point) point-and-shoot, my camera has done pretty well. However, there are things it does not do particularly stellar. The flash, for instance, sucks...it looks like someone lit a pile of magnesium on fire. I hate flash photography anyway, so I try to do low and natural light images...but people have to either stay perfectly still for several months consecutively (the shutter speed on my camera is essentially glacial), or the image just introduces a whole bunch of noise and blur.

So, when I found out I was gonna be a father, I realized one of my "father" tasks would be documenting Mighty's growth and development...so a new camera, I reasoned, would be a pretty reasonable investment. I asked friends for recommendations, did the research, and settled on a good model. And, for the last baby shower, my awesome sororal unit gave me a sizable gift card for one of the big box appliance stores...I won't say exactly which one, but they claim to have the (ahem) "best buys."

I sit down to purchase it online yesterday. I pull up the store's website, search for the model, and find it. Hey, they even are advertising free shipping! So I add it to my cart, and then it tells me "shipping is not available." Um, okay. Then I see it has "ship to store/pickup" as an option...so I entered my zip code, and it listed a bunch of stores. I click on the "add to cart" button listed for the closest one...and the page refreshed, but with "unavailable at this location." Grr. I then clicked on the next store...and the next...and the next...but the damn camera wasn't available at any store in a hundred miles (a fact the website decided to tell me only in annoying little increments).

By this time, I'm steaming. So, on the suggestion of the spousal unit, I call the company's 1-800 number. They put me through to a digital camera sales specialist. I explain my plight...and the sales expert informs me they only have a few of my cameras available nationwide. I ask if they can ship me one of the models, and they tell me they cannot. Um, okay. I ask them why the model is listed on the website, and they tell me that they've been meaning to take it off-line. Um, sure. I ask them if they're going to get more, and they say they should eventually. That's helpful. I ask if they can tell me when, and they say they haven't been given that information. Gee, thanks. I then ask if they can send me an e-mail or something when they do get some more in, and they tell me, no, for some reason, they cannot.

This is from a customer sales specialist?

I realize that this is the very definition of a first world problem...but hell, why is a store so determined to make it hard to give them money for a product they supposedly stock? If I didn't have the gift card, I'd go somewhere else, but I'm kind of locked in to a store which wants to make it very hard for me to give them my business. And this is not the first time this has happened...a little over a year ago, they refused to honor their price-match guarantee because their mp3 player model was (get this) a different color. I thought about just getting a different model camera, but the next best four options were also back-ordered or out of stock. Sigh.

Yeah, this is so much better than having a local, specialized, service-oriented retailer.

I'm trying to figure out exactly what the benefit might be of such box stores, and I gotta admit, I'm drawing a blank. It can't be an increased selection...because this company only claims a wide selection which they don't actually have. It can't be cheaper prices...because that's kind of a moot issue when they don't want to actually sell you anything. The point, best as it seems, appears to be to dumb down the average consumer to accept whatever crap service the corporations give you.

This is why, the older I get, the more I hate capitalism.

first world problems

2011-05-17T22:55:00.003-04:00

There is a ton of stuff going on in my life right now, but I haven't really felt like writing about much of it. You see, I have a fear...and it has to do with my face.

Let me back up. After the first time I took my spousal unit home to stay with my parents, she didn't immediately get our family dynamic. A couple of visits later, there was a night where she looked at me and said "you know, I think I have your family figured out...you express your love for each other by picking on each other." It's true...maybe it's the British in us, but sarcasm is a requirement if you want to survive.

Back here in the great white North, I have plenty of friends, people who love me. They too express their love (or at least a slightly lowered level of disdain) for me by picking on me. While they might do this with each other to a certain extent, I'm pretty sure I get picked on more than the rest. With my family, I could understand the picking as a result of cultural heritage, but save a few far flung friends, Britishness does not run in my circles. So why the biting interaction even emanating from those who, I'm pretty sure, seem to like me for some reason? I can only assume I have one of those faces that says "hey, put me down."

Couple this with my own natural tendency to focus on the elements of my life where foibles exist, where things go less according to plan and instead actively work against me to some degree (which some people, incidentally, interpret as whining), and the level of verbal warfare can become significant. And yes, as I've had this particular style of interaction for all my life, I'm generally used to being slammed, to being put down, to being burned. I can generally tell that it comes from love rather than hate. But there are exceptions, moments where I take things to heart more than I should. Particularly as I get older, as I experience loss and uncertainty more frequently, and I sometimes become hyper-aware of perception.

Particularly lately, I've been holding a lot of stuff in. Part of it is knowing, compared to many of my friends, my lot in life isn't really that bad. Part of it is having so many undeniably good things going on in my life (a beautiful spousal unit, a forthcoming package o' joy, an utterly kick-ass band), dwelling on the negatives I honestly feel might make me come off as at best a bigger whiner than anyone already suspects or at worst an ungrateful bastard...either of which might open me up to more verbal abuse than I can stand.

But if I can't talk about these things, they fester. If I hold in the shadows, it becomes darkness. If I can't write about my own life, my own feelings, my own fears, what am I doing?

I will be posting here more frequently. While I will try to have some kind of balance, at heart, it's really healthier for me to be honest, to work through some issues. And if it ever seems at any moment that I'm turning into one of those tremendously blessed people whining about my first world problems, please realize that I too am aware of my tone...and that I am also working on posts about happy stuff (like dancing baby sloths).

Be patient with me.

my friend Matthew

2011-05-06T15:33:00.003-04:00

A friend of mine died last night.

Matthew was someone I was really just getting to know, but I was really enjoying getting to know him. He was working for his MA from the same place I got my Ph.D. He had an unabashed love for and knowledge of cheesy 80s hair metal and role-playing games. He was a fan of my band. He was funny, nice, bubbly, warm, and just willing to go out of his way for you. I hung out with him just Tuesday night, and we talked academics and comics. Afterward, he dropped me off on his way home.

These are only fragmentary recollections...but I guess they'll have to be enough for now. Tonight, my band plays out, and I am going to rip through our set in his memory.

the gender predicative

2011-04-25T14:25:00.003-04:00

Since we've made the big announcement, there's been a lot of fear. Not about the impending birth, mind you. Nah, my fear is entirely bound with the level of gender role saturation which inevitably arises whenever either of us mention the forthcoming urchin.

The first thing I noticed is that it mattered not what we said...any observation/fact/detail about Mighty DuBose would invariably be interpreted as a sign we were going to have boy (50% of the time) or girl (50$ of the time). Tell someone that the heart rate was 150 at the last appointment, and you would hear "Oh, that means you're having a boy/girl." Spousal Unit tells someone she's been craving cinnamon, and that definitely means we're having a son. Tell someone she's also craved root beer, and that's a sign it will be a girl. It doesn't matter: how Spousal Unit is carrying, how much sleep she gets, how much and where exactly Mighty kicks, what time of day urchin was conceived, what phase of the moon, how urchin reacts in utero to zombie films, whatever you can imagine, it becomes a scientific marker of sex-to-be.

The absolute weirdest one so far? One co-worker told my spousal unit that if she uses the rest room and then pours Draino down the toilet before flushing, it will change color, and the resulting color will show either boy or girl...said co-worker didn't know what color would mean what, though, so this is one we didn't try. Plus, how did Draino's last reformulation affect its gender-prediction properties? No one is saying.

I've read a lot about how parents are supposed to react to pregnancy, and most sources say both parents will have strong preferences for either a boy or a girl, "I just want it to be healthy" claims to the contrary. Personally, though, I honestly had no real preferences...and I am most certainly an interested party. This makes everyone else's innate need for gender that much more puzzling. Co-workers and good friends both have made it their mission to trick us into saying one way or another. Why are they so invested as to resort to treachery?

The Spousal Unit had someone at work hold a baby shower for her. Spousal Unit told her co-workers that we weren't disclosing the sex of the kid, and that gender-neutral gifts would be best. Nevertheless, one coworker (convinced Mighty would be a boy) got blue clothes with race cars, while another (convinced Mighty would be a girl) got an array of pink outfits.

This weekend, I was telling these tales to a relative. Said relative looked at Spousal Unit for a minute and said, "But I know you're having a boy...I can tell by just looking at you...and I'm 95% accurate."

Sigh.

the costs of pregnancy

2011-04-22T17:58:00.003-04:00

Pregnancy does many things to women. The spousal unit, for instance, has been suffering the standard spacial disorientation, pregnancy brain, fatigue, and numerous other symptoms, so I have a little bit of first (well, second) hand knowledge of some of the things pregnancy can dos.

Today, I found another effect of pregnancy.

I was doing student conferences today from home for my online class. In between video and text chats, I decided to use my spare minutes to assemble the urchin's crib-in-a-box. It took a while, particularly since I had very few short or no-show conferences...and it's very hard to get any momentum with a single five minute work session per hour. So, unfortunately, when the spousal unit got home, I wasn't completely finished.

I labored on, though. It was, after all a quintessential male activity...sitting in a study-in-the-process-of-becoming-a-nursery, bolting together furniture for the forthcoming bundle of joy as the pregnant lady rests in the other room. A little under an hour later, I had finally finished.

I came into the living room to grab the mattress, and the spousal unit followed me back to the now-it's-actually-looking-somewhat-like-a-nursery...and, of course, as soon as she saw the criblet out an "awww." I put my arm around her and said "you know, this really helps drive home the fact that in just a little while, I'm going to be a father"...and then, after a brief beat, let out a brief panicky yell and ran out of the room.

Nothing. I came back in the room, and the spousal unit was examining the crib.

"What? No reaction at all?"

She didn't even look up. "Get used to it, dear."

So, one more thing pregnancy does for women...it removes their appreciation for cheesy spousal drama. Sigh.

transition

2011-04-03T15:58:00.004-04:00

No, it's not going to stop

so just give up
--Aimee Mann

Some kids want to be firemen or astronauts. Both options never really appealed to me...they both required more energy and physicality than I had. I was always a fairly sedentary child. My parents love to tell how I would always rather read a book rather than go outside and play.

It wasn't that I was lazy, per se. It's just that, given a choice, books always won out over running around. I would prefer to sit around, read, and think about what I had just read. Thinking was about figuring stuff out. It was about entering other words. It was about letting my mind go farther than my body ever could travel. The first books I can remember reading were the "Classics Illustrated" kid's versions of classic books. Then I graduated to the actual classics themselves (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was particularly vivid). Then it was on to detective fiction. I started science fiction and fantasy upon stumbling across Lord of the Rings in my middle school library. Then a friend introduced me to horror. Eventually, it was just any book, any story, any genre...as long as it transported me somewhere or let me think, it was where I wanted to be.

Somewhere in high school, my reading became subsumed by events...mostly work, guitar, and partying. Class took some of my time, but I got sucked into a job which occupied many more of my hours. I moved from part-time job to part-time job. Eventually, I found myself selling water as an operator-standing-by. When we were slow, we had permission to read, and it prompted a bit of a resurgence in my readings...I actually went through my local library's entire science fiction section.

Reading became important to me again...I found myself diving back into thinking, exploring, learning. There was, however, an unexpected result: I found myself increasingly aware of exactly how dead-end my series of menial crap jobs had become. I would like to say that I realized how little impact my various occupations (whether water seller, pizza maker, rat killer, or warehouse worker) made on anyone, and that I decided I wanted to move on to a career where I would make the world a better place, but the truth was nowhere so noble. Simply put, reading made me realize that I was tired of not feeling smart.

So I quit my water-selling job and went back to school. From the beginning, I wanted to figure out a way I could make reading and thinking my career, and pretty much from the start, this meant going to school long enough to become a teacher...in essence, I wanted to enter the university and never leave it. I wanted to become a professional thinker, someone who worked with ideas, explored theory, created knowledge. This implied teaching, but although I became very good at, enjoyed, and ultimately found teaching to be very rewarding, it was always about thinking for me, first and foremost.

I did everything I could think of to become a professional thinker. I studied night and day. I became a graduate assistant. I wrote. I read. I started my own literary journal. I wrote articles and published as many as I could. I expanded my vita as much as possible. Becoming a professional thinker--that is, getting a tenure-track professor's job--has pretty much been my focus since I went back to school in 1994. It has been the reason why I've read more than I ever thought I would, taught myself discipline after discipline, and spent my summers reading, writing, and thinking.

Unfortunately, my grand plan didn't work.

I got my Ph.D., entered the job market, and...nothing happened. I sent out over 500 applications in my time, and these did lead to a few phone interviews. The ones I wanted the most, though, I never heard back from the universities. I did get two campus interviews, but they were both at schools (including the community college I , and actually attended) where I really didn't want to work. I published more and more, but it's paid off less and less. It's been years since I've even heard back from any school where I've applied. No one, it seems, is interested in hiring me as a professional thinker.

Yesterday, I deleted all of the job announcement e-mail alerts in my in-box. Some time this week, I will unsubscribe to all my academic job feeds.

It's not, for the record, all bad. I do have a full-time job (albeit in a different field). I have published a lot of my writing, and when I last checked (which was a few years ago--in spite of my ego, I don't really sit around and google myself), some of them were used in classes and in other scholars' dissertations. But ultimately, thinking is not my career...and, as I will not be able to be on the job market for the next two years, there's little hope of me ever becoming a professional thinker.

Why did I not succeed? It's actually not a surprise to me. In an attempt to be different, I picked a topic that no one else was doing. Instead of being cutting-edge, though, my topic was just dramatically unhip. This prevented me from getting work doing anything other than part-time work for the first two years after graduation, and part-time teaching leaves utterly no time or mental energy for thinking or writing. Then, when I finally realized my dissertation was unhip, I rebranded myself...into something else that was also unhip. Then the economy imploded. Then many state governments decided that educators were the problem and that schools could survive without funding.

So it is officially time to give up on the job market. I wish my friends on the market the absolute best of luck, particularly since they're no longer my competition. I envy them: they still live in the world of ideas.

Me, though, not so much. I still have my dissertation-to-book project to write, and I still have three papers in circulation. I might still send out some apps when, in 2013, I'm able to reenter the job market, but I don't really have much hope. If I am honest, I've known for quite some time that I will never be a professor.

There is still tons to do, though. I have become a performing musician. I have pretenses of just being a writer...maybe an essayist, maybe a writer. And I still have article ideas, so the academic world isn't done hearing from me.

It's time, though, to admit that I'm transitioning into being a hobbyist thinker.

style versus innovation

2011-03-28T16:17:00.004-04:00

These chords are old, but we shake hands

'cause I believe that they're the good guys

I'm blessed by the ability to play music. Last weekend was a good one for me: an acoustic show, an electric show, converting new fans, getting to see some of my favorite bands, hanging out with my bandmates, feeling fully like a music guy again.

In spite of this, I do believe that in a very real sense, music ended quite some time ago.

When someone decided that kids in between the age of thirteen and eighteen needed to have their own separate culture, music started to change at an astounding rate. Shocking became the key trope in distinguishing "teenage cultural artifact A" from one belonging to your father. Depending on the genre and medium, this could mean any number of things. Obscenity. Blood. Brighter colors. Faster pace. Increasing illegality. Controlled substances. The street. Graphic whatever.

In music, this turned in many cases to an obsession with hardness. In rock, it was first in incorporating the forbidden timbre and groove of black music. Then lyrics became increasingly more... gritty... realistic... guttural... streetwise... obscene... whatever. In the meantime, some pioneer decided that using crappy, inefficient, prone-to-explode equipment could be, in and of itself, both beautiful and transgressive. Tempos increased. Distortion piled on top of distortion. The tone underwent went a slow crescendo into noise.

Unfortunately it was often missed, in this struggle to become more and more shocking, a realization, a certain subtle factoid, and it was this: at an eventual point in time, musicians would reach the point where they physically could not play any faster. Sooner or later, you would run out of startling lyrical possibilities. Eventually, you would meet the maximum level of distortion. Where would you go after you finally hit the wall? When there was no other side as a possible destination? Where can you go when you've gone too far?

I've never really known. My personal musical style could hardly be called progressive, futuristic, envelope-pushing. I am, at heart, just a blues-rock guitarists. My scale is the minor pentatonic. Yes, I use effects, but they are too far out of fashion to even be considered in the neighborhood of retro. I am far from the first person, for instance, to use an envelope filter or analog octave divider.

One friend, upon hearing me play, complemented me before saying she hadn't heard anyone play like me in a long time. My look must've been questioning, because she said, "y'know, like arena rock-ish." It took me a while to realize how accurate she was, and, more to the point, be okay with my arena rock influences. Hell, at one point in my life, I wanted to be a musical pioneer. Then I wanted to be unique. Now, though, I'll settle for just being the kind of guitar player I always wanted to be.

Sometimes, you gotta let the guitar talk. Sometimes you gotta just hit it. That's what I do.

home improvement.

2011-03-27T22:22:00.004-04:00

One of the real problems of being a media scholar is that you quickly run out of any entertainment options which might in any way be described as "brainless." I try out tons of programs in the pursuit for something that doesn't really make me think, but sooner or later, I'm breaking down everything. I quit watching food television because I couldn't turn off the gender analysis. I've tried NCIS, but the stereotyping drives me insane. The list goes on.

My latest effort in my pursuit of "not thinking for at least a moment" is home improvement television. Now, I've watched tons of shows in my years. For a while, I could've been described as a Bob Villa junkie. I've seen every single This Old House and Hometimes, many of them multiple times. I enjoy it, but mentally, I already have paper after paper planned. Some of them would be quite good ones, if only I had time to write them...damn job that doesn't reward scholarship.

I try to go more brainless by delving into HGTV, but that doesn't help. Many of the shows feature people looking for new houses...these always drive my thoughts into the area of class warfare, as I have very little sympathy for anyone depressed over the lack of housing options under $650,000. I watch the design shows, and they only make me want to invent a new game: "Gay or Canadian"...because all the hosts seem to be...well, you get the picture.

Lately, I've been watching the Mike Holmes programs Holmes on Homes and Holmes Inspection. They're particularly interesting, because they reverse the standard home improvement narrative. These shows are certainly not telling you "yes, you can do it yourself." No, they make absolutely no attempt at claiming viewer empowerment. You watch this show, and you have no thoughts about your repair competency. Moreover, they don't even hint that professionals in the field might be competent...quite the opposite, in fact. I watch Mike Holmes, and I feel utterly depressed at the possibility of there being anything close to an honest, skilled professional anywhere. Except Mike Holmes himself, of course...he is, according to the show, the construction industry Jesus, albeit with a Canadian accent.

Today's episode was particularly brutal. The previous owners of the hell-house in question had apparently, before selling to the now shell-shocked couple, found massive termite and rot damage, all caused by the fact that the foundation was made of dirt...simple, unpacked dirt. Their solution? Just insulate and drywall over everything. The crew's fix wasn't so much a gut job as a "bomb and start over job." It was truly horrifying.

The critical side of my brain is still trying to process a home improvement show which argues most professionals are incompetent, some of them at levels bordering on criminal. Are they telling us that experts everywhere inherently suck? Is a home improvement channel really trying to dissuade me from ever becoming a home owner?

I would worry about this all that much more if I wasn't doomed to enough poverty to never escape being a renter...and might even make the swarm of bees seem a reasonable price.

Thank goodness for debt.

the Rusty Scotch-Aid

2011-03-19T23:35:00.004-04:00

Sitting around late at night watching television? Depressed at the state of the world, your state government, the forthcoming sinus infection, and hopes of a successful resolution to the NFL labor situation? Maybe it's just me...but at times like these, I think the best thing to do is (wait for it) create a new mixed drink! I call it "the Rusty Scotch-Aid":

take a high-ball glass and add ice
pour in a healthy slug of cheap Scotch that someone gave you
squeeze in a quarter of a lemon and dump in the remainder
add a tablespoon or so of sugar syrup...more if the Scotch is particularly cheap
top off with soda water
stir, sip, and watch scary television

I am a rock star

2011-03-02T14:42:00.003-05:00

One of these days see me driving round town

In my rock 'n' Rolls Royce with the sun roof down

I am a rock star.

No, not really. In reality, I'm a guy who's married to a wonderful/pregnant spousal unit, teaches writing under an uncertain future (thanks, Senate Bill 5!), and who plays in a local (meaning we can't get gigs the next town over) band. But from the time I bought my first crappy guitar, I always had visions of being on stage, playing to a worshiping throng of admirers who would hang on my every note and scream at the end of the solo. It was my dream

This, of course, never happened for lots of reasons. I've known for ages I would never be a rock star. Going back to college perhaps sealed the deal, but I kinda knew long before that. But there are still times where, when I close my eyes, I wonder what it would've been like to play arenas.

I know, though, I will never be a rock star. So, a few weeks ago, I decided to do the next-best thing: I ordered some custom guitar picks!

I found a place online who sold custom guitar picks for a reasonable price. I went to town with GIMP on a photo from one of my past shows and made myself look like a cool line drawing. I uploaded my photo, moved some stuff around, and gave them my credit card number. A little over a week later, I recieved a bag of shiny, customized .73mm color delrin picks.

The picks are a geeky fantasy come true, something I've always wanted. I've given them to friends, most of whom seem inordinately thrilled to get a 50 cent piece of plastic. Some have told me they're the coolest thing they've seen. One or two (who were admittedly drinking at the time) said something about putting the pick with their special souvenirs. True, one friend, upon seeing the pick, said "DuBose, you're such a nerd" (admittedly, she does have a case), and my singer has threatened to quit the band if I throw a handful to the crowd during some gig.

This past weekend, I went to see Two Cow Garage, my favorite band in the world, when they played at a Toledo bar. I know both Micah, the guitarist and Shane, the bass player, so when I said hello to them, I gave them each a pick. During their set, Shane used my pick...and showed it to me from the stage. Maybe I became a rock star by proxy...just a little, mind you.

Afterward, I was saying my goodbyes. When I was talking to Micah, I told him that I showed one of my classes clips from a documentary someone did on them a few years back, and how it depressed the students. The students, I told him, focused on how hopeless it seemed to make it in the music industry. This puzzled me at the time, and, I told Micah, I couldn't figure out why the state of the industry was of such importance to them...because personally, I don't give a crap about executives, labels, or any of that. Instead, I care about bands and music. The industry? Stardom? Ultimately, it doesn't seem very important.

This does not mean, however, that I will ever give up my custom guitar picks. I'm holding onto at least a small fragment of the dream.

just a number

2011-03-01T14:44:00.004-05:00

But you know

The years make things different

When I turned 21, I actually did it at someone else's birthday party. It was close to midnight, and a friend asked who was of legal age. When I said I would be in 17 minutes, he insisted on driving me to the store...and then he insisted on waiting until 12:01...and then he insisted the clerk card me for my beer purchase.

After that, I don't really remember much about most of my birthdays. I understand why many people want to be sentimental about such things, and I kinda wanna be sentimental myself...but there is just very little of most of them that stick in my mind. There have been parties, there have been meetings at the bar, there have been times where I've just stayed at home and watched television. The one that sticks out most in my mind was when it was just me, my lovely spousal unit, and a vampire friend at Howard's Club H. I remember it because, after my spousal unit asked me three times if I wanted a delivery from The Cookie Jar, I finally asked her, "you want cookies, don't you?" She did that enormously cute pseudo-guilt look by way of reply. The cookies ended up being very tasty, though.

Moreover, my age itself hardly sticks with me. When I was 33, I remembered my age for two reasons: the play speed of an LP and the back of a Rolling Rock bottle. I remembered 34 because of a line from a Goober and the Peas song...of course, the song was about stalking, so I tried really hard not to think about it all that closely. I associated 35 with The Jayhawks song "Big Star" because of the line "a has-been at a mere 35"; that song ultimately is more optimistic than it sounds, but I still didn't think about it all that closely.

After that, though, whenever someone asked me my age, I would have to stop and think about it...and, embarrassing enough, do the math before I answered. While I realize some people might look at this as a sign of my encroaching senility, I've just never been that good at remembering some basic, simple facts. Hell, I still have to look at my hands most of the time to remember which side is my left and which side is my right.

The bigger issue is that I simply don't feel all that different. Back when I was still working in the pizza industry, I was sharing a cigarette with my supervisor, and we were talking about age. He took a drag off his smoke, looked into space, and said, "hell, Mike, I still have to stop and realize I'm not 22." When I was 25, this struck me as funny. Now, though, I can completely relate.

There was a time when I started to feel old. It was when I was working at another pizza place, and all the employees were teenies. No surprise there...the restaurant industry feeds on the young. However, I became acutely aware they were all younger than I only because they were all listening to more current music than I. I realized I was up against a decision. I could become a person whose references, experiences, and culture all came from his high school years (you know, the people who don't own an album that came out later than their 24th birthday). Or I could just dive into the world and experience it as I see fit...which might require me to reach a little bit outside my comfort zone. When I started to look outside of myself, age really quit being an issue.

Today, I turned 40. There's no tears, there's no freakout. There's really little significance at all for me. However, there's something better. When I woke up today, there was an awesome card and some organic dark chocolate from my beautiful preggie spousal unit waiting for me. There was about 40 e-mails and notifications wishing me a happy birthday, all of whom I appreciate more than I say. Tonight, there will be a good dinner and drinks with friends. If getting older brings all this, well, that is indeed alright.

my random 83rd Oscar observations.

2011-02-28T13:57:00.003-05:00

King's Speech is a good and worthy film, but I really wish True Grit would've gotten some love.
Whomever the male host was, he acted and looked stoned out of his mind...until, halfway through, it looked like someone had given him amphetamines.
I really enjoy watching the Oscars. I don't care about the telecast in the slightest, really...but it's a wonderful excuse to have friends over, eat good food, and have a great time.
The thing that bugs me most about the Oscars is the self-important "why does anyone watch this?" whining I hear online. I hear the same thing about the Super Bowl...which also bugs me. Hey, it's not a point of honor to not like something. It's not even a good conversational starter.
I really, really, really hated the attempts to make the Oscars look hip...all of which boiled down to "oh, did you know there's such a thing as Twitter?"
Do we really need to hear all the original songs? If you're gonna force us, then you should also, for the "best score" award, play every single second of every score.
I really do not like how the presenters of each of the best acting awards directly address the nominees...it seems creepy and voyeuristic.
If I was one of a few people to win an award, and if my co-winner hogged the mic the entire time, I would punch them somewhere very painful.
If I was a winner of one of the minor awards and was only given 23 seconds for my speech, I would find the actor who was allowed to ramble for five whole minutes and punch them somewhere very painful.
How depressing must it be to have to play the "we're glad you won, but shut up, so we can bring on someone else" music?

work and respect

2011-02-28T11:50:00.004-05:00

My name is Mike DuBose. The worker's rights that my government and many of its citizens are actively trying to destroy? They are mine. This is my story.

My first job was summer employment. I got a position alongside my brother, who was working at a pavement marking company. We painted the lines on parking lots, school tracks, parking garages, and so forth. This was in Florida, in the summer, and we were almost always working on freshly-laid asphalt. As a result, the working conditions were awful. The heat was enormous...on top of the standard 95-100 degree highs, we also had to contend with radiant heat from the asphalt, which boosted everything by 20-30 degrees. Then there were the surely toxic fumes: paint, mineral spirits, and asphalt...even over twenty years later, the merest whiff of a new parking lot turns my stomach. I have no doubt that had I stayed in this line of work, I would today have serious health issues just from inhaling all the chemicals.

Our boss was a really fun and nice guy. However, he only really cared about working us as hard and as fast as possible. When he would run to the store, he would bring us (fairly awful) coffee--if we gave him money, that is--but he refused to bring us sugar or cream because it took too long for him to grab some packets. When we would break for lunch, he would eat as fast as possible before yelling at us to hurry up so we could get back to work. He loved to yell and berate us if we were not flying at our jobs.

My boss wanted to push us, but he never really reciprocated with any loyalty. I was the summer guy, and, as a result, I was never taught any skills which would increase my future hireability. I never, for instance, got to run the striping machine; this meant that the only real thing I could bring from the experience was the ability to sweep, to carry stuff, and to wait on my other workers who were given the big tasks. However, even the workers who were taught skills were unvalued. One weekend during the next fall, he called me and asked me to help him with a job. I went, because I honestly did like the guy...and also, I could use the cash. When we left for the job, I asked where all the co-workers were, but apparently, my boss had "let everyone go" because he wanted to raise his income.

This led to my first two lessons about work. First, you are only a tool for bosses to use as they sees fit. Second, you have no rights; you are instead a machine cog. Third, it doesn't really matter how nice your bosses are...they are never looking out for you.

My next job was working at a pizza chain. I was a good employee...I would do anything I was asked, I would come in whenever called, I tried very hard to learn, and I worked as hard as possible whenever I was on the clock. Eventually, I became an assistant manager. When this happened, my mindset clicked. I started to demand everyone work as hard as I did. I ran my stores with a maniacal focus. I kept a very close eye on labor and food costs, and I would rather work everyone as hard as possible than treat my employees well if it meant I could bring in good numbers for my bosses (who, I assumed, I could make appreciate me through sheer force of will).

When I got promoted, I read it as a sign that my hard work was paying off, that my bosses were taking care of me. I believed this in spite of getting only about a dollar above minimum wage and working most weekend nights. However, about two months after a major car accident, and while still suffering the effects of broken ribs, I got a call that I was fired. I wasn't even given a good reason, but later, I found out that my manager fired me so she could promote her 17 year-old cousin. Turns out the lesson I should've learned was that promotions and such were not signs you were becoming a valued employee; they were just ways to extract more work out of you.

I then worked at a major package delivery service. My job was to load two 60' semi trailers. These trailers would then be picked up, moved to the other side of the building, unloaded, and moved onto small local delivery trucks. I had two types of interactions with my bosses. They might try to trick me by throwing in packages that were supposed to go to Jacksonville AL or Jacksonville NC rather than Jacksonville FL. Then, when one of these slipped through, they would come and yell at me. Their other method of interactions was to just skip to yelling: first, that I wasn't packing the truck efficiently, then that I had to tear down my truck and start over, and then that, while I was rebuilding the wall of packages, I was falling behind on incoming packages. Finally, they would send over someone to help me get caught up, but only after giving me a "I can't believe how awful you are" look. Eventually, they quit calling me in and, after a few weeks, called me to tell me I was laid off. The only real lesson I got out of this was that even working hard was no real guarantee you would be treated with even a superficial level of respect.

After a while, I started work for a temporary service agency, where most of my work was in warehouses and such...although it occasionally got much worse. As a temp worker, I learned that no matter what I did, I was invisible. Hell, even the other workers wouldn't learn your names...so why would the bosses not treat you with the same respect they would give to a disposable toilet seat cover?

I went to work for another pizza franchise, promising myself I would be just a worker bee, completely uninvested in my work. Only my boss (a supervisor at my old pizza place) forced me into management...and soon, I was back to killing myself every day. I did rise to a valued position...I actually got traded back and forth between the supervisors and ended up working in about ten different stores during my time there. This, however, was by no means a sign they were looking after my best interests, and I eventually quit when my manager kept ignoring my hours requests. This was, I learned, the only real power I had...to walk away.

I worked in telemarketing sales for a while. Again, I worked hard, and again, I did a really good job, but the other shoe dropped when one of my colleagues got a job in the company mail room. He was overly excited about this, because it was actually a full-time job, unlike our sales work, which was all through a temp agency...and his excitement just depressed me further.

I decided to go back to school, because college, I assumed, would lead to a job where I was treated with some level of respect. I figured that if I became a teacher, if I dedicated my life to the public at large, if I just worked at helping people and hopefully making the world a little bit better of a place, things would work out. I never had any hope for fame and riches. I just wanted a job where I could sleep well at night, knowing I made a difference in some small way. Surely that will be respected in some small way...right?

To pay my bills, I went back to work for the pizza place, only because I was good enough to work a morning shift and get all my prep work done by opening. I would wait on customers through lunch and then study. Later, I got a job as graduate assistant for my department (which meant being a glorified office boy); one professor in particular enjoyed dumping piles of photocopying on my desk when I had ten minutes left in my shift. Eventually, I also started working for another professor's teacher-training project, but this prof, I am convinced, was essentially unable to even pick me out of a lineup; when I cut off my long metal hair, she didn't even notice.

I moved to Ohio and became a graduate teaching assistant. I wanted to teach as much of a range of classes as possible (thus expanding my skills and hireability), but my first department refused to give me their film class. I was then transferred to another department, where, although I was a doctoral candidate, my work was analyzed, reviewed, and critiqued by an MA student with years less experience than I, and the decision on whether my students passed or failed was made by someone else. I did one research assistantship where my prof wanted me to write a research paper and him to put his name on it, and another assistantship where I got a spot on a couch rather than an office.

I was then thrust into the world of part-time work, where I was treated even lower, paid less, and remained invisible to my bosses (save one at the lowest-paying community college, who, even though they paid me half of my other schools, still wanted me to wear a suit to teach). I then had to take a part-time job at the local zoo to make ends meet. My bosses there liked me, but only because the rest of the workforce was so lackluster...I still had no rights.

Throughout it all, I remained a good worker. Wherever I have been employed (even at the lowliest of places), I have honestly given my all to my job. When I was doing temp work, I would bust my ass...not because the bosses might see my effort and like me (I knew they usually didn't know who I was) but because that's what you're supposed to do at work. I gave my rural low-paying community college my A game, and my students got a taste of top-level college teaching...even if it was unappreciated to do so. I killed myself at the zoo. I was an awesome employee wherever I worked. It's just, I always thought, how you are supposed to be....and, if you keep doing it (the entirety of American culture tells us), someone will notice.

For my current job, I'm an Associate Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at University of Toledo. I teach composition, business writing, technical writing, and literature classes. The subject matter really is outside my training, but I have worked hard to become a good, pedagogically sound teacher.

I meticulously plan my classes for maximum student learning. For instance, I put in long hours conferencing with students, discussing their writing, giving them the personal educational experience which I never had. I've had colleagues tell me "you're a badass teacher." My departmental evaluations are good, and my boss has expressed admiration at my reach and scope in the classroom.

All I want from work is to be allowed to do my job to the best of my ability, in an atmosphere of relative stability. While I by no means thought I would be a writing teacher, I honestly would be quite happy doing this work, at this school, until the day I die. I like my school, like my colleagues, like my students, like the work. As long as I am at this job, I will give my university as much of me as I can.

Unfortunately, I have learned recently that all the lessons from my previous job still hold true to this day. I might be good at my job, and yes, my bosses might like me. Ultimately, though, I am just a cog in a machine, and those who hold ultimate authority over my labor are not looking out at all for my best interests. Instead, they see me as the enemy.

My state elected a governor who ran on a platform to, among other things, raid my retirement. Now, my governor and legislators are ramming through a bill which will eliminate my right to collectively bargain. This means that my university president, who is already deeply engaged in efforts to undermine my college, will be able to do with me pretty much whatever he pleases. I am a soon-to-be father who is now probably going to have my family leave taken away. I am soon going to suffer a big financial hit when my take-home pay drops when the university administration quits contributing to my health care. I would not be at all surprised if my actual salary gets cut. These, though, are far from the worst thing that can happen. If the current anti-collective bargaining movement passes (as it surely will), my university could fire all us lecturers and replace us with part-timers. And because I wouldn't have the ability to collective bargain, and because the union wouldn't have the power to strike, there's absolutely nothing I or any of my colleagues could do about it.

Aside from my personal doom, the most disturbing thing about all this is that, if they gut my job (as I suspect they will), it will lead to worse teaching. You take away my job security, and I will be a much more panicked teacher. You increase my workload, and that's less time I can spend with my students. You take away my benefits or salary, and I will do my best to leave the business of teaching altogether (assuming, of course, there's anywhere else for me to go...I've even given thought to going back to the restaurant world). Moreover, you will teach me and everyone who does what I do that our work is unvalued...and although we really want to care about our job, there's only so far we can go when that consideration is constantly unreciprocated.

I don't really want much. While I think I deserve it, I have absolutely no expectations for a salary reasonable to my level of training and my work performance. I have no desire for awards, publicity, or accolades. All I want really is to be treated with a little respect and be allowed to keep trying to help the future generation become a bit smarter and better at critical thinking, in hopes that they can make this world a slightly better place. I also want to not be treated as the enemy.

That, during a time where you say we need increased job growth, and that the key to such growth is an educated citizenry capable of doing the work, this is the time you decide to rip the top off education, make all the workers devalued, and try your hardest to drive out the dedicated professionals who teach is frankly befuddling, counter intuitive, and more than a little sad.

exhaustion

2011-02-23T19:17:00.002-05:00

I slip in and out of volume, mind cycling into a particularly sweeping tremolo. Blasts of synaptic soundwaves, punctuated by pure desertion. Noise, space. Action, inertia. Motion, stagnancy. Vibration, static.

If only it were slightly more regular, one might read it for signs of some grand pattern in the chaos. Yet it is instead marked more by irregularity, uncertainty, and the occasional patterns where everything just sort of...stops.

I find myself lacking tether. Instinctively, I realize that bases exist, but where? It's not lost. Somewhere, I am sure, the knowledge resides. Where, though, might my center reside? I try to think where, but instead, I grind to another standstill.

My arms ache, but the causal labors in question escape me. My eyes seem to embody more weight than usual, as if they've seen things no one should see...but what? All I can feel is a certain time lapse spreading through my frontal cortex.

The blame can only reside in the nights and mornings.

one of my turns

2011-02-23T19:06:00.002-05:00

There are nights where, sitting alone at the bar, I realize that I'm surprised I'm manic.

Moments of blackness. Despair. Utter pissed-offness. Wave after wave crashing upon me, washing me out. The only thing I'm really missing sometimes is the regularity of a tidal schedule...and this, somehow, makes it all infinitely worse, in so many ways.

When these turns come, it makes very little difference if the music is crushing or lilting. Gravity, in this case, doesn't seem to apply...and at any rate, it doesn't seem to help.

This last turn, there was a definite initial incident, yes, but beginnings are ultimately less an issue than progressions.

Whenever it starts, it quickly triggers cascades in other locations. Soon school, scholarship, career, family, friends, all of these start their own respective reactions. One atom flies across the room, smashing into another. Particles fly. Compounds form, react, explode, starting cycles in other nearby atoms. Pretty soon, reactions outweigh elements, the fire builds, and it becomes one massive, devastating event which is quite often hazardous to behold with the unshielded eye.

My logic is a series of forcibly abandoned atolls, each pleasant enough on its own, but with the distant appearance of some innocent eyed pilot on the horizon...things will change.

Atomic rage has implications ranging far and wide.

cold planning

2011-02-22T09:41:00.004-05:00

Don't you love it when a plan comes together?

My spousal unit and I often carpool, since we both are working in the same directions and, this semester at least, work similar hours. We save some cash and get to spend some time together...that it's in the earliest hours of the day, when we both would rather be sleeping (or indeed doing anything other than being awake) is a fun bonus.

Today, I got up early, because there was one of those really charmingly fun Ohio weather patterns with both snow and ice (two-fer tuesday!), and the car needed clearance. On top of everything, on our ride home yesterday, one of my windshield wipers shredded, and I had to figure out how to chip off the ice, change the blade, and still clear off all the wintery trash while staying on schedule. But I am efficient, I am a machine, so everything happened according to plan.

I went in, defrosted, showered, ate my yogurt and granola, brewed my tea, watched a little television, noted how much Gadaffi nowadays looks like a very old Gene Simmons, and grabbed my crap for the trip to the car. I cranked the sucker up, scraped a bit of ice stragglers off my windshield, helped the spousal unit into the car, and went to buckle myself in. So far, no problem.

However, when I looked at the dash to see if I needed to stop for gas, I noticed my battery was discharging...badly, with warning lights and everything. This meant that I had to abandon my car, move everything to my spousal unit's car (only after banging off enough ice to unfreeze the doors), de-ice her car (with two days of ice, bordering around an inch), shovel all the freshly-plowed-off-the-road snow from behind her car, go back inside, change out of all my now sweat-soaked clothing, before heading back outside to leave for work, over a half hour late.

I haven't had enough time to plan for my second and third classes. My arms ache from scraping two icy vehicles. My spousal unit accidentally spilled my tea while moving from one car to another. AND, after classes are over, I get to inhale my lunch in about ten minutes before being locked in my office for student conferences for the rest of the day.

Everything is working out just perfectly...but only because, by now, I expect failure.

rethinking relations

2011-02-14T09:18:00.004-05:00

I was talking to my father the other day. On top of exchanging the standard pleasantries, news, family gossip, and such, the conversation turned deeper than expected. I found out some new truths about my past.

I always used to tell everyone that, some point in history, some distant relative came over from France and Americanized his foreign name, as it was not hip in this country at the time to be from "elsewhere." I've always considered this to be, at least on an aesthetic level, to be a real shame, I would wistfully add, because I could be the significantly more sophisticated "Michel DuBois" instead of the much more pedestrian, klutzy Mike DuBose. Who knows? Maybe the sophistication of my Francophone name would somehow transfer to my pedestrian, klutzy personality, and maybe it would make me just a little more chic, give me a little elan.

As cool of a story--and of a hope--as this was, I'm afraid to say it's simply not true, which really bums me out. I blame my fairly distant cousin-type's genealogical obsession.

We've found out that, in the Normandy area of France, hoards of DuBois' and DuBoses (maybe peacefully) coexist. They even have a family crest.

Tons of these Viking/Frog hybrids, it seems, came over to South Carolina. The settled around where we used to live. Our South Carolina interlude, it seems, is one of lost familial opportunities, as we were blissfully unaware of our distant relatives living just miles inland.

Last October, apparently, there was a DuBose family reunion. Hundreds of them showed up. DuBose upon DuBose.

The mind boggles.

I've always thought of myself as being at the end of my family line. My dad has no siblings. My mom has one brother, but my only personal interest in him is of his suitability as a punching bag.

Now, though, right as I (with the slight aid of my pregnant Spousal Unit) am bringing in the next generation, the newest model, I realize there are in fact other versions of the DuBose out in the world, wandering around, making their own impact, all in the services of our quite scattered (geographically, temporally) family.

Mark this: with all of us, we're now a force with which to be reckoned. We are invaders, infiltrators, an infestation.

Watch out.

my new philosophy

2011-02-08T13:56:00.002-05:00

I was sitting at the bar last Thursday, when I heard a pool player exclaim to a colleague "just Sarah Connor it!"

I have utterly no idea what it means...but this in no way hinders my burgeoning love for the phrase, my desire to live it completely and utterly.

Even the analogy is vague. Iteration after iteration of the once and future heroine spring to mind. None clarifies the issue.

Is there hope if one "Sarah Connor"'s it? Does it make on valiant? Is free will involved? Or is one inexorably drawn into events beyond control, beyond one's comprehension?

The more I ponder this phrase, the more worried I become. Yet my love for it continues unabated.

It's a strange metaphor, because it presages a unique yet never-ending ontologigal struggle.

Wouldn't be the first time.

last Thursday's bar notes

2011-02-08T13:32:00.002-05:00

I write.

We're down to just the barflies tonight. One of them is overwhelmingly proud of proclaiming, at the top of her lungs, of how much she hates television that makes her think. Another pair listen, nod, and argue over who gets the next round. I'm sitting in the adjoining room, drinking my oversized beer, listening, and wondering. The loud woman has just proclaimed, for all to hear, that Suze Ortman's financial advice is "right, but fuckin' boring."

What can I add?

The music adds a slightly psychotic counterpoint to the overheard conversations. In the last few songs, we've moved from Public Enemy, to Jerry Lee Lewis, to Smashing Pumpkins, swirling between classic, merely slightly old, and closer to new. None of it brings up any real associations.

I don't know what it means.

I'm nursing my Chicago-brewed beer, thinking of the parenting class we attended tonight. The nurse running the session sprung upon us a collage of fresh-from-the-womb newborn horror photos. Soon came (in her words) a "rainbow of poo shots." Later, we watched a very "after school special" dvd telling us we, it seems, should not shake our baby. I can only assume she misplaced the "don't dry your infant in the microwave" shot.

I wonder where the sense and sanity might lie.

During today's "don't be late" class lecture, three people walked in late. Two came to me after class, desperately pleading for my assistance. We scheduled appointments into the non-existent holes in my fully packed schedule. Later on, I found myself surprised that I was surprised when they didn't show up.

Is the surprise a good or bad sign?

Some newcomers camp out at the pool table in the back. One of them is setting up the rack while extolling the virtues of fried food. Fried broccoli, it seems, particularly "rocks."

I sip and wonder.

I'm full of war stories tonight. If my friend, who works out of town, actually stops by as planned, some of them might be bartered across the table over alcohol. We'll look at each other, take sips, and exchange the glances exclusive to those of us who finally know, finally understand. Maybe our knowledge will drown out the Michael Jackson playing out of the back table's cell phone speaker.

I stop and ponder hope.

The couples at the pool table are talking slurs. My eyes limber up for the obligatory roll when they bring up "retarded," and I tune in. It's not what I expect. One tells another "just be proud you're young and smart and still care enough to call them what they want to be called.'

I pause. I reconsider. My hand cramps, so I put down my pen and contemplate the next drink.

locked out

2011-02-05T14:02:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, when I was sitting down to grade, I realized that when I left campus Thursday, I forgot to transfer my updated grades to my flash drive. So this morning, I ended up getting up relatively early (well, for a Saturday) and driving to campus through near whiteout conditions.

I got there safely enough, grabbed my guitars (they were getting repair work, but I didn't want to leave them in my car) and made my way to my building's back entrance. Locked. Went to the side. Locked. Went to the front. Twisted my ankle. Cursed. Made mental note to not ever buy a tweed case again. Got to the front door. Locked.

I called the university police department, and they promised to send something. As I stood there, snow soaking into my tweed telecaster case, waiting on the police to arrive, my feelings were mixed. It's a good thing that they treat safety seriously on campus, I guess...we did have a problem with homeless people sleeping in and taking stuff from our building. On the other hand, though, I was getting cold and wet while locked out of my own office.

The arriving officer was nice enough to mollify my agitation, though, and upon letting me into the building, he told me a dirty joke, shook my hand, and took off.

losering

2011-01-24T10:09:00.003-05:00

"So what if all my heroes were the losing kind?"--Lucero

I have gotten to the stage in life where I don't really mind being a loser.

This is a big change since high school. I used to be obsessed with why I didn't have more friends, why I wasn't popular, why I couldn't get in a band, why I couldn't get a date, why I felt like such a failure. But one can only worry about such matters so long, and eventually, instead of just saying "I don't really care about being popular/cool/whatever," I actually became able to not care. When I finally found myself at the stage where I actually didn't care what people thought of me, I started to more be myself...and everything came a lot easier. I ended up in a career I love, with the world's most perfect women (who, eight years ago today, became the world's most perfect spousal unit), and in a fairly awesome band.

This is all, I guess, part of growing up.

However, coming to terms with where I am and who I am does not mean that I always succeed...or even come close. Yes, I'm in a band, but although we are (of course) awesome, we don't exactly sell out the local stadiums. Yes, I love my job, but it's by no means where I thought I would be (non-tenure in a different field). I think I write good scholarship (albeit completely unrewarded), but I have a terrible time getting the pieces I like best published. Let's not even talk about how long it's been since my job application material elicited even the slightest response from anyone...my last interview was (I think) about three years ago.

These are all fine, though, because they all are the result of me doing my best, me really trying, and things just not working out. Maybe I'm simply not good enough, lucky enough, hip enough, or timely enough. But I can live with being out of step with expectations...because I'm trying. I'm pushing. I'm doing everything I can to succeed...so who cares if I fail?

What I cannot deal all that well with is the type of failure which has no logic...which has no cause...which hits out of the blue, without warning, without precursor, without justice.

Friday afternoon, I was finishing my workout when the spousal unit came home. She had picked up the mail (she's a little obsessed with mail delivery) and handed my share, saying "here's one from your Human Resources department."

I opened it. It said that said Spousal Unit's health care had been canceled.

I cursed. I yelled. I more or less collapsed on the couch. Losing her health care would be bad enough, but of course, the spousal unit is now the pregnancy unit...and the idea of paying for a pregnancy and delivery out of our own pockets was horrific. It would've, quite simply, finished any hope of us ever recovering financially. Hell, we both have a painful amount of student loans, and I'm still trying to recover from the fiscal devastation that was my two years as an adjunct. Throw on the potential pregnancy health care charges, and I could easily picture Financial Disaster.

I began to plan for the fiscal apocalypse. How would we survive? I came up with a multi-pronged attack:

canceling the tv programming
canceling the internet
quitting drinking
never going to Howard's again (which would've saved money yet cost me my soul)
selling my plasma
changing my cuisine to a cat food base
having the delivery in our bath tub
charging admission to said delivery

The spousal unit took to researching lower-cost ways of delivery, clinics, pregnancy insurance, and so forth. All I could really think of was having the urchin, struggling until the spousal unit's insurance was reinstated, and then declaring bankruptcy. Earlier, a friend suggested auctioning off naming rights, and there was a part of me which soon began to give it serious consideration.

The financial doom was, though, only a part of it. I really had a problem with the random "out of the blue" nature of this particular terror. This had nothing to do with missed expectations, with personal failings, with any logic or order. It just was a giant ball of misery pelted my direction for no apparent reason.

This morning, after a weekend of agony, I dropped off the spousal unit and stopped by my university's HR department. I put on my best pleading/pathetic/panicking look (which was not an act in the slightest), stated my case, used the word "pregnant" about ten times, and threw myself on their mercy. After frightening me for a little bit, they decided to clear up the paperwork snafu and insure my spousal unit after all.

I cannot begin to describe the level of relief and elation I felt (and still feel). I can think about leading something close to a normal life again. The biggest lesson from this experience? As much as I don't expect logic/mercy/pity, it's amazing how much I can be shaken when the lack of any coherent order is rubbed in my face.

I guess when it comes down to it, I can handle being a loser. Being a victim? I'm not so good with that.

things going on

2011-01-16T09:34:00.007-05:00

Whenever our schedules come into some harmonic convergence, the spousal unit and I, in order to save on gas expenses (thus lowering credit card bills and hopefully guiding us one micron closer to clamping down on the higher-than-I-care-to-think-about debts incurred in our student and my adjunct years), ride together to work. While the spousal unit puts the finishing touches on her morning routine, I stumble into the still-dark outside frigidity, crank up the car, turn on the defrost, install my coffee in the cup-holder, and set about scraping the ice off the windows. Then we pack up the car, climb in, turn on the music, and hit the road

Last Thursday, rather than put the mp3 on random, I asked the spousal unit to just pick an album. I sipped my coffee, she scrolled through the list before eventually settling on a selection. A compilation of Lynyrd Skynyrd non-radio songs began to play. I wasn't expecting this. Suddenly, my mind was wandering through reminiscences fractals, wading through iteration after iteration of Skynyrd memories.

As a beginning guitar player, having friends show me the chord structure of "Sweet Home Alabama," while assuring me that, as we lived in Skynyrd's hometown of Jacksonville, this was a mandatory skill.

Sitting in a garage with an acoustic, some fairly drunk friend of my friend's dad insisting "Tuesday's Gone" was a double-time, almost bluegrass number, and that I, by adopting a bluesy approach, was playing it "all wrong and horrible"...all while blowing smoke in my face.

Master guitar player friend sitting in my bedroom, picking up my crappy Japanese strat, and playing "The Ballad of Curtis Loew"...me mesmerized by the dripping tale of an unappreciated artist.

Out on my dad's boat, fishing, radio quietly playing some of the more acoustic Skynyrd, aforementioned master guitar player friend commenting on "the perfect fishing music" as I got snagged in the weeds.

Hearing "Four Walls of Raiford" for the first time, wondering why the radio didn't play some of this awesome stuff instead of sticking to the same five overplayed songs...as this one perfectly captured hopelessness and crushing loneliness.

My brother's guitar player/1957 Cadillac owner telling us about playing in a bar, having someone requesting "Freebird," him making the flicking-the-middle-finger/"here's a free bird" joke, and having the requesting patron throw a 1 1/2" thick glass ashtray across the bar at his head in response.

Coming from Jacksonville, I have particularly complicated relationship with Lynyrd Skynyrd. Yeah, I know that every aspiring musician has to deal with their hometown successes, and I'm sure there are, for instance, a thousand Detroit-area guitar players whose stomach turns when someone requests Bob Seger (as, incidentally, would mine). But for us North Floridians, Skynyrd is a bit different. Pre-Jacksonville Jaguars, Skynyrd is all anyone knows of Jacksonville. And the image they have? Rebel flag-waving, George Wallace-supporting, "Freebird" yelling whiskey drunks. Jacksonville is way more complex than this. Hell, Skynyrd is way more complex than this. But the image, thanks to "Freebird," "Gimme Three Steps," and "Sweet Home Alabama"-obsessed radio programmers, persists. To this day, I have a friend who has, to my face, brought up the "southerners = Lynyrd Skynyrd = Klan members" equation.

I left Lynyrd Skynyrd behind long before I left the South, but eventually, thanks to Drive-By Truckers and a clever "Simple Man" placement in season one of My Name is Earl, I eventually found my way back. But I was living in Ohio by then, in completely different surroundings, a Southerner unrecognizable as such (thanks to my lack of accent). Lacking the Jacksonville context, Skynyrd just became a reminder, just something to occasionally prompt fuzzy nostalgia.

Last Thursday, though, hearing them out of the blue...it was different. The surroundings might've sported snow accents, but the bleakness remained. I was still driving through desolate landscapes (albeit without trees). After I dropped off the spousal unit, I crossed through an industrial zone full of warehouses, and save the cold, could've been on Beaver Street. A certain emptiness and despair entered the surroundings, and my mood altered itself to match. I was struck by how much of "is this all there will ever be to my life?" dug its way into my brain, and how strong was my desire to drown that feeling with whiskey. For the brief drive, Skynyrd became the over-saturated soundtrack of hopelessness, of ashtray-throwing critics, of fishermen and drunks.

Upon reflection, things are very much different for me now. I'm living in a much better place, with much closer friends, doing a job I love instead of merely tolerate, living with my true love instead of dwelling in emptiness. While it's true my life hasn't ended up how I expected, I am intently happy...and if this indeed all there will ever be, I will, 90 times out of 100, be perfectly fine with that.

But for one day, Skynyrd changed that. Hell, it's not even like it was in Lynyrd Skynyrd itself...they're too concerned with money, drugs, and sex...but that's where I saw it anyway. Maybe this says something about me.

I guess next time I should just focus on the endless guitar solos.

new year's tradition?

2011-01-01T19:20:00.003-05:00

I've just finished my black-eyed peas & rice, corn bread, and collard greens. It is the traditional menu for a good southern boy to have on New Years. My versions aren't entirely traditional(my collard greens, for instance, are boiled, drained, and sautéed in a ton of olive oil and garlic). However, it's all very tasty, and I like to think I fulfill the tradition aspect well enough by cooking it in the first place in spite of any hangover I may or may not have. Now, all I really have to do to make it a perfect New Year's day is to hang out, watch the Winter Classic, and contemplate the year that was.

This, though, is where my personal traditions fall apart this year.

In many ways, I'm in pretty much the same situation as always. My academic career continues to stagnate, and, by now, I'm pretty sure I will never get that tenure-track job. I'm still living in the middle of the student ghetto, still driving a hand-me-down car, still writing desperately un-hip scholarship for no good reason, still have most of my friends either currently or are soon-to-be scattered throughout the country. I'm partway through another job-hunt year without any response from anyone at all. By all sense of my normal New Year's tradition, I should be sitting here, working through a terrible hangover, desperately trying to think happy thoughts, and doing everything I can to avoid my traditional seasonal depression.

This year, it's different. Although so much of my life is essentially unchanged, for many reasons, I couldn't really be happier.

It has been one hell of a year. Instead of being the guy who perpetually thought of himself as a failed guitar player, I am now in a pretty awesome band that's played out almost a dozen times and should have a cd out in a few months. Instead of being the lonely whiner of my teenage years, I regularly hang out with the best friends imaginable. I have conquered distance: even though one of my best friends left the country, we still hang out, drink, and chat regularly thanks to technology. Instead of having doubts about my academic relevance, I published in a major journal, have another publication coming out this month, and have the best writing I've ever done (which has real revolutionary potential) in circulation. Instead of feeling like I've missed having anything resembling a normal life, I have a child on the way. Hell, even after a 3am New Year's eve, I woke up feeling great

What's led to this joy, this sudden satisfaction with life? Beats me. I wish that I had some secret to impart, some bit of "if you do this, your life will be as awesome as mine" advice to give. Maybe I was just due. Maybe there is some sort of cosmic justice at work...although I doubt it.

I suppose that, as a writer, I would be insistent on finding the deeper meaning, coming to some great insight. Normally, I would...but there's hockey to watch, a food coma to work through, and a spousal unit to look at lovingly.

Enjoy your New Year's Day...it's a long year, and there's always plenty of time for insight later.

media of the year

2010-12-31T15:45:00.003-05:00

2010 Best-Ofs

Albums

Two Cow Garage, Sweet Saint Me—My favorite band in the world does it again. With Sweet Saint Me, Two Cow serve up an amazingly complete collection of songs. The highs are tighter and more mature than anything else in their catalog. Sweet Saint Me opens up with “Sally, I've Been Shot,” which, lyrically, took my breath away from first listen...and continues do to so every other play; how can it not, with a chorus that includes “Hello, Mrs. Hayes, this is Holden, and I'm so sorry to wake you up, but righteous boys caught me down in midtown, and I'm choking on the blood. What's the use?” There are so many perfect songs on here: “Lydia,” “Soundtrack to My Summer,” “Insolent Youth”...and you gotta love any disc with a song title like “Lucy and the Butcher Knife” (which exceeds the promise of its totally bitchin' name).
The Hold Steady, Heaven is Whenever—The Hold Steady somehow manage to constantly refine and improve themselves. While this might not have quite as much edge as their earlier efforts, it makes up for it with improved vocals (particularly “Weekenders), improved textures (“The Sweet Part of the City”), improved musicianship (the solo in “Soft in the Center”), and what might just be the perfect pop song (“Hurricane J”) with the perfect lyrics (“They didn't name her for a saint, they named her for a storm, so how's she supposed to think about how it's gonna feel in the morning?”). Even more impressive, The Hold Steady managed to pull it off live, not just in front of big crowds (at Detroit's Fillmore) but in small bars (Toledo's Headliners). These guys keep improving, and this could've easily been my top pick.
Ghost Shirt, Daniel—This too could've been my top pick. I received Ghost Shirt's first album (Domestique) after much struggles with a horrible online retailer. By the time I finally got their first cd, though, Ghost Shirt had already topped it with Daniel. Daniel is not as polished as their debut, but that works in the favor of this collection of songs. It moves from clean to distortion, from control to abandon, from beauty to rage, and everywhere in between. Astounding lyrical depth is only boosted by Ghost Shirt's arrangements...this is already a band strength, but the unexpected orchestration here takes everything to new heights. I first discovered Ghost Shirt when in Columbus to see a Two Cow Garage show. I'd heard a few online tracks, but they were amazingly cool and solid live. If there's ever a band to prove that you don't need a music industry to have awesome music, it's Ghost Shirt.
Sick of Sarah, 2205—To be honest, I didn't really care for Sick of Sarah's debut...it seemed like all the rock and all the edge had been produced out of it. That is definitely not an issue with 2205, which manages to capture both the edge and the sophistication of this band. Infinitely quotable (“I'll do anything you ask for, anything you wanted, as long as it's free”), infinitely hummable (I dare you to quit humming “Kick Back” [see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqyBj11L45Q&feature=youtube_gdata] or “Kiss Me”, while still capable of bringing the rock (“Autograph”). They are awesome live, so go see them if you have a chance.
The Sword, Warp Riders—This is one of the latest additions to my list (thanks, Spicoli!). Utterly fun and cool metal that makes me wanna grow my hair long...and almost makes me want to go back to double coil pickups.
Hemline Theory, For The Stranger—More proof that the music industry is utterly superfluous when it comes to good music. Bowling Green's own Hemline Theory describes themselves as “Cabaret inspired rock with sultry female vocals and evocative lyrics.” I just think they're utterly smooth and cool, awesome musicians and cool people to boot. Go to cdbaby or iTunes and give them a shot. We got a chance to play with them in December and they were great...and I'm not just saying that because they gave the audience cupcakes.
Superchunk, Majesty Shredding—These guys are a new discovery for me...and I always love discovering anyone who loves distortion as much as I do, is able to pair it with good songs, and realizes that good musicianship and songwriting can and should be paired with raucousness.
Glossary, Feral Fire—Glossary continues to get closer to where they need to go, and this album is the best thing they've done yet. First off, it's an amazing sounding album...Matt Pence does his usual brilliant job pulling the rawk out of a band. But it's also much looser and cooler than previous efforts. If the opening duo of “Lonely is a Town” and “Save Your Money for the Weekend” doesn't get you moving, well, you might have bedsores.
Peter Wolf, Midnight Souvenirs—who would've guessed that, post J. Giles Band, he had become such a bang-on honest songwriter? Good rock and roll with swagger.
Drive-By Truckers, The Big To-Do—After a disappointing few albums (including the overwhelming sprawl of Brighter Than Creation's Darkness), the Truckers return with what is their best album since The Dirty South. Of course, the Mike Cooley songs, particularly “Birthday Boy” and “Eyes Like Glue” are awesome...proof that Cooley is cooler than you. However, Patterson Hood's contributions are better than they've been for a while...and “After The Scene Dies” is one of the best and most insightful DBT songs in ages.

Other album thoughts: I really tried with Titus Andronicus and Black Keyes, but I just don't get them. I really wanted to like Josh Ritter's So Runs The World Away; it certainly has some brilliant songs (“The Curse” and “Another New World” are both jaw-dropping), but it also has a lot of weak moments. I know I need to get Arcade Fire and The Henry Clay People, but I just ran out of time.

Songs

Two Cow Garage, “Lucy and the Butcher Knife”
The Hold Steady, “Hurricane J”
Ghost Shirt, “Meds”
Sick of Sarah, “El Paso Blue”
Josh Ritter, “The Curse”

Movies

True Grit—This has more mood and atmosphere than anything I've seen for a while. Plus a really wonderful performance both by Matt Damon (who continues to show more range than I'd imagine) and Jeff Bridges (who is simply cooler than anyone else).
Toy Story 3—More exciting, frightening, epic, funny, and gut-wrenching than I tought movies (let alone children's movies) could be.
Kick-Ass—People who found this too shocking completely missed the point...if you were not disturbed by this, you were not really paying attention.
Red—Hellen Miren as a retired assassin? Utterly awesome.
Inception—Wild, mind-bending premise that wasn't quite achieved...but gorgeous to look at anyway.

Television

Justified—My new favorite show. The dialog absolutely crackles, and Tim Oliphant is amazing.
Castle—This continues to be one of the most clever shows on television, with the best cast chemistry ever.
Leverage-A good, hip, cool show gets even better.
Dollhouse—True, most of season two was actually 2009, but it finished in 2010...and it really showed what could happen when Fox took their hands off and let Whedon run.
Big Bang Theory—Clever and painfully funny at times. Yeah, the characters are way far from reality, but the humor (an example: “You know, if they took the money they spent trying to make a decent Hulk movie, they could make an actual Hulk”) is “how do they think of this?” funny.
Modern Family—One of the most consistent shows whose writing continues to deepen and add layers...all while being laugh-out-loud funny.
Louie—Not 100% consistent, but when it works, whooboy, like early Woody Allen done better.
Eureka-A show completely changes its back story via time-travel and leaves it that way? Cool!

I really need to catch up on: Doctor Who, Burn Notice, Terriers, The Walking Dead, Dexter. I've also been watching The Wire on DirecTV, which is better than TV should be.

forcing morality

2010-12-28T10:50:00.005-05:00

The holidays might have many associations for you, but one of my prime memories revolves around Star Wars. It seems like, come Christmastime, there's always at least one cable network airing at least one of the movies. Yes, they are not technically about Christmas, but, through sheer force of habit, they have become my holiday normative movie experience.

(This is actually a complete lie, because everyone knows the ultimate Christmas movie is still Die Hard...but that's another post.)

I love the original trilogy, but, as I get older and more egghead analytical/academic/nitpicky, I've started to more readily notice its foibles. I'm not talking about the little things, such as why every large structure has an endless pit build into it; seriously, Luke falls down one in Empire, and the emperor is thrown into one in Jedi; throw in the pit where Darth Maul dies in Phantom Menace, and you have a galactic architectural trend with which a Freudian would have a field day. These are puzzling, but they are far from the biggest thing going on.

And I'm not even talking about the lack of blood. Seriously, tons of people (and creatures) die in these flicks. Is there an ounce of blood? Of course not. But I can always explain this away using fanboy/geek logic...after all, light sabers must also cauterize wounds, right?

No, the biggest issue with the Star Wars films is the lack of a coherent moral system. Throw in the prequels, and this becomes much worse, because, as a whole, it becomes impossible to even attempt to divine an operational or consistent meta-ethical structure.

Let's consider the Jedi first. Ignore for a moment that, what was a religion in the original trilogy became some weird relationship with microscopic organisms...we'll come back to this. Are they good or evil?

They definitely posit a Manichean. existence by dividing up the force (or at least the way it's used by its very practitioners) into the light and the dark side. They seem to put themselves as guardians of the light/good. This would mean binary, right?

Well, it seems that way at first, but as they go on, the films introduce contradiction upon contradiction:

In A New Hope Obi-Wan Kenobi emplores Luke to "reach out with your feelings." Yet the difference between light and dark is confused here, because if you give into these feelings you've been reaching out with, you will be succumbing to the dark side...at least that's what Yoda warns Luke in Empire.
Admittedly, Yoda is talking specifically about anger, not all feelings...but by separating out anger from other emotions and making it a negative, this would seem to play back into the good/evil binary. So Star Wars as a whole buys into binary morality, right?
Not so fast. In Jedi when asked by Luke why he said papa Skywalker was dead (and not just wearing a kooky S&M costume), Kenobi tells Luke "any of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." Does this mean that the Jedis embrace moral relativism? Unless I'm wrong, you really cannot have both points of view and absolutes on the same plane.
In the prequels, Kenobi says "only a Sith deals in absolutes"...and since the Siths are the opposite of the Jedis, does that mean that absolutism=Sith and relativism=Jedi?
Wait a minute...how can you define yourself as the opposite of another group AND as a relativist? Can one really be an agent of light over dark while still believing in moral relativism?
Consider the case of Qui-Gon from Phantom Menace. Qui-Gon was convinced that Anakin Skywalker would be a savior. Yet can you really have a savior if good and evil is, as Kenobi suggests, only a matter of perspective? Isn't salvation the move towards some kind of good? So Qui-Gon shows an operational absolutism.
Ignoring that he too is willing to lie to get his way, Qui-Gon dies convinced that Anakin will be a force of good. Is this why Qui-Gon is seemingly written out of Jedi history, for believing in an absolute that did not work out? When Kenobi sends Luke to Yoda in Empire, he calls the little green guy "the Jedi who trained me." Only problem with this is that Yoda did not train Kenobi...Qui-Gon did. Is Qui-Gon being written out of Jedi history for his false belief in a savior who would act as an agent of good? Or is Kenobi just a pathological liar?
Back to the Sith for a moment. If only Siths believe in absolutes, how do we reconcile this with the explicit statements of Chancellor Palpatine, who is (spoiler alert) the hidden Sith lord? When, in Revenge of the Sith, he is asked (by a conflicted Anakin) about good versus evil, he says "good is a point of view." Well, if good is only a point of view, that doesn't sound all that absolute. Moreover, Palpatine seems more interested in using all emotions...which again sounds more relative.
But if you flash forward in the trilogy, when C3-P0 is trying to explain to the Ewoks why they should fight the empire (this, incidentally, might've only been in the novelization...haven't gotten to Jedi yet this year), he talks about them in terms of good versus evil. To be sure, the whole Ewok versus Storm Trooper battle seems steeped in binary oppositions. Or is C3-P0 just wrapped up in the same pathological lying of Kenobi?

So where do the Star Wars movies lie in terms of Meta-Ethics? Frankly, it's all over the map. The prequels do confuse matters more, but even if we shove them into the Great Pit of Tarkoon where they belong, the original series still has some explaining to do.

I did read somewhere that George Lucas didn't like Empire all that much because it trafficked in moral relativism, which made it a dark film...and, one presumes, this darkness made it less merchandise-friendly. This is a shame, because it is that very lack of absolutism that makes Empire my favorite of the whole series.

Admittedly, though, that relativism might not be the best fit for Christmas, but I am willing to deal with it.

a cool ho-ho-holiday story

2010-12-27T15:04:00.005-05:00

The other week, my band Analog Revolution (come see us play live soon, buy the shirt, end of plug) was playing our last show of the year with the awesome Hemline Theory, and I figured, hey, since it's the holiday season, I would get some candy canes to hand out to the audience.

The first thing you should know about passing out candy canes at a rock bar is that stage lights are very bright and shining directly into your eyeballs, so you really have to hurl them rather than toss. This leads to a certain percentage of the audience ducking and covering their eyes rather than catching the candy. Secondly, it's a good idea not to throw the canes with your pick hand...that is, unless you wanna lose your guitar pick in the process.

Hemline Theory played after us, and they one-upped us in the holiday audience-giveaway area. Where we passed out candy canes, they had homemade cupcakes...and they also had gifts for the audience. I didn't mind the one-upping, though, as 1) they've been doing this longer than us, and 2) I got some nice chocolate-filled almond cookies.

It also led to one of the best moments of the season.

After Hemline finished, I was talking to a friend who made the drive down from Toledo to see us. Partway through our conversation, someone I didn't know came up to our table.

"Excuse me," he asked, "but you're Mike, right?"

I assumed he just liked the show, so I shook his hand. After he introduced himself (sorry, can't remember who it was...post-show drinking, you know) and complemented me on the set, he also said "I heard you and your wife have a child on the way...and I think you could use the gift I got from the band more than I can." With that, he ceremoniously presented me with a Santa Claus Mr. Potato Head.

This, my friends, is the kind of thing that I love. To round out the year, I got to play a show with my awesome band. I also got to hang out with a good friend I don't see nearly enough. Furthermore, I had a complete stranger give my unborn child a Christmas gift.

True, it may not be on the level of world peace, but it does make me feel awesome about humanity and life.

ho-ho-argh

2010-12-02T10:36:00.004-05:00

I hate holiday music. Utterly, terribly despise it. When I was in high school (and beyond), I worked at a variety of Little Caesars pizza places, and more than one location was in a shopping center which piped in generic, sappy, cheesy Christmas music starting immediately after Halloween and ending somewhere around Groundhog's Day...a year later. This insidious music dug into my brain, ripping out my insides...and not in a good way.

Each of those seasons was pure pain. I know this might get me labeled a "humbug" (see, even the Christmas insults are sappy), but let me make this clear: I don't really hate Christmas itself. I can even handle the consumerism and crowded malls; hey, I actually did all my shopping on Christmas eve one year, and seeing people go crazy trying to spend money on ungrateful brats is kinda funny. No, it's just the music that drives me batty. So I try and avoid it whenever possible.

Totally evading Christmas music, however, is unfortunately unavoidable unless you lock yourself in a closet and plug your ears up with a spare ornament or something. Much like oxygen, the communist conspiracy, and ugly sweaters, it's everywhere.

Case in point: I was doing some copying and scanning in my department office, and the student assistant was streaming Christmas music on her computer. Of course I control myself, because I am smart enough to know that office staff holds the true position of power. However, I still have to hear the damn stuff, and my snarkiness utterly refuses to turn itself off.

"Here Comes Santa Claus" starts playing, and I have pay some level of attention to the lyrics (mainly because my sleep-deprived brain is trying to kill me). I hear "Let's give thanks to the Lord above, 'cause Santa Claus comes tonight," and it dawns on me...these songs are often very, truly, epically stupid. Thank God because Santa Claus is coming?

The whole idea of Santa Claus strikes me as kind of insidious. Who thought it would be a great idea to create a massive lie and spread it to kids everywhere? Sooner or later, they will find out that Santa does not indeed come down their chimney to drop off the iPods and Gameboys his elves manufactured up at the North pole. After hearing that, how can said kids ever really trust anything their parents tell them again? And to directly connect the Santa Claus mass deceit into any idea of God just seems a really stupid move for churches trying to fight the evil liberal atheist agenda (or whatever they're calling it nowadays).

I will admit, however, that my thinking may indeed change when my child is born. I will also admit that, just maybe, I've had too much coffee this morning.

after the rock show

2010-11-23T00:13:00.003-05:00

I grew up with parents that didn't like music.

This, of course, I realize is a total lie. Of course, my folks listened to plenty of music, owned music, and incorporated it into their lives. Yet music, for my Maw and Paw, was by no means something with which to become consumed. I'm sure both my parents like music just fine, but the importance it has to their lives always seemed, from my perspective, nowhere near on the same level as it eventually became for me. It was more like background sound, or it was "that's nice" music.

As a result, I kind of drifted lazily into the world of music, picking up on some things I heard on the radio, some things I heard from my sister (most of either category was classic rock, like Styx or Foreigner). There were plenty of songs I liked, but for many of my early years, there was nothing that really grabbed me and refused to let go.

Then I heard AC/DC. AC/DC smacked me across the face. It demanded my attention. It did things to me emotionally that I had yet to experience. As I was a shy, quiet kid, I was completely unprepared for the power, for the energy, for the liveliness. In fact, AC/DC's If You Want Blood (You've Got It) was the first album I ever bought. And when I discovered Black Sabbath, my path was sealed. It's no surprise that Angus Young and Tony Iommi are the two guitarists who influenced me the most.

My first concert was Molly Hatchet opening for Triumph. Molly Hatchet was pretty horrible. They sounded like they were playing through mud, and I began to wonder what was the big deal with live music. But Triumph came on, and because of their tight playing, anthemic songs, and the biggest light and laser show in the business, I became a live rock show convert. They did much less a performance than an experience...which is now the heights which I expect rock and roll to reach.

I'm thinking about live rock and roll because this evening, the lovely spousal unit and I went into Toledo to see The Hold Steady. This is a band I utterly love. Everything about their live show screams "you must have a good time tonight." They might look utterly unlike rock stars, their singer might rarely if ever actually play the guitar slung over his shoulder, but their music is based on riffs that nail you to the wall. Lyrically, they are very much about rock and roll...about excess, about inclusiveness, about unattainable dreams, about good times, about what happens when the good times end. And personally, I think they give hope to all of us ugly, middle-aged rock musicians.

It was also my child's first concert. Yes, I realize the kid doesn't actually get born for six more months, but I'm going to stand by this claim...because womb concerts count, right? While I have fears that the urchin eventually will rebel against my tastes and listen predominantly to either new age or electronica, I hope that The Hold Steady show implanted at least a bit of rock and roll in the its soul. If not them, who?

Although it does occur to me that there will be an in utero Analog Revolution show or two...

obsession and imagery

2010-11-18T14:13:00.004-05:00

I was watching Aliens last night, when it hit me: the movie is more than just a cool action sequel to a horror movie...it's also the perfect metaphor for pregnancy.

No, I don't really expect the child to come bursting out of the Spousal Unit's chest and snarl. While the movie monster is cool, what strikes me more about the whole Alien series is how the appearance of the bugs cause everyone in the area to freak out in a different way, albeit one uniquely suited for their character. Businesses turn even more bottom-line obsessed/evil, risking not just imprisonment but human life (there own and others) on the chance for profit. Scientists turn more "let's dissect, and damn the cost to human life." Marines turn more "hu-rah" and "let's blow up everything in sight." And particularly in the second, Ripley, the narrator, sadly enough, goes into "she's a girl, so she's going to become the snarling protective mom" figure over her own safety. Aliens, in other words, prompt extreme behavior.

This is what seems to be happening around me. Sometime in June, I will be a father. While I am fully experiencing the typical trials, stresses, and expectations of the addition, this is not currently the most fascinating element of the process. No, the freakiest thing in the whole deal is how an impending child causes everyone in the world around you to freak out. To be clear: everyone seems very happy for us, and that happiness seems perfectly genuine. Yet within many reactions of joy, I learn a bit more about those around me and the things with which they are obsessed.

The spousal unit and I first noticed the gendered nature of most congratulatory comments, particularly with the vehemence of assumptions on our respective roles. Whenever spousal unit told anyone about the upcoming urchin, she was often asked "How does Mike feel about this? Is he happy?" When I tell anyone, a lot of people wonder "Is your wife okay? Has she been throwing up much?" For many people, that must be who we, as expecting parents, are: a vomiting wife and a depressed husband.

I have particularly noted how the "depressed husband" bit seems pervasive in not just some acquaintances but in society in general. What, according to the literature, is my job? Well, when you're part of an expecting couple, people give you lots of brochures and magazines, and according to New Parent, I don't really have much of any role in this child process. All of the articles are written by women, to moms, and the only mention of fathers is that "the husband may be confused on how to help, so write him a 'to do, dear' list." No wonder the father-to-be's supposed to be depressed...everyone thinks he's a neglectful moron. I'm also assuming that having to clean up all his wife's vomit might have something to do with his mood.

People also seem inordinately fascinated by the question of if we're going to discover the child's sex before the breaching begins. Right now, we're going back and forth (I don't care, while spousal unit has changed her mind at least once), but some folks are adamant that we should have either a boy or a girl...but they really should've submitted a request months ago. Both of our families are actively pushing for a girl for some reason and don't feel shy about telling us so. At this stage of the pregnancy, this line of conversation has morphed into a debate on whether the urchin's high heart rate means it's a boy or a girl. Personally, the level of obsession leads me to believe that most of my friends own stock in either blue or pink pigment manufacturing processes. Sorry, y'all, we're going with gender-neutral colors.

The biggest weirdness catalyst so far, though, has been the ultrasound photos. When my spousal unit took them to work, she was unprepared for the political ramifications they brought up. In particular, there were co-workers that, after expressing congratulations, made them into salvos in the pro-choice/pro-life debate and started to reach at-the-throat levels...that is, after they asked if the photos changed how depressed I might be.

I also shared the photos with my friends (ah, e-mail...the blessing of the lazy yet ambitious communicator), and, as many of them are academics, this naturally stirred up a theoretical debate. That there was a debate was very unsurprising to me, and that there were views I found reasonable, views with which I respectfully disagreed, and views that seemed beside the point was also expected. However, throughout many of the responses lay an intense and not-so-subtle distrust of institutions: of communicative institutions, of technological institutions, and of medical institutions. There was co-opting, devaluing, and erasing. And this made me realize: man, I know a lot of folk who are truly paranoid, but only in a theoretical sense.

And to think that it was Aliens that brought it all home to me. I should note, incidentally, that I personally don't find any of this scary in the slightest. Instead, I am amused intently by all of the reactions. I really haven't, for the record, found anything about the impending fatherhood to be scary at all...except the realization that I'll probably have to patronize a Babys-R-Us in the future. The horror!

the right metaphor

2010-11-16T17:32:00.003-05:00

I have news...but most of the standard metaphors are kind of clunky and inappropriate. "Knocked up" makes me think of some weird zero-G mixed martial arts. "Bun in the Oven" is too Hansel-and-Gretel/cannibalish. And "expecting" makes me think that someone is never going to finish their sentence.

This is more delicate than you might think. I know that I have to maintain the dignity of the situation. On the other hand, though, I also have to communicate the joy, excitement, and potential of the event. While I am a professional writer and thus have to hunt for metaphors all the time, this one is relatively important, so I really hope this does it justice:

My spousal unit and I would like to announce that, on or about the 8th day of this upcoming June, the future master and potentate of the universe will arrive, and we, as a couple, are the responsible party...so some of the "hails" should be for us.

a new dastardly student trick revealed!

2010-11-07T16:54:00.003-05:00

I've been teaching for a while, and I used to think I'd seen everything, in terms of papers. No, I'm not talking about stupid subjects or thesis statements (although, after "The Catholic church is the mother of homosexuality and should be banned," not much surprises me there either) but in terms of length stretching.

While I can't talk for all teachers, I personally am not really so anal that I desperately need a certain number of words or pieces of paper to sleep at night. When I set a length requirement, I'm mostly thinking about an appropriate level of focus and critical engagement, because writers think much differently about a topic in three pages than in six. So when a student tries to slip past inadequate thought, it kind of gets me steamed.

I have, like most teachers, seen students try a ton of different tricks, such as:

the use of Courier New, which stretches out a short paper
the use of Courier New on a Mac, which adds more space than on a pc
a slightly larger font, ranging from 13 pts. up to the fairly obvious 16
increasing margin size, up to an unsubtle 2"
increasing spacing, from the sneaky 2.25 spacing to the ridiculous triple spacing
adding extra spacing between paragraphs, up to 16pts. worth

By this point in my career, these are all relatively easy to spot...and when I do see them, I get angry that the student in question thinks I'm dumb enough not to be able to immediately spot their lazy attempts to stretch out a short paper.

Today, though, I discovered a new one. My spousal unit brought me a page which I was sure was triple spaced. When we opened the file, however, it was in double spacing. I opened it up in both Word and OpenOffice without difference. After puzzling over it for a while, I discovered the student trick: only the periods were in 18 pt....which stretched out the spacing while keeping it officially double spacing.

Pretty clever on the student's part. I still think, however, that it wouldn't cost too much more effort to just do the damn assignment. I am, however, pretty happy to learn another student trick. I have another bit of evil I can now effectively thwart!

identity and hard truths

2010-10-20T22:55:00.003-04:00

My dad was in the Air Force until I finished seventh grade. When he retired, we moved to Jacksonville, where he grew up. I entered Lake Shore Junior High. Strangely enough, it was not on a lake. It was on Bayview road. It was right next to Bayview Elementary...which was on Lake Shore Drive. Bayview Elementary did not include a view of any bay. In fact, there wasn't a bay or a lake anywhere near Bayview Elementary or Lake Shore Jr. High.

I found this confusing at first, but when I finally learned to quit trying to look for logic where it didn't exist (which, sadly enough, was public school's most enduring lesson), things got much more bearable...for a while. I dunno...maybe they thought the names created an exotic image or something.

I then entered Ed White High School on the heels of my brother, who had graduated the year before I got there. Nevertheless, he paved the way for me. One of the first things they did to incoming students was to herd us straight from homeroom into a line, where we would 1) get our schedule, 2) give you an id card, and 3) be assigned a locker. Lockers were of immense importance. Get a bad one, and any time you needed to grab a book or some homework, you would be doomed to a long sprint through the halls between classes, pushing over chess club members, hurdling over the shorter of the cheerleaders, winding through the labyrinthian hallways, towards your locker, and you would have to do it fast to avoid the dreaded tardy slip (and the inevitable accompanying detention). A good locker, though, was a status symbol...get a nice one, and you would be "da man."

When I got to the head of the locker line, the student looked at my id. "Hey! Are you Mark's brother?" I admitted I was while secretly praying my brother wasn't a jerk to this guy. Things worked out good, though, because I quickly found myself in possession of a front row locker. I joked that my locker was so cool, it would make me the envy of all my friends and help me woo babes. Strangely enough, within three weeks, the locker did become a chick magnet...I was sharing this locker with a pretty hot Junior ROTC chick (whom I have no idea how I initially met, nor did I (sadly enough) ever had the courage to ask out...and I have no idea what became of her).

My brother paving the way didn't just yield me the locker of my dreams. I also had an instant "in" to my brother's group of friends, which meant I had people from whom I could regularly bum cigarettes, I had an already-reserved before-school place in front of the trophy cases, and I had a ready-made peer group of cool kids.

However, the instant peer group did not turn out entirely to be the boon it originally appeared. Yes, there was a social circle waiting for me, but it was also a circle that came with a readily-defined (and in fact required) role: that of the little brother. My brother wasn't always around, but I was still tagging along in his footsteps. I had friends, but I always wondered if, to them, I was Mike or "Mark's younger brother." I always had possibilities for company, but whenever I was around (who I feared to be Mark's) friends, I always felt destined for the background.

So I compensated, and I did so in a fairly pedestrian way: I tried to be unusual. If I stood out in some way, I reasoned, I would be my own man. So, as I suspected I was already slightly weird as a kid, I became fully goofy...which, while it made me stand out, also locked me permanently into the role of comic relief. I also tried to adapt a rebel image, but I did so in fairly predictable and role-enforcing ways, by wearing concert shirts and growing my hair into an awesome heavy metal style (covered earlier)....which just meant I merely became the goofy heavy metal kid

And for reasons I still don't fully grasp, I decided to wear my sunglasses...in school...the entire day...every day. Literally, whenever I was in school, I had on my sunglasses. Years passed, and when it came time to take my senior year book photos, yep, I was sporting the sunglasses. This did, in fact, have the effect of making me stand out, but it became more annoying than fun. Eight years later, I was in my bank to open a new account, and the teller stopped in the middle of a transaction, looked at me, and said, "hey, aren't you the guy with the sunglasses?"

It was then that I realized that the sunglasses thing, while it might've made me stand out, didn't make me cool. All it did was lead to yet another image I couldn't escape.

I would like to say that things got better, that I eventually became my own man, and that I became a person of substance rather than image. However, like the whole Lake Shore/Bayview thing, it's more complicated than that. Yes, I was playing the role of heavy metal kid, but I actually was a heavy metal kid...no other music really spoke to me. In addition to fitting the "goofy guy" role, I was genuinely goofy...not to the extent which people saw, but it was still there. After all, one of the lessons of the great hair-cutting-off of 1998 was that even without the trappings of my identity, I remained, to a large extent, the same person.

Maybe this should make me feel good, that I've in fact achieved the consistency which many people seek...that I know who I am. However, there are days where I wish I was just playing a role, putting on a front...because if I was, I could change who I was, become someone else, maybe someone with whom people would want to hang, connect, befriend...who would not grate on people's nerves and turn friends into reluctant acquaintances...who people might take seriously...who people would never underestimate or (even worse) dismiss.

If you've read more than one of these posts, you know I am not the world's most optimistic person. I might argue, with my spectacular lack of success on the job market, amongst other things, that my pessimism is warranted. I might also make great pains to be pessimistic in a humorous manner (after all, I do have British blood in my veins). But in spite of however ingrained (and thus inescapable) my pessimism is, I wish sometimes it could just go away...because I know it makes people find me whiny and high maintenance. People tell me as much to my face, and I don't know if they're trying to be helpful, pointing out the obvious, or simply letting me know that they find me annoying.

You also probably know, from being a reader, that I am in fact a little weird. Again, it is legitimate. I tend not to look at things from expected angles, and I try to be unique in my thinking. But however this skill might be a boon in my chosen profession (after all, would you want an academic who always took the expected path?), it also means that I am doomed to the role of the department weirdo. And while uniqueness is, I suppose, a good thing, it's also true that no one really takes the weirdo seriously. Even if the Shakespearian foole spouts the wisest words, he is, in the end, still a fool.

But what choices do I have? If these things are inside me, can I change them? Should I? Can I in fact temper my weirdness while maintaining the uniqueness that serves me well in my scholarship? Is it possible to minimize my pessimism and still have anything resembling my sense of humor? Ultimately, how much of what people see is me?

What is the cost of being yourself?

beverage: the Candy Corn

2010-10-14T10:22:00.002-04:00

Due to popular demand, here's another mixed drink, perfect for those autumnal feelings! As a word of fair notice, there is no actual corn in this beverage.

Chill a couple o' martini glasses
Fill a shaker most of the way up with ice
add
- 2 measures of bourbon
- 1 measure of triple sec
- 1/2 measure of peppermint schnaps
- fresh local apple cider to within an inch o' the top
shake well to combine while doing a light "cha-cha-cha" dance to remind one's self of summer days gone by
pour the mixture into said glasses
add a splash of grenadine to each, making sure not to stir
sip while contemplating how to carve an erotic design onto a pumpkin of your choice

clearing out the deadwood

2010-10-13T14:13:00.004-04:00

Way back when I started this blog in December of 2004, I had a few definite thoughts in mind for what I wanted to do. First and foremost, of course, I needed to convince and remind myself that I found the act of writing to be fun. This is one thing that this blog has done extremely well. In large part to its existence, I love writing again. Indeed, some of the writing of which I'm most proud in my life ("Issues and Six Strings" and "On Exits") is on this blog.

There were a few other guiding thoughts, though. I was facing a fairly dire situation: I was long out of money, did not have any work prospects, no longer felt like a scholar, was uncertain about teaching, was a failed musician, and generally felt like I had failed at life. These are things that, if you can get past the rough (and frankly embarrassing) prose and the macho bravado applied to mask the deep depression into which I was sinking, come through loud and clear in those earliest of entries.

Things are different now. I have lucked into a steady job which I can (and probably will) do until I either retire or die (I can see it now...a hoard of students asking the chair (while the EMTs drag off my bloated corpse from in front of the white board) if they still have to turn in their essays). In spite of being pretty sure I will never land the fabled tenure-track job, I am very confident in my scholarly production and think I have done good, note-worthy research (currently under review in major journals as we speak). I play in what I modestly think is a pretty awesome band. I am slowly, ever so slowly crawling out of debt. So I live, in the balance, in a universe drastically better than the one I inhabited upon entering the bloggosphere.

I have not (and, I suspect, I never will) run out of things to say, which I wish to share with the world. But a lot of what part of me thinks is important in "The Quest to Understand Mike" are topics which I'm pretty sure I should not speak. I've never, for example, wanted to write about the highs and lows of teaching, because I cannot really do so without violating the confidentiality of my students (which is something I will never do). Everyone who has ever glanced at this blog knows I've been frustrated with the state of academics and the job market, so to say anything else would be to rehash. I am also pretty sure that no one really wants to hear any mid-life crisis rants either.

What is left? It's a question with which I've been struggling lately. The short answer is: big things. Big changes. Big realizations about my past, present, future. Big understandings about what is important in the world. Some of these might be vague. Some of these might hinge on the "to be revealed at a later date." But I can assure you: most of what is to come will be pretty important, at the very least to me...so staying tuned isn't an entirely bad idea.

Mainly, it all has to do with the state of where I am and how I'm feeling about the world in general and myself specifically. I will admit that I have always been a melancholy kind of guy, and things like self-deprecating humor have always come naturally to me. I always used to think about such attitudes as being endemic to the state of TheMikeDuBose-ness. Lately, though, I have wondered about whether such an attitude is in fact an intrinsic part of me, and I have started to contemplate the cost of such a mindset.

If I'm to be honest with myself, though, I believe I've been (on some level) contemplating such matters for a while.

Back when I was a recent MA, I was finishing up the summer in my grad department office before moving to Ohio, when I suddenly decided to cut off my heavy metal hair. I had been growing my metal hair since really getting into ACDC, Black Sabbath, and Iron Maiden. I had gone from straight to Bon Jovi-ish perm back to straight, plowing through countless brushes and gallons of conditioner. By my last summer in Florida, my glorious hair had reached within a foot of my waist.

One day, though, I decided it needed to go. I joked about this with friends one night at a bar, and although most of them took it as drunk talk (sweet, sweet drunk talk), one of them suggested I make an appointment at the stylist where she worked. The next day, I did so, without telling anyone. I took a lunch break, drove to the stylist, got all my hair chopped off, and went back to work. The afternoon was filled with a whole bunch of "Hi, Mike...OH MY GOD!!!!"s. When I came home that afternoon, my own parents didn't recognize me at first. I went to the bar that night, and some of my own friends wondered who was this guy sitting at their table.

Most of the reactions were of shock and of the "oh, it looks good" type of surprise (with the exception of one professor with whom I was working who didn't even notice the change). There was one professor in particular, though, who demanded explanation, justification, and all that. He was strangely oblivious to my plea to lower shampoo bills.

I never was able to give him an explanation at the time. I can do so now. I was, at the time, wondering if my image made me me. Would I survive without the hair? Would I stand out? Would anyone notice me if there wasn't an intrinsic shock value? Chopping off all my hair, ultimately, was about trying to figure out who I was when all the trappings were removed.

This is, incidentally, what this blog will try to do from now on..and, if I'm honest with myself, I think that clearing out the deadwood in myself has been perhaps one of my main motivations from the start.

dreaming of the future

2010-10-04T06:52:00.002-04:00

I awoke far too early this morning but in a shockingly good mood, better than 6:30 really warrants. I was having a very good dream, you see.

Me and some generic dream-friends had decided to enter this competition to see who could build the best science fiction-y device that actually worked. So we developed a hovering 30 foot rocket car out of pipes, mystery blue fluid, and more bottle rockets than you would conceivably fit on a semi. We took it to the competition center in downtown Bowling Green on the day of the show, and it worked...sorta. We really couldn't steer it, and it took wild, unexpected laps through the alleys and paring lots of BG, frightening conference judges and pedestrians alike.

In spite of our car not being 100%, we were giggling nonetheless...because it was simply so damn cool. Then, overhead, we saw another entry...a working replica of a Pod Racer the size of a soccer pitch. Our giggles quickly turned to laughter. Then, entering our town's airspace from the opposite direction, was an actual flying version of Lando Calrissian's cloud city double pod patrol cars, jetting overhead to the BG (s)mall, and our laughter turned to wild, insane cackling, mixed with unbridled applause.

Yes, we were building science fiction.

We were not really cheering because our creations worked all that well. As well as having no steering, our rocket car's brakes quickly failed, and the Pod Racer almost took of the top of city hall. And it wasn't just because we were watching science fiction come to life.

No, it was awesome because instead of some company like Apple taking our common sci-fi mythology, making it shiny and plastic, loading it with proprietary software, and selling it back to us at a significant cost, it was us. We built it. We ripped the science fiction right out of the guts of its corporate owners/overlords, made it real with vice grips, baling wire, and our own hands, assembled it right in our back yards, and gave it back to the world at large for the simple joy of doing so.

It was a good dream.

on exits

2010-10-01T13:47:00.006-04:00

One of the least fortunate things about being a renter is that pets are problematic. I can't have pets now, so the best I can do is fawn over my friends' cat. It's a poor substitute, though, so I also just have to remember pets past.

We had a dog named Rusty when I was one, but I don't remember him at all. My dad was in the Air Force, and when he was assigned to Germany, we couldn't take Rusty with us. Instead, we left Rusty with a relative. I met him briefly when we returned to the US, but we didn't recognize each other.

We then had a Guinea pig named Snoopy. I liked Snoopy, but I don't remember much about him...Guinea pigs don't have an awful lot of personality, and I was quite young. We also had fish, but I always saw them as more decoration than anything else. As such, it was quite a while before I really understood the whole pet thing.

Tigerlilly changed all that. We got Tigerlilly when visiting my Grandmother. Tigerlilly was a Calico mix cat who I immediately loved. Tigerlilly didn't really care for me at first, though, and she would resist my efforts to hug or hold her. Eventually, when I learned to calm down a bit, Tigerlilly and I became friends. She was an interesting cat...she liked to sleep with her head buried in my shoe. She would also crawl into my violin case or camp out on my back when I was laying on the floor watching television. We also liked to play, in all the traditional boy/cat ways.

When she was about halfway through her natural life-span, though, Tigerlilly developed diabetes. We tried to regulate her blood sugar with insulin injections, but it was really a losing battle. I remember those last days, when Tigerlilly couldn't really get up off the floor. I petted her, told her I loved her, but when my father finally had to take her to the vet, I couldn't bring myself to go say a final goodbye...which still bothers me, to be honest.

We had another cat, a stray my mom named Muffin. Muffy had a hard life and was most likely abused before we got her. My mom was the only one who Muffy really seemed to like, and she rarely let me get close to her. She was always nervous and skittish, hiding underneath beds more often than not. Eventually, Muffy also got diabetes and didn't last long after the diagnosis. We were never friends, and I never understood her, but I was sad when she died, because I knew my mom did miss her tremendously.

Afterward, we eventually got two more cats, sisters from a litter in my Grandfather's barn. We got them when they were kittens. One of them was a tortoise-shell with almost leopard-like markings. My mom named this one Sheeba. The other was a long-haired Siamese my mom called Cleopatra. My brother and I, though, decided these cats deserved cooler names. Sheeba had massively long legs and tail, so we called her Spidey. The long-haired Siamese? She became Fuzzhead.

Both Spidey and Fuzzhead were great cats. They were generic cute kittens while young (I remember Fuzzhead falling asleep in my arms the first day we had them, which was truly an "aww" inspiring moment), but they both quickly developed strong personalities. Spidey was a talker, a yelper, tremendously loud, fast, and muscular. She really hated being held, but she was not shy about yelling "pet me! PET ME!!! NOW!!!!!" Fuzzhead loved to be held, but she would make you work for it...often, she would make you follow her for two laps around the living room and through the kitchen before stopping, looking back at you with her piercing blue eyes, and collapsing, almost as if saying, "Okay, you have now earned the opportunity to love me." That these two were sisters was also very evident, because they looked out for each other. One day, Fuzzhead fell into my parents' hot tub on the deck, and Spidey ran to the glass doors and pounded on them until she got our attention...and then led my Dad to the hot tub, where Fuzzhead was struggling to stay above water.

Eventually, we got cat number three, who decided to camp out on the street in front of our house in a torrential downpour, looking pathetic until my Mom finally brought her inside. This one was a black and white longhair, which Mom named Smudge after the white blotch of fur in between her eyes. Smudge wasn't very attractive at first, as her ears and eyes were way too big for her face, but she grew into it. She also never learned to meow, so she let out this weird grunt. Smudge also wasn't tremendously bright. She was, however, an awesomely sweet cat. She would run to greet me when I got home, and often, I would step out of the bathroom post-shower to see her sitting in the hallway, staring up at me like a long-lost friend.

Eventually I moved to Ohio. About a year or so after I came up north, Spidey developed a huge growth on her back. It was cancer, and although my parents had it removed, the cancer came back...and she died a thousand miles away from me. Smudge, who was very much my cat, also died of cancer when I was away. I often wondered what it was like for Fuzzhead, first seeing her sister disappear, then seeing her playmate (such as it was...Fuzzhead often just would whack Smudge for no reason) leave and not come back.

The last time I went to Florida, Fuzzhead still recognized me. She still looked beautiful, and she still purred like mad when I held her. But we knew not all was well. For starters, she weighed half as much as she used to, even though she ate constantly. She was also going deaf, and when I would sit down to pet her, I would surprise her...she had no idea I was near. Still, she seemed happy enough.

Before I left, I sat down on the floor next to her when no one else was around. She was laying on her side, so I gently started petting her. She snapped stroke head around, saw it was me, closed her eyes as if smiling at me, and let me pet her. I told her that although I wasn't around, I still thought of her...like I still thought of her departed sister and of Smudge. I told her that she was always a great friend to me, and I loved the time we spent together. I reassured her that even though I was the other side of the country, and even though I didn't know when I'd be back or if we'd see each other again, I would never, ever forget her or stop loving her. She lifted her head to mine and rubbed our noses together, as if to say "I understand...and I feel the same way."

I found out this morning that Fuzzhead died last week. At age 19, her body finally gave out. She had a great life, though, and was loved to the end...especially by her friend a thousand miles away.

Right now, I am torn. I think of quotes from two of my favorite writers. One of them, in the course of a story, has a character that remarks "bringing home a kitten is, in one way, committing yourself to eventually burying a dead cat." The eventual pain, in other words, is inseparable from the pleasure of life. This might make one wonder if it's worth the separation, the suffering. The other writer, though, once said "Remember: every day here is a gift." This is the attitude I will try to take, as I'm sitting here, typing a memorial, realizing I'm totally cat-less, tears rolling down my cheeks, thinking of my departed girls.

pushing and pulling

2010-09-23T09:32:00.003-04:00

This morning, I got to get up early and go to my physical therapy treatment. I seem to have a case of rotator cuff tendinitis, coupled with mild bicep tendinitis and some impingement...which actually sounds a lot more impressive and bitchin' than it is in reality.

It's one of those annoying injuries, because I don't even know how I injured myself...I just woke up one day in pain. I've been trying to come up with good explanatory stories, such as:

I pulled it carrying my singer's amplifier (which has the benefit of picking on said singer and making me look like a self-sacrificing kind of guy--neither of which are, in reality, all that fair).
I injured my shoulder playing one of my band's particularly intense songs...meaning I put my physical well-being on the line for my art, man! Rock 'till you hurt!
I had to break up a gang-fight made up of perturbed supermodels, and one of them got some licks in.
I strained it holding up the very integrity of my species (whatever this means).

The problem, though, is that since no one believes or even listens to anything I say, such fictive explanations all go for naught.

I do hope that my upcoming P/T schedule will be beneficial. Ultimately, I want to be free of any pain, even of the lingering variety. At the very least, though, I do know it will be a learning experience. I even learned something today, in the first session. As I had my shirt off around two women, and as neither of them threw themselves at me, I learned some very hard truths about how well I'm aging.

Oh, well. I will try to focus on the positives...at least the sight of a shirtless me didn't cause any of the staff to become physically ill.

battling the insect invasion

2010-09-08T20:45:00.003-04:00

This morning, the spousal unit and I were carpooling. As a result, not only was spousal unit up ridiculously early, but so was I. I was finishing up my breakfast and e-mail, and spousal unit was putting on her face paint in the study. That's when I heard "wooooooo!"

It wasn't, I'm afraid, an excited wooo either.

"You okay, babes?"

"There's bees in here."

"Hah?"

"Beees!"

Sure enough, there were two bees in the study. Spousal unit killed one yesterday, but I suspected it just snuck in when we came home. That didn't explain why there were two more flying around by the study's light fixture.

We had to get to work, so we left the light on, in hopes that they would "walk to the light"...and hopefully fry. We planned to, upon our return, clear out some of the kibble from the study so I could call our maintenance man the next day.

When we did get home and start shoveling out the room, we found another bee on the floor. Then another. Another still. Spousal unit got to kill one, but we must've found about twenty of the dead little bastards.

This is, of course, fairly puzzling. We haven't had the window in the study open all summer. So where are they coming from? The attic, via the light? Is our window broken? Spontaneous generation?

We will find out tomorrow. In the meantime, just pray we can repel the invaders.

tuning out

2010-09-03T15:14:00.003-04:00

It only took a few days for it to happen. And while I'm happy to have direct evidence of some religious doctrines, I just didn't think it would come when I was teaching.

The first week of school always means lots of adjustments. I have to wear pants, shave, and look presentable...well, at least as presentable as I ever get. I have to be prepared. I have to have notes. I have to reestablish the to-do list routine.

Then I get up in front of strangers and talk. I have to look like I know what I'm talking about, and do so while making them pay attention. Personally, I cannot succeed at this by trying to be entertaining or friendly. Rather, I slam them with information delivered in a "this is vital" tone of voice. Luckily, I do in fact know what I'm talking about, because otherwise, I would be scared out of my mind.

There is normally routine to help me through. I have my standard "first day of class" bits for my Comp I (which I have taught continuously since 2003). However, this semester, I also had a section of Writing About Literature, a course which I've never taught before...so I had to develop a new first day discussion/lecture. So I pulled material from other lessons from other subjects, boosted the level of intellectual intensity (after all, I have mostly upper classmen), and I funneled it all into the study of literature.

Halfway through the first session, however, I realized my attention was wandering. My consciousness was worried about what I would do when I got home...when I hung out with friends, would I drink wine or bring beer? I screamed to myself, "Hey, idiot boy...you're in the middle of teaching!" Then I focused on the lecture I was in the middle of delivering to find out, much to my surprise, that I was actually firing on all cylinders in spite of paying no attention to what I was doing...and I didn't even have the "I've done this 1.7 million times" excuse to blame.

It's not the first time I've entered a trance state. When I do student conferences, I often find myself giving the exact same advice, over and over. And fairly regularly, I go on auto-pilot during these sessions. A few years back, however, there was a conference where I could swear I had an out-of-body experience and could not just hear myself carrying on this conversation with a student, but actually see it happen....from a position somewhere up in the ceiling.

Later that night, post-lit class trance, I was on a friend's porch, bottle of Merlot in one hand and a cigar in another. I asked mycolleague if she'd ever done the trance-state teaching thing, and she replied, utterly unsurprised, "Oh yeah, it happens pretty regularly."

Trance/fugue states? Alternate consciousness? Out of body experiences? I think teaching might be the new Eastern religion.

diversity, music, and art

2010-09-03T10:22:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, I posted my internet meme post of 15 albums in 15 minutes. Yeah, i don't normally do these things, but I needed a mental break from conferences and class prep. Hey, at least I didn't tag anyone...which is important, because I hate coercion...unless I'm getting paid to do it.

Anyway, within a stupidly brief amount of time, a friend of mine pointed out (on some social networking site...apparently, she's too good to comment here) that I had a very "dudely" list. Yes, it's true...there were utterly no female artists on it at all.

After I saw this comment, I had to go off to my lit class. We had a bit of discussion on the general concept of heroes in general. When I asked what the first thing that came into my students' minds was with the word "hero," the answer was, of course, super heroes (hey, an area of specialty!). So we made a list and talked about what being a superhero (and, by extension, heroes in general) meant. After class, one student came up to me and asked if we were indeed going to talk about how heroes seem to be male and white. I assured her that yes, it was all part of my maniacal plan.

Of course, when I started driving home, the two incidents coalesced. When thinking about my lit course's readings, I did think about the general variety I tried to include (working class, Latino, different genres, and so forth)...but it still wasn't as diverse as I would've liked...there is only two black authors, for instance, but as this was my first time teaching this class, I had to pick from people I knew. I was constrained by my own experience.

Then, I started thinking of my albums. Of course, Aimee Mann (most likely I'm With Stupid) should've made the list. Caitlin Cary, if I had more time to think, would've also been in serious consideration. But what other female artists? No one came to mind. I also realized my list was very, very white. Yes, Living Colour would've rectified this (and, as they were one of my most important high school bands, they would've earned their place)...and Hendrix of course was a serious contender. And I love Motown, Sam & Dave, and Taj Mahal, but greatest hits albums and box sets seemed cheating. But there was no other variety...no Latino artists, for instance.

For music, there's a certain narrative at work which determines the music I've experienced. I started off with heavy metal (the British variety more than the American/glam-inspired variety), as I was particularly drawn to the virtuosity and power of the guitar-playing (undoubtedly because of my personal inadequate feelings of my own masculinity, or something like that). Yet metal is also a fairly non-diverse genre, so there just weren't a lot of non-white male options to chose from even if I would've thought of artist diversity at the time. At any rate, Vixen did nothing for me.

When I started to wane on the "shock value" and the "play it close to the genre conventions" aspect of much of the later metal I heard, I moved to alt.country. Something about the Johnny Cash-meets-Replacements sounded more "real" to me (whatever that means) while still stressing the power and crunch of a guitar. But was it more diverse? Well, there were a few women, but that was about it. I then moved to greasy bar rawk, but it was pretty much, in terms of diversity, the same thing.

I like to think that when it comes to music, I'm not really constrained anymore by genre conventions, by labels, or any of that...but unfortunately, I still tend to move within predictable music styles. Yes, I'm more diverse than I ever have been in terms of the artists to whom I listen, but my friends can still easily point out "Mike Music." And unfortunately, what counts as MikeMusic is still mostly performed by a narrow group of people.

I know I should be diverse. I know I'm missing out by not following a wider variety of artists, and I do want to expand what I experience. However, in the music, I'm constrained by my tastes, and I just need to hear the power of a G chord. Diversity is a definite requirement of the lit class, so as well as wanting to include a variety of writers, I know I must do so. Music is different, though, because while I know I want diversity, I'm also unable to give up the sound of a raunchy guitar.

I only see one solution: a government grant to increase the diversity of rawk performers by getting a guitar and a distortion pedal into every child's hands! A Marshall in every bedroom! Loud noises as a government mission!

15 albums in 15 minutes

2010-09-02T13:49:00.003-04:00

So, I got tagged in one of those "15 albums in 15 minutes" things. Rather than use a social networking site, however, I decided to post my response here.

Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. When I first heard this, I hated it...but, for some reason, I couldn't stop listening to it. There was so much variety, so much unexpected in the album. This disk had to teach me how to listen to it. In doing so, I had to rethink a lot of my conceptions about music. Plus, "Heavy Metal Drummer" still makes me want to dance (which I do not do).
AC/DC, Powerage. Yes, it has absolutely no hits. Yes, it is the AC/DC album most people are least likely to hear. But this one is their blues album. It is loose, free, and cool. Moreover, it's very pissed off. "Down Payment Blues" alone wins this album a "desert island" slot for its snarky feelings towards poverty, in addition to having the best sounding guitar solo of all time.
Slobberbone, Everything You Thought Was Right Was Wrong Today. Slobberbone is one mighty live band, but this is their shining moment of studio glory. Forget that, because of its mix of country, rawk, Replacements-esque punk, and aggression, you can't really classify in most normal genre terms. It hits hard while being surprisingly intelligent.
Two Cow Garage, Speaking in Cursive. Two Cow, as most readers know, is my favorite band. This album is good proof why. Lyrically, this album can be summed up as "What happens when you realize you will never be a superstar musician but still can't quit the music game?" As someone who has similar feelings about his chosen career, I can relate.
Black Sabbath, Volume 4. Of course, Sabbath was gonna be here. This is a wall-to-wall album. Just listen to "Supernaught," which was doing what grunge tried (and failed) to do decades later.
Frank Zappa, One Size Fits All. This is the perfect mix of humor, virtuosity, and attitude. I'm not sure it gets more beautiful than "Sofa No. 2" or more jaw-dropping than "Po-Jama People." Bonus points for the unexpected heart of "San Ber'dino."
Drive-By Truckers, Decoration Day. DBT is the band which made me rethink southern identity, and this was one of the albums which served as a main soundtrack to my adjunct "years of hell."
Metallica, ...And Justice For All. It is impossible to explain the impact that Ride the Lightning had on me...it sounded utterly like nothing else I've ever heard. Justice, however, is better...the band at their peak.
Son Volt, Wide Swing Tremolo. Son Volt came along right at the time where the cliches of heavy metal were getting to me. This album felt somehow more real, more organic.
The Faces, Ooh La La. Why did it take me so long to discover the awesomeness of this band? There's very few feelings better than riding with my spousal unit, singing "Just Another Honkey" while plowing through the countryside.
Rainbow, Richie Blackmore's Rainbow. An album of startling depth and variety that is utterly uncontainable by genre labels. Neither Blackmore nor Dio ever showed this much range elsewhere.
Judas Priest, Sad Wings of Destiny. Beautiful, sprawling, orchestral. This is where heavy metal should've went, instead of the shock value genre it became in the 80s and 90s.
The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds. The first album I played for my beloved (later to become my spousal unit).
Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street. It actually took me ages to find this on cd, but when I did, whoooboy. The Stones had more range than anyone suspects. This whole album is a Saturday night party that stretches into Sunday morning hangover...in a good way.
Green Day, American Idiot. I'm one of those who think Green Day really never did a bad album (except maybe Insomniac), but this is perhaps their most solid effort. Moreover, I was astounded at how much it made my students think and question things they thought they believed. Plus "Letterbomb" is an awesome rock song.

New York, escape to and fro

2010-08-19T10:10:00.003-04:00

You know the saying "It's the journey, not the destination?" I would really like to find the person who said that and repeatedly punch him/her in the prefrontal cortex.

I had occasion this week to transport a vampire to New York City. We got up early for the long drive. Ohio was fine. Pennsylvania seemingly never ends. Seriously. It goes on forever. You enter Pennsylvania on I-80, travel 300+ miles, get in sight of the Welcome to New Jersey signs, and then you undergo an instant quantum transportation back to the Ohio border. Little known fact: remember the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where the Enterprise was caught in a temporal causality loop for several weeks? That was based on Pennsylvania's interstate.

Furthermore, about 35% of said never-ending interstate system is currently under construction and down to one lane. This adds even more time, but what can one do, other than raise a fist to the sky and curse Obama's communistical socialism? How dare he spend money on something helpful and productive rather than just give us bribe checks as did his predecessor.

At one of said construction areas, traffic stopped. After five minutes, I turn off the car. Five more, we get out and wander the interstate. Helpful truck driver behind us tells us there's a major accident ahead. We see three separate helicopter ambulances. Then, 20 minutes later, they begin to shunt all interstate traffic onto a back road. About 20 minutes after that, they let those of us past the exit turn around, go up the on-ramp, and join the endless flotilla of vehicles clogging the isolated two lane country road. Eventually, we get into a very small town where, no lie, people are sitting outside their trailers staring at the line of cars while drinking canned beer...for entertainment purposes, one would presume. Two hours after we initially stopped, we get back on the interstate, ten miles down the road. By this point, though, the interstate is open again...so it would've been quicker if they would've just left us alone.

We wind our way into New Jersey and follow the handy online directions to the NJ light rail station...which is fun, because although said station was in a relatively affluent area, the township apparently doesn't believe in either streetlights or legible street signs. At said station, there is no mention of parking payment, meters, or anything else to suggest exactly how we're supposed to make sure my car didn't get towed. The train ride into Penn Station was uneventful, but Penn Station itself was about 128 degrees, with 98% humidity. This made hauling the vampire's suitcase over the top of the subway gates real fun.

For my solo trip back to Ohio, I woke early...around 6:30, thanks to the cars at the nearby intersection blowing their horns repeatedly and a neighbor moving what I can only assume is a piano out of the third-floor walkup. I walked the three city blocks to a bagel factory (recommended by our awesome hostess). While munching on a fresh out-of-the-oven everything, I:

walk the seven blocks to our original subway stop; they don't sell tickets.
I then walk one block to another entrance; their ticket machine is broken.
I stagger the two blocks to one of the Times Square stations, knocking tourists and schmucks out of my way. The station has a working machine, but you can't get on the line I need from that location.
One block away was the Times Square station that did grant access to my line. The building was closed for repairs.

So I crawl on my hands and knees the three blocks back to my original stop and actually got on the train. This ended up being a seventeen block walk (Manhattan city blocks, mind you) to get a bagel and a subway ride, which takes about an hour...and although it was early, I was tired, thirsty, and utterly drenched with sweat.

From that point on, though, the trip was relatively smooth. I negotiated New Jersey's mass transit with no problem. My car was still there, both untowed and without ticket. I found the interstate and drove westward, towards my beautiful spousal unit. Eventually, my sadness at the vampire parting just turned into anger and political activist resolve. I became road-weary, but it only caused me to do something stupid once (when I accidentally entered a YouPass toll lane and had to back out without getting hit). There was still a metric crap-ton of construction in Pennsylvania (which, once again, refused to end), but there was only one stretch where I averaged four mph.

Still, in spite of the good company on the ride into the city and the relative freedom of my return drive, I think the destination was far more momentous than the journey, which just annoyed me incessantly. I just wonder if Snake Plissken would agree.

on tissues and personal expression

2010-07-26T09:28:00.003-04:00

When I pulled down the box of tissues, I was a little puzzled that the top informed me that the box "contains green tissues!" Gee, the box was green, so that was my first hint. However, when I looked at the bottom of the box, it advertised the company's new line of colored tissues, claiming that one could "use the color of tissue that says something about you!"

Damnit. I'm in the middle of quantifying my entire existence for a job application, and that's stress enough. Now I have to coordinate my tissue? Where might I list my tissue color choice on my resume anyway?

Freedom from choice, please!

issues and six strings

2010-07-20T19:46:00.008-04:00

We were playing last Saturday on the deck of a Toledo bar called Woodchucks. After a set spent staring at the stars, enjoying the smell of a deep fryer, and blasting through our set, we hung out, drank, listened to the other bands.

It's the end of the night. I'm hauling my equipment out of the patio, when the sound man and the drummer for one of the bands (a rockin' power trio from Detroit) see me. The sound man says "You guys sounded great." The drummer says "guitar god!" I was a bit stunned as I thanked them before hauling my pedal board into my car.

It's during Junior High. My brother's jamming with some friends, and I take my first guitar (a "Chicago" brand Les Paul copy) in the hopes that someone will let me play through a real amplifier. I plug in my guitar, but I can't stop it from squealing. I feel like an amateur.

It's high school, and a bass player friend is having a jam session at his practice room. I find out about it when I stop by randomly, in the middle of a long drive I only took so I could smoke. Everyone else looks like they're having a good time playing, I think, as I watch them from outside.

It's a year after graduation. Some friends of mine are in a band, and their guitarist quits. They ask someone else immediately to play with them. They don't even consider asking me, and when I realize, I sink a little more.

It's three years after graduation. I have been playing guitar for a while now, but I can't get anyone to play in a band with me. I've had some spectacular failures of band auditions (one group was playing AC/DC but switched keys in the middle of a song). I've had an ad up at a music store for weeks before someone finally calls. I go to the audition, and everyone in the band is a good 15 years older than me. We play, but they're upset with me because I don't know every pop metal song note-for-note. I pack my car in a torrential downpour, the weather matching my hope.

It's one of a hundred times where, frustrated by my lack of success with an instrument I dearly love, coupled with 40+ hours a week of work on top of being a full-time student, I haven't touched my instrument in weeks. That's when a friend will call me to jam, and, upon hearing how damn rusty I am, quietly remind themselves not to call me again.

It's a year before I move up to Ohio, when a "good friend" drunkenly tells me, "Mike, you really suck on guitar." I smile and laugh, trying to hide how much I believe him.

I have always loved music. I always "got" playing music on an intellectual level...I could always think music, see the layers, know what needed to happen. I never had that strong of technical skills...I was always (and remain) a sloppy player...but I had feeling. However, whenever I pick up my guitar, most of the above instances immediately leap to mind, and my confidence evaporates.

I do what I can to hide my embarrassment and insecurity...long ago, I learned of the real value of performing bravado...but it's always there. I'm not used to anyone thinking I'm good at guitar...and since guitar has always been very important to me, to who I am, this means that I've always had to fight the feeling of being a fraud and failure. And when someone complements me, I always feel uneasy, as if they're just trying to be nice.

These are my issues, though, and I will work to overcome them. For now, I just want to thank everyone who has come to see our show intently for your time and attention and tell you how much I appreciate you seeing us...particularly if my own embarrassment or bravado has hid my appreciation in any way. And I want to really thank my current awesome band for playing with me...it truly is a dream come true.

I'll continue to be mentally screwed up, though...after all, my mental state is, by now, as big of a part of me as music.

metal and the academic mind

2010-06-28T10:53:00.003-04:00

The smartest thing I ever did in my life (no, it's not finding and tying up a wonderful woman to a contractual obligation...that was pure luck) was my move up north to enter doctoral school. While the career thing hasn't worked out quite as I planned, the other benefits are too numerous to count. I have the best friends in the world, I love my job, and I love thinking about and figuring out stuff...as my occupation! It's truly glorious.

There are, however, downsides.

I'm sitting in front of my computer, pulling out (as usual) all of my work-evasion tactics. I've already completed a full round of my daily web browsing, and neither Twitter, Facebook, or Reader has anything new to offer. I've done some audio editing on one of my band's demos. I've played enough games of Spider Solitaire (which is in a daily work-avoidance rotation with Tetris). And, notably (for the purposes of this e-mail) listened to music.

Today's pre-writing/avoidance music is Dio, which has been fairly regular in the playlist since the singer's death. I love Dio. I saw him on the Sacred Heart tour, and it was one of my first shows. It was awe-inspiring. They had a friggin' fire-breathing dragon on stage!

I always remembered Dio's lyrics as being one of the major draws. They were, as opposed to those from most hair metal acts, actually clever. They were actually about something.

But one of the dangers of being who I am, a trained academic with a culture and media specialization, is that the critical mental tools are always at work. When the song "Sacred Heart" came up, I started to pay attention to the words. The song start off with:

The old ones speak of winter
The young ones praise the sun
And time just slips away

Running into nowhere
Turning like a wheel
And a year becomes a day

The first stanza shows possibilities...a metaphoric examination of how the various age-related intellectual obsessions cause us to forget to see the true minute to minute joys as we live our lives? Cool. But then there's that damn "time turns like a wheel" cliche. Folks, bad Jungians have destroyed that as a legitimate phrase. It's simply hippie crap nowadays, and fairly uninsightful hippie crap at that. Moreover, hippie lyrics have no place in metal!

I still have hopes for something intelligent, though, if not a critical take on human existence. Later in the song, Dio sings:

You can see tomorrow
The answer and the lie
And the things you've got to do

..and I'm now expecting some good resolution. Hell, if I can see the answer and the lie, and if there's something I have to do, then it's gonna be notable, right? You're gonna tell me, and it's gonna be good...right? Right?

So, according to Dio, what do you have to do now that you know the truth of the world? Well,

Sometimes you want it all
You've got to reach for the sun

And find the Sacred Heart
Somewhere bleeding in the night
Oh look to the light
You fight to kill the dragon
And bargain with the beast
And sail into a sigh

It seems the grand answer, now that you know the answer and the lie of existence, is to lose yourself in a nice, long, geeky game of Dungeons and Dragons. Here's the truth of the world! Now use this knowledge to dream of living a nostalgic existence for a time where almost everyone was a slave and lived in filth, where people were repressed and killed for their religion, their national origin, for no reason at all! Weee!

Lest it seem I'm being harsh in my analysis, look at the next two stanzas:

You run along the rainbow
And never leave the ground
And still you don't know why

Whenever you dream
You're holding the key
It opens the door
To let you be free

Why do you dream? You don't know this, but the only real freedom you have is dreaming of a fictionalized existences you will absolutely never have! That no one ever had!

You see? This is what an academic mind can do to you. I guess it's better to realize this stuff than not, but it's still an interpretation I will now never be ever to not see when I listen do Dio.

Sigh. At least it still rocks.

drinking cures pain

2010-06-22T22:26:00.003-04:00

I haven't even hit the ripe old age of 40 yet, but my body is falling apart. First, I have a rotator cuff injury (which comes, I suspect, from too much "rocking out"). Then I get tendinitis in my foot. And right after that starts to heal, I pull a muscle in my (until recently) uninjured shoulder. Grrr.

Naturally, there is only one thing I can do: create a mixed drink! I call this one "The Anti-inflammatory":

Take a highball glass and add several ice cubicles.
Add one shot of bourbon and one shot of triple-sec.
Top off with apple juice, stir, and dream of pain-free days.

I must add that this is one damn delicious drink. I sometimes amaze myself with my general brilliance.

doctoral advice

2010-06-17T14:27:00.003-04:00

Another friend of mind just (successfully) defended his dissertation today. This is a version of the advice I gave him (and to many of my friends when they become new Ph.D.s):

Congratulations, and welcome to the club! Now, there's something you absolutely have to do:

As soon as you possibly can, write some scholarship that's not dissertation-related. Do that fun article you've had to push to the bottom of the "to-do" pile. At the very least, do a book review. But get something else, something new, something non-dissertationy under your teeth, and do it quickly. Also, do some personal writing. A blog is a good idea, but a diary works as well.

The big thing that happens to a lot of Ph.D.s is that, after their defense, they want to take a break from writing. They want to just sit and not think for a while. And while I understand these impulses, they are not in your best interest. It is very easy for your "a few weeks off" from writing to turn into a few months...or (as in my case) years away from writing. And when that happens, it is very damn hard to start writing again.

My personal experience bears this out. When I finished my Ph.D. process, I was already an adjunct...meaning I worked a hell of a lot, teaching things that were not my specialty. Adjunct work is really hard, and it's nigh-impossible to do it full-time and still write. However, you still gotta try.

I had the summer off, and this also became a long break from being an academic. What I really needed, I naively figured, was to recharge my batteries. Once tanned, rested, and ready, I believed it would be easy, during adjunct year two, to bust out an article. So I did nothing over the summer. However, the second adjunct year was even more nightmarish than the first (see the earliest of my blog posts), and all I ended up writing, in those two years of adjuncting, was a single 7 page mini-article. This lack of scholarship, I feel, undoubtedly contributed to my poor performance on the job market.

But this is more than just career advice. Trust me, I understand your current position. You are undoubtedly burnt out from the dissertation process. Everyone at your stage of the process is burned out. One friend, a week away from his defense, told me, "Mike, there's no one in the world who cares about my dissertation less than I." And this is understandable. Personally, all I really cared about was plotting revenge on a few "professional academics" who seemed intent on sabotaging my career before it started.

However, you have to remember that you got into this lifestyle for a reason. There were good reasons why, way back when filling out your grad school applications, you thought of yourself as a potential academic. Reminding yourself of this is now your next task...because I have seen bad things happen to those who forgot why they became Ph.D.s. Don't be one of those people who, upon thinking of the last half-decade of your life, forgets why you did it in the first place.

Trust me, you have passed a momentous milestone, the highest academic degree in the world. You need to feel good about yourself, about your work. You deserve to realize just how excellent you are, and how awesome is your accomplishment. You also deserve to think of yourself as an academic, as a professional.

So, by all means, celebrate. Have one hell of a time. Take a few days to relax...something I know you probably haven't done in quite some time. But then, jump back into the work...because it's the only way to remind yourself that both writing and thinking are fun...are good...and, most importantly, are what you do.

my own toy story

2010-06-16T08:31:00.002-04:00

In my heart of hearts, I've always wanted to be a writer. Yeah, I know I write now (been published, too), but that's academics. And although I am also a published poet, that's a lifestyle of which I never really aspired...too tortured. No, what I always wanted to be was a novelist.

Perhaps it goes back again to Twain. Although my parental units tell me that I liked to “read” at an early age, flipping through books as if soaking up the words via osmosis long before I actually knew how to read, the earliest books I actually remember reading were the children's adaptations/abridgments of classic novels...but I remember being so struck by A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (particularly the very gruesome scene where The Boss takes on all of England's knighthood, and soon the knight's corpses are surrounding his castle, their armor brushing against electrified fences) that I begged for the real version of the book...and I became a fan of novels.

I had some early attempts at writing a novel of my own, but they were really fragmentary and had no real concept of plot or character. The early works were horror novels in the making. Now, I'm sure that if you can get away with faceless characters and little plot anywhere, the horror genre is the place to be. However, I couldn't figure out what any of these nascent books were really about (a key factor for even a very young novelist-to-be), and they were all quickly abandoned.

I did have one fairly serious push to become a novelist in me, and that hit when I was in my early years of grad school. It would've been a good one, too. The novel concerned a (with a not too subtle autobiographical slant) a young man who couldn't grow up. This failure to mature was manifest in what I thought was a pretty interesting way. See, the protagonist still had his room festooned with many of his childhood toys and other such decorations from his past. One night, they came alive and, spurred by the efforts of two curmudgeonly gargoyle figures, started an active rebellion/open war against the protagonist.

The opening chapter, when debuted to my grad school creative writing class, got positive feedback. They thought it was lively and fun. They pointed out to me that the toys had more character than the protagonist, but that was a design feature...as the “war” between them progressed and the balance of power shifted, so would the characterization. While the protagonist started out with no character and the toys with tremendous personality, everything would reverse until, when the guy won the war, he would become fairly realized, while the toys would, in defeat, become mere toys.

Everything was going both swell and swimmingly. I busted out a few more chapters. I had real ideas on how to make the novel work. I finished writing chapter four, describing the aftermath of one toy-versus-man battle in the style of Red Dawn (particularly in the style of the Cuban general's letter to his wife) (also, Wolverines!!!!) (sorry for that). I had real hope that I'd actually finish the damn thing this time, and it would be good to boot.

Then one of my colleagues from the creative writing class asked me if I had heard of this new movie Toy Story. When they described the plot to me, my jaw dropped. Then I saw it. Granted, they were doing a very different story than I, but still, there were enough similarities between the two where everyone to whom I described my novel would ask, “have you seen Toy Story?”

So I gave up the novel. It's just as well, because even if the original Toy Story wasn't all that close in its specifics to my tale, the sequel (particularly in Jessie's flashback) came frightfully close. The rest of my academic life was also intruding, and I realized that, in between full time grad work and three different part time jobs, I just didn't have time to write anyway. And when I later found out that the movie was the product of such writers as Joss Whedon and Joel Coen, I realized that I could've never competed anyway. You see, my ego does actually know some bounds!

Flash forward to today. I've never written a complete novel to this point in my life. However, I do have yet another novel idea bouncing around my skull all summer. It would be a cool one, too, the story of an aspiring rock musician, colored with all sorts of anecdotes from my own playing experiences (and from my musician friends, who might recognize whole periods of their lives in the narrative). I could make it work. But I also have way too much academic writing left to do, and the very real timeline of this upcoming season being my last shot on the market (for at least a few years, but maybe forever) is lighting a fire under me...so this novel too goes into the ever-increasing “I don't have the time” file.

And what opens tomorrow? Toy Story 3. I guess it's time to see how much of my planned toy rebellion novel makes the screen this time.

the river rolls, rolls, rolls (final KY notes)

2010-06-15T14:25:00.006-04:00

Cairo Cairo is a place I dearly love

Everything around me and the moon and stars above
--Lil' Son Jackson

Cairo, Kentucky is a town that's located near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Like most things related to the mighty Mississip, and even though I never actually have (until recently) stepped foot in the town, it's a name that resonates.

It is my junior year of high school, and I'm hiding in the back corner of fifth period history. The class is, of course, relatively boring. With hindsight, I realize how hard it must be to make any good sense out of “all the history of the world in the last five hundred years” in the span of a single school year. All I could tell at the time was that I was overwhelmed by nothing but bland, boring, faceless generalities. But even at the untested age of 16, I realize at some level that the specificities are where the real interesting stuff occurs...and without the quirks of history, I just can't force myself to care about the class even in the slightest.

I've long since tired of staring at my surroundings, and there are no close friends in the class to distract me. I've also long since bored of trying to perfect my hand-drawn renditions of various band logos and guitar designs...I suck at drawing anyway. As I'm sitting next to a shelf, I decide to quietly dig amongst its contents...just for something to do. The shelf is mostly filled with teaching supplies for various classes held in this room. After discounting a box of writing supplies and chalkboard erasers, I stumble upon two stashes of paperbacks, no doubt for an English class later in the day.

At the time, I didn't realize this was momentous, a sort of “monkey discovering the monolith” moment. But when I found those boxes full of copies of Animal Farm and Life on the Mississippi, something changed.

I dug Animal Farm, to be sure. Even in my inexperienced state, I was beginning to suspect (hell, I was a teenager—which meant I knew with every fiber of my being) that power and leadership were valuable commodities that should not be handed out to someone just because they desire them...which describes the point of the Orwell novel perfectly.

Life on the Mississippi, though, really captured me at a vastly deeper level. I plowed through that book at least ten times that year. The characters, the conflicts, the settings, all of them washed over me, taught a bored teenage version of me more than a droning teacher ever would. One image which always stays with me, however, is of some small village that, because of the river being the official state border, went to bed one night officially in Kentucky yet woke up the next morning as part of Missouri after the river decided to change course in the night.

I loved that book because it resonated with some of my deepest desires. I desperately wanted to escape my life of hardship and boredom, go out on the road, have a chance to not just reinvent myself, but to invent myself in the first place. I wanted to become an expert in something mysterious, I wanted to learn a new, mysterious, romantic way of life, learn it deep in my bones. I wanted to live where I had real value, and where that value had all come because I personally earned it, through hard work, perseverance, and innate ability.

In spite of these dreams, though, I stayed fairly pedestrian in my life for some time. I lived at home entirely too long after high school, took extraordinarily menial jobs, engaged in typically pedestrian irresponsible behavior, went to a community college that was in biking distance, and generally clamped down upon that fledgling Twain-inspired desire for adventure.

Flash forward to my recent Kentucky vacation. After days eating much smoked meat, drinking in lakefront bars, and holding many conversations both more profane and personal than expected, my awesome hosts offered to take us to a brewpub in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. On the way, upon hearing we would drive through the town of Cairo, Illinois, my mind immediately clicked onto Cairo's appearances in Life on the Mississippi, and I looked forward to staring at the river while reliving my memories of Twain.

Time, however, had not been kind to Cairo. What had once been a town of over 15,000 has dropped to under 4,000. What was once a fairly grand main street is now a monument of decay and abandonment, with windows boarded up, paint peeling, and (in one case) a thirty foot tree plowing through the middle of one building. Our host informed us that the citizens are quite used to us college-types slowing down to take photos of the deindustrialized, post-apocalyptic landscape. However, we were informed, we would not be leaving the car, because Cairo had become quite a center of crime.

Cape Girardeau, our ultimate destination, was a complete and utter whiplash-inducing contrast of a town. I had never heard of the town at all (not in Life on the Mississippi or otherwise), but it immediately struck me as somewhere I wanted to be. Although it boasts a university I've never heard of (who knew there even was a Southeast Missouri State University?), it had a wonderful midwest college town atmosphere, tons of good restaurants and shops, beautiful houses, wonderful views. It was a truly unexpected jewel

After our brew-pub meal, we even got a chance to wander down to the waterfront, past the flood walls, and stare at the mighty Mississip, much as I do whenever I get down to New Orleans, and it was (as always) glorious. True to form, it held all the mystery, all the nostalgia, all the Mark Twain memories I imagined as a kid, that I see every time I stare at its vast expanse and drift into my own dreams.

Because of the day's travels, however, there was an entirely new level of complexities to the river, which begged the question, How did the world fit in? Cairo, the town of which I dreamed, whose very name resonated with me on some deep, personal, and spiritual level? It was a mess, beaten up by forces beyond its control, pushed into obscurity and blight. But then there was the unknown town of Cape Girardeau, which was glorious and fun, which had been sitting there just outside of my realm of knowledge and expectations.

There were many lessons there, but as I was staring at the brown water of the Mississippi, most of them escaped me. Twain was still in my mind, but mostly as a counterpoint: how would Mr. Clemens, I wondered, respond to the dualities of current day Cairo and Cap Girardeau? What lessons of hard work, romance, and dreams would he find? How would the Mississippi of today stack up to that of his childhood?

As I gazed out at the river, I knew I couldn't answer for Mark Twain. More surprisingly, I couldn't even answer for myself. I have no idea where my expectations lie anymore, or even if I should have them in the first place.

The river was still there, though. It would always be there. It would just be me that's different, I thought, as I took one last glimpse at the water. We then left and went back to our host's house, where I prepared for the long trip home.