Now Santa Claus comes forward, that's a razor in his mit; and he puts on his dark glasses and he shows you where to hit

I had just pulled out of the Dunkin Donuts on my way into into work today and found myself behind a car with the words 'Antibacterial Socks' plastered in huge black letters across the rear bumper.

Antibacterial Socks.

No other explanation (apparently none needed).

I pulled around to pass the guy and noticed lots of advertising on the side, albeit none related to foot odor or other similar hygienic or podiatry needs. The adverts indicated the vehicle was a rental - a zip car - nothing odd about that. Some shitty little subcompact thing, it might have been a Toyota but my attention was elsewhere.

Then it got weird. Starting with the driver.

His window was down and we were across from one another at a traffic light.

The dude at the controls couldn't see over the steering wheel, was wearing a very tall blueish top hat(!) , wrap-around Bono shades, a pink t-shirt and was drumming the dashboard furiously with what looked like latex gloves on (the dish washing variety).

This cat was singing, howling at the top of his lungs. But he had no music on in the car that I could hear and no ear buds or other obvious source for his rhythmic inspiration. The words he was torturing weren't English but they weren't exactly not English either. I felt I could almost make them out, but then at the last instant they'd float away, undeciphered. Out of phase, is the best way I can describe it. And there was no familiar melody or recognizable genre to help place his warbling in some sort of context I could understand.

I felt for just a second like someone must have laced my Dunkin Donuts coffee with a potent hallucinogen. But no one had touched it other than the counter person I see every day, a shy but friendly young Indian gal that most definitely did not seem the deadhead trippy hippie type. Perhaps the java is packaged that way, a new marketing angle for the random customer who asks for "Cinnamon Spice flavor". Wink-wink, sly smile. A tie-in to the new Ang Lee Woodstock flick about to hit theaters, perhaps?

I wanted to ask the zip car drivin' cat-in-the-hat next to me about antibacterial socks but I didn't know how to broach the subject given his operatic focus and my dumbfounded confusion. And then the light flashed green and he was off. I slowed down and watched him continue down route 202 South as I turned right onto Allendale Road and the daily grind.

Antibacterial socks were but one of a litany of puzzles I was chewing on as I pulled into the parking lot.

So I started work today in a state of flux and never regained my balance.

As I write this in the evening I'm still trying to shake the encounter from my psyche. Does it portend something ominous to come? Is this some kind of I Heart Huckabees existential calamity? Is this Short Top Hatted Singer to me what the Tall African Man was to Jason Schwartzman?

Or was he just some clown driving through King Of Prussia on his way to work?

Maybe he was freaked out by my lack of a Top Hat and because I wasn't singing along to music he couldn't hear. And primarily because I did not declare my support for Antibacterial Socks, at least not in the overt way in which he was accustomed.

Maybe I'm just listening to too much Leonard Cohen on the iPod these days. Apart from my Beatles jag last night, I've been fixated on the first three Cohen records of late - my "Early Cohen" playlist has been on a continuous loop: Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs from a Room, Songs of Love and Hate. Especially the Love and Hate disc. Dress Rehearsal Rag, Last Year's Man, Famous Blue Raincoat. Those three are enough to make you existential ... or maybe it's suicidal ... or perhaps both (though in that case you'll likely not know if you've done yourself in or only imagined you have).

Cohen's lyrics do you in for sure. Though the baritone, unceasingly minor chord progressions and spare bordering on non-existent backing instrumentation do their fair share of damage as well. To compare to another favorite of mine with razor sharp teeth, Elvis Costello's words are even darker and more vicious, but he dresses them up in happy major chords, Lennon/McCartney style melodies and keyboard heavy punkish hues. Leonard doesn't let you off the hook like that: there's nowhere to hide in his well of sorrow. Don't get me wrong, now: he's got some wonderful melodies, they're just more oriented toward the shadows.

The rain falls down on last year's man. Indeed.

Storing away the nuts of a Folky Bum, Jon and Kate, and One Beautiful Loser

Squirreling Around

This picture on the right is floating around the web today and it caught my eye as I have a family of squirrels that have nested on one side of the window air conditioning unit jutting out my bedroom window at the head of my bed.

The squirrels have been there since winter and I thought when I cranked the AC unit up in May, that'd be it. Nope. They're tenacious fuckers. I knocked away their nest but they just rebuild it. They haven't otherwise bothered me, but when I open the blind in the morning I'm often presented with just this image (well, minus the people in the background).

The Mystery Tramp

Apparently, Bobby Zimmerman of Hibbing Minnesota was wandering around Long Branch recently, several blocks inland in a 'low income, predominantly minority neighborhood' doing some 'sight seeing' when he was questioned by police.

They asked his name and the 68 year old disheveled 'bum' muttered, "Bob Dylan."

Blank Stares.

The 20 something cops apparently did not recognize either the man or the name. They just saw an aging potential vagrant.

"What are you doing here?"

"I'm on Tour, just looking at houses until the show."

He didn't have ID. Why do famous people never have ID on them? He should at least carry a folded up copy of one of his cover shots from Rolling Stone or Creem.

At least sing for them, Mr. Voice of a Generation.

"Who am I? The answer my friend, is blowin' in the wind."

"No it's not, that's one of the industrial chemical plants just north of here, you're in North Jersey dickweed - I ask again, who are you?"

They took him back to where he was staying and the tour staff vouched for Mr. Tambourine Man.

He shoulda known better, he said it himself once upon a time:

"Up on Housing Project Hill It's either fortune or fame
You must pick up one or the other
Though neither of them are to be what they claim
If you're lookin' to get silly
You better go back to from where you came
Because the cops don't need you here
And man they expect the same."

Jon and Kate + Hate

For me, the devolution of Jon and Kate from learning channel curiosity to huge family-friendly sensation to full-on Jerry Springer / car-wreck-we-can't-avoid-watching phenomenon sort of parallels the relationships in modern American mainstream politics. Specifically, the centrist wings of the Democratic and Republican parties. To be more clear, I'm referring here to the 'professional' politicos, not those of us out here in the peanut galleries of 'main street'.

Sure you've always had the extremes of both bents railing at one another and at the center. I've been watching the pros in this league kind of closely, as I play Left Wing position in pick-up games on the weekend.

But I think the mainstream has in recent years become much more polarized than they have been in a while, certainly since Reagan, and maybe since Watergate.

It's all cyclical on the generational scale, but we're definitely in the midst of a bad patch.

The latest 'break-up' I feel came to a head with the invasion of Iraq (though the 2000 election shenanigans signaled a separation and certainly there were fireworks during most of Clinton's second term).

Oh, the centrists tried working it out over the last few years as the Yeh Ha Cowboy Nutso antics of Bush/Cheney became ever more pronounced and Grandpa Grumpy saddled up with Sista Sarah making the central right look more like Limbaughland than the Gipperville he advertised.

They even tried moving back in together during the recent election, keeping it going for a couple of months of the Obama administration.

But that temporary reprieve all ended for good with the maelstrom that is health care and the false specter of Socialism on a Grand Scale, the central left understanding that the Fear-mongering is all one big red herring and the central right not taking any changes.

I'm not yet sure who is who in this admittedly 'stretching it' Jon and Kate analogy.

But I'm guessing Jon is the randy Dem, hanging out in Vegas with the babysitter, a 'Looking for Mr. Goodbar' type who'll no doubt be his downfall.

Kate is the self righteous Elephant, seemingly all 'family-first' but who will eventually be outed as a deviant loon. She's already had one brush with the law ('bad girls, bad girls, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?').

The kids are, you might have guessed, all of us.

Beautiful Cohen

After watching the PBS Leonard Cohen concert the other night, I picked up one of the two novels he wrote (he has several collections of poems and short stories), first published back in 1966. Beautiful Losers. "God knows how far up your moccasins were laced." The guy's gotta way with words, in song and in story. It's a bit too metaphysical for my taste and his prose can get mighty purple, but he's always on his game with an inside out turn of phrase and a heady mix of the pretty and profane.

'I thought you were a racing man, ah, but you couldn't take the pace. That's a funeral in the mirror and it's stopping at your face'

Michael Vick is a Philadelphia Eagle now, eh? Has Andy Reid found a new motivational coach, a new regiment? Can't make the cut? Here's a new way of releasing a player: how 'bout a little 'lectricity to the gonads, Scarecrow?

Welcome to the Novacare Complex and Training Pit.

How do I feel about it?

Eagles? Eagles, who? Go, Seahawks!

Vick lands for me somewhere between a child molester, a rapist, and Dick Cheney. Which means, I guess, that he's fits in just fine in professional sports.

Yeah, I'm a meat-eating, slaughter-house-appeasing hypocrite. Guilty as charged. My prerogative.

But there's a difference. Humans are carnivores. We started out hunting with our hands, then spears, and so on. We've gotten brutally effective at turning what was (or so we thought) a necessary evil into a massive, assembly line killing-machine industry.

And a lot of that industry is needlessly cruel, both in their treatment of the animals before slaughter and of course in the means by which they are killed.

But they don't do it as sport. Vick wasn't electrocuting dogs for his supper, he was doing it for his jollies.

Redemption? Yeah, I believe in it.

This is different, though, than getting busted for selling drugs or robbing a bank or any of that kinda stuff. This is badness and cruelty over a lengthy period of time that comes from an innate sadism.

'But, Steve', you say, 'bad can morph into good.' It can. Not often. Is this the case here? Is this some sort of Edward Norton/American History X prison metamorphosis from evil to inspirational?

I don't see any signs of that yet.

For the techno-geeks, there something in software development called 'refactoring' - turning bad code into maintainable software. You start by identifying 'bad smells' in the code. You know you're done when there is no more odor.

You spot a bad smell the same as pornography: 'I know it when I see it'. Now, that's a bit cagey - there are patterns and known bad smells. But at its core, that's the starting point: something doesn't smell

right, your intuition and experience tells you.

And with Vick, something doesn't smell right.

Fuck football, anyway.

Roller Derby is coming back in a BIG WAY. Go Philly Roller Girls League!

So with that, I switch off the Eagles pre-season game and drown my sorrows in the psychedelic wonderland that is Woodstock (celebrating the 40th Anniversary, man), documentary-style.

Well, too distracted to keep it in 1969 for too long a clip at a time, so ...

Click.

... Flipping incessantly between Woodstock and Generation Islam on CNN with a rock star in her own right, the incomparable Christiane Amanpour.

It's kind of surreal whipping back and forth between swaying, muddy hippies and the shifting sands of Islam in the modern world. Jimi Hendrix and the Star Spangled Banner played over scenes of poverty on the Gaza Strip.

"The New York Thruway's Closed, man!"

Blood stained misery and steely eyed prepubescent hatred. Stubborn motherfuckers on both sides of the equation. Land and Religion and Ownership and "Security". All worth life and death and worthless in the end.

"Some people say that the acid is poison. It's not poison, it's just bad acid, just manufactured badly. There really are no bad trips, if you ask me. If you feel like experimenting, just take half a tab!"

There are bad trips, Mr. Unidentified Bad-Trip-Talker-Downer from the Woodstock stage (I'll just call you 'Doctor'). This intermixing of cultures I'm trying to do (sort of a hippie/Islam mashup - Cat Stevens would be proud) is giving me a migraine.

Ahh, the DVR to the rescue. I "taped" a Leonard Cohen Live in London on PBS the other night. Leonard at 74 is still at the top of his game (well, maybe a shade or two below it but only just).

I never really listened to Leonard's song, "The Future" until just now, though I know it's on my ipod somewhere. Any song that can rhyme "Charlie Manson" with "White Girls Dancin'" is okay by me.

Thanks for saving the evening, Lenny. It's just a Dress Rehearsal Rag, after all. Story of my life.

Now, before bed it's time to get my Philly Roller Girl League gear for the upcoming season. Shit - "men's 'merch' coming soon". Gotta wait to get decked out in my Roller Mania Colors, I guess.

Finally, to choose my team. Will it be:

• The Liberty Belles?
• The Heavy Metal Hookers?
• The Broad Street Butchers?

Mmmm. Film at 11.
And who do the Philly Roller Girls sponsor?

PAWS.

Fuckin' A.