Digging Skeleton and Graves

I'm OD'ing on Raspberry Diet Snapple and watching the Olympics.  My favorite sport, Skeleton, is now over (Luge is for chicken-shit wimps).  Skeleton riders go head first and the sleds are not allowed to have steering or brakes.  But there's still freestyle aerial skiing and more alpine action to be had.  And, always, curling on the lesser NBC channels.  Almost Famous is on the tube so I find myself switching back and forth between the Olympics and that.  I always gravitate to Almost Famous: any movie that includes Lester Bangs as a character is okay in my book.

Speaking of Lester Bangs, and other dead people, I stumbled across a fine online service today that helps you get the low down on the disposition of a dearly departed's remains.  It's called, appropriately enough, Find A Grave.  I can't believe I haven't found a need for their services up to this point.  Finally, a site with a useful purpose.  I dig it.

'I was born in a pool, they made my mother stand. And I spat on that surgeon and his trembling hand. When I felt the light I was worse than bored. I stole the doctor's scalpel and I slit the cord'

"A good fuck is much better than TV!"

Oh, Spam, is there nothing you can't teach us?

Words as wise as any fortune cookie just waiting to be cracked open and pulled out of my email filters.  This truism is just the latest in a long line of tidbits, parables and proverbs I regularly receive from the great spam slicer in the sky.  Many are wise in ways the sender likely didn't intend.

Often it's hard to tell exactly what the author's original intent might have been.  For example, the sex/television comparison promised in the subject line of the aforementioned email was in fact not provided: neither sex nor TV is mentioned in the message body (from what I can tell, it's an excerpt from a badly written sci-fi short story parsed from somebody's livejournal entry).

That spells disappointment for this television addict, with so many questions unanswered. Better how?  Better than Mad Men?  Better than Weeds?  Better than the mid-90s-era Simpsons?!? What defines a 'good' fuck? Is there a 'bad' variety?  Sadly, I got a no-such-address bounce-back when replying with these follow up questions to the originator, one 'Candice Farrell '.  Oh well. Pity.

Even as I was pondering all this, a friend let me know that Jim Carroll died on Friday.

The news hit me harder than I would have thought.  After all, I hadn't heard from the man regarding new material in quite awhile (to the point where I'd been re-re-reading his earlier work for lack of the fresh stuff). When did he last release an album?  A book? I couldn't tell you (though I could look on his Catholic Boy website, had I been of a mind to).  And frankly he'd been admittedly living on borrowed time since his first days as a prepubescent junky.  Making it to the ripe old age of 60 was quite an achievement, given the appetites he was loath to deny over the long term (he was, as he put it, more inclined toward shadows).

But as I said, Jim's passing hit me hard.  I read Basketball Diaries when it was first published in 1978 and it ignited this Seattle boy's love affair with New York City, along with my latent discovery of Mean Streets, Ramones and Velvet Underground that same year.

Jim's prose had an immediacy and sly intelligence to it that spoke to me like nothing I'd read to that point (I hadn't yet discovered Hunter Thompson or Lester Bangs).  It was Carroll's 16 year old voice coming at me from those pages, remember. It felt like he was talking to this 16 year old as though 1965 was 1978, instantly obliterating the 13 year gap from pen to publication.

It took Jim's death to bring back my adolescent memories of a lasting epiphany: a realization that words themselves were pure joy when you put them down to paper in interesting ways.  Paper might have given way to bits and bytes, but the feeling remains. 

Why had Mr. Carroll slipped off my radar in ways that Thompson and Bangs hadn't?  I guess the fact that he wasn't the most prolific writer had something to do with it. Working on a novel since at least 1991 (the year he first performed public readings of material from it), it was finally due to roll off the presses this year, at least as reported by Catholic Boy back in Feburary. Boy, that was fast! :-)  I'm crossing my fingers that it was truly 'done' enough to be published posthumously. And that's the thing too: this is his first novel. Apart from Basketball Dairies and Forced Entries, Jim's output was pretty much exclusively poetry with maybe the odd short story, while I've tended to prefer the narrative form.  But still, he's right there on my literary Mount Rushmore beside Thompson, Bangs and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It took his passing for me to climb back up there and kick the dust off his likeness to recognize the face again.

Oh, yeah - let's not forget: Jim also put out some pretty good music with the Jim Carroll Band.  Catholic Boy is still one of my favorite records.   When the City Drops Into the Night and the title tune - songs rarely get better than that.

Rest in Peace, Jim.

It was 40 years ago today, I was told to go outside and play (or to shut the hell up, you little shit - maybe both)

My thoughts are especially scattered and unfocused this week, not sure what might be causing it. Is it the fact that Nancy Botwin has packed her bags and flown south for the season? Or that age 47 is standing there waiting for me less than two days hence, the cold hand of death lurking in the shadows behind it?

Perhaps that's a touch dramatic, it's probably just the cold hand of an AARP representative lining up to welcome me to the fold. Perhaps the midlife crisis I thought I had averted has finally caught up with me?

Last night I had a dream Dr. G was chasing me around the office with her big rib separators, screaming "Time for your standard 'Y' incision, Stevie!" That's gotta mean something. Well, something besides the fact I watch way too much Discovery Health programming. Which in itself tells you a lot - I'm just prepping for my new demographic.

How the hell did September get here? Hell, it's late enough in the year that they might even be burying Michael Jackson soon. I hear tell its tomorrow, at Forest Lawn in a suitably creepy crypt beside Gable, Lombard and Harlow. Talk about rushing a guy into the ground - I guess his "Summer at Bernie's" is coming to a close. Time to take him down from out front of Joe Jackson's Used Furniture Shack, remove the "Blow Out Summer Sale" sign pinned to the back of his head, dust him off, hose him down and slide him in.

MJ gets a dignified send off and I get Dr. G hunting me down in my dreams like Freddie Krueger. Where's the justice in that?

Christ the time just flies by, what is it about this year in particular?

Maybe it's all these 40th anniversaries that have been popping up. Woodstock, Moon Landing, etc. Now we have Momar celebrating 40 years of repressing a people, terrorizing neighbors, all while looking fabulous. Seems like just yesterday he was Major al-Gaddafi with only one way to spell his name. Not sure how anyone could live like that.

Do you remember where you were when Colonel Khadafi took power? I was almost 7 but can't say where I was or what I was doing. I'm sure we celebrated as all patriotic Americans did. Lynn, you're the one with the photographic family memory - where were we when Quadafi claimed Libya as his? Say, wasn't that the time Dad got really drunk? No help? Doesn't narrow it down?

Hell, even Sesame Street turned 40 this year and I was too old to have ever watched the thing except as a goof. That's the definition of old.

Now it seems the Cookie Monster has fallen from on high. Strung out they say, freebasing Bakery-grade Chocolate-tar 'dough'. That's bad shit, flowing across our border thanks to an army of nefarious Amos Cartel cookie mules. But I have to say, it's what you get for hanging around with Amy Winehouse and Kate Moss. And Mrs. Fields. Act your age, man.

Good thing Cookie wasn't one of my heroes growing up, I'm already top heavy with self destructive role models. Hunter Thompson, Lester Bangs, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, F. Scott Fitzgerald. And that's just the first room in the literary wing of the Buzzard hall of fame. Most of my heroes are dead, done in by their own hand for the most part (directly or otherwise). Time to hitch my wagon to a new generation of degenerates.

Of course, Cookie was hardly the first of that lot to develop feet of clay (well, feet of felt, as the case may be). Gordon, the father figure of the neighborhood ended up decked out in purple plumage and backslapping sadism as Tyrone, Donna Beck's abusive Pimp on All My Children in the late 70s. And we all know the stories circling around Ernie and Bert, not that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, of all the characters, those two might be the most believable (other than the Snuffleupagus, of course). Speaking of Snuff, what the hell is the presence of this sort of character saying to kids? The horror.


Something wonderful and evil happened 40 years ago today - The first ATM opened for business in the US. Certainly the advent of the ATM opened up a world of convenience for folks who until then had go to the bank when in need of the paper stuff. But for those of us who have danced with the devil in the pale moonlight, ready access to cash at 1am on a Saturday - or a Wednesday for that matter - is usually not a good thing (well, not in the long term, anyway; it was a wonderful thing indeed 'in the moment').

We've started drawing to the end of the ATM era recently, I think - the register itself playing that role nowadays at most places. I don't carry cash much anymore. But it will be a very long, very slow death as there are still a great many places, people and things insistent on negotiating in hard currency. So happy birthday, you gloriously miserable piece of enabling technological convenience. And good riddance to bad rubbish.

Hey, Altamont is coming up on 40 in December, wonder what sort of magical reunions people have planned for that? Are the Angels going to show up there and nostalgically stab some folks?

Finally, though, I'll remember 1969 (in particular, its summer) as the inspiration for that insipid Bryan Adams song. If for no other reason than that, the year should have its calendar privileges revoked.

'Why so Serious, Son? Let me put a Smile on that Face of Yours!'

I figured that I should slip in a somewhat more coherent post in the midst of my goofy drivel.

I'm sure those inane attempts at satire or slapstick are likely positively confusing and confounding to those that aren't familiar with my particular sense of 'humor' (which I fully understand might not qualify as such to many).

I figured if anyone happened upon this blog and were either confused, bored silly, or offended by any of my scribblings, they've long since gone away never to return.

Then I said to myself, 'Well, there are likely a lot of masochists out there in the wide, wide web of sports. Maybe they stuck around. And I don't know their safety words.'

So, for you all ...

Know that my literary gods are Hunter Thompson and Lester Bangs and I regularly rip off both of them in equal measure as they spin uncontrollably in their graves.
[I have quit attempting to emulate their extra curricular activities once I figured out that a.) those things did not, contrary to popular belief, fuel their writing and b.) I might like to stick around on the planet a few more years and maybe even write a little if only for my own amusement.]

That should frame pretty much anything I write. Be forewarned.

I also admire (and therefore attempt to steal from every chance I get) a number of other writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Kennedy Toole, Chuck Klosterman, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Maureen Dowd, Joseph Heller, Kirsten Bakis, Truman Capote, Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Tom Wolfe, John Irving, Martin Fowler, Bob Woodward, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Clemens, James Frey and Ralph Ellison come to mind. Some of these guys are very prolific but several only popped to the surface with one or two amazing pieces of work.

From the world of screenwriting, I'd add to the list David Mamet, Diablo Cody (Juno is the start of something special I think), Charlie Kaufman, Quentin Tarantino, Billy Wilder, the Cohen Brothers and Woody Allen. And the Marx Brothers. And Orson Welles.

From the world of TV writing: Larry David, all the writers associated with the Simpsons through the 1990s, Michael O'Donoghue, Tiny Fey, Christopher Titus, John Stewart, David Chase. And Chris Carter, David Lynch (Twin Peaks! Yeah, he's done movies too, but ...), Ernie Kovacs, and Danny Arnold. And perhaps most especially Rod Serling.

From the world of music specifically as it relates to their words, see Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Liz Phair, Velvet Underground (Lou Reed), Clash and Gang of Four.

Why list all these folks?

In the spirit of full disclosure.

Disclosure of what for godsake!?!?

Disclosure that I'm a thief and a sponge (an absorbent crook). The Depends of Bloggers. Somebody else's Depends. Get the picture? No, not that one. Don't be so literal - the analogy. Geez.

Oh, and speaking of crooks, I forgot one of my biggest 'influences': Richard M. Nixon. The biggest Dick the world has ever known. I'm sure he's looking up at us now and smiling. Throw another log on the fire, Beelzebub, looks like Dick is gettin' chilly!

Anyway, primarily a thief. In case you vaguely recognize something but it just doesn't seem right - like maybe it might be an overripe version of something from someone of note but that it's now past its expiration date and there's a faint odor emanating from the general direction of your browser.

So, primarily a thief and not to be taken seriously. Or taken at all.

I relate perhaps most of all to that Groucho Marx line, "I would never want to belong to a club that would have someone like me as a member."

Finally, Congrats to the newest Supreme Court Associate Justice, Sonia Sotomayor! Here's hoping that Scalia and Thomas for some reason opt for early retirement in the next couple of years. And Roberts, isn't it time you left? Come on, it's been over three and half years now!