She used to lay there, right between the fridge and the lazy-susan. We had to do this weird version of Twister whenever we were both preparing dinner with Rascal at our feet.
I couldn’t be standing here
Every morning, as I swung my legs out of bed, I had to be careful not to whack her across the nose. She was almost always there, snoozing by my bedside. I’d leave her there when I went to shower, and she’d always be in another place when I came out. More than likely, in front of the fridge.
I wouldn’t be standing here
More than a few times, while Liz and I were having a knock-down drag-out fight, right at the cusp of one of us leaving (perhaps for good), Rascal would interject with a loud, clear burp. And we’d take a step back from the precipice.
What follows is a post I typed up a few months ago, during a long flight from California to Rhode Island. Typed on an iPhone. I’ve really wanted to post it, but I’ve been looking for the right music-hosting software ever since. It’s a long one, but you’ll see why.
When I graduated high school, my friend Elaine introduced me to her circle of friends, all of whom turned out to be the best friends I’ve ever had. At the heart of our friendship, each of us had our musical tastes which sort of defined us, or at least put a certain flavor on what we brought to the group. Eli (my nickname for Elaine) was a big fan of The Cure, while Bill was really into Robyn Hitchcock. Peter was into Depeche Mode, and he turned me on to Moxy Früvous (although that didn’t really fit the alternative theme of the group). I was kinda the oddball, being a bigger fan of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin…my horizons were definitely broadened, and I’m indebted to each of them for that. In knowing these people, I was also introduced to a variety of people who didn’t really strike a chord with me, so I didn’t really get close. But one such person is having an impact on my life now, fourteen years later, and I wish to hell I’d been mature enough to be a better friend to her back then. I haven’t seen nor heard from her in at least ten years.
I’ve written about Maria, albeit briefly, before. She’s the one who had a nose-ring — a tortoise — named Mortimer. He clicked on her round-framed glasses when she scratched her nose.
Maria is the daughter of two college professors, and she was pretty straightforward about her own rebellious nature. She smoked hand-rolled cigarettes (like a chimney), didn’t shave her legs or underarms, was a voracious reader (her apartment was littered with stacks and stacks of obscure novels or classic literature…there may have been a smattering of graphic novels in there too, but it’s been a long time). She and Bill usually amused themselves talking about obscure independent or international films like Strictly Ballroom or Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (long before either of those films were widely-known, and long before “independent film” became the buzzword non-struggle that it is now).
She was perhaps two years older than I, and was not enrolled in school. She was the only person I knew who was independent enough to have an apartment. During that summer after high school, I often saw her at Bill’s house (the de facto hangout spot, followed closely by Taco Bell at midnight). She was the brooding type, but not overly so; she would often pipe up with some bit of wry wit, and sometimes she’d get downright animated…but in a way that convinced you she was always in control. She’d generally be at the fringes of the conversation, and it was quite often asked “where’s Maria?” To which, of course, the answer was “She’s on fire.”
On one or two occasions, I gave her a ride to work or across town to her place. I ended up hanging out alone with her once or twice, and it was a bit weird without having the rest of the group there as the “glue.” Her tastes were indescribably different from mine, but nonetheless I found her fascinating. She was attractive, but I was so young and closed-minded that the slightly hairy legs turned the attraction into simple friendliness.
During one of our solo hang-outs, she tried to explain to me just how awesome Camper Van Beethoven was, but I just wasn’t getting it without hearing it. The next time I saw her, she had three mix tapes for me (one, a collection of CVB, and two tapes of a series she called Alternative Giants of the Previous Decade), and the gesture blew my freakin’ mind. Getting one mix tape from someone was a sure sign that that person kinda liked you. Getting three was kind of intimidating. I listened to them each in turn, but A) the music was a complete departure from the stuff I liked, and B) the dub quality was so poor, it was really hard to appreciate the music/artistry at all. We compared notes on a bunch of the music, and I told her which songs I liked best (a few songs by The Pogues, The B-52′s, Depeche Mode, etc.), but I never addressed the question of whether or not she liked me. Again, somehow, at that point in my life, hairy legs trumped a pretty face, nice body and fascinating personality…what can I say, I wasn’t raised by professors, and I had a lot to learn.
Two weeks ago, I heard an episode of WNYC’s Soundcheck, on which they interviewed the creator of the blog at www.cassettefrommyex.com. A lot was said about the lost art of creating mix tapes on actual audio cassettes…which I kind of agree with. There’s something very deliberate in the act of making something like that with those tools, which is kinda lost when you’ve got tools like iTunes at your disposal. Anyway, the discussion got me thinking about those tapes Maria made for me (even though she isn’t actually “an ex”). Funny, I’ve actually got a few mix CDs from my current girlfriend (which, of course, I still listen to), and a very nicely-illustrated mix cassette from an actual ex. But the three from Maria immediately came to mind, perhaps because I never gave them a proper shot.
So, the other night, I busted out the tapes (oh hell yeah, of course I still had them, are you nuts?) and transcribed the artist/song names so I could maybe re-build the mix with some higher-fidelity recordings.
Step one was to decipher her handwriting, which was, thankfully, very neat but also very dense. If she was a journal-keeper — which, I can almost guarantee she was — I’d imagine the pages would be almost black with the density of her script.
Step two was to make sure the artist or song names were accurate. Again, she was damn good at this. Most song names were either accurate or at least derivatives of the correct title. There were only two songs (out of 53) with missing or incorrect titles, and she had even put them in parentheses to denote that fact. She was well-versed in the art.
Step three was to track down the songs. Some of them I had already bought or downloaded over the years, but that was a very small minority. For the rest, I actually had to employ a few specialized tools to get my hands on most of the songs. For starters, I generally turn to SeeqPod, but that service is only meant for finding/listening. I’ve found some specialized tools that allow me to download the mp3s that SeeqPod finds to my computer. Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m the devil…whatever. Anyway, for the songs that can’t be found with SeeqPod (or aren’t very good quality, or are only available as live versions) I turned to iTunes and bought the track.
For the only track that had no title listed — “Cocteau Twins – (?)” — I listened to the track on the cassette a few times, and had to listen to dozens of preview tracks on iTunes (and run back to the tape to compare, for the close ones) before I finally found the damn thing. Who knew the Cocteau Twins were so damned prolific?
For the really obscure songs, I couldn’t even find the damn things on iTunes or Amazon MP3. For those instances, I actually had to turn to YouTube. Oddly enough, that ended up being the perfect treasure trove for the most obscure shit. Apparently, people loves them some YouTube for catalogging their old alternative loves. Got some great stuff from Robyn Hitchcock and Nitzer Ebb, among others. But, of course, YouTube kinda only has videos, not mp3s. Thankfully, I have a javascript bookmarklet that lets me download the h.264 QuickTime videos that YouTube provides for iPhone users. And, with GarageBand, I was able to import those video files and extract the audio track, which I then exported to iTunes. Made me feel really devious and tricky. I think I had to do that for at least ten tracks. The audio quality sucks ass on those ones, but it’s far, far better than the tapes’ quality.
And now, I’m totally in love with this compilation. I’m finally able to hear the nuances and appreciate all this music I totally couldn’t get into back in the day. Granted, I’ve been turned on to a lot of this stuff in the intervening years, but most of it is still new to me in that “nostalgic although I wasn’t there” kind of way. Not only that, but after all the effort Maria put into these mix tapes, for a guy she hardly knew, I feel pretty happy to try and match her efforts. I hope maybe I can find her and share it with her.
Anyway, check it out on my opentape, or you can listen to it here (like Pandora, it’ll pause between tracks if you minimize it):
Alternative giants of the previous decade
Part 1, side A
1. B52′s – Dance This Mess Around
2. Bad Brains- Sacred Love
3. Bauhaus – Silent Hedges
4. Butthole Surfers – Sweat Loaf
5. The Church – Under the Milky Way
6. The Clash – Clampdown
7. Cocteau Twins – How to Bring a Blush to the Snow
8. The Cure – Caterpillar
9. Dead Milkmen – Smokin’ Banana Peels
10. The Dead Kennedys – I Fought the Law
11. Depeche Mode – Never Let Me Down
12. Dinosaur Jr. – In a Jar
Part 1, side B
13. Fishbone – Those Days are Gone
14. Robyn Hitchcock – Vibrating
15. Hüsker Dü – The Real World (need an album-version)
16. Jane’s Addiction – The Mountain Song
17. Jesus & Mary Chain – Just Like Honey
18. Joy Division – Leaders of Men
19. King Missile – Jesus Was Way Cool
20. KMFDM – Money (deutchmark mix)
21. Lemonheads – Belt
22. Lemonheads – Sad Girl
23. Meat Beat Manifesto – All the Things You Are
24. Minute Men – Paranoid Chant
25. Mudhoney – By Her Own Hand
26. Nitzer Ebb – Lightning Man (need an album version, complete)
Part 2, side A
1. Nine Inch Nails – Down In It
2. Sinéad O’Connor – Never Get Old
3. Pixies – Something Against You
4. Pixies – Debaser
5. Pixies – Mr. Grieves (need a copy w/o blips and pops)
6. Pixies – Brick Is Red
7. The Pogues – Bottle of Smoke
8. Public Image Ltd. – Seattle
9. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Brother’s Cup
10. REM – We Walk
11. REM – Superman
12. The Replacements – Unsatisfied
13. Siouxsie & the Banshees – Metal Postcard
14. Skinny Puppy – Worlock
Part 2, side B
15. The Smiths – That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore
16. Sonic Youth – Eric’s Trip
17. Sugarcubes – Deus
18. Talking Heads – Born Under Punches
19. 10,000 Maniacs – City of Angels
20. They Might be Giants – Santa’s Beard
21. Ultra Vivid Scene – Three Stars
22. U2 – Seconds
23. Suzanne Vega – Tom’s Diner
24. Violent Femmes – To the Kill
25. Was (Not Was) – Hello Dad (I’m in Jail)
26. Was (Not Was) – Earth to Doris
27. XTC – Runaways (need album version)
I was driving along in traffic, headed to work, and there was a Ferrari ahead of me and to the right, in the slow lane. I was moving along nicely in the fast lane, not pushing my luck, but pretty happy that traffic wasn’t oppressive. I looked in my rearview mirror, and saw a big Mercedes sedan coming up fast…I mean, 100+ mph.
What I saw scared me — not because he was going so fast, but because A) he was weaving in and out of cars, and B) it was a big, unmodified luxury sedan; knowing what I know about performance cars, that big boat doesn’t have the suspension to handle a 100+ mph slalom without losing control.
The dude in the speeding Mercedes swerved around a few cars, and when he realized I was in his way, he swerved so close to me, he damn near clipped my rear bumper…he had to have missed by mere inches. My fucking dog was in the car…I got pissed. After clipping past me, he got stuck behind the Ferrari, and since everyone in both lanes got scared, everyone hit their brakes and the dude got stuck in the slow lane next to me.
I, being who I am, gave him the middle finger, which he smiled and returned gladly. I made the snap judgment that he was probably coked up. When traffic let up, he jumped on the gas and sped back up to his weaving, dangerous routine, and quickly got far ahead of me.
Here’s where I go from pissed off to happy as a clam, and back to pissed off again.
Through the traffic, I’m keeping my eye on him as he makes a hard swerve from the inside-edge to the outside-edge of a sweeping corner (they’re not so “sweeping” when you’re doing 100 mph). How about that early apex? Exactly as expected, his car went off the road, sliding completely sideways, and throwing up an enormous dust cloud like you see in the picture above, before re-entering the road and carrying on. Somehow, he avoided hitting the guardrail, entirely out of sheer luck.
Fifteen seconds after this happened, the cloud was still there behind us, and a CHP officer entered the highway, having missed everything.
It’s getting pretty late in life to still be calling myself a punkass in mixed company, and I’ll likely want to try to re-name myself in the digital arena before A) I have kids, and B) they learn to read. But, for right now, it’s a name with which I still identify, a name by which I’m widely known.
Several months ago, I took a Saturday afternoon to port over all my blog entries from Myspace to LiveJournal. It seemed like the right thing to do, given that I already had the LJ account, and well, that’s kinda what an online journaling site is for. As much as I just wasn’t a fan of MySpace’s interface, user experience and overall design, it was really silly of me to be “blogging” on that platform in the first place.
Now, I’m kinda going through the same thing all over again. For several months, I’ve been uploading all of my “mobile photos” directly to Facebook, basically with the hope that my friends would be notified when I snapped something new. The problem is, Facebook isn’t really the platform for that. I mean, it handled it well, but it doesn’t make my photos/data/whatever portable.
Honestly, I don’t care which social networking site is the current darling…I just want a way to A) re-connect with old friends, B) keep up with new/old friends, and C) show people my thoughts, images, interesting links, and other stuff. And the best way to make it work for everyone is if it all goes modular. Facebook does a great job of this right now, and so does Flock. The key, to me, is to use a damn good photography site for your photos, a damn good blogging site for your blog, and a damn good whatever site for your whatever. The whole point of all this “Web 2.0″ crap is to make communication easier without forcing anyone to adopt proprietary software. That’s why, on my Facebook profile, the only “apps” I actually care about are the ones that aggregate the updates from my LiveJournal, del.icio.us, Twitter, and Flickr feeds. Eventually, I’ll get into shooting quick videos (once the bastards update my iPhone to do so), but until then I’m not likely to care about YouTube too much.
It’s a pretty sweet site, probably the best user-signup experience I’ve ever had. The whole point of this site is to give you a “river of news” taken from all your social sites. Unlike Facebook, the news feed doesn’t miss anything, and also unlike facebook, it doesn’t subject you to any BS vampire or lil’ green patch invites.
Thank fucking god.
I may end up moving over to Soup for all my blogging needs, but I haven’t decided yet. Plus, it’s still a young site. But I really like how standards-based their coding is, and how clean the whole user experience is. I’ll be playing with it for a bit, but I’m still gonna rely on LJ for my blogging needs.
A few years ago, my brother made a couple of blog posts about his dogs. They were more like eulogies, as each post was made after the dog in question had died. Having known each of these dogs, having welcomed them into our family, and having played my part in raising them, I was deeply touched by my brother’s words. He loved Lotus and Ludwig very much, and it’s clear that our family has a bond with our pets that transcends the usual pet/owner relationship.
I’ve been living with Liz for several years now, and we started dating in late 2002. She’s always had Rascal. And she’s another example of someone who looks at her dog and sees her small, furry child. A child she’s helped to nurture, to teach, to heal, to be happy. Rascal is now 13.5 years old, and her age has been weighing heavily on Liz’s mind for several years.
Rascal was about a year and a half old when Liz adopted her from the SPCA, and had already given birth to a litter of puppies. She was in poor health, most of her hair had fallen out, and it turns out she had a serious birth defect in her kidney plumbing. So, pretty much right away, Liz needed to invest a great deal of money, care, and time into surgeries and medications to get Rascal into a better state of health.
That was almost a dozen years ago.
Since then, Rascal has been there for Liz through trying times, through new boyfriends and breakups, through frustrations in school, trials and tribulations in her career path, and through moves all over the place.
Rascal has traveled across this country three times.
While my family has always (for better or worse) taken a laissez-faire approach to our pets’ health, Liz has always been right on top of Rascal’s shots, vet appointments, and other important health tasks. This has rubbed off on me quite a bit, and it makes me even sadder to think back to my family’s hands-off methods. On the one hand, maybe we didn’t have the ability to dump all that money into our pets. But, on the other hand, our little furry kids likely would have been happier and lived longer. If there’s one upshot, it’s becoming clearer to me now: at least we weren’t always thinking about the impending death of our little loved ones.
See, Rascal’s sick. She’s got a small growth on her upper jaw, and we just got confirmation that it’s melanoma. Research suggests that, in long-haired retrievers with dark fur, melanoma (especially when found in the mouth) is a Very Bad Thing. I don’t remember the exact statistic, but it’s highly unlikely she’ll be with us a year from now, and six months might even be a stretch. And, given that serious treatment would likely mean removing a large portion of her jaw, neither of us want to put Rascal through it. We just went to a consultation with a doggie oncologist, but we’re both of the mind that decreasing her quality of life for the sake of longevity is not right.
It’s just really hard to look at someone you love, and know that they are dying. And she has no clue.
But I’ve got to give Liz serious credit for her thoughtfulness. She noticed, even before I did, that I might have a hard time of it, since I basically had to watch my mom decline into cancer. It’s something I’ve long since faced and grown to understand, but it’s still an old wound that gets itchy when our fur-kids get sick, and you’ve got to make the choice of whether or not to treat it.
For some crazy reason, my mind has recently been wandering back to this kid I went to Catholic elementary school with. Most of the kids in my class went on to become proper miscreants or whatever (my peoples), but Chris, as far as I know, was never heard from again.
I’m not sure how, but somewhere around 4th grade I got tricked into going over to Chris’ house to play a couple times. He was the absolute biggest of dorks (back then, it wasn’t a badge of pride), and it took a herculean effort by my mom to actually get me in the door of his house. His mom, who ran the Cub Scout troop, was apparently at least a generation away from her Irish roots, and she had a tendency to dye her hair an unnatural shade of red. She cut her son’s hair herself (poorly), and I always — even as a child — got the impression that he was the product of extreme coddling. Something about him just screamed “under-developed.” He always had the best toys, and he had an extremely condescending attitude that made me feel like shit because my toys weren’t the really big and expensive ones. But somehow, even when I was feeling belittled by him, I felt bad for him. I was way too young to consciously recognize that he was trying to compensate for something, but I always knew I shouldn’t take it personally (even though I always took such things personally from others).
I wonder where he is these days. I wonder where he went to school, post-grade school. I wonder if he lost weight in middle school, like I did. I wonder if he found an identity for himself. I wonder if he started smoking or drinking or rebelling in some other way. I wonder if he stayed a mama’s boy. I wonder if he ever lost the awkwardness, or gained enough self-confidence to perceptibly exude a little.
Earlier this year, Liz and I were standing in line to get food at an airport. We were still struggling to wake up, but I caught sight of a girl farther back in line. She looked, for all intents and purposes, just like Chris’ younger sister. Or, at least, that’s what my mind’s eye might configure when asked to create “Chris’ younger sister plus about 20 years.” I’m sure it wasn’t her, but it somehow gave me hope. Because this girl had the right face, and she looked like she had confidence, stature, experience, etc. And I hope that after 20 years, Chris has gained those things and assimilated them into a personality that suits him. The thing is, I can’t picture it. I wish I could.
I also wish I could find a picture of this t-shirt I’m thinking of. It’d illustrate the point perfectly. It’s a t-shirt that I saw Seth Green wearing in an episode of Greg the Bunny. Basically, it has just the head of Stewie Griffin on it, but it’s a depiction of Stewie as a mid-20′s hipster with some facial hair and a casual look in his eyes. Not all wound-up anymore. Cool.
I rode the bike to work this morning, and got caught in some serious traffic about 15 miles South of the office. For several miles, I was riding between cars to get to the front, and the closer I got, the more people were starting to open their doors…people had been there a while.
And the closer I got to the head of the pack, the more the pile of cars started to look like a scene from The Happening: crooked, angled away from the median, and just looking more and more haphazard. Like, something had happened that scared all of these people into swerving to a stop.
Well, I finally got to the front, and saw a southbound 18-wheeler had jumped the divider, connected with a northbound box truck, and burst into flames. The whole thing was just a big smoky skeleton by the time I got there. Someone definitely died in there.
A few minutes after I stopped and took off my helmet, they opened up the nearby exit to allow cars to filter around the carnage. As I was exiting the highway, I saw an absolutely beautiful woman in full fireman’s gear (all I could see was her face), with an expression that said the emergency of the situation had just recently faded. She was five feet from me as I rode off the highway.
I wish to Christ I could take pictures with my eyeballs.
As kind of a follow-up to my post about the parking situation at work, I’ve got to say that the aftermath left me scared, and then completely impressed with Oakland’s ability to solve a problem.
The city’s response to the “park however the hell you want” problem was to finally paint diagonal lines on the street. While one might think this would make everything hunky-dorey, the fact is it makes things infinitely worse for guys like me…I ride a motorcycle. I’ve been relying on people who park poorly, so I can grab the narrow spots between cars. But if I’m parked on a line, I’m that much more likely to get a parking ticket. Fuckin’ YAY!
On top of that, the city started putting up 4-hour parking limit signs where it used to be unlimited. And, of course, now that there are distinct lines to divide the spaces, it actually turns out that there are fewer spots per block. A perfect storm, which really made me feel like all the city cared about was revenue from tickets.
So, cut to a few weeks after the parking restrictions were enacted, and an amazing thing happened. Suddenly, every single day, there were dozens of parking spots open. Every time I went out to move my car, there was no trouble finding a spot. Apparently, most of the motivation for putting up the 4-hour limit was because there’s a BART station just a few blocks away. People were dropping off their cars and leaving them there all day. Now, not so much.
I can deal with moving my car every few hours, as long as there’s a method to the madness.
Yesterday morning, I saw a wondrous thing.
