Thoughts While Sitting in Traffic Listening to New Wave

So a few months ago I'm sitting in Atlanta traffic, listening to a college station. They're playing a whole set of new wave stuff that sounds pretty good - sort of like stuff I'd catch on college radio  back in the '80s or at a new wave club where they'd never announce what the names were.

Then the DJ announces that all this stuff came out in the last year.

"That's pretty cool," I think. "Glad that the kids are getting into the new wave instead of all the other crappy musical styles they could be listening to."

But wait.

"Wouldn't that be the same thing as bands in the '80s aping, I dunno...Country Joe and the Fish or something? College kids should be making music that I find unlistenable and offputting. They shouldn't be doing stuff that makes me remember being a teenager. This is almost starting to annoy me as much as when I finally check out one of those raved-about indie beardy bands only to find I've been listening to a repackaged James Taylor album."

Then a new DJ comes on and announces that her set is all vinyl.

"That's cool, I guess." I think. "Although really, who's gonna know if she isn't really playing vinyl? What if she's sneaking some MP3s in there just to trick us?"

She announces she's starting the set with something off Bauhaus' live album "Press the Eject and Give Me the Tape."

"I played the hell out of this album in high school," I think. "Again, weird that kids today are listening to stuff from what - 30 years ago? Also, I never really noticed this long-ass intro. They're really building up the tension with these two notes. How did I miss this? Damn, they're still milking those notes. Funny how obvious the reggae/dub influence is in their bass. Guess I wouldn't have known anything about that in high school though. Damn, they're really building the tension. Is this an import or something? I know I would have remembered this."

Just then the DJ comes on the air and apologizes for the record skip. I guess they were really playing vinyl after all.

Hanging on the Telephone

Part of my job involves talking to old people and service providers on the phone. This might seem funny to those of you who have talked to me on the phone and heard me doze off after about three minutes or have waited on me to return a call, sort of knowing in the back of your head that it ain't never gonna happen.

But I'm professional and courteous, and get called "Hon" a lot.

One morning I helped one of our customers with his account. This happens fairly regularly - people want to change the frequency of the mailings, or change one of their selections, or want to re-listen to something they had years ago.

After the usual small talk, we get into it.

"Well, I'm looking to see which ones of the Jedi series I've read before. I know I'm about halfway through with one series and WOULD YOU KEEP IT DOWN, YOU BITCH? I'M ON THE DAMN PHONE!"

I was pretty sure this previously nice old man wasn't talking to me, but something had obviously tripped this switch over to Hyde mode.

I don't like being around people getting yelled or yelling. It always reminds me of being at a friend's house as a kid while they got in trouble and you just had to sort of sit there and act like you're not hearing anything. On the funny side, when he screamed, he sounded remarkably like the angry dad  in the D.R.I. thrash classic "Mad Man."

"Just a second, please. I TOLD YOU I'M ON THE DAMN PHONE! WHY CAN'T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT? So, I think I finished all that New Republic stuff, but I can't remember. Could you see what I've read?"

"Uh...yeah...uh..certainly. It looks like you did finish most of  --"

"YOU GOT ENOUGH MANURE IN YOU TO FERTILIZE ALL OF KANSAS! YEAH, YOU KNOW IT ALL, SURE YOU DO! Say, do you have "Dune" on digital yet or is it still only on tape?"

This went on for a few more minutes, him screaming at some unknown person, returning to me as a nice old man, me looking up book series for him, and neither one of us acknowledging the screaming. Should I say something? Should I ask if he needed help? These are were all great options running through my head as I ignored the yelling and finished the call.

I found out later that I did the right thing by ignoring the problem - he's been calling for years and almost always gets into it with whoever he's sharing a house with. As always, my strategy of ignoring problems and having good telephone skills continue to work like a charm.

Quicksand! Dang, Now We Are In Trouble.

Growing up I thought quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be.

OK, I totally stole that line from an ecard thingy my girlfriend posted on the facebook, but truthfully, I was fascinated and terrified of quicksand as a kid. It took up a large part of my fears - probably a smaller part than getting eaten by a shark (we lived in Mississippi. The chances were pretty slim.), but still something to look out for.

It seems a large portion of entertainment geared towards kids had people sinking slowly into quicksand, generally British explorers puffing on pipes and uttering something like, "Oh, bother." Quicksand was everywhere in cartoons and old movies - if you were outside, chances were pretty good, at least according to TV, there was a pit of quicksand just waiting for you to fall into.

These old movies also taught me that gorillas and skeletons were somehow the most terrifying things ever back in the old days, but that's another story.

I asked my parents what quicksand was exactly, and they told me it was just water and sand. TV was right! The stuff was all over the place.

A few months later, I had an enemy. I can't remember exactly why we were enemies, just the usual little kid stuff, I suppose.

Wait! I remember! He totally called bullshit on my cyborg story.

See, during this time, "The Six Million Dollar Man" was was a popular television show. The hero was an astronaut who almost died until the government implanted super-strong robotics in him so he could solve crimes and beat up Bigfoot.

Cashing in on that popularity, I had half-convinced a group of kids that I too, had robotics in my arm. Luckily, nobody asked me to lift anything heavier than my 6 year old muscles could handle. Maybe there just wasn't anything heavy enough for me to lift to impress them with, or maybe I got out of it because, hey, kids are dumb.

But this one kid wasn't buying it. He wanted proof. I explained that peeling back the fake skin on my arm and revealing my circuitry would cause an explosion that would kill us all, but he was skeptical. Worse, I could see the other kids were losing faith in my robotics, also.

I don't recall how I got out of my lie, maybe my timing was right and everyone had to go home to eat before I had to whip out my circuitry, but I could sense that the crowd had turned against me.

I couldn't eat my dinner that night. Who the hell did that kid think he was, ruining my story and calling me a liar? The nerve! And he turned all my other friends against me! How dare he slander me like that! I had to get back at him, but how?

I had the answer. Quicksand.

I was able to get out after dinner and run to the back of his apartment building. There was a sandbox outside. I set a hose into the box and turned on the water.

I got the quicksand to a good consistency then went home in the dusk, secure in the knowledge that I was gonna make that kid pay for doubting me. Like a mini Walter White, my enemies would perish due to my knowledge of science.

I had trouble sleeping that night. What if that kid didn't know not to struggle against the quicksand and drowned? There were only about 7 inches of the stuff, but who knows how powerful quicksand is? Maybe it ate a hole in the bottom of the sandbox or something.

What if some other kid went in the sandbox? What if a baby crawled in there? I only wanted to punish my rival for his slander, not kill any innocent babies. And I didn't even really want to kill that kid, just sort of punish him a little. I might have gone a little overboard with my revenge.

My stomach was really churning now, but it was too late for me to go back and fix my trap. All night I was haunted by thoughts of innocent people drowning in my quicksand trap. One after another, they all fell in - a mailman, my parents, my sister, my teacher, friends - who knows how many people would die before the sun came up and I could fix things?

As soon as I could make an excuse to get out of the house, I ran over to the sandbox. In the light of the day, my quicksand trap didn't look all that lethal. In fact, it looked like a bunch of wet sand in a plastic sandbox. I might have poked around just to be sure there were no babies trapped in there, but everything seemed OK.

Walking home I reflected on the beauty of human life, the futility of revenge, and more importantly, the importance of always being honest in storytelling. This was going to be a new start.

OK, not really. I was like 6 or 7 years old. I had a lifetime of revenge fantasies, lies, and exaggerations to go. But I did learn a vital lesson. If called on my bullshit, I could totally whip up some quicksand.








P.S. When doing a Google image search for British explorer in quicksand, about half of the images were cartoons of scantily clad ladies up to their chests in quicksand. You people are weird.

Tales of Rock and Roll Glory

A disclaimer: as with many of the stories here, I can not 100 percent verify the following tale's accuracy. I'm almost positive one of the band members told it to me right after the tour, but my age-ravaged memory could be making that up as well. I don't want to submit it to my usual thorough, hard-hitting investigative reporting, because I really like this story, and want to believe it is true.

Let's proceed.

Panthro United UK 13 were a Gainesville punk rock band in the late '90s/early '00s with a long name. They were awesome.

Jimmy the bass player had been growing a beard on one of their tours. One day out of boredom or funniness, he shaved it all off except for a mustache. The band pulled up to play a show at some little bar in the middle of nowhere. While the opening bands were playing, Jimmy sat silently alone at the bar with his mustache and some aviator glasses, drinking, and occasionally blurting out, "Don't look at me. I'm an undercover cop."

Now I might be a simple country lawyer, but I'm pretty sure most undercover cops don't usually yell out their status in bars.

Here's Jimmy in some snazzy blue pants. Picture by elawgrrl.com.

Most of the people at the bar/show were younger than the band, and they were starting to get seriously weirded out by this older mustache guy. They were pretty sure he wasn't really an undercover cop, but he was still being a big ol' mustached weirdo down there at the end of the bar.

Meanwhile, the rest of Panthro is getting ready to play. The kids are still eying Jimmy, wondering if they're gonna have to do something about this guy before the band starts. Finally, Jimmy finishes his drink, runs up to the stage, puts on his bass, turns around to face the bar, hits a chord, and the kids start gong nuts. Crazy undercover cop guy was a rocker!

I'd like to think that those kids learned a lesson that night. That maybe even the quiet square (or weirdo calling attention to him/herself) might be an undercover star, ready to rock faces off at a moment's notice.

Even if they didn't learn a lesson, they still got to see an undercover cop play bass.

EXTRA BONUS STORY!

Since I can't completely verify that story, here's another Jimmy story from an earlier tour with Don's Ex-Girlfriend and Highway 66 that is 100% true:

This tour was so long ago we used covered wagons to cross the country, and once we got to Chicago Jimmy was running out of money. We were in Chinatown and he's counting his remaining funds, and says, "Alright, I can't buy any more stupid stuff." Ten minutes later he bought a $15 T-shirt with a big smiling face of Andy Lau, with huge letters saying ANDY. Of course, the largest shirt they had was designed for a Chinese girl, so you could see his lungs working through the thing. He wore that shirt for years, and it was always awesome.

All We Are is Dust in the Wind

I'm not sure how I ended up getting a minor in anthropology.

Actually, I do. Back in pre-computer days you had to register for college classes manually. By the time the scribe etched out your schedule on your tablets, most of your day was gone. When I got to the front of the line, all the classes I wanted were full. So I ended up in anthropology.

I should have seen this coming -  the same thing happened on my first day of high school. I showed up with everyone else, but somehow my registration wasn't there. The principal said, "Well, it'll probably show up tomorrow. As of now, we have no record of you. Maybe you should just go back home." So I walked back home and missed my first day.

Hey, maybe I was the problem.

Anthropology wasn't too bad once I got over the fact that I wasn't going to minor in art history (where the real money was).  Except for Folk Medicine.

Folk Medicine was one of the classes I got stuck in because nothing else was open. The workload was insane - I still have a suspicion that I somehow ended up in a graduate class. There was a ton of reading, and none of it was what I thought it was going to be - helpful hints like, "to get rid of a cold, take half an onion and bury it at the crossroads at midnight while petting a black cat." No, instead, we read a lot of dry articles about epidemiology and other words I didn't understand.

There was a cool section of the class devoted to a disease spread through cannibalism,which kept me interested in between ...jeez, I don't remember anything else about that class, other than my thinking I was in way over my head.

Speaking of over my head, our final paper was supposed to be 30 pages. I had never written 30 pages before in my life. Just thinking about made me feel like I was supposed to turn in "Moby Dick" or "War and Peace."

Somehow I was able to do it. I have no idea what my topic was. Maybe something about cannibals or cavemen. I was pretty proud of myself. I mean, 30 pages? With an opening and ending and everything? There is no way I could pull that off today. As you've probably noticed, after like 6 paragraphs I get bored and trail off, post whatever I've done up to that point, and go to sleep.

This was also in the days of word processors, where you couldn't save your work. Well, you could, but not that much. Saving a 30 page paper at that point would have taken one of those huge NASA room-size computers, far beyond the processing capabilities of my Brother word processor.

I put the finishing touches on the paper while visiting my parents in Bradenton. It looked pretty impressive in the front seat as I drove back to Gainesville. I imagined I was a respected and famous author delivering his latest manuscript to his New York editors. "This is your best stuff yet," my sexy editor would say. "Let's celebrate by buying some new leather patches for your jacket for your Letterman appearance. Then we'll drink some martinis and have some sexy, literary sex."

But before that could happen, I had to stop in Tampa to buy records. I was still in the throes of a fairly serious record collection habit, and had to stop in Tampa every trip between Gainesville and Bradenton to get my fix.

I rolled down the windows as I pulled off the interstate, possibly in an effort to sniff out vinyl treats.

I'm sure you can see where this is going.

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch weeks' worth of work fly out of my open window onto Fletcher Avenue. As I watched sheets of paper that I had worked on floating in the breeze like a parade, I had a sudden revelation.

Like Bill Murray taught us in Meatballs, "it just didn't matter." Sure, these pieces of paper represented hard work, but in the long run, what did it really mean? Would anyone remember how I did in some class I didn't care about years later? And why was I knocking myself out in school, anyway? Why not just relax for a few years - maybe I should mellow out and wander through America, having real experiences, exploring my feelings, and communicating deeply with other searching strangers.

Then I remembered that I don't like exploring my feelings or talking to strangers and realized I had to corral that term paper.

I screeched into a gas station and ran out into traffic, frantically trying to grab the floating papers.

I straightened everything out as best I could and tried to reassemble my masterwork. I was missing a handful of pages in the middle, and there was no way I could find them.

I stayed up all that night trying to recreate the linking pages from memory. It would have been easier if it were the beginning or the end where I could pad some stuff, but the middle was a lot harder to figure out.

I eventually came up with enough filler to finish my paper and ended up getting a C+. There were no marks on the paper. I'm not sure the professor even read it.

I don't think I've ever written anything that long since. I never got a sexy editor. You know how you'll have nightmares of being back in school and having to take a test you haven't prepared for? Every once in a while I'll have a dream I'm chasing those papers down Fletcher Avenue in Tampa.

Can't You Hear Me Knockin'

I don't like conflict or confrontation.

I do like sleeping.

Sometimes these opposing sides come into conflict with each other.

I was dreaming hard about 3:30 this morning. I can't be sure, but I'm fairly positive that a wise old ghost was telling me how to find his secret fortune so that I could be set for life. Before the ghost could give me the final location of his riches, we both noticed a bass line snaking through the dream.

"Sorry, I'm outta here," the annoyed ghost said. "But remember, my fortune is hidden directly under a ...."

The bass line that chased my money away was coming from my real-life neighbors across the street. I usually go over there once or twice a month or call the cops in an effort to get them to shut up.

This time I decided to walk over, even though it would mean putting on pants and shoes. This was going to be a simple "Hey, turn off your crappy music" visit and I'd be back in bed within minutes, hopefully tracking down my rich ghost and my phantom fortune.

I'm banging on the door and can see the shocked faces of people inside through the little panes of glass above the door. Then I realize why they look so shocked. Instead of knocking on the door like a normal person, sleep-deprived and newly fortune-less me had been knocking on one of the panes of glass above the door and had put my fist through the thing.

Fist of Fury

So my intended 30 second confrontation escalated into me arguing with a bunch of drunk 20 year olds and now I have to call the landlord to get some glass put in in the morning. I really should have just called the cops.

But even though I have to deal with the landlord and got about two hours sleep which I'm somehow supposed to function on today, I think I imparted a valuable life lesson to the kids.

Old people will smash some stuff up if they don't get their sleep.

When Animals Attack

I am a friend to the animals. Sort of a St. Francis of the 'burbs. I'll swerve to avoid hitting a squirrel. I'm on a first name basis with all the feral cats and dogs of the neighborhood. OK, so first name basis means Kittycat or Poochie, depending on species, but it proves that I'm interested in their feelings.

Some of my favorite times have been spent in a boat, fishing and checking out river creatures or biking early in the morning on the trail digging the deer and turkeys as the morning chill starts to evaporate.

But do I get any love back from the animal kingdom? No, I do not.

Last weekend my girlfriend and I went to the North Georgia Zoo. It was pretty cool. We hit the Atlanta Aquarium earlier thanks to free passes, so it was a day of animal fun. We bought a bucket of food and started feeding animals. I made friends with an emu, a bird you might recognize from crossword puzzle clues.

The goats and sheep were all over us, due to our magical bucket. Here's one of the few photos I shot, mostly because my fingers were covered with goat spit.

As I was distributing handouts to another group of pushy farm animals, a llama wandered over. I started to say something deep like, "Check it out, a llama," when it looked at me with its stupid llama eyes and spit all over me.

If you've never been spit on by a llama, imagine being dunked in lawn clippings that smell like the inside of an animal's stomach. Add some grit, some liquid, and a little more stink, and you've got the idea.

It was all over my face, my hair, my shirt, inside my mouth, basically everything above the waist. I dropped my glasses on the ground while spitting and coughing. Apparently I was ready to just leave them, saying, "I'll just get some new ones." I'm surprised I didn't just leave my shirt on the ground as well, but my reluctance to display my doughy physique won out.

I spent the rest of the day smelling like the stage of a 1977 Sex Pistols show, and learning a valuable lesson about animals that pretend to be your friend.

I still speak to the stray cats in my neighborhood, but I am a bit more wary and not as cheerful. Will I still swerve to avoid a squirrel? I'm not 100% sure anymore. Some might say that blaming all of animalkind for the actions of one asshole llama is a terrible example of racism, but I'll bet those people have never been covered in llama spit.