Willet Rye

There is something more holy, more wondrous, more bitchin than a good Manhattan, the kind a friend of mine makes (always better than I can) so well that I'm convinced my wife wants to sleep with him, and I would let her--they're that good.  Still, I digress, there is something better than a good Manhattan, Willet Rye on the rocks in a buckettt.  I don't normally resort to that "repeated letter for emphasis" shit, but I had to here.  I am sitting, as I write this, in a sweatsuit, with the window wide open on the first rainy day of the year, watching college football I don't care about and drinking whiskey I can't afford.  The wife and kids have given me the day off, an evening to myself and I am grateful for their sacrifice. 

It has been a shitty month, in a shitty year, or two.  My paycheck has gone down for three years in a row.  The house, as of today, is worth $200,000 less than it was four years ago, and everyone, even the nice good ones, is pissed at work.  Pissed at the kids, pissed at me, pissed at God, pissed.  There is a near total breakdown of government at all levels in our country.  One side unwilling to do anything because the President is black, if not liberal or progressive and the other side too afraid to be what they fucking claim to be.  That was not a good decade, the "zero's".  I'm tired, a bit melancholic, middle-aged, and starting to wonder if this is it.  Alright that's bullshit, I know this is it.  This is all we will have, will be, and we'd better make the best of it.  Which brings me back to Willet.

115 proof, small batch Rye Whiskey is the Crack of alcohols.  One sip and you're on that wax encased glass tit for the ride, and the ride is smooth.  Whiskey has always been a man's drink.  It tastes like straight gasoline the first time you drink it, but gets better with age--yours and its.  You develop a taste for the stuff because you know, below the belt, in your man eggs, that it's right.  Your father drank it, his father made it, and it's your birthright/responsibility to drink it and enjoy it.  So you work it, 10, 20 years.  You mix it at first with 7up, though you discover that this is for pussies, so you move to the Manhattan, The Old Fashioned and so forth.  At some point, the time is different for everyone, you find yourself pouring a three finger bucket of the stuff, on ice (you don't need to be a fucking cowboy), and lifting it to your mouth, smelling, tasting in addition to drinking.  Then you need better shit, because you can taste it; it won't be mixed, or even fucking stored, with 7up.  You know, because you can't go back, that you are ready to spend $35 on a bottle of Rye and not think too much about it.  You know too, that it will be around for a month, you won't be drinking it all tonight and puking it all over Howard Miller's driveway (sorry Howard, did I ever say that?)  So here's to you Willet family.  May good bless you and your magical grains.  The rain has stopped and my glass is empty.

The Weight

Losing 25 pounds in three weeks(ish) is revelatory.  I know I'll probably gain a fair amount of it back, but I now weigh 199 pounds, a size I haven't been since 1987, the year I got out of the army.  I started the diet in part to support my wife who was doing it too, but mostly because I needed a change.  For the last few weeks and change, I haven't had a drink, haven't eaten very much and haven't gone out at all.  The difference is remarkable.
When you get to be a certain age, say 44, you start to believe that the changes you notice in your life, physically, mentally are mostly due to age, and they probably are.  But many of the small issues that were cropping up in my life, occasional high blood pressure, lethargy, gut, have gone away with the weight.  I'm not a new man, haven't turned a corner, will not be pulling a dingy full of people from Alcatraz to the San Franciscon shore anytime soon, but I do feel better, more alive, happier.
Now, I know that this won't last, that I will probably revert to being the fatter, happier, drunker me soon.  In the meantime, I can't recognize the man in the mirror, but he looks good.

Showdown at the Pearly Gates

There's a fight in heaven tonight over who gets in first, if at all--A CEO of a gadet company or an NFL Owner.  One a tyrannical, son-of-a-bitch who ran his company like a concentration camp and screwed over every partner he ever had, and the other Al Davis.  Yeah, I said it.  Steve Jobs was an asshole.

The endless ass kissing that has followed Jobs' death is enough to make me want to buy a Zune, if i could find one.  And isn't that the point?  I could find a Zune, but Apple's product is so dominant that it wouldn't be worth the money.  The company that Jobs designed is the biggest monopoly in corporate history, which is admittedly not Jobs fault so much as it is proof of his genius.  So why hate the guy?  It's the comparisons to Henry Ford that I have the biggest issue with.  Ford knew what planned obsolescence was, but he didn't push it to the ridiculous heights that Jobs did.  The endless need to own the latest Apple, made in China, piece of shit is the issue.  Every fucking time a new Apple product comes out you know it will be replaced in a year.  You know that the company making it has more cash on hand than the U.S. government and you know that people in shit hole factories in China are being exploited to make the product, which, I readily admit, is amazing.  It's not that Jobs wasn't a genius, or that his product is inferior, it's that he didn't have a heart.  He didn't give his money away, as Bill Gates is busy doing.  He was hard on his employees and he cared more about the bottom line than is decent.  Yes, his inventions have changed the world, but so has his corporate model, which will be imitated to our detriment as a nation and as a planet.  I want to champion the guy who invents some shit that will last a decade and was made in America.  Yeah, I know that nobody makes anything in our country, which might be why we are nearly dead.  It is time to start asking more of our geniuses, of ourselves.  How much cooler would Jobs' legacy be if he had been just a little more conscientious, like Al Davis?

The Ride

T.S. Eliot had it wrong--September, not April, is the cruelest month.  The shitstorm that is my life for the 9 month of the year, between the kids going back to school, myself going back to school, my wife going back to school, is as demoralizing as it is debilitating.  I has never been easy, but for the last five years, I have had an annual reason to get over the pity party, my friend Kris.

Five years ago, when Kris was diagnosed with MS, I didn't know what to think.  After doing some research into the disease, I got worried.  Fortunately, Kris's response to medicine has been great thus far and his symptoms haven't progressed, but neither Kris, his family or friends wanted to sit around and do nothing to help.  As luck would have it, or so I thought before my first journey, MS sponsors an annual bike ride in the Ventura to Santa Barbara vicinity.  So, we did what we thought was right.  Kris bought a bike, asked me and several others to come along and we haven't looked back.  5 years and three bikes later, I'm still going on "the ride" with Kris and his ageless father, Ron.  Each year, I have felt a little more like a biker, a little less like a scared, out of shape friend who's in over his head.  I have had an annual reason to stay in reasonable shape, something anyone who knows me knows I need.  I have become closer with each passing year to a friend who ranks among my favorite people.  I have become more connected to Kris's family, who I look forward to seeing every year.  It has become an annual holiday, a day of action, national "getoffyourassandhelpafriendday".  Yesterday, as I rode with Kris and Ron and Julius and Faye and the always happy Mike, I thought of how lucky I am, to be able to help a friend, to be able to climb a mountain on a bike and to do it with my lovely wife and not to shabby children as my road crew.

When I was in the second grade, my teacher, Mrs. Shimatsu, gave me a certificate at the end of the year:  "Most likely to be happy-go-lucky".  In retrospect, she was probably insulting me as I hadn't exactly been an academic star in her class, but it didn't seem to bother me.  Whatever her reasons, she had it right.  My life has had its share of ups and downs, but I still feel lucky.  Lucky to have friends I want to help, lucky to have kids I still like, lucky to have a wife who actually likes me.  Thanks for another great year, Kris.  Some of my best memories have come on "the ride", at the Hollywood Bowl, at Karaoke.  You're one of the best and I'm proud to be on your team.

Winehouse

It wasn't hard to predict this day, but it doesn't make it any sadder.  Watching Amy Winehouse die has taken 4 or 5 years, but we all knew it was coming.  "Rehab" says everything you need to know about the situation, not that it works anyways and maybe that's the point of the song.  Winehouse had it bad, like a lot of people I know; she couldn't stop.  Lord knows what was eating her, though I suspect it was the usual.  There is a deeper sense of decay and inevitable doom in England than there is in the U.S.  Decades of decline, politically, economically, and socially have reduced Britania to a bit of an afterthought.  We are 50 years away from that point in our trajectory--we burned faster and brighter.  And, while it may be a bit of a stretch to say that Winehouse died because England has lost its mojo, I think there's a connection.  The popular music of England, while amazing to listen to, is not terribly happy.  Consider one of Winehouse's contemporaries, Lily Allen.  Allen writes stuff that is hard to distinguish from Winehouse's in content, though the music is more upbeat.  Or consider Guy Ritchie's films, especially the terrible Rock-n-Rolla.  This isn't a complete list of all popular British media, but, from a Yankee perspective, it's indicative of a country with a drug and alcohol problem.

Maybe that's it in the end.  England is a drunken, drugged out, hooligan of a country, at least in certain economic circles and I'm sure we are too.  Maybe its western culture in general, but it does seem like there are too many people around now who are in profound pain.  I don't think Winehouse was suicidal, nor do I think so of any addict for that matter, but that is the end of things for her kind.  Perhaps we should spend more time looking at why there is so much pain, dissatisfaction and lack of interest in contemporary Western life, than in wondering why Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan, etc. can't stop the madness.

We Meet Kris Kristofferson

Is there anything better than meeting a personal hero?  It's a rhetorical question, so don't bother answering as you and I all know the answer.  So it goes that this Saturday the wife and I got to meet Kris Krisfuckinstofferson at the Johnny Cash Music Festival in Ventura.  I saw the flier a few weeks ago and thought it would make for a fun day, and it did.

I've seen Kris (he's my friend now) perform before at UCLA's Royce Hall.  Steve Earl warmed up for him and then KK played for 3 hours non-stop, just him and the guitar, every song he ever wrote, which is a lot of songs.  That show was cool, even if a bit long.  He played "Moment of Forever" towards the end, a song he wrote with another guy I know, Danny Timms.  Timms was in a band with a colleague of mine and they played our wedding.  I told this to Kris on Saturday in the 30 seconds I had to say everything I have ever wanted to say to him.  This is what I got out:

Me:  "Mr. Kristofferson, Danny Timms played "Moment of Forever" at our wedding, can we have a picture?"

Kris:  "Sure"

Me:  "Thanks, I'm a high school English teacher and I teach William Blake every year"

Kris:  "I can't figure out cameras today"

Me:  "Can I make a request?  Would you play "Junkie and a Juicehead"?  It's pure poetry"

Kris:  "They only gave me 30 minutes, so we'll see"

Me:  "Thanks"

That was it.  My wife got the picture, from her Iphone (that's what confused Kris) and the whole thing was over.  I stood stunned for a couple of minutes, then the tears started.  Those of you who know me are not moved by this; I've been known to cry during television commercials, but I was moved.  The William Blake thing was a bit of a fib as I haven't taught Songs of Innocence and Experience for four years, but I wanted to say something that would reveal my profound knowledge of KK's life.  So he went into the gated area and we went back to get another beer and a good spot for the performance, which was a good thing.

Kris came on a stage and fiddled with his guitar for a few seconds (there was feedback) and then he tried to sing over the sound of the car races happening a quarter mile away.  Now I know it's mildly sacrilegious to say so, but the man could never sing anyway.  This isn't as damning a claim as it may appear.  The list of singer songwriters who I love, who can't really sing isn't that short:  Dylan, Todd Snider, Tom Waits (though in his case, it's intentional), etc.  Alright, maybe it is short, but it's not unheard of.  In any case, KK tried to sing over the cars and the feedback and a crowd that was talking a lot, and what do you think he played.  For his second song, for the first time in a long time, "Junkie and a Juicehead" made the list.  This song has five or six of the greatest lines in lyrical history in it:

"So I drank the whole thing over, puttin one and two together and it added up to more of what I didn't want to be"

"He says every empty bottle is his private crystal ball, where he stares into the future finding nothin there at all"

Check it out below and call me a liar if it's not as perfect as I claim.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZU359hdM1w

So he plays the song, not well, missing some of the lyrics, looking unsure, and he finishes, saying:  "I wasn't gonna play that song today but somebody out there requested it"  And my wife screams, "It was us" and I scream "thank you", and the tears roll again.  He finishes with "Moment of Forever" and all I can do is hug my wife, kiss the back of her head and thank God I'm here right now, today.

In the end, that's mostly what I took away from the day--my wife is awesome.  Who else would get this excited about meeting a guy my parents' age whose name doesn't even register for most people our age?  Who would stand for an hour with me at the back of a warehouse because I'm convinced that that's where Kris will be coming in?  Who else would go to this show with me, knowing me, understanding that they will be selling beer?  It's been a lucky week, decade, perhaps even life.  My second grade teacher, Mrs. Shimizu, gave me a certificate at the end of the year naming me "most likely to be happy-go-lucky" and I have no idea how she knew, but she was dead on.

The Rapture

I get one or two epiphanies a year, moments of higher brain function than my normal high school teaching slog requires, coming almost always at the end of a semester or on a break from the grind when my mind is otherwise unoccupied.  Epiphany is a strange thing, equal parts inspiration and ephemera, but I had to share this:

End of the world movies and stories are not the self-fulfilling prophecies of a species lucid enough to know it's killing itself and the planet, but too drunk to care.  Rather, they are a very perverse kind of wish, a certain desire to have every trapping of modern life, the cars, the toys, the clothes, the food, the shit, without quite so many people.  That's how fucked up we are as a species.  We know it's the cars that are killing us, so we rationalize that if there were simply fewer of us, we could all drive Hummers.  Think about it for a second, all the disaster movies (from Zombieland to The Road, the comic to the tragic) have this thing is common--not everyone dies.  This was the most absurd part of I Am Legend, the part that made it so much less appealing than Omega Man.  The later ends with mother and son survivors finding a "safe-town", complete with white church steeple, suburban streets and plenty of gun and ammo.  The message is clear--there was nothing wrong with the way we were living, there were just too many of us.

Disaster films suggest that all we really need to do is find some way of killing off 99% of the world's population, after which, we can go back to eating bacon and watching Shrek.  Sure it's a heavy price to pay for the 99%, but they'll either go quickly, or turn to zombies and wouldn't we really rather be dead at that point anyway?  Fuck population control, sustainable energy, cleaning up the rivers and lakes, getting rid of nuclear waste, what we really need is a bad mutant virus to escape from a secret government lab.  Sure, there will be the unpleasant period of time when we are eating each other and cooking babies, but it will pass and there will be a family, complete with dog, who live in the woods to take us in.  Then we can start all over.

This shit we feed ourselves is not some masochistic, self-flagellation we have imposed on ourselves; it's our escape plan.  Deep in our American psyche lie buried a simple thought: the freeways and the planes and the "food" we eat would all be fine if there were far fewer drivers, fliers and buffet lines.  God forbid we should examine whether in fact we are living the good life.  It's far easier to imagine, long for, a hundred different calamities that could do for us what we are too fat, too stupid and too lazy to do for ourselves.  At the end of the day, what we see in disaster movies is what we truly want--99 out of 100 of our fellow earthlings to die.  It beats giving up the Lexus.