My Drug Of Choice

It starts months beforehand, when the tour is announced. You buy tickets. It goes back into hibernation, waking slightly now and then as the date gets closer, when you are reminded, either by a song on the radio, an ad in the paper, an equally excited friend.

Sometimes you can’t sleep the night before. Or maybe, if you wake up early, a few hours before your alarm would normally wake you, you just won’t go back to sleep. You can’t say exactly why you’re up, it could be you’re not even thinking about the show that night. But once you remember it, you understand.

Maybe that day you go to work, or school, like any other day. Except not quite like any other day. You watch the clock a little more than normal. You’re even more eager to leave than on a typical day. But maybe you have the day off. You might play golf, or lounge in front of the TV, or go swimming, or sleep in. Maybe you’re traveling, in which case virtually the whole day is devoted to the show.

I’ve played golf the day of concerts, I’ve gone to work, I’ve waited from early hours outside the gates. I’ve driven through awful storms and waited in awful traffic jams. I will soon fly to another state mere hours before showtime. None of this effectively changes that slightly tense, breathless feeling at the top of the stomach. Whatever you do: You’re really just waiting.

Arrangements have been made, food is consumed, friends are met, and very often libations are joyously consumed. There is driving, walking, parking, walking, waiting. Yes, there are lines, there is smoke, there are even the people next to you in line who are not only wearing a shirt for the band you’re there to see, but they’re talking about the band and getting the names of songs wrong. There are people who are high, people who are drunk, friends you’d just as soon leave at the gate. Ultimately, none of it matters. You will come into close contact with hundreds of people you’ve never known before, you might introduce yourself to some of them. You might even make friends.

There’s always an opening band. Once, maybe twice in your life, this never-before-known-to-you act will actually be good, and you will have a new band to be interested in. Slightly more often, it will be a band you know and maybe even like. But most of the time it will be noise, nothing more, and you will pity the band members on stage because everyone else is ignoring them right along with you.

You have wandered, bought shirts, bought drinks, bought food, gone to the bathroom, wandered, talked, wandered. You are in your seat. House music is playing over the speakers. People on stage are setting up. If this is a band you know and love, you might recognize vital steps – the vacuuming of the stage, taping down the setlist, Nirvana’s “Nevermind” being played over the PA. Let’s be honest – you are bored. So bored. But – exquisitely bored. Exquisite because this is the boredom of anticipation. The tension ebbs and recedes inside you, then pools again.

Finally, something. Maybe it’s a song they play. Maybe you see something or someone backstage.

The lights go down. Around you, thousands of voices rise in unison. Everyone stands up. The hair on the back of your neck stands up. People all around are screaming, yelling, whistling. For a moment, there is nothing. And then you see the band, coming onto stage, smiles and waves – or maybe dramatic smoke and lighting effects. It doesn’t really matter. The feeling is the same.

There are better feelings I have known in this world. But not very many. It is this moment I am addicted to, even more than the music or any particular band. It is for this that I will fly across the country, drive across state lines, walk for miles. For this moment. When the lights go down. When the band comes out.

Showtime.

7 Things I Would Never Do

Trish tagged me, so I guess I have to share this list of 7 things I would never do ...

1. Advertise my blog in the comments section of other people's blogs.

2. Put dog poop in a bag, put it in front of someone's door, light it on fire, run the doorbell and run away. Much as Erin's blog is full of helpful healthcare tips, I'd like to think I can help us all keep our neighborhoods a bit safer with some insurance-learned wisdom. Though it is truly, hysterically funny, the ol' crap-in-a-burning-bag trick can, in fact, catch the entire house on fire, and that's just not as funny as making someone stomp on dog poop.

3. Live in New Orleans.

4. Wear a "trucker hat"

5. Wear my collar "flipped" up for any reason than to keep the sun off my neck while golfing

6. Dance in the presence of anyone but my cats (and even they laugh).

7. This

I'm tagging Erin and Lani, since neither of them has updated in years.

Know Your Limits

I have often wondered if I in fact ingesting so much caffeine that it might kill me. Thankfully, I've found this Web site to let me know just how much peril I'm in.

Apparently, it would take 248.18 cans of my chosen poison (Mountain Dew) to put me under. Disappointingly, the Web site offers no information about what sort of time period I would have to drink all that Mountain dew in for it to be lethal. I'm no longer worried about overdosing, but I'm still thinking I should cut back.

EDIT: Found the answer to my question. "The number of cans/bottles/etc the calculator gives you assumes you can drink it all immediately, or one-after-another. Physical limitations mean that you probably can’t drink enough of anything to kill you, but you can certainly start freaking out, hallucinating, go into shock or seizure, all sorts of cool things. Many people have correctly pointed out that the liquid capacity, or sugar contents, or any number of other things would probably prevent you from ingesting that much caffeine."

9,131

That is how many days old I am, as of today, which is my 25th birthday. Really doesn't seem like such a big number, does it?

So, as far as I know all the people who read this blog are actually older than I am. Fret not, aged ones, for I am not about to bemoan that having been alive a quarter of a century makes me feel old. (Though it is stranger than I expected. Because everyone I know is older, even if only by a few months, by the time my birthday rolls around I tend to feel like I've already been that age for a while. I've been telling people I am 25 for months, and yet today when my Dad emailed to say how he couldn't believe it, I found I couldn't either.)

But - happily - I don't feel old today. I feel like - wow! I'm still only 25!

Maybe it strikes me as novel because I'm living a life that is older than what I expected to be living -- married, settled, etc. I never had a "life plan" but I surely didn't expect all this only 3 years out of college. Couldn't be happier, though.

Then there are the other things that annoy me about getting older. True, I'm still in this pointless and obnoxious job and I don't know when I'll be able to go back to schoolto actually go after the career I want. But then again, I know two 25 year-olds who are just this year going back to school themselves. And, as noted above, I am by far the youngest person in the class I'm taking. I'm the youngest person in my office. Anyway, I'm in a good mood today. Though I am trying to keep reminding myself more that John Irving didn't get published until he was 28, and forget that damned Bret Easton Ellis did it when he was like ... 19 or something. That little prick.

EDIT: Oh, there's also that other reason to be happy ... (cue angels singing)

On My Lack of Motivation

So I enrolled in a creative writing class offered by Phoenix College that is specifically geared toward writing the novel. Our first meeting was Saturday and it went well, I like the instructor and the people in the class seem to all be intelligent. I'm the youngest person in the class, however, which was definitely surprising.

I enrolled in the class because as much as I write, as many ideas as I have, I haven't actually finished a novel for ... well, 9 years. I wrote four novel-lenght stories between my freshman and junior years of high school and since then ... nada.

If you know me, it might occur to you that the sudden drought in finished works coincides nicely with a few things, cheif among them (1) getting a driver's license and (2) girls. In a nutshell, that's the problem even today: I want to write, it's just that there are so many other things I want to do that I get easily distracted. In college, probably the time in most of our lives when more doors are open than at any other time, I couldn't even finish a short story unless I had a class deadline coming up. I still wrote good stories, they were well-developed since they'd been knocking around in my head for months. It just took a deadline for me to actually get it all down on the page. Obviously, it's even tougher with novels.

I solved part of my problem last summer with the purchase of a laptop, which negated one of my eternal obstacles: namely, that I don't tend to be inspired to write while sitting at my office computer but that (again) I lack the motivation to transcribe anything I might write out longhand into the computer. But with a laptop I can usually write when I want to and where I want to (coffee shops, airplanes, other cities, etc.).

Last summer I got off on a tear and wrote a lot. In fact, I wrote so much that what I had imagined as a novella or shortish novel (maybe around 100 single spaced pages) quickly reached that length ... and I wasn't even halfway through yet. This is another problem I always have: overwriting. I blame too many years of growing up reading Dickens, John Irving, and Stephen King. For a brief while in high school I was obsessed with Hemingway and the novel I wrote while reading Hemingway is crisply written, if not well plotted. Why hast thou forsaken me, Ernest?

Still, I figured with such a good start I might even be able to finish the book before the wedding. Instead, between Halloween and Christmas I wrote very little. And then between Christmas and the wedding I wrote little short stories, not parts of the novel. It was only a few weeks ago I got back to actually working on it, but by then I wanted to go back to my original conception (ie, something short) and so I restarted it. You can see why a class might help motivate me to actually get something valuable done.

Tonight, I need to turn in a synopsis (though it can be vague) of the story I'm going to write. I'm thinking of starting something new entirely, but I haven't decided for sure yet. Which is why I just wrote this blog instead.

I think I'll do the new one (I think of it as the Los Angeles story) and give the one I've been fighting with (the Las Vegas story) a rest for a while.

My New Favorite Web Site

Overheard In New York

I wouldn't recommend clicking the link unless you have some time to waste.

gimme gimme

It has come to my attention that many of you may be practically desperate to ply me with gifts and attempt to buy my love. I want to encourage to the greatest possible extent. However, it also seems many of you do not know what gifts will maximize the esteem I grant you.

As such, I now have an Amazon Wishlist.

I'm doing this for you, people.

[Insert Cowbell Joke Here]

I'm sure it's a joke, but it's a funny one.

Then again, if a candidate were to come out and instead of giving some inane speech just gave you a little bit of these moves, wouldn't you vote for him?



And just try to tell me this face shouldn't be on our currency.



Plus, Kane would be able to make prank calls pretending to be the President. Oh, the possibilities.

Why Josh Will never Again Wash His Corona Shirt

At least until Diana publishes her Chicago blog with pictures of the whole experience, this is really all you need to know about our trip.

A Plea and an Apology

A note: I read this article, went crazy, and started writing this blog, which I've now been trying to get right for weeks now. And I'm still not sure if I've made my point, but here it is anyway ...

I subscribe to both McSweeney’s Quarterly and The Believer, which are literary magaizines both published by McSweeney’s. I find McSweeney’s Quarterly sometimes brilliant if always wearily elitist. I find The Believer to be only occasionally elitist and the rest of the time almost pathetically insecure. The founding idea of The Believer was to eliminate “snarkiness” in criticism, which I think is a very valid goal, except that they go about it ridiculously by abolishing all negative criticism, which is so juvenile and pathetic that it’s pitiable. Part of consuming art is being disappointed. Sometimes people write bad books and sometimes we read them. It can be valuable to talk about why something is bad – at the same time there is utterly no value in mocking something bad merely for the sake of putting it down.

It’s not that sarcasm and withering criticism doesn’t have a place – goodness knows I’m sarcastic enough myself. And no doubt part of the reason I despise it so much is that I am myself guilty. But moderation is required with sarcasm. You can’t just be sarcastic about everything.

On the other hand, there are critics and others who take a passion for sincerity so far that they, too, seem ridiculous. I admire feeling passionate about things, as you know there are musical artists and movies and books that I have an incredible passion for. But to retreat totally into that world would be sad.

Often, these flaws exist within the same person – and new pop culture is almost always the victim. Recent movies get snipped at, new songs mocked – and a critic will lament for the “good old days” of this or that art form. But as surely as I now love the Ghostbusters movies of the 80’s, I know there were people then who must have mocked the fad to no end. I wonder how many of those people now own the DVDs? By the same token, there will be movies released this summer that are loved fanatically 20 years from now, no doubt by some people who excoriate them for fun and profit today.

Again, I know I’m sometimes guilty. I just feel very tired of cruelty and negativity without purpose. Sure, I was pretty mean in my review a few months ago of the latest Tom Wolfe book. But I also tried to take the time to explain what I hated about it – and what made parts of it good enough that I read the whole thing anyway. There’s a lot of bad art that gets made, and it’s important to be aware that not everything is good just because it exists. But mocking something bad tells us nothing about how to be better.

[/off soapbox]

How The Internet Makes Not Living In Colorado OK

As much as I listen to my iPod when listening to music at work, I also enjoy the occasional foray into Internet radio stations. Well, radio stations that also broadcast over the Internet that is. Sometimes it’s just the local NPR affiliate, KJZZ. But much of the time it’s the world’s greatest radio station, Boulder’s KBCO. Sometimes – like maybe if KBCO has an artist in studio I don’t want to listen to – I’ll venture to Tucson’s The Mountain, which is really the same thing as KBCO … just in Tucson.

That KBCO has now become a franchise radio idea is both wonderful and deeply sad. KBCO is to radio what Boulder is to college towns – quirkier, but better. I wonder sometimes what kind of music I would enjoy if I hadn’t grown up with KBCO – and the thought makes me tremble. There were some other good radio stations in the Denver area when I grew up – for a time we had two grate rock stations right next to each other on the dial – and for a time 96.5 the Peak and 93.3 were also wonderful. In time, all of them disappeared. The rock stations were bought out and combined into one bland station. The Peak became Clear Channel-fied. And one night I went to bed listening to pleasantly alternative 93.3 and woke up listening to country – even the DJs hadn’t know what was about to happen. That day at school you know who listened to 93.3 because we were all unexplainably depressed.

But KBCO always endured. There is no radio station that plays such an eclectic variety, no radio station I have ever known that is less self-conscious. Their motto “World Class Rock” (Tucson’s The Mountain calls it “World Class Music”) could encompass just about anything … and that’s what they play. In the early 90’s you could hear Pearl Jam or Nirvana on KBCO – and you still can today. But then, as now, that Nirvana song might well be followed by a blues artist you’ve never heard of before, or a country-folk artist, or the Beatles. You never know.

That unpredictability means there will be a number of songs played on KBCO you don’t know, and some that you wish would stay unknown. But every time someone I’ve never heard of stops by to play a live set in Studio C I at least pause to listen to a little bit of the performance, because I remember that 11 years ago a band I’d never heard of played in Studio C and I got so hooked on their sound right then that even still today I trval all over the country to see DMB.

Not that listening to the radio online doesn't have some drawbacks. The frustrating thing is that when you listen to radio from Boulder or Tucson (or San Francisco, if I’m moved to put on KFOG) you inevitably hear commercials and DJs talking about incredibly exciting upcoming events … except you can’t go to them, because it’s a thousand miles away. Or you’ll hear a call-in question to win tickets to a great concert … that you can’t go to. It’s frustrating and oddly disorienting, sort of like taking a vacation while still at my desk. I even get confused by the weather reports (me: “WTF? It’s not raining outs—oh, I’m dumb”).

Anyway, I hope you didn’t expect this blog to have a point today. I’m fresh out.

Calendar

So there are about 678 concerts coming to town in the next few months that I’d like to see. Maybe I’ll go to 4 or 5. Anyway, this is a list for me, so there’s no need to read on at all. Unless you’re really bored.

8.19 / Friday / White Stripes / Dodge Theatre
8.20 / Saturday / Ben Folds / Joint Las Vegas
8.25 / Thursday / Coldplay / Cricket Pavilion
8.25 / Thursday / Blues Traveler / Ava-Anselmo
8.27 / Saturday / +Live+ / Bank One Ballpark (after baseball)
8.30 / Tuesday / DMB / Cricket Pavilion (Have tickets)
9.9 / Friday / DMB / Red Rocks (Have tickets)
9.10 / Saturday / DMB / Red Rocks (Have tickets)
9.11 / Sunday / DMB / Red Rocks (Have tickets)
9.14 / Wednesday / Duncan Sheik / Marquee
9.16 / Friday / Tori Amos / Dodge Theater
9.17 / Saturday / Black Crowes / Dodge Theater
9.19 / Monday / Nine Inch Nails / America West
9.20 / Tuesday / Jason Mraz / ASU?
9.27 / Tuesday / Mike Doughty / Plush Tucson
10.5 / Wednesday / Green Day / America West
10.29 and 10.30 / Vegoose / Sam Boyd Las Vegas
11.5 / Saturday / U2 / MGM Las Vegas
12.14 / Wednesday / Nickel Creek / Marquee

I've been meaning to write ...

It seems to me substantially unfair that a person could have a life like Jack Johnson has. But at least it seems the life couldn’t have been given to a nicer guy. Consider: Can you really think of that many careers better than being a professional surfer? What about being a professional surfer who also makes surfing movies? It’s a pretty sweet gig if you can get it. Of course, the only real downside (and this is true of pretty much all athletic careers) is that sooner or later injury or age just get in the way. This was true for Jack Johnson, too – except that after he got hurt and had to take time off from surfing he started taking his music hobby more seriously and a few years later … he’s a fucking rock star. Maybe the only job that’s actually better than professional surfer.

But it wasn’t jealousy (at least not jealousy of his professions) that made me just a little sad at the JJ concert at the Dodge Friday night. I was just a little sad despite the unrepentantly positive vibes of all of JJ’s music (even his sad songs are hopeful). And it wasn’t having my dear, beautiful wife with me, which prevented me from standing up or singing a tiny bit louder (though I swear I wouldn’t have been dancing quite like our aisle friend, no matter who was or wasn’t with me). It was just that, in every way, JJ’s music evokes Hawaii, and months after returning home and getting back to normal life, I still can’t get Hawaii out of my mind.

I first discovered JJ opening for Ben Harper at a show two summers ago. I didn’t then know his story and he didn’t then have a slide show of very island-y images behind him – but I was still instantly made to think of Hawaii. In the same way, Bob Marley can make anyone (even if, like me, you;’ve never been there) of Jamaica … JJ just sounds and feels likes the islands.

So there were a lot of highlights for me Friday night, the aisle dancer notwithstanding. I didn’t expect to hear “Cookie Jar” for example, but was thrilled to. Closing with “Better Together” was perfect, and his cover of the Beatles’ “Two of Us” in duet with Matt Costa was wonderful. I liked the (mostly) solo encore, and the energetic end of the set with every song just blurring together. I liked the love songs (I was there with Diana, after all, and she was there only because I played JJ CDs so much on our honeymoon that she had no real choice but to give in and enjoy the music). I especially liked “Do You Remember?” which is a painfully sweet song to his wife that, while we were honeymooning, gave me pause to think of how Diana and I might remember this time in our lives ten years from now.

But what I remember most is, much fun as I had, much as I was able for a few moments to feel like I was back there – that twinge of sorrow that comes from knowing I would walk outside and be back in Phoenix, where the temperatures are frankly inhuman and the ocean seems like a rumor. A song like Taylor invokes the longing quite plainly, even the characters in the song are obsessed with the memory of that which is “about two thousand miles from here.” On the other hand are songs like Flake, with no explicit Hawaiian references, but with a hint of steel guitar – and we all know nothing sounds quite so tropical as a steel guitar – or Breakdown, which is played with a ukelele (the only thing that’s more island sounding than a steel guitar, actually) and reminds me so much of the cheesy Sugar Cane Train for kids that runs along side the highway near Kaanapaali.

I guess I’m just still amazed that this obsession has held on. I loved Hawaii the first two times I was lucky enough to visit – both of those trips were with my parents. No matter how great a place is, no matter how free you are to do your own thing – by the end of a week with one’s parents, you might understand I was ready to be anywhere so long as it was away from them. (And I love my parents.) The trip with Diana was so different. Sure, it benefited from all the typical illusions of vacation (and more, considering circumstances) – we were spending ridiculous amounts of money, had no responsibilities, etc. Still.

We both talked while there about the idea of living there. Not unusual, really. When visiting a place isn’t that always something that goes through your mind? When we got home, though, we were still talking about it. And then we didn’t talk about it so much, but I kept thinking about it. So did Diana – if her propensity for checking out multi-million dollar Maui homes is any indication. I never thought it would be me, but I realize now that among my life’s goals are being comfortable and wealthy enough to be able to live (at least part time) even if only when we are retired in Hawaii. And, moreover, that if there were a feasible way for us to live there now (and maybe if we could bring a few friends along – we would probably drop everything and start over “about two thousand miles from here.”