Berkeley In July - Visions of Evil in the East Bay

Zachary's is a zoo as I dodge the elbows and glares from mindless predators of Downtown Berkeley in July. Thick walls of intelligence sip blood-thinning serums of mass as we loom over still-eating couples, willing them to slurp through their sauces and crusts more steadily so that we may ease the stiff of our sore, sore muscles. We are forced to wait and gawk in a holding area until there is a proper table for us to occupy.
I order one Fat Tire and savor it like the lingering change ringing in my savings jar (modeled after one of those posh London telephone booths - all crimson and criss-crossed), which waits at home to be looted for parking meters and plastic jewelry machines. Marty stumbles in and squeezes his disproportionate torso through the brood, adding to our already bulging, eager brigade a new lurker to shine the heat of hurry to our more fortunate counterparts already seated in the dining room of the pizzeria.
The rest of us - Robin, Mathieu, Jillian, Adam and some poor bastard whose name I am unable to recall - swilled and leered and were beginning to match eyes with the patrons of this cramped Bay eatery. I didn't know personally half the crew I was huddled up with. Adam, Marty and the cruel swine whose name I can't recall are as familiar to me as tilling soil or coal mining. But as if by divine appointment, here we stood, along with roughly 30 other road-weary warriors of the 21st Century - hard-working troglodytes who just wanted a piece of the pie, literally in this case. We'd become one in the same, left somewhere starving along the food chain, together, and in desperate repose.
We wanted a fucking table. We reasoned, "Who in their right mind would deny the comfort of those who'd love nothing more than to make you rich? Build a bigger restaurant, fer Chrissakes." What did these people have that we didn't? A trickier tipping maneuver?(The ol' standby of folding the fiver between your middle and ring finger while shaking the hand of the maître d' is no longer palatable, as there are fewer and fewer maître d's and increasingly more snot-nosed, white, middle-class gangstas patrolling our establishments. Thanks, Eminem).
Suddenly our modest sips of beast morphed into threatening, desirous gulps; eyes ablaze with utter hatred and anger at the relative nonsense we seemed to be enduring in this suffocating murk. No one was being called upon to take his or her place among the gorging herd. No one would rise from his or her seats at the conclusion of their feast - everyone digested, sickeningly and for absurd periods of time; dabbing at food-stained mouths with wretched, grease-blotted napkins; fetching gum or toothbrushes from bottomless purses to freshen up their atrocious portal stench; yawning and slouching in pathetic hunch while the rest of us were husking for sustenance in an exceedingly more doomed, cramped corner (limbo, as it were).
Our supposed seating time of 7 PM zoomed past us in a flurry of talking heads, fruitless reservation announcements, sticky pint glass circles on the tables adhering to the sleeves of my "vintage" Western button-up, and my hands trembled from the lack of nutrients and introduction of booze. My brow furled, eyebrows shifted at downward-sloping "V" toward the center of my flaring nose. My lip quivered in some demented Elvis Presley improv bit on the outskirts of Vegas gone totally and fatally awry. The stink of herded humans hung heavy in the halls and I was ready to inflict swift death within seconds to the dawdling consumers STILL STAYING SEATED.
...If it hadn't been me, it would have been someone else...
Even then I noticed that all waiting area banter had ceased and all of us, clutching heavy glasses and drooling hunger spit, rejoiced silently and angrily in a singular bliss. We were a thousand eyes, scoping with shotgun cross-hairs at the jovial bunch, holding high pitchforks and fiery torches, chanting mutely for vittles and victimless victory. Just as I began a surreal, slow-motion lunge over the makeshift barrier separating the paying from this reeking pig pen of rage and hate I was so desperate to vacate, a half-full (always an optimist) glass of some unknown amber liquid whizzed past my ear, sprinkling sticky suds along my cheek until it ended its storied arch directly upon the cackling mouth of a hulking, mustachioed gentleman seated at the table closest to the kitchen. His name was Paul. The counter-attack was almost instant...



[To Be Continued Next Week: The Story of Paul]

Chico: Rock City? Why God Hates Chico

So. I am led to believe that I reside at some sort of apex of modern culture. Chico: the town that brought you Deathstar, The iMPS, Abominable Iron Sloth, Mother Hips...all years ago, and all of which were only received with praises outside of the mile markers of sick and dying Butte County. Some connoisseurs of the ubiquitously hip may lay mention to newer local acts (your La Fin du Mondes, your Makais) as being essentially the honey on an otherwise sugarless biscuit of musical side dishes. And we are almost always bombarded with who and what is the new art, the fresh face, the pissed and the wounded souls who fling scathing diatribes from the pits of their own boiling stomachs, or the unflinching, rogue, quasi-happy-despite-being-a-seventh-year-senior-at-Chico-State-but-there's-good-weed-here-and-the-booze-is-cheap-so-I'm-gonna-sing-like-I'm-not-really-depressed-and-suicidal troop; they occupy the dimmest taverns and most rustic haunts in town, and they usually stink and don college football sports caps and Birkenstocks. But in spite of it all - the surface hostility (which doesn't exist) between the punks, the Hessians, the ravers, the mods, the backpack hip-hop kids, the dirt-twirlers, the jammers, the Americana revivalists or the world music loadies - there is almost always the underlying dilemma of this being a jumping-off point for artists, not the peak of it by far. We are privy to the seedling, not the tree. And even the best bands are negated by an overbearing media resistance to anything even remotely associated to any god at all. And sure, there's a legitimate market for most semi-talented bands who may even have a fleeting, passing interest in a god (and especially the God, of which I don't believe in, but that's neither here nor there). And I realize that the whole "success equals sell-out" argument has been blasted to death many times over, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a shame in the largest sense of the word. Regardless of how many malls or how many heavy metal radio stations this city acquires, the hippies will always have control, and that is why I will almost always hate the hippies. Their hearts are in the right place, but their processes are old, old, old. Their circuitry is wired to feign opposition to corporate thuggery, yet wholly invites competitive awards programs for local artists (a horrendous and vulgar disregard for art in its truest sense) and limits or flat out extinguishes the already flickering flame of creativity within a new revolution as a direct result. If I see one more band campaigning to win an award for its music, I'm moving.
I try to help, but I usually end up catching an Americas show instead. Ah, The Americas! Bridgers of every music gap in town! Friend to the Christian and the cold Satanist! Beleaguered and well-traveled duo of embrace! If Chico were more like The Americas, we'd be Omaha in one year. The concert series I book bands and promote for can't even showcase hip-hop or metal bands because our insurance company deems those genres dangerous and harmful to public image. Chico Rock City? This is only a test.

Change: It Doesn't Matter Who You Are

For some odd reason, my text must today be accompanied by this pesky underline. Hi there, fella! Are you following me? Are you? Awwww.
So, while I try to ignore the advance of this subterranean pest (not to mention this fucking annoying blue hue), I will attempt to, through sketchy prose, fess up and face the boiling twist of total enlightenment I seem to be enduring. But now that I have to write it with this blue/underline menace, I may wait until I don't feel compelled to include a picture of myself as a Simpson. I think some HTML tomfoolery is at work here due to this strikingly real personage of myself.
Anyone...whoa! It's gone! Hot damn! Finally, I can rant and rave in peace! In Real Time! And in total anonymity, because I'm on Blogger! I was contemplating a second-story shot-putting of my work PC onto the silent 6th Avenue thoroughfare. I'm glad things are working out more favorably for you, you doomed and looming mess of tech-y mischief (man, two Americanos and I'm speaking to my computer. What a morning). Onward! Rescind the attack of our personal dementia for greener pastures and wireless connections! We need convenience! We worship the toil of the minority for our own residual pandering to a majority! We claim independence on a machine marketed for and powered by a conglomerate whose interests toe the storied lines of wickedry, and we almost never note the irony! Ah, but doesn't every decision we make hold some level of irony?
Change is a stubborn beast. And without even the smallest sliver of pride, I seem to have broken free from whatever shadowed this hulking bulk. Not so much in ways that I aim to hand over to the public in elegant design or rooftop exclamation, but in ways that do much more to facilitate a purpose for me. I shed the layers of yesteryear in stinking mounds from my body; new skin, thicker and tanned with the blood of the world falls sloppily and wonders why it ever was. Eyes berated by insane onslaughts of fury do now release their focused squint; inviting orbs now nestle between my ears and thin only when I venture toward the brightest lights. Fists once forever-clenched in stasis for invisible combat extricate themselves from the white-knuckled pinch of fear.
See, I've finally admitted to myself that you can train your mind to be what you want it to be; to believe wholly in the things you only thought you valued before. I used to attempt to "discipline" myself by absolving certain worldly vices from my routine. There was the time I quit eating meat; seeing as how I'd been smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol for a few years at the time (I was 19 when I shunned the consumption of living flesh), I felt that a swift affirmation of will was in order, and what better way to do that than to make hamburgers, pepperoni pizza, chicken tacos and steak off limits? The brutal experiment lasted two years. I supposed I had "disciplined" myself long enough, and dove headlong into a frying vat of chicken fingers drizzled in hamburger sauce at first chance.
Another instance saw me forsaking computers (oh, how I cringe at the absurdity of that notion today. If robots want the planet, let man riot in protest; just leave my iTunes be).
What was I really looking for? Some kind of anti-acceptance acceptance? A first-place ribbon in the methods of underground and damming social practices? Or was I just trying to figure out what the fuck I was? If all I am is what I have lived through, then I believe I am a man of rotund decency. And this man just may be in the thick of a metamorphosis. Wait and see. Or not, whatever. (See! Enlightenment makes you apathetic! Whoopee! Look out world! Here comes another disciple of free-thinkin'!)
I'll leave you with a scowl, for the last time...

Mysticism and the Whiskey Monopoly of My Heart

There's a particularly mystical tune on the new John Vanderslice album that bellows a refrain of "I've never been lonelier/ I've never been lonelier," a line I've been unnaturally fond of for the past two weeks. Of course, seeing the line written out by my eager digits clicking fading alpha-numerals doesn't really do it justice. Of course. But there's a time in everyone's life when your loneliness becomes this palpable pink elephant, sitting in your corner, taunting you, making your stomach churn and twist in boundless yearning. It requires that you fend off the cobwebs of solitude; those dusty relics championed by the meek for purposes of their own self-glory in the face of societal ineptitude. It takes pleasure in making sure you know you are the lowest form of matter currently breathing oxygen on Blue Orb Three. And it makes you drink. Yes, loneliness is a vengeful whore, ripe with the sores from unprotected one-offs.
For instance, at the very moment I'm writing this line, I am in my creaking, spider-thick living room, casually sipping a glass of Jameson. And I'm not sure why. I think it's because my abilities to spout anything even closely resembling profundity is usually inversely proportional to how much alcohol I've had. Once my actual vision is skewed, my hidden perceptions are as free as the French. Or maybe I just miss my girlfriend.
Yeah, let's talk about her for a while. She's the problem, or rather, her absence has spiraled me into this stinking whiskey cave. So let's discover, together, the deepest caverns of my gratitude and love for my best friend and girlfriend, Robin.
The Suffocation was once a muck of equal parts self-loathing and spite for the ease of humanity to persevere in the grimacing face of the 21st Century. For longer than I planned, I became consumed by an idea of perfectly effectual reasoning to combat the ills of man - or men whose ethics stemmed from weakened wills at the hands of crippling insecurity. My perspective on the evilness of man and all its blasted Death and Money and Hate and Lies is only slightly less vigorous these days, and the only person who could have dropped the mercury even that much has been Robin. Sweet Robin, who told everyone she was from Redding to break the ice while in initial meetings with my friends; who drank too many Heinekens at a Chamber of Commerce ribbon cutting for my work and jumped a cue ball onto the reverberating floors of my office, cackling like a Sahara beast into the night; who laughs out at the world in defiance of regimen when everything's a mess; who taught me that life is an adventure not for pity but for lust; who screams into the crisp morning air out in front of our home that she loves me; whose fearlessness commands the admission of man's darkest secrets, regardless of length of acquaintance; who conquered Europe in 2006 and visited postcard outposts in Switzerland with sheep and trampolines; who breaks the rules and expects nothing less from anyone else around her; who stayed behind to be with me when her brood had jumped the sinking ship of Chico for sturdier vessels; who opened my eyes to a life I'd have never known without her kind, mystical embrace; who sings like sweet wind and writes for passion over money; who longs for me even now at a camp site in Chester where the warm lake water teases her toes; who admits when she's wrong; who laughs louder and more jovially than even the most advanced sitcom laugh track; who layers clothing never meant to be layered in fantastic rainbows of fabric lining the modest curves of her torso; who gives; who loves.
There are, of course, always more words to describe how one person has affected your life. How they've become half of your whole. How their absence makes you wince. How much you love them. Of course there are...

Generia and the Fortress of Gratitude

Without technology, we are destined for abbreviated brains. As a sworn enemy to anything abbreviated - be they words, sentences, or otherwise - I have hereby given of myself to the giving of nothing and rededicated volumes of cognitive reasoning to a blogspot in lieu of a Moleskine journal whose pages are filled with quadrants instead of lines to write on. Writing on graph paper is a daunting task. Lined - you just follow left. Let your fingers dance. Graphs go everywhere. Your mind makes it so. I begin writing within these goddamn blocks and before you know it I'm wincing and plotting a letter per square and my promising literary output is soon a drawing of a sharp-edged robot mouthing invaluable shapes, like some neo-Web savant commentary on the vagaries of the computer generation, of which I could give a shit. Be computer-savvy, for Christ's sake. Who gives a shit? Hug trees too. Fuck a cloud. Everyone needs a crutch, some of us just limp in for too long.

Speaking of limping in, near dead last in a heat begun in the last years of the 20th Century, it seems I'm beginning the process of becoming consumed by gadgets again. Why can I not shun these natureless leaches? Who knows? How fast do I need shit to be? Just last night, instead of purchasing your standard flip cell phone with a [sic] color screen, polyphonic ringtones and some demo version of solitaire, I spring for the one that flips, talks, emails, AIMs, photographs, reasons, decides, lives and gives birth (eventually it will die, completing the circle, or I will die while using it and neglecting those pesky approaching headlights). If anything's worth doing, it's worth doing right, isn't it Doc? And I suppose the thing is pretty handy. It has a goddamn flashlight. And it will tell me how much I am to tip a waiter/waitress after I receive my bill. I can also surf the "mobile web," which I'm guessing is like drinking Hamm's instead of Blue Moon. There's really no comparable basis for leveling ins and outs of either, but one inevitably owns the other. I haven't tripped down that slippery hole yet.
I can only hope that by embracing the future, and its ridiculous (addictive) buzzers and cogs and lasers and lights, I can finally come to terms (read: block out shameful memories) with my past. It's like a distraught woman eating an entire pint of ice cream. When I get lonely, or bored, or both, I'll turn off the lights, and activate my cell phone's flashlight. Guide me, sweet illuminati! Shield the shadows of adolescence! Make me cool!
I still don't have a MySpace though.