5/30/05

Of course, now and again something fearsome and appropriate does manage to blunder into your sensorium, just outta sheer rotten chance, and it does help to make some desultory preparations for this unlikely turn of events. There are two routes. One is to be careful what you wish for, and accept that you only get what you really need, and the other is to wish like crazy and be glad for whatever falls into the begging bowl. It's a simple, simply wicked fact that the basin that washes your face and the lake that drowns you differ only moderately by any scale except the personal.

I've been putting the screws to the Wha? for some time now about my chief occupations and how I want them to balance out. I'm rotten ready to get away from a steady diet of handyman jobs and to dig into some real fine boss chow music work. I'm entirely aware of the character of music as The Dreadful Profession, as Monsieur Berlioz so kindly put it, but dread or not, it's what I do the best and I oughta be pursuing it, not leaky faucets or leprous wallboard.

The good news is that in the past month or so that goal has come perceptibly closer -- I'm playing gigs, recording, making CDs and just businessing away here, almost enough to cover the bank's pound o' flesh even. The somewhat more mixed news is that I have to deal with, uh, musicians.

Artists, as a rule, are an ornery lot -- stubborn, self-absorbed, or to use a technical term, jest plain coo-coo. It comes with the territory, or more correctly the lack thereof. When you're out to reconstruct the objects of perception into entirely divergent forms, it helps to be able to go out into your own private Idaho and muck around in the fluorescent potato patch. And anything artists do, performing artists do backwards in high heels, or more accurately, right out in public. Naturally, or perhaps unnaturally, this makes musicians and actors the life of the party and the bane of the workplace.

During my motley career as an office temp, I myself got a fair ration of doodoo behind my tendencies in this direction (admirably restrained, I might add) (my tendencies, not the doodoo). I've gotten The Look from secretaries and fellow drones for peculiar remarks, bristling formality from macho types over my exercise of Freedom of Attitude (a little known derivative of the Bill of Rights) and chilly reprimands from silver-haired middle-management matrons for my horrific predilection to -- (((shudder))) -- whistle while I work.

Perhaps the only kindly reproach (if reproach it was) I ever received was from the Labor Ready clerk (okay, I wasn't always a temp) who heard me talk about being a musician and admonished me, "That's what you should do. That's what you love. That's what you're good at." That I'd spent the previous two days irritating whole crews with unconscious Roger Rabbit impressions may have contributed to the advice, but its core was still supportive, and I accepted it as such.

And of course now I'm the guy behind the counter in service to untethered balloons of creative self-indulgence. And they say there's no justice. I have to be kind and careful and consistent and organized and perceptive and reliable and all those boyscout virtues while my lovely lovely clients wander around pettishly kicking the tires of their imaginative vehicles. Aww, isn't that just precious.

The really unsettling part of the whole arrangement is to see just how clueless artists can be about how they're portrayed by their work. My rates are low enough that I see a good bit of wannabe trade come in through the kitchen. As an honest tradesman, my job is to put them on disk, not buy them an ear or a new voice or five years of guitar lessons. But commonly, more than just their money's green, and it shows.

For musicians, the recording process is the Knight of the Mirrors, exposing every flaw and irregularity in physical performance with millisecond timing and sixteen bit accuracy. But that's not the creepy part, oh no precious. Digital editing gives us the power to erase physical booboos with equal timing and accuracy. It's the metaphysical stuff that's the real problem. No matter how mirror-bright a finish you hone onto it, a turd is still a turd, and no amount of reverb or compression can mask a total ignorance of one's own talents as evidenced by the mulch pile they tender for their fellow humans' inspection, faces glowing with innocent pride.

Even scarier is the performer with talent, organization, diligence and a galloping personality disorder that turns everything they perform into a House of Wax grotesque, all without the slightest notion that they're a walking talking freak show. These are the ones that really get me going, because I can't be sure that I'm not one of them. Hey, don't laugh. You're not laughing. Why aren't you laughing? Laugh, dammit!

Whatever Socrates may have said, the eyeball cannot see itself. You cannot know if you're superduper or just duped. And you might not want to. Goethe's famous rejoinder to "Know thyself" was "Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away." In this respect, audio recording may well be the most brutal form of psychoanalysis known to man.

Chary I remain to wish the giftie of self-sight (or hearing) on anyone, clue-deprived or no. After all, it could happen to me.

5/23/05

Yeah, yeah, the guy. I'll get to the guy. Listen, alright? First I gotta tell you about Jesus. No, not the guy they worship, the real one. There's a real inneresting theory went around in the sixties, went about like this.

There's this religion, see? Jewish religion. Guys are big on laws and records, precedents, real lawyeristic. They're always proving stuff by quoting their old books. Now these guys have a big problem: they're constantly getting their asses kicked by big outside countries like Babylon and Rome. First they think God's on their side, they fight a buncha lame battles believing ol' Number One's gonna bail them out. But he doesn't. He's on that side with the big guns or slings or whatever they use. Next thing you know their country's annexed, their capital is plundered and they're all dragged away to who knows where.

This goes on for a while, they get real despondent and think God's pissed with them. Then some real imaginative guy comes up with the goofy idea that a leader's gonna show up, a superhero, a guy they call the Messiah, who's gonna defeat all their enemies and rebuild the capital and rule the world and probably cure cancer and invent the light bulb in the deal. They got all these references in the holy scrolls say when he's coming and who he'll be and where he's from.

Now flash forward to about 20, 25 AD. There's this young guy, just a peasant, a punk from the sticks, but he's smart and he's got a head for the books and he's hung out with these guys who believe in the Messiah and he's all for it himself. Now he takes it into his head that maybe this Messiah, he ain't just coming on his own, y'know? Maybe he needs a little help. So this guy, let's call him Joe, Joe he figures he'll start getting together all the stuff that the Messiah needs, based on all the old predictions.

And maybe he gets a little crazy, y'know how hot it gets in those parts, Joe he starts thinking he's the Messiah, or will be if he can just get all his prophetic ducks in a row. He also starts pulling a buncha super snappy magic tricks, like they've been doing around there since the pyramids were built. All this is supposed to make people believe he's the Chosen One and get the priests behind him.

And dang if it doesn't work. Works so well the priests betray him from jealousy and the Romans string him right up, perfect ending there on the cross and ready for the final trick, which is to come back from the dead. One version says his crew just drugged him and broke him outta the tomb, another says he really died from that spear in the gut and his handlers had to hoke up the last part to get the story to fly.

So in the end they get their Messiah, a little beat up in transition and most of the Jews don't buy it but something, anyways, something to build on. But all planned, worked out in advance to correspond to the Scriptures. Pretty smooth move if I do say so myself.

Now like Bill Cosby says, I told you that story so's I can tell you this one.

Light. Down. Gotta glass of water? Thanks, hoss.

Met this guy in a bar last night. We got to knockin them back, he seemed kinda unhappy about something. Finally starts to tell me.

See, he says, back in the seventies, there's this guy. Man, he is a piece of work. Good family, political connections, best schools, lotta money, the whole bit. But he's a total fuckup. Gets drunk and dodges the draft and does coke and chases women and one thing and another, it's a wonder the family can keep him outta jail, let alone find him a steady job. Just another rich punk, right?

But y'know how back then a lotta young people were mad at the government. I mean, Viet Nam, f'crissake. He just barely got out of that. This kid begins to get the notion that America is the biggest danger on Earth, that it needs to be brought down. Y'know that old New Left, antiestablishment stuff? He's a little smarter than he acts, though, and he figures out that it's never gonna happen from the outside, right? That old Vonnegut line -- "Machine guns and tanks have a message: Work within the system." And this guy, he realizes that he's a perfect candidate -- wealth, position, connections, all of it. He can do it, he can bring the beast down.

So, this guy I'm talking to says, this rich kid starts climbing the ol' ladder, works all his privileges, gets into the whole power game. Starts out to make a whole buncha money, can't rely on the family stash, gotta have control. Makes a few mistakes, sure, but keeps pluggin' away and eventually he's got the cash and the machinery in place, owns sports teams and everything and he's ready to make his move. So he becomes the governor and runs for president. Almost loses it there, too, cause the guy he's running against has the popular vote.

And then he goes on about how the guy starts methodically destroying the country, running up giant deficits and alienating all its allies and insulting its enemies and dividing the citizenry and all that good stuff. All the better to stop the machine, he says. Says if the guy gets just a little more time he'll put the whole shebang right down the toilet, rest of the world can breath a big sigh of relief.

Huh? Where'd who go?

Say, y'know what? I'm through talking. You don't like it, you climb back in that black helicopter and fly straight up my ass.

5/16/05

Impressed? Don't be. I fiddled (guitared and tromboned, to be exact) away my youth in hot pursuit of the wayward dream, but like a dog chasing a car I had no idea what I'd do if I caught it. The terms of my existence would rewrite themselves on a monthly or even weekly basis. I never lived anywhere longer than a year or two, and sometimes I'd spend long stretches bouncing from one place to another, drifting along in a creative haze. I did no good, I did no harm, I was in the world but not of it. Call me a dharma bum. I dare you. Okay, don't.

Along the way I encountered more than a bit of resistance and even resentment from otherwise well-meaning friends and relations, seemingly composed of equal parts disapproval and skulking envy. I can't get away with that, they seem to silently assert, so why should you? Naturally they ignored little subtle details like the fact that I was only just getting away with it myself. Then they went back to their fantabulous mansions and fondled their 401(k)'s and forgot all about po' po' pitiful me.

Even after I got married, my happy hexagramic extremities (yes Mister Pynchon, those are your I Ching feet I'm copping) and/or those of my darling wifie's would carry us off on bozo adventures, sometimes trailing a string of bad debts and unpaid bills like turds behind a small, lively dog. Equal parts wanderlust and ADD, our travels took us across the country and back, endless vistas of lonesome highways and frozen wheel bearings, generally behind the (cracked) windshield of one or another of a series of mid-70's Dodge vans, dragging one or another ugly little travel trailer, with cats comfortably ensconced in our laps.

In recent years, though, I've been changing my way of living -- or more correctly, not changing. Since that aforementioned wifie got served up a warm heaping helping of Shit Happens, we've abandoned the open road for the straiter route of the disability treadmill. I've lived in the same city for nearly fifteen years, in the same house for over seven. I have a mortgage and a checking account that I never bounce and excellent credit and a phone number that even my most skeptical acquaintances have come to believe in. I've even got something resembling a business in motion. Lord help me, I've settled down.

Now, if I was writing for, say, Spin or Mother Jones, this would be the point in the essay where I'd coyly reveal that underneath all the Norman Normal disguise the real me, the rolling stone without a speck of cereal, lurks in all his distracted glory, and that he's just rarin' and tarin' to go back and hit the ol' macadam trail. Or, if I was writing for, say, Newsweek or maybe the local teh suxx0rs newspaper, this is where I'd grudgingly admit that the good life ain't so bad and I don't really want to go back to sleeping in rest areas or changing engines in the mud and snow.

But since I'm not writing for any of those clueless income streams, but rather for the brave noble flat busted TG, I'm free to not strike any faux-adamantine poses and admit that this whole situation puzzles the fuck outta me. It's not especially either nostalgie de la boue or creeping middle class droop (to nicely match my middle age spread) that has me going. I've pretty much done what I intended to do in this period in my life, albeit with more detours and fewer sheckels, and I can't say I have any regrets about any of it.

But my whole pattern of life up until the freebird of fate let one go on me was one of exploration and change and uncertainty about my identity, as though I was a superhero who hadn't found his particular power yet but really dug spandex. Now I'm more like Mister Incredible Fifteen Years Later, crammed into a little house (well, not that little) and a little car (hey, I just got a bigger one) and a little job (not) [turntable screeches to halt] -- mkay, maybe not that much like MIFYL, but my substance and stability, no matter how light and frolicsome, leave me restless, vaguely yearning for the kind of baseball-bat-to-the-head changes I used to go through on a regular basis.

I hear tell that a lotta combat soldiers get home from their horrific battle experiences and wind up just a little, well, bored with ordinary non-explosive life, but without the slightest interest in hopping back on the firefight merry go round. In a way, that's what I may be experiencing -- a degree, not of desire for any particular experience, but a sense of the absence of it, of the kind of unnamable novelty and unpredictability that enticed me down the rabbit hole in the first place.

Last winter, I took a couple weeks off from everything, including caregiving, and went blundering off on my lonely only, both as a change and a chance to get away and do a little brain salad surgery. Mostly what I got out of that trip was how useless it felt to be traveling without S. Nobody to talk to, to share the sights with, to keep company. It was a bracing reminder of just why I'm putting up with this glorious horrible tolerable conventional (for me, anyways) life I'm leading. Restless or not, here I come.

5/9/05

I'm taking advantage of this opportunity by making every first timer mistake I can. My book has the usual overly sympathetic, hypersensitive, excruciatingly virtuous first-novel hero, a precious little foundling with an emo history of orphanages and foster homes. As he describes his lugubrious background, first person o'course, I can barely hold back the tears of sorrow welling up in my eyes, contrasting nicely with the gorge in my throat. Naturally I do my best to get him into as much trouble and/or nookie as possible, complete with awe-inspiring coincidences and feats of intuition, with the end result that he saves the world from rampaging badness by -- but that would be telling, now wouldn't it.

I make no apologies. My two simple rules for this travesty beyond Scott Fitzgerald's Advice To Young Writers ("Sit down") are: 1. No Shame and 2. No Fear. If it's gonna be a dog, then b'gad let it howl!

I myself was, of course, no foundling, and only half an orphan, losing my father at the ripe old age of three (me, not my dad -- he was at the ripe old age of 39). From all I hear, he was a pretty cool guy. Sometimes it pisses me off. But this led to a really weird relationship with my mother. While she eventually remarried (twice, that would be), my basic parental unit was decidedly female, which gave me a distinct advantage in the getting-along-with-hot-feminist-chicks competition as well as an early grounding in the niceties of cooking, sewing and making my own (censored) bed.

But as a thoroughly modern woman, she took the first opportunity once the family was resettled near her parents to go right back to work, leaving most of the raising of her four (count 'em) kids to a parade of housekeepers. She'd been content to give up her career for the life of a housewife until her beloved husband had the temerity to check out, but after that she was apparently ready for something resembling a life beyond scraped knees and psychotic siblings.

Liberated before it was cool, my mom anticipated a whole trend: the professional woman for whom children are only a facet of a fully-realized life. She worked fulltime, taught Unitarian Sunday school, volunteered at relief organizations in Tijuana, gardened, earned a Masters degree and basically did all the self-empowering things contemporary women do back before there were contemporary women to do them.

All this had the predictable nurture effects on me. Progressive though the whole affair might have been, I probably caught a touch of insecurity from it. I did, after all, end up in a profession that pays more in approval than coin, assuming you're successful in the first place. Despite any confusion I might have about them, other people's opinions of me are vital to my sense of self-worth.

I also got a big shot of distrust of the whole process of child bearing and rearing and such, perhaps by osmosis. I developed a distinct aversion to chaining my one-and-only life to squalling balls of ego and poopoo, tiny imperious dictators with much too much time on their hands. By my midteens, after the divorce, family life was the unavoidable band of leftover time bounded by school, friends and sleep, usually involving conflict, involuntary servitude or both, which didn't exactly endear the whole institution to me either.

Perhaps my subsequent disinterest in conventionality, even the modest amount required to keep a maternally-pleasing source of income or semi-permanent abode, can be understood better in this light. Certainly my mother's frustration and eventual disconnection from my peculiar way of life makes perfect sense given her girl-of-the-Great-Depression emphasis on self-reliance and job security. We barely spoke for years, only becoming reacquainted in the event of my marriage, which for all her musician's mother niggling she recognized as being as Real a Deal as the one she was rudely cut short in.

In the end, despite all my attempts, I've become a family man after all. Actually, I've become a mother. As my sweetie has gotten more and more disabled, I've found myself increasingly engaged in the tasks generally associated with mumdom, from managing the house to bandaging booboos. I've even resorted to my mater's trick of looking for outside work to provide some contrast with my relentlessly constraining mommy track, complete with my own cavalcade of government-provided housekeepers.

Sort of the old Mummy's Curse, with a twist. Instead of growing up to have a child just like me, I've grown up to trade my wife for an adult dependent just as wild and woolly as I am. I should know, I picked her out myself, chose her from thousands I did.

So as a working single parent, lemme just make a heap big shoutout this Mother's Day to all the caregivers out there, female, hemale or somewhere in between (me? don't ask) slugging their way through the paper bag of their lives with whatever model ball and chain, duty or sentiment or loyalty or must-be love, firmly shackled to their raw and bleeding ankles. Maybe we can all go out for a beer sometime, eh?

And if you're just dying to take a peek at my magnum opus (that's magnum in the PI sense, btw), tell you what -- drop me a note (preferably a large one, but fives and tens are always useful too) and I'll shoot you out a first edition just as soon as I get the poor dumb foundling down out of the tree he's been in the last year or so. This writing stuff? It's harder than it looks.

5/2/05

But if you really want the bad day that Adam barfed up right after they threw him and the old lady out of Eden, try self-employment. Not only do you get to pay both halves of your Social Insecurity, not only do you live at the behest of whatever hysterical hallucinaynaynaynayshun your last client may be suffering regarding your services, but you're stuck with that guy in the mirror over there as your overseer. I don't think so.

Actually, I don't. I know so. I are so. I'm so self-employed that I'm on a first-name basis with the boss. And I can tell you truthfully, he's a nice guy and all but he's a freaking moron.

All this is apropos to a relatively rare occurrence in my Gentleman Handyman career path: having to redo a job. A plumbing job, to be precise. A really mean plumbing job, to be more precise. How mean, you ask? Mean like work two tedious days on antique faucets only to have them all spew recklessly the moment the pressure comes back, then spend three hours on (unpaid) retrofits, then have the client go whine to the guy that referred me til the only sensible thing to do was issue a refund and close the door on the whole sick affair.

Par for the course -- the only other time a handyman job blew up in my face, or more accurately sat down in my lap and dumped a Hot n Stinky whilst howling its head off and biting my thumb (or was that the client?) was another plumbing job. Funny coincidence there.

Ah, but no. There's a special factor in plumbing, one which is not mimicked by any of the other trades: leaks. Electricity can short, wood can crack, paint can drip and sheetrock play a hundred horrid tricks, but only water squirts. Water, like information, wants to be free. And in its eternal desire not to be confined, it will go that extra mile to bipass or penetrate any incidental barriers placed in its indomitable path.

I'm not talking down the art and science of fluid management. It's one of the oldest and most stable building technologies, most of the parts unchanged in design since they stopped making lead pipes and switched to galvanized iron. It's a wonder we aren't born able to swap out faucet washers by instinct. But this is exactly why plumbing can also be such a tiger-trap for the unwary and inexperienced. Once a piece of pipe gets old and funky, it's like a retired Sunday school teacher on a cruise liner -- it can and will do anything, usually wetly, and lord help those who try to figure out why. And don't even get me started on the mysteries of threaded couplings or sweating copper. I do all that stuff, but not by choice. I do it for money.

Or not. Once while recuperating from a particularly nasty bout of what was either walking pneumonia or one whale of an allergy, S and I wound up staying in a slope-floored shanty on a hippie farm outside Eugene Oregon. A cold snap froze half the pipes under the house, and in lieu of our landlord's help I was constrained to crawl around in the muddy bowls of the dwelling patching and repatching the garden-hose-and-clamp splices that previous tenants had installed in other meteorological incidents of this sort. Every time I replaced one, the next down the pressure line would blow. It was like Sisyphus, only with a giant water balloon instead of a boulder. We moved.

But the direst of all possible fixit problems, even more than the fishbowl basement, is the slow leak. Not necessarily related to plumbing, but all too connected to the nature of water, this is that dread familiarity, the drip from some arbitrary point above, collecting with Chinese patience to freefall into your tv set or freshly prepared tax return. Is it raining? Is it a bad pipe? And worse: where is the splatter really coming from? Questions that have reverberated in the crawlspaces of the housed world and fomented curses in every language the tongues of mortal men doomed to die of terminal dampness have formed.

A severe and seemingly unquenchable drool in the ceiling of our dear old doublewide turned out to be the result of a retaining strip nailed right through the cheap tin sheathing, fed by a puddle in a dimple of the cheap tar roofing. A bleeding bathroom blower that rotted the nice clean sheetrock all around its vicinity revealed itself to be condensation from the clothes dryer that shared the vent conduit. Slow leaks are cunning, ingenious and relentless as trying to fight a blowup rubber punch 'em dummy.

They say: where there's smoke, there's fire. Meaning: a problem creates symptoms relative to its location and source. But the fact, the sorrowful, mortal fact of the matter, is this: most problems don't smoke, they drip. And like most evidence, leaks are the opposite of clues. They distort, distract, prevaricate and lie through their teeth. The truth dribbles off down the hidden rafters and studs of the greasy real world, to appear as if by magic in some seemingly disconnected location, a tantalizing, infuriating hint of What's Going On that never reveals its true source or logic.

And only the esoteric plumbers of the world ever know the sinister reality behind it all. No wonder they charge so much.