no he ain't gonna die...

In honor of the early morning workplace arguments over whether Alex Chilton or Layne Staley is better, or, the eternal culture clash between the boomers and their spawn.

I don't go broke, but I do it a lot...

My younger sister and I had a conversation about drugs the other day and she was shocked that I've never smoked weed because I "seem like the kind of person who would," which is something people have said to me ever since high school because I was relatively mellow, drew trippy doodles in a sketchbook, was incredibly skinny and long-haired and listened to weird music.

She hangs out with a bunch of suburban hippie and metal kids who are probably a lot like my friends at her age, who skateboard, get stoned, and listen to Black Sabbath and Sublime but she's somehow never heard of Cheech and Chong, which my dad and I introduced her to over Christmas. Kids these days.

Caffeine is my mom's vice of choice and while she swears she's not addicted, she can't go a day without her coffee. I used to make fun of her but then it became my drug of choice as well. I didn't start until I got my first and current "real grown up job" and found that I really did like the taste of black coffee.

It got to the point where it didn't matter if it was good coffee or not just as long as I had it, and I soon realized that between work, Saturday mornings with my mom, and Sunday mornings at church where there is always good strong coffee, thanks a pastor who drinks espresso by the cup and the Ethiopians, I now drink at least 2 cups a day.



"We just ran out of coffee" on my 4am day is a scary sentence to hear because if I don't have it, I'm either sleepy or cranky and can get by but it's just not the same. We put our five dollar bills together so I could make a run across the street at 7:30 in the morning to buy a pound of house blend much to the amusement of the baristas who live off our culturally acceptable addictions.

Now we're stocked up for awhile and I had this totally guilty look when the head honcho came in early while I was in the middle of my early morning coffee ritual / 15 minute break I never take.

Upon return, I was rewarded with a copy of 'Dirt' since mine disappeared around the time all the drama went down and I moved out and I drove out to the burbs to meet up with the family for my uncle's annual New Year dinner. It blew my mind again and reminded me of recording "Down in a Hole" and "Would?" off WMMS onto cassette tape, listening to the radio with my dad, and conversations with my crew of friends back in the day wondering why Layne Staley is dead and Dave Navarro is still alive.



I worried about my little sister and some of the really negative stuff she was listening to coupled with the whole unhealthy self-image propagated by girls on the Internet who think that emaciation and cutting is sexy.

Then again, my musical diet in high school was almost exclusively dead or might-as-well-be-dead rock stars, coupled with the writings of Poe and Hawthorne with most of my art done with colored pencils on black paper.

I still think that Conor Oberst and these whiny indie kids who claim Hall & Oates as their biggest musical influence ever suck, but my boomer coworkers and hipster friends think that what I like sucks too. It must be one of those generational things. Then again, my dad likes this song just as much as I do.

every week I need a new address....

Having a week of vacation without school or work for the first time since I was fifteen was amazing but I really don't mind coming back to the routine, now that the apartment is as clean as it'll get, I got plenty of socializing and time to read books, listen to good music, drink tea and watch awesomely terrible Ernest Angley Christmas specials ("And Jee-zus IS the Christmas Tree!), white rapper videos from the likes of House of Pain, 3rd Bass, and Snow, and Krull with my neighbors around the corner.

Everyone acts shocked when we get the annual thaw, and it was great to leave the house in a hoodie instead of a winter coat to pick up a fellow DJ and go up to the station on Friday afternoon to do a "Grungy New Year" with the sweet and sludgy sounds of the Pacific Northwest. We did the more obscure bands (Green River, Mudhoney, the Wipers, the Gits) and then the b-sides and rare cuts from the ones that get played on the radio still.



It being the middle of the day meant that we couldn't play most of the requests we got for fear of being smacked by the almighty FCC so we threw in some Stooges and midwest 80's punk like Naked Raygun but it was fun to play Nirvana covers, dig through the racks of vinyl, and have guys in Lakewood singing this song over the phone to us.



I wanted to take pictures of the frozen lighthouse on the lake but it had already begun to melt like a wicked witch but we went to Whiskey Island and took pictures anyway and I fell through a snow drift into the lake but the water was only up to my ankles. The park was closed technically but everyone was out there with their cameras and pets.



It's days like that when I feel damn lucky to live in this city when the lake is greenish blue and icy, the shore is littered with sticks and Black & Mild stubs and I got a full tank of gas and no plans except to be a slacker for the day.



We got food and went up on the balcony at the West Side Market before making excursions to the Glass Bubble Project to hang out with random friendly people who give me history of Parma while I take pictures of Morty the chicken, random stuff on the walls, and lamps that I would have in my house if I had money.





I took her to the graffiti walls before it started to rain, and we took pictures of paint and general Rust Belt disintegration that never gets old. It was too cold for the skaters and the gangbangers, but "Cleveland/LA" graffiti covered the art that was left and the skaters had built jumps and ramps on the concrete.





I had a lot of New Year's Eve invites, but really wasn't in a mood to be social among strangers, or drink so Lindsay and I went to Algebra for strong cardamom-laced coffee and Scrabble and overhearing earnest conversations from zealous recent converts to Islam on the evils of Facebook as a tool of Western fornication. It seemed like every major social ill went back to the other major branch of Abraham's descendants owning the media or fornication which I should have counted because it was said more times than I've ever heard anyone use it.

Meanwhile, we dispensed with scoring and the banning of proper nouns and Shabba made an appearance on the Scrabble board before going back to her parents' house to watch the ball drop and bang on pots and pans. I still don't understand boy bands or Ke$ha, but I probably never will.



I came home and stayed up awhile longer thinking about all the crazy that transpired over the past year as the gunfire crackled a few streets over. One of my friends stopped over the next night with her dog and we're plotting trips to Boston and road trip excursions to weird places, with my flexible vacation time and her teacher's schedule. It's too bad This Noah's Ark/Tabernacle extravaganza is on the other side of the country because she said it's amazing.

My great-aunt died this weekend as well, making it into the new year at the age of 99. She was sassy and completely lucid up until the end and spent most of her last days going to Mass and playing pinochle. It's the side of the family I don't know nearly as well with cousins I only see at funerals, but the ones I did know outside of that were telling me about their trip to Poland, giving me some family history and asking when I'm going to make something of myself and go to law school, considering my lack of income and matrimony.

"I'm happy with the way things are," I insist, knowing that I can't explain my cynicism about the rat race of modern society or this whole idea of romance, that I prefer cheap rent and something that looks like bohemianism but is really more that my interests are eclectic and that all my furniture has been inherited from previous roommates and elderly relatives.

And yet I enter 2011 with uncertainty, wondering if I'll still be employed by the end of the year, wondering if having something on my record really means it's expunged if I try to get another job, wondering what proverbial shit is going to hit the fan this year, trying to trust God with an increasingly uncertain future.

I'm ok with the possibility of downward mobility but I know that there's not too much further down that I can go, knowing that while there's a lot I contribute, I'm ultimately disposable, with little seniority and being constantly reminded that I'm just a kid by my boomer overlords even though I'm closer to 30 than 20. We were all young once, right? Right? Or maybe everything was just handed out back then, the right hands were shook, the right credentials earned back when it meant something.

Is part of the fight of climbing the ladder a response to this anxiety, because it's better to be knocked down a few rungs than be at the bottom completely? Is the whole culture of sucking up and tooting one's horn born just as much out of desperation as ambition?

nothing new under the sun

I can't seem to get warm, even with the space heater and the heat turned up to almost 70, which makes me want to sleep, but I've been sleeping a lot and sometimes I just want to have something to show for this massive amount of time I have to play with besides having the flu.

Ryan came up yesterday for what's become a wonderful annual hanging out tradition. We went to the Art Museum to see the "Treasures of Heaven" which is totally stuff I'm geeky for because of that weird convergence of religious devotion, body parts of dubious origin, and medieval bling. And they had a corresponding illuminated manuscripts exhibit downstairs so I was in artistic heaven.

It was even more fabulous than I thought it would be, with a lot of Byzantine and early German and Irish artistry with this sense of seriousness, beauty, and ancientness that doesn't seem far removed from the time when my ancestors were still painting themselves and running around naked in the woods throwing people into bogs to ensure a good harvest.

Even as weird to our jaded minds as it seems to be taking trips to see the enshrinement of John the Baptist's tooth or the skull of one of St. Agatha's 11,000 virgins, I get the feeling that while some people did the pilgrimage for the whole religious experience but for others it was a chance to get out of whatever village you were stuck in and have the excuse to go somewhere warm like Spain and party at taverns and maybe shave a few years off of purgatory. I get why the Calvinists were pissed off because the whole shameless revenue of this enterprise must have been hard to bear.



It's not unlike the way that people now do spring break or take road trips out to the middle of nowhere America to see abandoned buildings, eat at weird diners or places like the Cathedral Buffet and take photos at roadside attractions with giant dinosaur sculptures. Or the people who go to Graceland or the gravesites of Jim Morrison or Kurt Cobain. I wonder what Chaucer would make of us and our strange mess of European culture with its own agnostic mysticism.

We were talking about some of the conversations heard around the table at Christmas, where our relatives who listen to a lot of Glenn Beck are freaking out at the state of society and how it's on this continual slide into the morass of something or other, and how back in the day it was better.

But it wasn't. There's always been wars and power struggles and corruption and moral degeneracy as long as there's been people. Peace is the punctuation between war not the other way around. It's just that now there's the Internet and bigger guns and nuclear bombs instead of cuneiform and spears. Is 21st Century America really worse than Nero's Rome?

It's not surprising to me that Ecclesiastes doesn't get a whole lot of coverage on Sunday mornings with its despairing existentialism that resonated with me in my teens when I wasn't sure if I believed in God and if He/She/It existed, did it really matter, but the way it describes human nature and the patterns in society and culture could have been written yesterday, they resonate so strongly with what I saw around me in a way that more esoteric texts didn't. It was a visceral truth that was reassurring in its lack of platitudes.

There's nothing really new, just repeated patterns and revisions.

There is a time for everything. Most of our pursuits in life are dead ends. Politicians are greedy and corrupt. Sometimes good things happen to bad people and vice versa. The eye never has its fill of seeing and the ear never has enough of hearing. It's foolish to talk about the good old days because they never existed and it doesn't do any good. God gives meaning to existence but that doesn't always make it easier to understand or bear.

I'm sure if this got thrown into the conversational fray I'd probably get some funny looks but whatever.

the breaks...

Christmas was wonderful this year with no car crashes or drama, even though we all got the flu one day after another. We did the traditional Polish fish and kluski, breaking the oplatek together before us 'kids' split off for Apples to Apples.



I wasn't expecting everyone to still be hanging out when I split to go to Midnight Mass with a friend from church. We both grew up Polish and Catholic before our search for God took us to the same place, but those roots run deep, that staying up late to sit there and listen to the choir, bask in the echoing quietness, the incense and candlelight. If anything we believe more than we once did.





Most of my cousins on the other side came in on Christmas and we joke that the alcohol consumption has gone up massively in the past few years, which has something to do with all of us getting older, and I got some family history about relatives who were in the IRA and how everyone ended up where they did way back when because back then no one else talked about things.

But it's a week off, and I've got some fresh stuff for my show to get a good world format going again, and friends coming in to visit, and hopefully a trip to the art museum to check out that medieval relics exhibit. It's nice to have a winter break again.

let all mortal flesh keep silent

This, while being too melancholy and dramatic for the radio, is one of my favorite Christmas carols, especially when sung in a huge old stone church by an epic choir. Stay safe and blessed this season whatever your way of doing is... much love!

eve of the eve

With a Christmas vacation pending for the first time since my high school graduation, I am so ready to go home even though I'm watching a friend's dog and haven't totally finished shopping as my plans for DIY gifts for almost everyone are still sitting in a kiln and unfinished on shelves.

And I can't wait until I don't have to hear any holiday cheer sung by Wham!, Billy Squier, We Are The World, or Wings. I do find a pleasing poetic justice in that Bob Geldof will have to hear his creation sung by snarky carolers at his house til the end of time.

I need to get some more coffee for certain individuals, wrap some things in brown paper (possibly will put the lino print blocks to good use), maybe make some candy or something. My grunge buddy's band is playing out on the east side, but I don't know if I'll make it out there tonight even if I'd love to hear a Mudhoney cover or two.

With all this to do, I don't want to deal with any kind of bar scene and anytime he's dating someone it's awkward because me and him have been chummy on a totally platonic we-like-sports-and-music level for the last decade or so which makes things awkward especially when said girl usually could care less about obscure 80's Pacific Northwest sludge and usually prefers country.



Speaking of obscure Pacific Northwest sludge, if all goes well I'll be guest-DJ-ing with my fellow english major/rap battler/punk rocker extraordinaire partner in crime on New Year's Eve from 11-12:30 in the afternoon playing all sorts of 90's grunge also-rans. Expect to hear some Green River, Seaweed, the Gits, Love Battery, Mudhoney, and Melvins. I'm sure those expecting more class of '77 sounds won't be thrilled, but it should be fun.