hard to be soft, tough to be tender...

I cannot help that I don't buy into these systems, I can't help that I'm alive while everyone else is too busy jostling each other and faking their faces, because I love beauty and God and people and the smile is mostly true and the laughter genuine.

If I spent all my time trying to please people I'd go crazy because I'm either too negative or too happy or too Madonna/whore or whatever, everyone wants you to be something else, assumes one thing or another. I can be more circumspect maybe, but I won't change who I am, if past life is any indication, couldn't if I tried.

I try to live out this whole quiet life, try to live out what I believe and it's hard as anything to treat others the way one wants to be treated when they don't do that, to love enemies, to pray for those who make your life frustrating. Trusting in something that still seems so abstract is hard for me, my faith existing and yet so fragile and small.

It's not that I have any reason to doubt, especially after everything else that's happened. I sometimes wonder if the reason that people get all crazy and fundamentalist is that it's easier to hide behind structures and rules than actually deal with the interior of one's soul in relation to God and others.




I tremble
They're going to eat me alive
If I stumble
They're going to eat me alive

Can you hear my heart beating like a hammer?
Beating like a hammer?
Help, I'm alive, my heart keeps beating like a hammer
Hard to be soft
Tough to be tender

Come take my pulse, the pace is on a runaway train
Help, I'm alive, my heart keeps beating like a hammer
Beating like a hammer

If you're still alive
My regrets are few
If my life is mine
What shouldn't I do?
I get wherever I'm going
I get whatever I need
While my blood's still flowing
And my heart still beats . . .
Beating like a hammer
Beating like a hammer

you know what? you know what?

I'd rather know that something is wrong and be told than to let it continue to go on to have the shit hit the fan now rather than later, but I feel my internal organs shudder when I get the impersonal communication devoid of context and enforcing a suffocating conformity to a norm that makes next to no sense outside of boardrooms and in motivational books.

I will smile and nod and say yes of course you're right, I laugh too much I smile too much, I'm too fucking human. I don't buy into this, but I'll pretend to because I need to eat.




But in reality I will say what I need to say, and not so much for cowardice as survival. I will try not to cry. I'm feeling resentful and not so much ashamed as understanding that the language that we speak is different than the language of those in power, that they will never understand us, and that we don't want to lose our souls to be them.

At least I have Kristin to cathartically rock out to in the car on the way home.

in the eye of the beholder

Boomerific ramblings about revolutionaires and royals across the pond be damned, there is much more to life, though one might say that my life is nothing thrilling, as there are no fabulous wardrobes, love life drama, or exploding sports cars. My days of ridiculous adventuring seem to be behind me now, and will be saved for future Not-So-Great-American-Novel fodder and stories for the next generation of nieces and nephews.

But I don't need much to keep me entertained and inspired, just a cup of tea and some people-watching, some clay or paint or ink at my disposal, going down to the West Side Market or the lake, driving around with good music though I try to conserve that precious gasoline.

While I was mediocre with effort as an undergrad attempted art student, I feel like I've figured out my aesthetic sense since then, hovering between the starkness and grit of monochrome and the brilliant splashes of color that characterize the paintings piled up in my front room.







It can't be all melancholia, because the seasons have slowly shifted into budding and brilliant hues and we were lucky to escape the concrete and steel for the oasis under glass and the accompanying statuary and tulip bulbs. Some more crackerific types avoid this lovely place because it's in the hood. It's their loss because not only is this fine establishment free, they sometimes hook you up with hothouse fruits.









And in other news, while I don't really know much about jazz, I know what I do like and I love Regina Carter and her violin very much. Especially when she covers Amadou & Mariam and her current project includes a kora player. I don't know anyone else anymore who likes this kind of thing so I'll probably go by myself.

No Elvis, Beatles, or The Rolling Stones...

"Everything you are and do from fifteen to eighteen is what you are
and will do for the rest of your life."
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD,
letter to his daughter, September 19, 1938

At a family function this past weekend, I made a snarky comment about my little sister's oh-so-twee indie bands, with "all their chimes and handclaps and stuff," to which my other more mature than myself sibling countered with "well you like all that weird world music" and thankfully dessert in the form of cherry pie arrived to end all sonic disputes.

We all prefer the sounds of our adolescence, though the prior generations have done a great job of monopolizing the canon, as if there wasn't good music made before 1965 and as if the world stopped ten years later.



It's not that I really hate Freedom Rock all that much, but the entitled mentality of certain members of that generation and infinite PBS fundraisers with washed up 60's burnouts doing The Songs That We Got High To and the assumption that well duh there hasn't been anything good since the Beatles and Bob Dylan and maybe I just don't understand the hagiography of the agnostics in my midst because when I think of St. John I don't think of Lennon and his primal screamer of a soulmate.

While I do love the first couple Police albums, this song exemplifies everything wrong with my Boomer Overlords. Ian Mackaye once sang that we're not the first and we know we're not the last, and that's a good kind of humbleness to have to realize that. Sting on the other hand, well...



This might be particularly sensitive to some of us peons, due to a time warp vortex especially strong in Parmastan, where classic rock never died, those who consider themselves more hip will maybe prefer the Velvet Underground or Elvis Costello but little beyond that or their influences, crackers still wash their Camaros while listening to "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" on the boombox, and every other classmate of mine in high school that wasn't into the Wu-Tang Clan seemed to own an AC/DC t-shirt. Something about those post-war bungalows and bowling alleys where time hasn't changed much. As inner-ring suburb Cleveland kids, a love of some kind of classic rock is almost a birthright even if some of us prefer more fuzz and weirdness.



I don't understand the appeal of Of Montreal or Throw Me the Statue or whatever the Urban Outfitters/American Apparel set are listening to these days, but I don't have to. I've still got power chords, black t-shirts, and my dad's flannels to fall back on.

the widening gap

I remember when phrases involving gaps regarding generations and haves and have-nots seemed like theoreticals discussed in Sociology 101 classes but more and more I'm seeing the way that these dynamics play out in a dying city where the ones who can afford to get out flee like rats off a sinking ship and the politicians still manage to get theirs for theirs and tell the rest of us to keep being nice and paying our taxes and our union dues because we don't really have a choice.



I live a simple life and don't ask for much, and I know I could get by all right, having ample networks in the way of support (family, church, friends), and I keep on going knowing that the future looks more and more bleak.

I just have to laugh when I listen to the foolish and selfish talk of those older than me who live a life of ease and self-centeredness who can't see beyond their own generational myopia because they make twice what I do and have nothing to worry about but maintaining the status quo while still trying to fight the system.

It's "those other people who tax our social services" not him and his fat public pension that I'm paying for. I blame the Republicans and Dems equally because the former have run the country into the ground, and the latter have continued to do so, not to mention having run my city into the ground and have bled us dry.

"We paid into this system and so we get what we're entitled to. You young people seem to think that you deserve everything handed to you. They paid into it for us and now it's your turn to do the same."

And then the talk about revolution which is a fashion statement to the Woodstock generation and its ideological whitewashing descendants who brag about their favorite whiskey and cool clothes as opposed to being musicians who often lost everything for speaking out against corrupt systems.

To which I say that you wouldn't like it because it'd keep you from watching sports and going to gamble at the casino that will only contribute more misery to those who don't live in the swanky cracker burbs. You're just as tone deaf as the neocons you rail against.

There's no point in trying to explain that everything is screwed because everyone's so obsessed with their own comfort that they don't think about how their decisions affect anybody else. No one they know is living paycheck to paycheck, they'll be totally fine when the bottom drops out for the rest of us.



Up in the morning and out to school
Mother says there'll be no work next year
Qualifications once the Golden Rule
Are now just pieces of paper

Just because you're better than me
Doesn't mean I'm lazy
Just because you're going forwards
Doesn't mean I'm going backwards

If you look the part you'll get the job
In last year's trousers and your old school shoes
The truth is son, it's a buyer's market
They can afford to pick and choose

Just because you're better than me
Doesn't mean I'm lazy
Just because I dress like this
Doesn't mean I'm a communist

The factories are closing and the army's full
I don't know what I'm going to do
But I've come to see in the Land of the Free
There's only a future for the chosen few

Just because you're better than me
Doesn't mean I'm lazy
Just because you're going forwards
Doesn't mean I'm going backwards

At twenty one you're on to of the scrapheap
At sixteen you were top of the class
All they taught you at school
Was how to be a good worker
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself

Just because you're better than me
Doesn't mean I'm lazy
Just because you're going forwards
Doesn't mean I'm going backwards

and I say I don't like it, I know I don't want it...

There's no sound worse than the dentist's drill going down into your jaw, looking up and seeing gloves flecked with blood. "You did so well," she says as I spit pieces of broken molar into the sink and mentally curse my irresponsible youth, family genes, and the past three years full of car crashes and stress that wreaked general havoc on my little snarky mouth, while thankful to have insurance and live in an industrialized country where there's things like local anesthesia even if half my face is temporarily paralyzed and my grin has a glint of silver in the back like a fortuneteller's.

I'm uncharacteristically bitchy today, still sore, unable to wake up despite having coffee in my system, contending with "I'm fighting the system even though I'm totally the Man and don't even see it" boomers way too early in the morning. Quoting Jim Morrison like it's new and fresh and deep was the last straw and I got a bit more vitriolic than usual. Maybe it's the residual Novocaine still coursing through my bloodstream that made my lips get a little looser but given that I smile so much, most of the snark and generational antipathy went unnoticed.




when the fact of the matter is you just don't care
to comprehend or understand a single word I say

Seriously, I just want to go home and listen to the Bad Brains right now.

The sunlight coming through the ice-covered trees was so amazing that despite my wooziness and aching jaw, I drank tea with my adopted aunt and then drove along Riverside after seeing the the Valley was closed off and took lots of pictures of glittering branches.









Oh well, life goes on. I'll feel better tomorrow.

suburban angstas "we're not the first and we know we're not the last..."

One of my friends from the hallowed slacker Tri-C days of yore, who made the Cleveland Scene for Dumbest Quote of the Year for selling a parental-advisory-stickered CD to a grade schooler saying he'd "sell it to a fetus if he had to," declared that if he was elected Mayor of Strongsville, he would change the mascot on the downtown water tower to the Wu-Tangs instead of the Mustangs due to the high volume of suburban hip-hop fanhood in said land to the south.

My east siders find it supremely ironic that the white kids of the southern suburbs adored the crew while mostly oblivious to the whole Five Percenter thing, but it was what it was. And ODB's stage crash was infinitely more awesome than Kanye's. For the children, indeed.

There will always be suburban kids who love hip-hop for the same reason that white kids have always turned to African-rooted music. It's danceable, freaks out their parents (see: jazz, early rock and roll, etc), and is eventually co-opted into a sanitized mainstream culturally acceptable form, usually getting whiter in the process. The next musical form that freaks out/totally annoys the future white suburban parents my age who loved A Tribe Called Quest and the Roots will probably have African diasporic roots too.

My dad can't stand hip-hop but loves Beck, and made up parody lyrics to "Loser" when it came out that became an inside joke with his fellow truck-driving coworkers whose careers involve purveying bread of all kinds to the good people of the hood.

Meanwhile, in Crackerland, as it's been since the 1960's, there will always be disaffected youths who will turn to loud music with electric guitars that may or may not freak out their parents even if they don't understand this new sound that the Kids are into these days.

While the medium on which the music is recorded may change (see cassettes, vinyl, compact disc, MP3), The Kids will more or less look the same regardless of decade and are somewhat interchangeable, as what's basic yet never terribly fashionable can never go out of style. Jeans, black t-shirts, basic footwear usually of the Converse variety, zip-up hoodies, the occasional Joey Ramone leather jacket? The haircuts may vary in volume, the glasses may look different, but the basics are still there.

The Kids may not be getting stoned, but they love kung-fu movies, played Stratomatic in the 60's and 70's (because in the inner suburbs, it's still acceptable to be into sports and music), videogames from the 80's until now, guitars if they were available, and still probably spend a lot of time driving around aimlessly listening to music and discussing high school politics, and dishing snarky pop/subculture commentary at an all-night diner or the nearest coffeeshop.

One of my fellow peons from a generation old enough to have birthed me claims that in another 15 years, the Kids will no longer be listening to Slayer, but I disagree. For one thing, Slayer's older than I am, and their first record came out the year I was born.

17 years later, The Kids in my day mocked me for my love of U2 while extolling the virtues of Hell Awaits at the lunch table, while we regretted that we were too young to see Minor Threat or Nirvana or Led Zeppelin way back when and wondered if that new Alice in Chains song on the radio meant that maybe Layne Staley wasn't totally far gone yet.

My friends often had to turn their band t-shirts inside out (this was the post-Columbine era and any band t-shirt suggesting anything involving death and destruction was suspect), made fun of our valedictorian who didn't know what a pentagram was, and one of us, who also played on the football team, bore a startling resemblance to Kerry King, especially when he got tattoos post-graduation.

Even if you didn't know how to play anything else on the guitar, you knew how to play "Iron Man," and "Smoke on the Water." Every hardcore punk band I saw threw in a few bars of "Reign in Blood" when requested.

Maybe we Parmanians were just 20 years behind the times, but I'm sure there's kids sitting in a cafeteria right now listening to 70's punk, classic rock, and 80's thrash, just like we did. My little sister likes all this weaksauce indie, but her boyfriend's skater bros look just like my metalhead friends from back in the day.

I got the warm fuzzy feeling when I watched two teenage girls at My Mind's Eye buying pre- Blood Sugar Red Hot Chili Peppers albums on vinyl because I remember being that age and starting to delve into the underground gradually, or when my cousin posted pictures of his first electric guitar and is now presumably wailing away.

So boomers, thanks for Hendrix and Black Sabbath. We don't want to admit that we're still kind of like you (because who doesn't become their parents eventually?), because we insist that the sounds of our youth are the best they could be, but we have to give credit where it's due, and we have you to thank for spearheading the soundtracks and subcultures for disaffected and usually brilliant loners. Now, go retire so we can pay your pensions and stay employed.

Thanks.