Sotally Tober

Read the subject line until you get it, it's funny.Chirp-poppy voices lilting to the light-up scroll on the dirty screen, misguided attempts at jerking your body along to the music, chairs surprised by the burden of the sudden collapse of people standing before them with the best of intentions to ignore gravity, but without the capacity to meet those intentions. Sloppy wet floors that would spread with rolling blue flame at the drop of a match. Confused bodies rubbing, bumping, bobbing, jumping. No one will remember the details later, no one will care. Now is for the buzz. The keg dies early, the caterers pack up and go before most people are finding their sea legs, but, hey, we're here, there's a bar nearby, let's go.It's cozy and warm and the wood is dark. Charming bartender, king of all he surveys, he barely has to raise his voice for Last Call. Maybe it's just that Yuppies are quiet. Stumble out into the cold. What cold? I'm fine. There's a cabbie nearby that hears us a half a block away discussing the need for him. It must be three in the morning, if he heard us. Get home quick, chatter, flop, sleep.Wake to fuzzy light, the need for water and coffee, and quiet.

Story

The two entries below this one are two parts of the same short story. Obviously, read PART I first. Or don't. It's your party.And I didn't spell check again. Decided not to. So sue me.

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas...PART II

He was at the car before any of us, trailing in the wake of his cigarette-stained breath. At this point, his mood could be attributed to anything--he had yet to fully explode and lay bare what had set him off. I learned long ago that an unbroken, stacatto stream of "mothafuckamothafuckamothafucka" had connotations from one end of the spectrum of human experience to the other. My brother and I didn't want to ask Mom--we couldn't make it look like we were questioning him at all, couldn't delay our pace getting into the car. We got in and he was actually rocking back and forth in his seat, smacking the steering wheel lightly with the heel of one hand, repeating his mantra over and over, as if the repetition of it would somehow bring about a solution: "mothafuckamothafuckamothafucka". My brother and I always found it a little funny when he did this. It was such a sure sign of not being aware of your surroundings, of being so completely swallowed up by your emotions, of being so psychotically embroiled in the same vicious loop, that it was goddamn hilarious. If we didn't laugh we wouldn't be able to do much of anything else in the face of it. Of course we couldn't show we were laughing. Luckily at times like this he rarely looked anyone in the face, except my mother, who was foolish enough to think she'd be able to talk him down from the ridiculous heights of fury he was currently caught on. Imagine my surprise, then, when he turned and looked right at me. "You know what they just did to me in there, those mothafuckas?"I was dumbfounded. Addressing me directly? About one of his problems? Appealing to me, the subject of his anger so often in the past, me--the kid who's heart would start jumping rope in the classic fight-or-flight response scenario whenever he'd get that look in his eye and take a threathening step forward, fists clenched, lower teeth jutting out menacingly? What the hell was I supposed to say? What the hell was this all about? "What happened?", I ventured.My mother puts an arm on his--pleading, probing. His head snaps in her direction. "They fuckin' said no, those fuckin' rat bastards! Mothafuckamothafucka..." "What, though, what did they say no to?," my mother insisted.He shoots one more quick glance at me--specifically my hair--and spins back around in his seat. Something is turning over in his mind, now, something bright and fierce and heavy with dark possibility.He turns again, his face softer now, his eyes half-lidded instead of taut back in feral anticipation. "So we part-own this horse, this mothafuckin' horse. The horse won today, for the first time wince I had a fuckin' part in it. Once in a fuckin' lifetime, y'know? Never happened before. Never. Today of all day I need this fuckin' horse to win and it fuckin' wins. Never happened before, do you understand? Never. Do you fuckin' understand that?"It takes me a moment before I realize this isn't part of a littany--he asked me a question. "Oh, uh. Yeah. Really, never?" "I come to this fuckin' place--I fuckin' come to this fuckin' place and lose my fuckin' money every goddamn month and the one time it fuckin' happens I can't do nothin' about it. Mothafuckamothafucka."Like a piston, his fist rams into the ceiling of the car, scary-fast, followed quickly by a dull "THUNG!". At this point I'm not sure if I should answer. Punching usually just leads to more punching, and I don't want to encourage it. I snatch a glance at my brother quickly, then my mother. She rolls her eyes as if to say: "No biggie, just another one of his moments. Whattaya gonna do?"But this isn't just another moment. This is different. He's talking to me, and whenever he or my mother try to appeal to anyone, whenever they try to explain the incredible situation they're in, they are asking for help. They want something out of someone. What in God's name could he want from me? And why the fuck does he keep looking at my hair? "These mothafuckas!", and another slam to the ceiling. "What, honey, what?", my mother, wanting to help, needing to feel important. "They ain't fuckin' here! They--"(a sudden drop in octave from the past few words' screaming, as if he realizes he's acting rashly and speaking quietly will lend more credence to his words somehow)"They fuckin' need to be here to sign for the fuckin' check. I can't sign the fuckin' check out myself. Mothafuckas are gone for the fuckin' holiday, do you understand? That's are fuckin' Christmas money sittin' in there, do you understand what I'm sayin' to you?" My mother is struck by this, and finds herself speechless. She shuts her mouth and turns her head forward. I can see her in the side-view mirror, face slack, disappointed, angry, calculating. Dear old ma. "What do you mean, our Christmas money? That's what you're going to pay for Christmas with?" she says, looking forward.He turns his head to her swiftly, eyes blinking out F-U-R-I-O-U-S in morse code as he does. "What the fuck are you talking about? Alright, fuckin' yeah, that's where our fuckin' Christmas money is, you fuckin'...yeah, alright? Yeah."He made little sense in one of these moods. English fell to the ground bleeding and broken in the wake of his anger.At this point my stomach was about as twisted and burning as a car after slamming into a phone pole at around 99 MPH. It wouldn't bother me half as much if I hadn't been involved, but obviosly something was going on and I was more involved--FAR more involved--than I wanted to be. I wanted to be home, or better yet, hanging out with my girlfriend, as I had planned to be. Instead here I was, adrift in this nonsensical storm, slowly learning that our Christmas was fast going down the shitter. He takes a moment to collect himself, his thoughts, occasionally muttering "mothafucka" under his breath so quiet it's almost gentle. Then, in the rearview mirror, I see his eyes again, brows raised, creasing his fprehead in a series of thick frowning lines. "How old are you now?", again, asking me a direct question. "Eighteen."This does not please him. He shakes his head in tight semi-circles. "No good. No fuckin' good. I got nobody down here."Bizarrely, my mother looks at me in the side-view mirror, and smiles. "Eighteen. Jesus. I remember I had you and you were so big. You were so big the men would stand at the window and look at the babies and they'd see you there, in your incubator--they had to build one special for you--they'd point at you and say 'I wanna see the woman that had that kid'. And I'd be standing right there behind them and I'd raise my hand. 'Right here', I'd say," and she began to laugh, I guess because there was nothing else to do. I smile the best I can--why is she talking about that now? What the fuck is she talking about? "What the fuck are you talking about?", my stepfather asks, genuinely confused. She wilts under this, shrugging her shoulders, putting her gloves in her purse to give herself something to do. "I don't know. I don't know. So what do you wanna do now? It's cold. Can you at least turn the car on?"He stares at her, letting it linger. It's a pointed, angry, don't-push-your-luck stare. As he turns his head he's still staring at her. As he turns the car on (we're always glad when it starts, especially in the winter; it is not what one would refer to as a 'luxury vehicle') he begins to mutter again, perfectly in time with the engine, a chorus of growling menace.He turns to look at me again. The soft, pleading stare now. "How old do you look?" he seems to be asking himself. He turns to my mother. "How old does he look?"She looks at me in the side-view, no trace of a smile on her tired face. "He looks eighteen. People think he's in his twenties sometimes. With his facial hair he looks older," she offers.He nods and now his leg, up on the ball of the foot, starts jackhammering up and down, like a huge sewing needle fueled by rage. He blows warmth into his cupped hands. Maybe my mother's mentioning of the cold let him notice it more, maybe he's looking for a distraction.He looks at my brother, his son. "You cold back there?" "Yeah," he answers simply, involved with his toys.He can get away with a simple answer or even a flippant one sometimes. He shares genes with this angry bastard, and that seems to lend him privileges and freedoms not afforded to my sisters and I growing up. He isn't usually embroiled like this. Neither am I, actually. The one day I decide to throw the old folks a bone, hang out because the holidays are close...My stepfather turns the heat up, trying to warm his hands that way. His mind is racing now--the leg gives him away. "You wanna sign the check for me?" He says to me.I don't know if he's kidding or not. As such, I don't answer. Now he's looking at me with the trace of a smirk on his face. An honest-to-goodness goddamn smirk is squirming its way around beneath that bushy grey-flecked mustache of his and I can't believe my eyes. "Uh..." "Whaddayamean? If you can't sign for it, how can he?", this from my mother, genuinely annoyed at being made to sit in the car, our only view the dirty grey backside of Belmont Park. She always does this head-bobbing thing when she's annoyed and trying to convince someone of something that makes so much sense to her. It makes her looked like a ticked-off chicken. "That fuckin' lawyer can sign for it--John. He can say he's John. They don't know what the fuck John looks like at the window."He says looking at me, at my mother, and finally at Belmont Park, that stubborn fortress containing all his riches within and the hopes, it now seems, of our Christmas being Merry or not. My mother turns away, half-looking at him out of the corner of her eye, and finally shakes her head. "No."He turns his head to her and lunges forward suddenly, hands half-clenched in rage. He stops short as he always does when he threatens like this. The trick with him is you never know if he's lunging with the intent of choking or punching or slapping or if he's just trying to scare you. She flinches. So do me and my brother. Turns out he's just scaring her--for now.Through clenched teeth: "What the fuck're you talkin' about? He don't sign for that check and we don't have no money for Christmas, you unnerstand me? You fuckin' get me? That's all our fuckin' Christmas money in there. Fuckin' sittin' there and I can't get my fuckin' hands on it, ya fuck ya."He turns and slams the heels of both palms into the steering wheel. That poor, poor steering wheel.He turns to me again. "Come on, I'll walk you to the door. Can you do a signature? Just do a quick one, it don't have to make sense. Put your hair in a ponytail, lemme see what you look like."I put my hair in a ponytail quickly, looking at my brother, who is now looking at me. No one can quite figure out what this is for. "What's that gonna do? Why's he gotta put his hair up?" from my mother, the voice of reason. "You don't fuckin' know, these lawyers, they all look like fags, always puttin' their hair up. Lemme see. Lemme see how old you look."He looks at me, hair in a ponytail, vaguely processing the fact that he said I look like a fag, in so many words. At this point I've resigned myself to doing it. I keep imagining scenarios with the guy at the ticket booth--I didn't plan to look him in the eye much, or say much, just smile and act professional and be quick. Then my mother stops us both in our tracks. "He's eighteen, though. He's forging a signature for money. This is a fucking track and he'll go to jail."My stepfather turns to her and draws his fist back to hit her, lunging forward again, but again it's a feint. My brother flinches anyway, looks out the window. He knows what's possible. He knows the risk. And he doesn't care. He can see no other option. "MOTHAFUCKA!" he screams this and slams the dashboard and the car rocks a bit. It's still ringing in our ears when he turns to me again, tender. "What do you think? You got balls? You wanna do this? This is all the money in the world, you understand? You don't do this and I got nothin'. I got fuckin' nothin', you understand me?"Now Christmas, traditionally, was a cease-fire in our household. It meant less arguments, less violence, less threats, less screaming, less running away from one or the other parent pursuing you with murderous intent for pissing them off. It meant visiting family members that you didn't get the impression wanted to cause you bodily harm at the drop of a hat, which was always nice. It meant there'd be dinner for at least a day or two. There may be only iceberg lettuce and dime-store bologna in the fridge for the rest of the year, but for Christmas we had Turkey. And fish. And side dishes. It also meant presents, to a lesser extent. Presents, at least to me, that meant so much despite how painfully aware we were made of the money and hardship it cost our mother and stepfather to get the presents in the first place. They were a sort-of reconciliation for everything else we didn't get the rest of the year. In that multicolored box--no matter what was actually contained within--was the culmination of a year's worth of disappiointment and frustration swept away in one fell swoop by (usually) a cheap piece of plastic. So presents were big. Christmas was big. I was loathe to be the cause of its downfall. I couldn't let it happen. "It's okay, I'll go," knowing in my gut that I'd be in jail that night, weighing out the possibilities in my addled mind. I'd miss work, I'd miss my girlfriend, I'd have a permanent record, I'd have to stand up for myself in the cell. Didn't they like beating on the guys with long hair? Would this ruin my chances for a good job somewhere down the line? Would I get a credit card after this? Would I be fired?Maybe there was a way I could sabotage the whole ordeal before ever getting into the building--maybe I could fall on the ice and re-break my leg and we'd have to go home and that'd be that. Maybe my stomach will finally get tired of its career as a contortionist and explode and then how could I sign for it with a steaming load in my pants? Possibilites flew around, a snow-globe of grotesque news clippings. The guy behind the window kept swimming up, his face a mask of ill intent, wearing a clear plastic visor that shaded his eyes in otherworldly blue. He'd look me right in the eye, see my acne, see my lie, ask what I wanted, wait for me to tell him. Then he'd smirk and turn and tell me to stay right there and then two big guys in tattered grey suits and blue striped ties would saunter up to me (those aren't Christmas colors, I might quip, insane), maybe even coming down the stairs toward me, from where the people that didn't have to forge signatures were allowed to tread. Would I run? Would I spill my guts about my stepfather and my brother and my mother out in the car? How the hell would I call them? How long before they realize something is wrong, that I shouldn't be in there that long? And what would they do even after realizing it? "No. He can't do that, that's crazy. What if he gets arrested for it? He can go to prison for that. He's an adult."She was right. We all knew it. But that meant there wasn't any options whatsoever. Christmas was cancelled. He turned to look at her, all motion stopped but for the mad twitching of his yellowed eyeballs, back and forth quick, scanning her face for any possibility of an answer. He didn't find one. "I got nobody down here. I got nobody to call on down here, I'm just like everybody else down here," he said as he scanned through his files of cop buddies. Being a Detective Commander garners you many friends and a small amount of influnece, but not, it would seem, enough influence to extend seventy five miles away from your precinct. Which is precisely why we'd all come so far in the first place--so nobody knew about his gambling. We were reminded all throughout childhood that in his line of work, the less people knew about you, the better. This was why he'd routinely park three blocks away from where we lived. Another piston-punch to the ceiling brought me back to the present.THUNG! And another, and another, now in a rapid succesion that left a weary dent in the ceiling's fabric. "FUCK! FUCK! FUUUUUUUUUUCK! THOSE MOTHAFUCKIN' MOTHAFUCKAS! Today of all days, why do they have to fuckin' do this fuckin' today to me, today, mothafuckas! FUUUUUUUUUUUCK!"He let loose a flurry of blows to the dashboard, to the steering wheel, to the ceiling, to anything without a pulse that was within reach, anything that would sit there and take the abuse. We'd never heard him scream like this. He'd yell for what he wanted, he'd threaten with that beady/bug-eyed stare and that ram-rod accusatory nicotine-stained finger on a daily basis, but we'd never been privy to a full-on sreaming fit from him before. We sat there stunned, half from the shock, half from the abuse our eardrums were getting, in that cold tin prison, all the windows up to protect against the cold.He lunged backward all of a sudden, arm bent as if to swing it into my head, unwilling or unable to be of any assitence to him. I jumped back, arms reflexively bracing, criss-crossed before my face.But he was just throwing his arm around the seat and looking back over his shoulder to back out of the space. He was muttering again, his mantra. We spun out of the space, car rocking on its haunches. He sped off down the parking lot and out of nowhere"FUUUUUUUUUCKFUCKIN'MOTHAFUCKIN'FUUUUUUCK!!!" Followed just as fast by a new series of punches. Everyone's heart was racing. We were driving with a madman. There was a pause as we waited to merge onto the interstate. "FUCK! That was our fuckin' Christmas money! Fuck I got nothin' else, nothin', fuckin' NOTHIN! MOTHAFUCKAAAAAAAA!!!" Each syllable of this last punctuated with a blow to the dashboard.And we rode the rest of the way home like that, two hours in the cold, under a barrage of swears and threats and impending violence, jumping everytime he'd explode from the everpresent muttering with a new ventilation of fury and screaming and punching. He punched the ceiling raw, and left flecks of blood that soon faded from Christmas red to old rust.When we got back into town I looked at all the houses with Christmas lights in the windows and nice cars in the driveway and wondered if I'd ever know what that was like or if I would ever want to again.

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas...PART I

There isn't anything inherently interesting about Belmont Park. It is a palace of brown-ish mottled linoleum; a paragon of utalitarian pillars and towering windows with a grey-tinted view of the track beyond, below. Occasionally you'll hear the stutter-thunder of horses racing by, accompianied by frenzied yells and protestations from the men in the stands. It isn't cheering--cheering is something people do when they're having a good time. This is the sound of men straining, through the sheer force of their own wills and the power of their nicotine-choked voices, to carry their horse across the finish line to glory and enough cash to get themselves home tonight. After the bar. The light is flourescent and therefore sickly bright, making what few shadows fall, fall puke green and weak. People are not there to make friends. They chat with one another, they talk of horses and of close calls and of previous small victories, but outside of the track, when they're not on the betting line or staring up at one of the many monitors showing the progress of the race being lost at the moment, they are strangers. Of a kind. Obviously, they're all pitted against one another. Everyone wants to bring home all the money. Everyone wants to have their problems solved with the motion of those legs out there, with the speed of their hooves, with the infallibility of a horse's need to get the hell away from where they are if they so choose. They'd be loathe to admit it, but they're actually all part of the same huge splaying family; they are all cut from the same cloth, they are all here for the same reason and will all go home to the same lives, with very little variation. Some are addicted, and will ruin their lives and the lives of people they love here, pumping their income into the track, providing the money it needs to keep its flourescents on, to keep the glow from the monitors bright upon their faces, filled with hope and hunger and fear. Some are just here out of curiosity, that may or may not burgeon into entire lost paychecks one day, depending on their luck on this maiden voyage. They all think they want to be there, but the truth is they have to be. It is something in their wiring. It is as necessary as a marriage. Not being here is as unthinkable as not having a beer with dinner, as not sharing that off-color joke with your cousin from Philly once a holiday. I am not here because I want to be. I am here because I was told to come. My parents, such as they are, think that this is an acceptable form of family pre-Holiday togetherness. The truth is: my stepfather needs to be here, and we're too afraid to tell him we're staying home, my brother and mother and I. I couldn't care less about horse racing--I'd rather see these horses from afar, watching as they roll and curl over the landscape of Montana, one unstoppable, rich brown wave of sinew and muscle and mane. Instead I catch grainy glimpses of them, burdened as they are, with absurd man-shaped tumors clinging desperately to their hair, to their backs. The place is as decked out as I suppose it can be for Christmas--there are thin cardboard Christmas Character cutouts taped to the walls, to the incongruently red pillars, some are on the betting windows themselves. Weak lights on strings cling to the railings on the ramp leading into the main hall--a wide open expanse to hold all the various lines and clusters of men and their soon-to-be-departed money. There's the occasional oversized plastic candy cane--some are lit from within, some sputter uselessly, some are dark and hollow. I joke with my brother--grabbing one of the dark ones and pretending to whip it off the ground and engaging him in a desperate swordfight that will determine the future of one or both of us. He laughs and runs to the other side of the hall, pretending to grab his own. "Knock it off," is the curt warning we get. We both glance at him, to see whether or not he's all that pissed. The lidless, beady stare we get back confirms he'd really much rather we'd stop, and he's prepared, as it turns out, to resort to fisticuffs to bring about this occurence. We knock it off, seperate, look around at our surroundings. There's nothing else to do. Nobody here looks anybody else in the eye. They're all looking at their tickets, at their wallets, at the monitors, at the windows, at the horses so far away out there, so fast. The only one who gets looked in the eye is the guy behind the window, the guy who takes your money, the guy who, if this were a sane and just universe, would be able to bestow upon you riches beyond your imagining. He's their connection. He's the last vestige of familiarity between the handing over of your hard-earned dough and the vast unknowable chasm of Chance. He also couldn't give less of a shit. He's got his own ponies to watch. He's got an awning over the living room window to fix. He's got kids, who need presents, and the wife who never gets his dinner right. He's one of them, but vastly more powerful, more desirable, than anyone in these men's stilted view of the Universe in general. And looking him in the eye is as good as looking at anyone else here in the eye--he can do no more for you, really, than anyone else. We're asked if we're hungry. "Not really." "But they have hot dogs here." " No, I'm good, I just had breakfast." "Come on, get a hot dog or somethin', I don't know how long we'll be here." Now, to the objective observer, this exchange would appear, perhaps, to be amiable--a father figure concerned for his youngsters' well-being. They can't really know just how fraught with danger this dialogue actually is. What is really being said is this: "I'm showing a definable point of interest in your happiness, so as to over-ride any possible complaint of displeasure you might concieve of at having to come to this sad place for reasons that are very clear to your mother and I but which you have yet to understand or comprehend." "I acknowledge your show of good will for what it is and do not wish to let you off the hook so easily--the promise of shitty food that will make me sick later is not enough to make up for the misery this place brings me, or the discomfort I feel in the presence of you and your woman--ahem--my mother. Besides which, the food would be so distasteful that it would actually make me even more miserable than I already am." "I am pushing the point. This is the only concession you will recieve from me today or, perhaps, at any point in the near or distant future. This option of food, it would seem, is quite preferrable to the option of blind violence which may await you for disrespecting me in this fashion, for not allowing me this chance to absolve myself from any wrongdoing thus committed or yet to come. I am even going so far as to show interest in your particular tastes, mentioning as I did the Hot Dog. Turning me down would be most unfortunate. It would show me that you are not interested in what I can provide for you, and my role in life, at least in relation to you, is that or Provider. Remove this meaning from me and you are just another asshole in my fucking way. From this point on, piss me off and I will have no other recourse but to treat you as an enemy." "I am pressing my point as well. I am appalled by you and this place and my mother's complicity and everything the combination stands for. Hot Dogs, if you truly knew anything about me, make me riotously ill and are therefore not at all desirous to me. I am not willing to meet you halfway on this. Actually, from the tone of my voice, you should be able to tell that I am more interested in you saving money for whatever you wish to use it on than for my happiness. Please, I am unworthy of your grace." "I am caught slightly off-guard by your obvious sign of selflessness, one I applaud as being worthy of my attention and indeed mirrors my own sense of charity. However, you are here against your will, and will continue to be, as long as I see fit. This is your last chance for food or any sense of comfort or happiness until you are returned home at some point in the future. Ask for this happiness later and it will be much harder to come by, as at that point the grace period would have been over and my attentions will be turned from charity and towards what I need to focus on to make myself happy. I have very little in this world that quells the rage that churns inside me. Interrupt that small, fleeting window of opportunity, and you traverse on ground I myself fear to tread." So I get a hot dog, and my brother gets a hot dog, and so does my mother. My stepfather can't be bothered. While he's gone my mother tries with her preening, desperate enthusiasm to get us interested in the horse races: "They're so beautiful!" "How fast do you think they're going, really?" "Can you imagine being on one of those?" And, finally, after many attempts: "Well I don't know how long we're going to be here. We want to be home for The Simpsons, right?" These phrases are much simpler to translate, as my mother's motives are much less complex: "I am appealing to your apprecitation of aesthetics by making the observation of the horse's beauty! Like me despite being responsible for the misery you're now experiencing!" "I am appealing to your intellectual sense AND your ego at the same time, asking you a rhetorical scientific question in the hopes that you will take it as aquiesing to your superior knowledge of the material world! Like me despite being responsible for the misery you're now experiencing!" "In a last-ditch effort I am attempting to appeal to your unknowable imagination, on which I have remarked on many an occasion as being quite impressive and beyond my scope, to further stroke your ego and draw you closer to me! Like me despite being responsible for the misery you're now experiencing!" And finally: "Oh, fuck it. I tried. At least you have something to look forward to later. Maybe." We stood, the three of us, my brother and I joking about the horses pooping in each other's faces at high speeds, imagining action scenes atop the horses--a chase scene or two between two G.I. Joe guys my brother had in his pocket (I always made sure one or the other of us had some toys on any long family trips; it was the only distraction from the bickering and hostility that spilled over from the front of the car), generally getting as far away from the situation as we could, more by habit than need. Eventually Mom broke our reviere--"Where's he been? It's been a fuckin' half hour."And off we went in search of him. There wasn't much to search--the place was wide-open, the only places you can lose someone is behind the many pillars, or in the bathrooms, or perhaps in the balcony that pressed the ceiling down from above at a threatening angle, but this was out of the question; only people that could afford to went up there. Being the oldest, I was told to check the bathrooms. I didn't want to mention to my mother that looking at men in the bathroom of a race track might not be taken too kindly by the less savory elements of the race-track-visiting men of the world. I just scuttled in, the dutiful son, furtively glanced at the shoes of the men in there, and peed as much as I had to, washed, and reported the failure to my mother. No bother, there he was: down the hall, standing at a window not frequented by many people. It was bigger and better-lit and unadorned with any Holiday cutouts. Frosty had no place here. There was a staircase nearby, leading up, and to whatever promise lay beyond for those who knew what promise meant. He was deep in discussion with the man behind the window, shifting his weight, changing his stance with the movement of his hands to better convey his meaning to be more convincing, perhaps, to get the point across through any possible language barrier that may exist. We stood there, me and my brother and my mother, looking mostly at the topography of the floor and the way the light from above gave it a ripply, wave-y look, like a lake of milk frozen, its burden at the moment to bear the weight of these bettors until it's allowed to swirl and lap and gurgle once again. At least that's what I was looking at. My mother must have been looking at my stepfather--her "uh-oh" brought me unpleasantly back to the here and now. He walked right over that shiny bit of linoleum, right for us, swiftly. His head swerved from side to side fitfully, not willing to focus on any one thing, his anger ill-contained by the confines of what surrounded him. He needed to be outside. And we needed to get out of the way. My mother caught up with him as he pushes his way through the cold, trying so hard to get into our bones, to tell us beyond a shadow of a doubt that winter is here and wasn't going anywhere for awhile. Or maybe it was just trying as hard as it could to quell the heat of my stepfather's anger as it boiled and sloshed and rose dangerously quick. Spattered invectives reached my brother and I, heads down against the wind, resigning ourselves to what we knew what was to come, and were steeling our resolves, our stomachs, from the impending stress and discomfort this very long car drive home would prove to be.

The Inherit Flaw...

...in this whole Livejournal thing for me is that writing requires concentration. Focus. "Free" time. Or at least time in which nothing else is required of you. Or me. Obviously, at work, that is not the case. My attention is called in--at last count--fifteen or so different directions at once, my personal distractions being one among many.So I don't have time to concentrate on the writing, to practice the way I'd like, to utilize this tool to its fullest. Which is not to say I'm not going to try.The Holiday Gift they gave us is a large duffel bag that stinks of gasoline and other non-inhalable substances you only experience with your head half-way into a car's chassis. I think they're trying to kill us all. Fuckers.

Rock Out With Your Cock Out

The Strokes are mincy and inoffensive and delicate. They are pleasant enough to listen to, non-intrusive background music, if you want that sort of thing. I truly don't understand the adulation surrounding them. I mean, they're okay. Is it possible their popularity is based on publicity as much as, say, Britney or American Idol? Are they just counter-programming? The cynics would say yes, of course, moron. All music today is a product of the corporate hive mind! Resist! These same people would also say, most likely, that the only "honest", "true" music is coming from people making CDs in their basement or at least signing with labels that have a market of 1,000 or so. But what I must ask is this: how is that music any better than anything else? How much influence and power do these people think music execs have over musicians?The Strokes, I think, can't help what they are. They are mediocre musicians with a funky way of dressing that many people wanted to emulate. And one of them is dating Drew Barrymore. The huge third-world-refugee-murdering-corporate-giant-label which releases their music is very very good at marketing and presenting their image and throwing their considerable public presence behind a band filled with the progeny of a few very rich and very influential men in the world of business. So you know who The Strokes are. And you buy their album. And you forget it the minute after the stereo is off, left with a passingly-pleasant buzz from the aforementioned inoffensive music. Three years from now, maybe two, they'll release another album, promising they've gone in new directions, and that they're eager to get away from the expectations people have of them. The quality and variety of this next album will tell you what kind of musicians they are, but my guess is that they're just okay. They will always be just okay. Not innovative, not influential (at least not to people with an appreciation for variety and newness in all things), just there to influence lower east side fashion and employ Roman Coppola to make a video every now and then. But the Execs didn't make them like that. That's who they are. That's what they can do, and their label is simply presenting it more and better than any other band out there.It is people, record buyers, who really make a band big or not. Record stores will buy lots and lots of copies because they're told to by the labels that they deal with; they're almost guaranteed a return for their investment. But if people stop buying the records from the record stores and record store owners discover stacks and stacks and stacks of Strokes CDs and nothing to show for it, you better believe they're not going to buy as many copies of their next CD. People dont' HAVE to buy what MTV tells them to.But they have to like something about a band besides the look, I hear you say. Well, you'd probably be surprised just how many people would buy CDs based on what the band looks like. You yourself are not that shallow or crass--you cannot concieve of what goes on in a mallrat's mind. Their priorities are skewed. They believe vehemently in the power of hair gel and Timberlands. I know someone that believed a serial rapist/murderer should not be treated too harshly because he was cute. These people exist, folks. They're out there, and they shape the world we live in through commerce. Not that The Shallows make up ALL of the Music Industry's business (or the Movie Industry or TV or Politics, etc., etc.), just most of it. I wish the reverse were true, obviously, but there you are. Anyway, I digress. My bad. I really think the only way "execs" control the actual output of music from their artists is in the overproduction--the layering of the different strands of music into one safe public-friendly macrame basket for your listening pleasure. To whit: Britney Spears cannot sing. At least no better than your average overbearing eleven year old in your school's talent contest who grows up to be the girl who sings in bars and at gatherings because she sounds, well, okay, and everyone is too afraid to tell her she can't sing because they may one day make the move to sleep with her. But you'd never really notice that she can't sing. Her voice is buried beneath the beats and the guitars and the whateverthehell the semi-talented musicians in the studio happen to be playing that day. That is overproduction. But only one example. Most of today's "Rock" bands also suffer from overproduction in that everything is blended together so seamlessly you can barely tell the bass line from the drumbeat, the singer's voice from the guitar warbles. So, folks, it is down to you, and it is down to me. If we want music to be better, we must make it better. Complaining about it will only point to the symptoms. You don't like the way music is? Go out and make some of your own. Start your own label. Become huge. Or, if you don't like The Strokes, don't buy it. I happen to like The Strokes, in that inoffensive this is cool to listen to when I'm not really listening way. But mine is a burned CD. Mwoohoohahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaa!Dashes are annoying to insert. If you miss the lack of them in the previous paragraph, put them in yourself. Use a magic marker on your computer screen.

Jessica Simpson Is Ugly, Kind Of.

Well not actually ugly...when she has her hair down and she's in sweats and eating Haggen Daaz (sp?) out of the carton, she's downright dreamy. Yes, dreamy. But then they strap her down and glam her up by trussing up her hair and slapping eight inches of makeup on her and suddenly she looks like Charlton Heston wearing a blonde curly wig. No, really. I'm screening her TRL appearance at work and she looks EXACTLY like a young, tan Heston wearing a Miss Piggy wig. Same facial lines, same nose, same determined chin. It's amazing. And this makes her ugly. At least when they do this to her. Otherwise, hey, I don't mind lookin' at her. "Get yer stinkin' paws off me, you damn, dirty ape!"