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!"

Don't Tell Anyone...

...I have not done one LICK of work yet today. At work. Which is why you shouldn't tell anyone. Look, do I have to spell it out for you? I'm at work, and not doing any work. GET IT? Fuck, you're an asshat.It's snowing quite a bit out there. Up here on the 21st floor, if you look out the window, it looks like the snow is falling up as the wind pushes it against the building. Like being in a snowglobe.Like being in a snowglobe, slogging away at a meaningless job for a multibillion dollar corporation that doesn't offer job security or a holiday bonus. I want a better snowglobe.I'd rapturously describe the way the snow is falling today, but I'm not in the mood. I'm not in a crabby mood, either, those of you who said I'm in a crabby mood. I'm in an auto-pilot mood. Auto-pilot mood consists of being able to carry out basic functions such as walking, breathing, spelling the word "marriages" for people, eating, and updating livejournals. Higher functions, such as the ability to write well, are safely tucked away in the big soft corners of my brain, hiding from the cold germs that are currently rip-roaring through my head in souped-up muscle cars, leaking all sorts of fluids that continuously seep out of unguarded head orifices. If I tilt my head for too long, I start to weep. Which is girly.So I'm amazed at how much work I'm not doing. I know it won't last long, it's just a lull, but jesus, no one has bothered me yet, which is frankly shocking. It's like getting away with something I'm not even trying to get away with. Doo dee doooo.