Just a friendly reminder why West Coast rap always has been, and always will be, better than East Coast rap. And I usually don’t even like rap. More on that next week.

Semi-Optional Disclaimer: I understand that I’m hardly breaking new grounds by “On-ing” my titles, as Seneca and Montaigne, et al, have been doing so for ages, but as prolific Barker Brendan Lynaugh pointed out awhile back, the “On” essay (or blog post – sometimes there’s hardly a difference anymore) is often seen as pretentious, self-indulgent. Well, fine – I’m pretentious and self-indulgent, but that certainly doesn’t mean I’m the first to be so, nor does it mean that I’m the “best” at being such, and while I may be inducing winces amongst my readers, I sort of have a reason for introducing this post with such an unwieldy disclaimer, as it does sort of relate to the post. Think of the hang gliding scene that opens Michael Winterbottom’s film 24 Hour Party People, in which Steve Coogan crashes his hang glider in the lowlands and haphazardly compares the event, himself, to Icarus, tells his audience that they should “probably read more,” and lays out the metaphor that guides the subsequent film and its protagonist into the dusty brush.

And it’s in that capacity that I will declare myself a music snob, albeit not a very good one, and an exhausted one. How is one a “good” music snob? I suppose it’s all subjective, but all I can do is momentarily turn my attention to my friend William, who I began hanging out with fairly regularly in 2006, and was my musical drug dealer, in a sense. Whatever genre of music I was interested in listening to, he had the best representation. By “best representation,” I mean the most complex, at times tedious, but ultimately rewarding, if one were to spend enough time with it. Think Glenn Branca, early Sonic Youth, the no wave stuff. Or even pleasant folk music – Pearls Before Swine, Vashti Bunyan, and Bobby Brown. (The 1960s folk singer with Hawaiian roots, not Whitney Houston’s disreputable, Humpin’ Around husband, though William did have a curious penchant for listening to New Edition for a spell.) I felt like whatever I listened to without consulting William was “So last year,” as the irritating cliché goes, sort of like when one begins a new job, and just when one thinks they are doing a good job washing dishes, or whatever, they are told, “Well, everyone can do that – learn some prep work and do it faster than you were washing dishes.” The same can be said of literature – I am severely under-read for having a master’s degree in creative writing, but the fact is, we all are: that’s one of the many beauties of literature, as Sam Ligon and I were discussing at a party last year – no matter how much you read, there are so many books, stories, essays out there that we’re never going to catch up, but we certainly will discover something great, and when we do so, and find another carbuncular soul who has read the same esoteric text we have, a moment of understanding will be shared, a moment of life, a (insert pithy warm fuzzy here). As far as music is concerned, however, listening to music is far easier than reading – it’s passive (the complex, avant garde notwithstanding), you can do the dishes or crunches while listening to it, and, if you’re not afraid of viruses or cops, you can acquire a grotesque amount of it in very little time for free.

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Have you ever worked with someone who makes you think, “Oh yeah – that’s why school shootings exist”?  A bull, blessed with homo-erectic posture, who charges through the kitchen in cargo shorts, calling his hard working cooks faggots and pussies, who forever modifies his tickets in an attempt to tempt you into screwing them up, rendering you not only a pussy and a faggot, but also a failure? Whose overconfidence is 1 part appalling, 2 parts unnatural, 3 parts catastrophically convincing – who all the girls want to fuck, who all the girls have fucked, who all the girls forgive when he opens the car door for them after telling them to get the fuck out of his High Drive condo on South Hill, or wherever he lives? “See – he really is a good person, a gentleman,” they might say? Whose stride you will never break because were you to make an effort to do so, you would be acquiescing to his aura, skinning your soul to feed the bull?

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The other week, I grazed my hand on a bike rack, accidentally wiping it in bird shit while I was in Hutchinson, Kansas, for an awkward family reunion, at which I was asked by aunts and uncles cliched, McDonalds-esque questions such as, “So, are you gonna write the next American novel?” and “Creative writing? How do you make money doing that?” and so on. When the shit hit the hand, I had snuck off to the Target parking lot by our Holiday Inn Express for a cigarette, and didn’t want my niece and nephew to see me and get all worried and disappointed in me. I didn’t know where to wipe the bird shit, since I was wearing clothes I spent an embarrassing amount of student loan money on, and I wanted to make sure I looked nice for the family I was hiding from.
So I just sort of held my arms out at peculiar angles, which served no practical function, except to keep cigarette smoke and bird shit off my clothing, and to pique the interest and/or bemuse the old, conservative Hutchinsonians who passed me by, pushing shopping carts filled with soda and Wranglers and farm equipment, or whatever. I imagine I looked as if I were some sort of lanky puppet, redundancy notwithstanding, my strings pulled by each family member I was reunited with – my aunt, who, despite my reassurance to her that my new kitchen job offers health insurance and a 401K plan and pays rather well, told me that Hopefully I’ll get a “real” job soon; my brother, who lives in New York, 98% of whose sentences begin, “Well, in New York…,” or, “Well, as a New Yorker…,” who I’ve heard talk about how much he’s “worth”; my parents, who have to be proud of me by default, who reply to my disinterested utterances at dinner with polite laughter and such commentary as, “Well, I hope you’re writing all this down,” who kindly promote my trade to the rest of my family – the rest of my family, who have real jobs, who are “worth” money, who happily hang off the metronome of convention and predictability that keeps food on the table and money in the bank and endorphins in functional balance. My niece and nephew were pulling the majority of the strings, though. Had they seen me, I would have been known as creepy Uncle Sam, the vagrant who dabbles in whatever sadism their imaginations would allow as the years pass. But that’s the thing – I am creepy Uncle Sam, the creep of my extended and immediate family, who drinks and smokes and worries about cancer and cardiac arrest, yet takes no measures to prevent it all, whose passion is a trade only a dwindling population of the world can relate to. It’s no wonder I’ve always hated the Radiohead song, “Creep” – the majority of the family reunion, all I could think is, “What the Hell am I doing here/I don’t belong here,” and so on. It’s fine if most of my family thinks I’m a creep – I just don’t want my niece and nephew to find out just yet.
I stubbed out my cigarette and headed back to the hotel. Some people wear hearts on their sleeves, but I’m a creep, an addict, and a writer – I wear bird shit on my hand.

Nothing quite like earning an MFA and going on to work a job you don’t need a GED for. And loving it immensely.

Yesterday, when my Russian neighbor asked me if I was a Christian and I replied, “No,” and he told me I had blackness in my soul, etc., I told him, “Well, I find it odd that one would use Christianity to stave off the demons and fear that were quite likely bred by Christianity and the intangibility of religion in the first place,” or something like that. He furrowed his brow and blinked a whole bunch. English was not his first language. Why do I brandish (semi) big words and (semi) complex sentences to those who aren’t well versed in English? Isn’t that kind of like talking loudly and slowly to a blind person?

I accidentally wiped my hand in bird shit the other day while I was in Hutchinson, Kansas, for an awkward family reunion. I had snuck off for a cigarette, and didn’t want my niece or nephew or second cousins to see me and get all worried and disappointed. I didn’t know where to wipe the bird shit, since I was wearing clothes I spent an embarrassing amount of student loan money on, and I wanted to make sure I looked nice for the family I was hiding from. So I just left the bird shit on my hand until I found a faucet.

I’ll probably elaborate on one of these three paragraphs next week. In the meantime, I need to get back to being trained by co-workers, some of whom, had this been twelve years ago, would have been young enough for me to camp counsel, which I did in high school.

Also, you should read Seth Marlin’s post on gaming and literature. It’s quite good, and we need to stop stigmatizing gamers. That is all.

The first time I heard the song “Girls FM” by Happy Birthday (found at the bottom of the post), my hatred for it was akin to discovering you’re wearing one wet sock on your way to work 13 hours at a shitty job, or listening to a 4 year-old scream in the waiting room at Jiffy Lube while the mechanics replace the air filter you were tricked into paying twenty extra dollars for, in addition to an oil change. The tempo changes are jarring; the lead singer sounds like he has a sinus infection; the lyrics are stupid; the band’s name is Happy Birthday. There’s so little to like about this song that I’ve grown to love it for what it is, like how you grow to love a Kool-Aid lipped brat you babysit for, who thrashes through the living room, wears his shirt inside-out, spills milk on your commemorative Green Bay Packers Super Bowl XLV issue of Sports Illustrated, pulls down your pants, and asks you for five bucks for a booster pack of Yu-Gi-Oh! playing cards. The song misbehaves, throwing peculiar little tantrums (see 1:16 – 1:25), indulging itself in a creepy, geeked-out bridge (1:48 – 2:16), and never staying in one place too long. The great thing about this song, however, is how artfully sloppy it is.

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A few months ago, I was at Tacos El Sol, my favorite grammatically incorrect taco truck, the slogan of which I’m forever tempted to vandalize by writing a large, proper ‘D’ in front of the ‘El’ in blood-red Sharpie marker, but refrain from doing so when I remember that they are a kind, struggling food stand. I was already late to work, waiting for my steak burrito, when, emerging from around the backside of the vehicular business was a construction worker, his jeans and work boots blasted gray and brown with dried cement and dirt. The man looked to be a foreman. As he walked, he moved his arms as though he were a body builder, or a policeman wearing a utility belt equipped with a flashlight, handcuffs, and a gun. But he was neither – his arms were just taking up more room than necessary. He looked cocky and pissed off in his orange hardhat, as though he had just fucked some girl he didn’t care about beneath the tailpipe of Tacos El Sol, and was beefing up his affect, flaunting his plume to whomever he encountered. The taco truck employees, friendly as they are, were already taking longer than I’m used to, and just as I began biting my bottom lip as hard as I could, six or seven other construction workers came around the back end of Tacos El Sol, jostling one another and hawking loogies, which they spit on the sidewalk for passers-by to step in.

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Oh hai, blog post

The other day at the grocery store, I saw an elderly man buy a dozen roses and hand them to his delighted wife. She said, “Why thank you, dear,” or something like that, and they left together. I found this a little baffling. I certainly have no business claiming that I possess the machinery of sustaining long-term relationships – my longest so far has been a paltry six months – but isn’t the idea of roses supposed to carry with it an element of surprise? Aren’t you supposed to leave them in a vase in the kitchen, to be discovered by your loved one later? Or slide them beneath the windshield wiper blade of your loved ones’ car, like you would a parking ticket, while she’s at work? My father, who was visiting over the weekend, suggested that perhaps the octogenarian couple were both suffering from short-term memory loss. Whatever the case, all I can do is stretch the event in an effort to discuss nonfiction one last time, before I start Barking about other things.

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My thesis is finished. Ergo, I’ll be back in regular posting rotation soon.

In other news, Matt Bell and Christopher Newgent are phenomenal men, fantastic writers, champion promoters, and have contributed significantly to the literary world, and just how exciting it is today. For the first time in my life, I can say I’m happy to be a writer, and these guys’ passion and energy have helped make it happen. That is all for now.