Renaissance Redneck

Reboot

2012-02-09T17:08:00.001-08:00

Or Retcon. Whatever. I'm thinking about resuming my public masturbation right here, very soon. Not literally masturbation, but definite wankery. Still cogitating (that's redneck for 'ruminating/thinking/pondering').

Being 13

2010-03-19T18:43:00.001-07:00

Being thirteen sucked.
This radio station plays a "Five at Five" segment where, at 5 PM, they play the top five songs from that day in a given year. A couple of days ago, the year was 1982. Men at Work, Tommy Tutone, Asia...I was listening to these songs that were all over the charts when I was thirteen, and I lit a Marlboro Light and I was driving home, and I thought to myself, "Man, these songs kick ass...1982 was an awesome year."
But then I thought a little deeper, as these songs took hold of me (never underestimate the power of music to transport your ass through time, no way. It's the best time machine I've ever known). I got to thinking about listening to Men at Work on the way to a football game, and remembered just how awesome being a first string player on the B-team was (it wasn't) and how being thirteen was like being perpetually on the B-team, perpetually not quite good enough, perpetually embarrassed and praying to god nobody realizes just how ugly, awkward and stupid you really are. You feel your way for your place in the newly-forming pecking order, you learn to toady to those higher and ruthlessly stomp on those beneath you, all the while dreading that somebody will notice how fucked up you are.
Like I said, once you strip the romantic, golden glow of nostalgia away, you realize that being thirteen sucked. At least for me it did.
So, when I got home, I went upstairs and hugged my twelve year-old and told him how awesome he is and he looked at me like I'd just sprouted tentacles, but it was all cool.

Worst. Girlfriend. Ever

2010-02-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

I have a new worst girlfriend ever. Her name is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and she is an utter bitch.
You see, I once dated this girl, and I was batshit for her. She was my life, my raison d'etre, the whole ball of yarn. But she was evil. She'd ignore me, just to watch me contort myself to get her attention. She'd cheat on me, and then tearfully come back full of penitent evil. She ran alternately hot and cold, in a perfectly choreographed dance designed to keep me off-balance and vulnerable.
And that's COD:MW2. I suck at the game. I don't seem to be progressing. I play for a couple of hours, getting my ass handed to me time after time...I get ready to quit, and...then...
POW!!!
I have a perfect game, and I'm hooked all over again.
Three hours of abuse, just for that ten minutes of post-coital glow.
I'm no longer in denial. I admit it's an abusive relationship. But like every other codependent sucker out there, I keep hoping it'll just get better if I only "try a little harder!"
Shit.
See ya online. I'm ShinerBockVA on Xbox live.

Manual

2009-07-27T17:35:00.001-07:00

I love my laptop, no shit. But, whilst cleaning out the crawlspace, I found my old Brother AX-250 typewriter. Who knew, but Office Max still sells ribbons; so, I bought a couple of ribbons, and spooled up a blank sheet of paper, and...
Damn. We, as a generation of writing people, have gotten lazy. I totally forgot about manually setting tabs, about the importance of 'carriage return', and the lack of spell check and cut&paste functions.
BUT:
I'd also forgotten about the visceral joy of 'clack-clack-ding!' and actually having a sheet of paper with strike-outs all over it. It's closer to the heart-beat of writing shit, you know? No bullshit, no glossy-smooth-tricky-font-format crap. No facebook or email to distract you. No crutches. No safety net. Just you and a sheet of blank white paper and a world of unformed ideas.
Beautiful. No shit, beautiful.

Signs & Portents (a fragment)

2009-07-20T16:54:00.000-07:00

I knew Doug was getting a little out of hand when he started sharpening pencils. He'd sit in the cubicle next to mine with a brand-new 25-pack of PaperMate #2 pencils and he'd sharpen them with this dinky little hand-held sharpener. He'd sharpen one down to a stub, neatly catching all the shavings in his under-desk trashcan, then he'd sharpen a second one, which he'd use doing actual work for maybe an hour. Then he'd sharpen that one down to a stub, and put a point on a replacement. Finally, about an hour before quitting time, he'd sit in his cubicle and sharpen whatever pencils remained in the pack, one after the other, down to the stub like a chain-smoker lighting one off the butt of the last.
One afternoon I stayed late to finish the end-of-month reports. The office was deserted except for me and Dwight, the janitor guy. I'd always liked Dwight because he was a totally grizzled old black guy that reminded me of every Mississippi Delta Blues stereotype I'd grown up with. I was sweating through about eight-thousand Excel cells and Dwight was methodically dumping out the cubicle shit-cans. He got to Doug's and paused a minute before dumping it out. "You see this shit?" he asked me. I just shrugged. "You watch this guy. Anybody does this shit is a little fucked in his head." I mumbled something about Doug having some personal problems at home.
On his way out, Dwight stuck his head back around into my cubicle. "Don't tell him I said nothing about his crazy shit. I don't need some crazy ass coming after me."
I'm not saying shit to Doug about Dwight, or about anything else. Dwight's right. That shit just ain't right.

J.S. Mill

2009-04-17T20:17:00.000-07:00

Mill's On Liberty is the week's assigned reading, and I thought a few passages were worth relating here. Hope ya'll see the need for some modern-day Mill like I do.

"...the general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind."

"Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time."

"It is not progress that we object to; on the contrary, we flatter ourselves that we are the most progresive people who ever lived. It is individuality that we war against: we should think we had done wonders if we had made ourselves all alike."

Keyboard

2009-03-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

As this machine spills my words across these floors...

Urns and Stuff...

2009-03-17T14:44:00.000-07:00

So I was writing a post on Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and here's what I thought about it.
I have to admit, I was a bit leery coming to Ode on a Grecian Urn. The poem is almost a punch-line, associated with doe-eyed young poets in white shirts with flaring sleeves, open at the throat, sighing heavy sighs. Despite my early days as a poetry junkie, I'd somehow missed Ode, so I came to it with some preconceptions.
First time through, it struck me as vaguely...not to use a fifty-cent SAT word, but...pedestrian. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the urn was wicked pretty and stirred some wistful longing in Keats. Okay, next.
So then, I was standing in the rain, waiting to pick the kids up from school, and made another stab at it. Very different reading the second time around.
It seemed to me that Keats saw the best things in life, frozen in time upon the urn, and the figures' eternal static postures reminded him that all those good things are so transient in real life. They are captured in the urn, but that's the only permanent manifestation of all the good things...when experienced, they are fleeting, and the urn serves as a reminder for all time that the good things are impermanent, and maybe that's part of what makes them so dear.
I suppose watching all the little kids rip-snorting out of class at the end of the day reminded me of Keats urn. They all grow up, and end up with mortgages and divorces and bitterness; but for that one moment in time, frozen in my memory, they were all six years old and wild for life.
*sigh*
Oh well. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
~Jack

Equinox

2009-03-08T12:10:00.001-07:00

On the morning of the Spring equinox,
the day when twenty-four hours are perfectly
divided into precise halves of twelve,
The sun was shining in my eyes like tiny sharp needles,
driving into work.
That afternoon, leaving work,
the sun was in my eyes again, and I
squinted and bitched.
The glories of nature thus revealed wisdom to me,
mainly that I work too god-damned much.

Facebook

2009-02-28T20:47:00.000-08:00

I was an early adopter of myspace, mainly as a chance to shamelessly plug my guitar playing and inflict my bad poetry on the world. Eventually it became a useless venue for either poetry or music, clogged with scammers and junior high pervs and just plain stupid shit.
So I came here. Here I can write whatever bad poetry and shit I like, and the world can take it or leave it without having to email me offers of slutty girls in my area and/or guaranteed penis extensions.
But my brother signed up for Facebook, I don't know why, and gmailed me an invitation. So I signed up, using the so-clever (infantile) pseudonym Jack Kinovalot. I lied about the last name, sure, but I was honest in my high school and college graduation dates. Why not, right?
Then I completed the registration process, and -kapowie!- up pops a page full of people I haven't seen since the late 80's / early 90's. I guess facebook is all about social networks, but this is more than I'd expected. I clicked through a couple more pages, somewhat taken aback by all these names and faces from so long ago: guy who kicked the shit out of me in junior high? Check. Girl who populated every masturbatory fantasy from 1982 to 1984? Check. And she got fat, and married a fat bald guy.
Every one of these picture/profiles had a link to "contact me!" and I almost did a couple of times. But then I got smart...I graduated high school and left town less than a week later and never looked back. So why start now? Mid-life crisis, maybe? Nah...when my mid-life crisis hits, it's gonna be all about heading west and holing up in a cheap cold-water apartment and writing God's Gift to the Written Word.
Anyhow, I digress. I didn't click any links, didn't kindle any old fires. Let sleeping dogs lie, especially when they're likely to be mangy and flea-bitten, right?

Shameless Plug

2009-02-28T10:55:00.000-08:00

I'm not a proponent of pushing my favorite things online, but I just ran across something too cool to not pass around.
Y'see, I've been a dilettante Latin student for about twenty years. I have three editions of Wheelock's Latin, I have literally six or eight different "teach yourself" books, but never got very far. No time, no discipline.
But I was reading Victor Hanson's blog and the google ads across the top had something about 'learn Latin! Free download' so I figure WTF and tried it. It took me to BYKI.com (BYKI = Before You Know It) and I checked it out, and it's really cool. No shit. They offer languages I've never even heard of, but I just downloaded the Latin lists and started from there. I actually had to pull myself away from the computer to make the kids lunch today. Hell, even the kids learned a little bit (before their Nintendo-jaded attention ran elsewhere).
http://www.byki.com/
No shit.
~Jack
PS: I got an A- in my Senior Seminar of British Literature, so I guess my indiscretions with the semicolon wasn't deemed too bad after all.

Okay...

2009-02-20T19:42:00.000-08:00

So I finally got around to writing my paper. Hell, I even got an A. But my professor said I needed to lay off with the semicolons; despite my technically correct usage, she said I was in imminent danger of losing their narrative "punch".
I loves me a semicolon. You can string together phrases without worrying about comma placement or awkward conjunctions or coordinating clauses. You can babble endlessly with a few well-placed semicolons; and the best part is that my paper was on Jane Eyre. Read some Charlotte Bronte one of these days...that kid was totally obsessed with the semicolon. I mean, it's totally rampant, especially in her dialogue.
So, to my Seminar in English Literature professor, I want to give a big old Colonel Klink shout-out.

Valentine's Anomie

2009-02-14T13:46:00.000-08:00

That's my old Paladin on the right there. Yes, I am such a geek that I used to draw my own character portraits. And let's talk about geekiness...
I have a seven-page paper to write on Jane Eyre and Victorian society, but I can't get moving. It's due tomorrow night; I have a nice thesis statement, a rough idea, sources lined up and citations highlighted for use...but I can't get writing.
I'm in the proverbial funk.
Profoundly less than satisfied.
Do you think that, maybe (work with me here)...do you think maybe growing up as a total book-worm can ruin somebody's life? Maybe lead to some inflated ideas about how things should be?
Blame it on my middle-school obsession with Tolkien, followed by Robert E. Howard, followed by Michael Moorcock, Frank Herbert, Harlan Ellison, John Bellairs and Ursula LeGuin...all of that followed by another thirty years of voraciously reading every book I could get my hands on: real life falls a little flat, don't you think?
Where's the dramatic climax? Where's the heroic sacrifice that saves the day? Where's the love that topples kingdoms and lasts for all eternity?
Real life just kind of...goes on. No structure. No plot. No denoument, no climax.
Blah.
Even better:
meh.

What's on My Nightstand?

2009-02-07T17:01:00.001-08:00

What with work, school and mr. mom duties, my real genius these days lies in tagging along in the reflected brilliance of the wise Strumpet ( www.strumpetslife.blogspot.com ). No end to the clever idea hooks and creative sparks therein, yo. Thus, I steal this from her.
What's on my nightstand? Well, that's a long and funky story...y'see, I live in a house of mess. My wife is a clutter-magnet, as are my kids. Me, I'm Mr.Mom...I spend my time picking up after the brood. I'm no anal-retentive neat-freak; far from it. But I hate seeing shit laying all over the house. I can Lysol and disinfect the whole house; but when there's piles of toys and clutter shit all over, it still looks like a pig-sty. A germ-free pigsty, sure...but still a pigsty.
I have one place where I relax my guard, and that's my side of the bed. Since I was a wee nipper, I've always been nicknamed 'the Nester', because I tend to make nests. I like blankets, and I like to read. So my side of the book is knee deep in piles of books. Literally. Notebooks full of bad poetry and short stories well started but never finished; comic books; D&D books (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 3.5, and 4th editions); textbooks, magazines, and most of all, plain old books.
So here's a quick sample from book-stack 1a, the one closest to the actual bed:
Jane Eyre (for school); Norton Anthology of English Lit (vol D and vol E); the ubiquitous TS Eliot; TX Hamme's the Sling and the Stone; 4th Edition Player's Handbook; Mencken's Treatise on the Gods; Jung's Man and His Symbols; Chris Hitchens' God is Not Greatand finally, capping off the stack, several issues of Guitar Player magazine.
It's not pretty. Obsessive, compulsive, eclectic, sure. But not pretty.
Oh yeah, there's an empty Yuengling lager bottle precariously balanced on top. Not only do I read in bed...sometimes I drink beer in bed.
I'm such a redneck sometimes.

Beach Book

2009-01-30T19:32:00.000-08:00

For explanation on the concept of the beach book, go check out the wise woman:
http://strumpetslife.blogspot.com/2009/01/these-books-were-made-for-walking-new.html

First, an apology: I'm taking my "Senior Seminar in British Literature" this semester (on top of hectic work schedule and full-time Mr. Mom duties), so writing for my own good-happiness-stuff has somewhat fallen by the wayside. My professor is not one for slack-ass papers, no way: it's MLA or the highway, and you can't dazzle her with bullshit (my specialty).

My beach book: the Signet edition of T.S. Eliot's the Wasteland and Other Poems. The why of this particular book is a long story...

I left college after five years and joined the Navy. It seemed like a particularly dramatic and romantic gesture at the time. It was a good choice: I got to travel, I got a little discipline instilled in me (like it or not), and I got to indulge my freaky, Jack Kerouac / Zen lunatic personality in diverse and interesting places.

But it got lonely.
So I took to carrying around a copy of TS Eliot in my back pocket. My Kerouac-ian wandering often left me sitting, alone at a bar, hundreds of miles from home, drinking and trying to be Kerouac-ian. Tom Eliot was (and remains) the thread of my existence, the guy who binds the tangled threads of my life into some semblance of a coherent fabric. So I took to carrying my Eliot with me, reading it to pass the time.

"To pass the time"? Okay, let's drop the bullshit. I've secretly harboured the notion that one day I'd be sitting there reading my Eliot with a cold Coors in front of me, and a cute girl would sit down next to me and confess her own love for ol' Missouri Tom Eliot, and then I would know I had officially met Her (capital aitch-ee-arrrrr) and I could give up the wandering and spend my days basking in her glory, reading poetry and being artsy with Her and just living a life of barely-post-adolescent-literati daydreams.

Pathetic? Maybe. But I'm kind of proud of that twenty-years-ago-me kid. There was a certain romantic purity there, ya dig?

Anyhow, I ended up stationed in Virginia Beach, and I took to reading my Tom Eliot on the beach (still hoping to meet capital-aitch-ee-arrr). That summer I met the woman who would become my wife, and she had not the slightest interest in TS Eliot. Crazy, how I abandoned those crazy romantic artsy notions in exchange for an extremely (note the capital letters) Hot Chick. Okay, so the Hot Chick ended up having the soul of an accountant. I was weak. Whatever.

So that's why, when I think of reading at the beach, I always think of the dumb-ass me of twenty years ago, self-consciously reading TS Eliot, waiting for Ms. Right to sweep me off my artsy little feet.

New Specs

2009-01-04T07:26:00.000-08:00

So I turn 40 in two weeks, and my reading glasses I've had since 1994 aren't quite cuttin' it anymore. I had a shit-ton of money left over in my health-care spending account that I was going to lose if I didn't use it, so I got some new glasses. Bifocals. I'm blind up close and far away. Yay for me.
So the optometrist guy recommends these no-line variable glasses: distance vision through the top of the lens, middle ground through the middle, and up-close through the bottom part. Sounds great in theory; but you spend a lot of time tilting your head, trying to find that elusive sweet spot of focus.
And taking a leak is a total nightmare, because you have to look down, but looking down looks through the up-close part of the lens, so you have to crane your neck over so you're looking down while looking through the top half of the lenses, and it makes you look like you must have the tiniest little wang in the world.
Getting old sometimes sucks.

Leisure Sucks

2009-01-04T07:02:00.000-08:00

Our ongoing Economic Downturn (yes, it has assumed proper-noun status) has allowed me quite a bit of laying-around-on-my-ass time lately. Luckily, I work for a company that doesn't lay people off when times get hard; but we do shut down production for extended periods. When that happens, you make more money by burning vacation, so that's what I've been doing.
I did a bit of house-cleaning. I played quite a bit of Battlefield 2142. Hmmmm...that's about it. I've been between classes, so no school work. I finally had all this time to write and get all my me-things underway; instead, I sat around on my ass doing a lot of stupid, frivolous nothing.
I guess I work better under pressure. I'm kind of a lava-lamp: I don't really do much until you put some heat on me.
~Jack

Duesseldorf

2008-12-12T05:10:00.000-08:00

Yep. It's all that. Travis and I knocked back some Gluhwein and have generally been having a great time. The business end of the trip went really well, and the local color/Altbier end of the trip is phenomenal. Amazing town, especially at this time of year.

Globe Trottin'

2008-12-05T20:46:00.000-08:00

I'm off to Germany tomorrow for a week in Dusseldorf. I've been jamming on the "Teach Yourself German" CD's so much that I catch myself introducing myself as Helga Kirsch, the woman's name in Lesson One. Ooops. After a round of Altbiers I might get in trouble with my weak command of German.
Wish me luck, ya'll.
~Jack, AKA "Helga Kirsch"

Depression: Bring It On

2008-11-22T07:34:00.000-08:00

People need hard times. It builds psychic muscles.
Thank you, Frank Herbert.
I agree. My 401k has lost more than I make in a year, my beloved stock portfolio is worth about a third of what it was last summer...family frugality is the new watchword, and fried baloney sandwiches have taken the place of eating out...and the kids are discovering what it means to not get a new game for the Wii every week.
And it feels pretty much okay.
As long as I can meet the base obligations and not get foreclosed/repossessed/incarcerated, that is.
I was raised poor, I was poor throughout my military career; it's only recently that I've become a nouveau riche idiot. Looking back, I was just as happy (even happier, maybe) when we were poor. Money and stuff can be an serious impediment to happiness.
Bring it on, I say. It feels good to let go of this mountain of extraneous shit.

Coulda-woulda-shoulda...

2008-11-21T21:00:00.000-08:00

I was debating what to tell my faerie when she shows up...it's easy to ask other people what they'd do; not so easy to face my own Regret Faerie.

TEXT REDACTED
I wrote some clever shit here, but soon rethought it. There are some things you just don't advertise. Nothing incriminating, just silly and personal.

The picture is the golden apple of Eris, by the way. Chaos, discord, all that stuff. It seemed appropriate.

Excercise in Hindsight

2008-11-14T15:40:00.001-08:00

So...the Magical Regret Fairy comes to your bedside one night and says,
"You lucky shit-stick. I will grant you twenty four hours of your past to relive. You can enjoy a good time all over again, avoid a bad-time, or change an important decision; it's your call. You pick the time. Choose well, dumb-ass."
Then she disappears in a poof of Obsession, leaving a ticking clock floating in the air. You have two minutes to decide what 24-hour period of your life you want to revisit, relive, possibly change.
Think fast, spud.

Republicrats

2008-11-05T19:09:00.000-08:00

So I thought I'd be the smart guy and get to the polls early...y'know, beat the rush. Yeah. Ten till six, still dark, and the high school parking lot was full and a line snaked about half a mile out past the football field.
Yes...me and about half of Suffolk, Virginia waited over three hours in the pissing down rain just to vote in this stupid ass election.
By the time we got actually into the building, we were no longer Republicans or Democrats. Nope, we were cold, wet, shivering bosom-buddies, sharing the pain to do our civic duty. It was kind of cool, actually. People sharing umbrellas, letting old folks cut in line, and mostly just talking about general shit. No animosity, no preaching, no real politicking.
Hope and change.
Politicians suck. I'll put my faith in people.
Plain old folks.

Language Paper

2008-10-25T20:16:00.000-07:00

I'm about to finish ENG-350: The English Language and this is my last weekly paper. I thought it might be worth posting for all the drunks out there.
For even better wisdom, try this: Toast to a Tippler
Here's the paper, for better or worse:

Mary Clark describes a two year-old's speech as “The Telegraphic Stage”, meaning a language lacking in inflection and function words. Much like the old-time telegraph, where word-count was at a premium and brevity was paramount, little kids get by with a focus on economy of words. Who needs “I think I'd like to eat that” when a kid can point and say “me eat”? Naturally, as the kid progresses along the development road, he/she grows into more sophisticated language structures to convey more complex meanings. But when you're two, who needs the sophistry, right?

Little kids, and one other social group: the catastrophically drunk. There's nothing like seeing a drunk guy cornering a girl in a bar and telling her, “you very pretty”. There's an advanced level of inebriation that strips away the structural elegance of language, leaving only a bare-bones armature of intention. A few drinks can have the opposite effect: garrulous chatter, circling around the long way to get to the point. But if the drinking continues, eventually the drinker enters the dire verbal wasteland of the telegraphic stage: clumsy gestures and simple phrases of brute-force intent.

Yeah, drunks are funny; but, on further thought I was intrigued as to how the abysmally drunk can devolve in such a parallel to the normal evolution of language. It begs the question of how language develops, how layers of meaning and sophisticated verbal constructs are learned and become second nature to the average adult; but when those cognitive processes fall by the wayside (a wayside littered with beer-bottles), language becomes a matter of bare functionality. It becomes primitive. The silky imagery of Byron becomes the grunting of the caveman: she walks in beauty like the night / of cloudless climes and starry skies becomes you berry pretty lady. No artifice, no elegance; just bare brute intention.

It takes years of development to gain the arcane skills of language, and only one good happy-hour to lose it all. Thanks to this class and Mary Clark, I'll never see another bar-room courtship quite the same way again. I'll leave this, my last POP of the term with a few words of wisdom from that magic place where toddlers and tipplers meet.

Maybe I Might Change My Mind....

2008-10-25T19:20:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's not all video game violence and beer-drinking. Strumpet's Life posted this guy, and he's an eloquent visionary who says everything I wish I could. And he's got the fides to say it: he's (no shit) a conservative black guy. Oh my God. According to Obama, that should be a contradiction in terms, right?
I love stereotype-breaking people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjo85WhbYqM

Screw It...

2008-10-25T18:23:00.000-07:00

I've given up on politics, fashion, religion and philosophy.
I hereby devote my days to blowing shit up and drinking beer. Battlefield 2142. Like a Tom Clancy induced boner.
Do you have any idea how much frigging fun this shit is? Oh my God, it gets into your brain like some bizarre parasite.
Screw ya'll, I'm off to go blow shit up online.

Disillusionment, Bitterness, Politicus Interruptus

2008-10-14T16:20:00.001-07:00

This is what it looks like when prostitutes are workin' it. That's Sweet-cheeks John McCain on the left, Luscious Barack Obama on the right, and look at the Big Money trying to be inconspicuous in the cute little Dodge Neon.

I mean this shit.

There's some real frustration in the world. I just read a blog from someone whose judgment I've come to trust (as well as I can know/trust anyone who is only manifest as a disturbance in the informational ether), and I'm picking up on some bad vibes coming from her way. And her bad vibes are echoes of my own.

Fact: Al Gore can preach carbon footprint all day, but he's jetting all over the world to do that preaching, dumping more environmental damage in one trip than any of us could manage in a lifetime. AL GORE DOESN'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT. AL GORE GIVES A FUCK ABOUT AL GORE.
Barack Obama seems like a good guy, and he gives a mean prepared speech. But he's politically untested, and he's had as many shady back-scratching political relationships as the rest of Washington. BARACK OBAMA IS NOT JESUS CHRIST. WITH LUCK HE WON'T BE THE ANTI-CHRIST.
John McCain is a registered, card-carrying war hero. He served his country under conditions of extreme duress, and he acquitted himself admirably. But that was thirty years ago. In the mean-time, he has been playing Washington political insider games. Just like everybody else. JOHN MCCAIN IS NOT THE ANTI-CHRIST. BUT HE IS A POLITICIAN. THE MAVERICK BULLSHIT IS JUST THAT: BULLSHIT. HE WILL TELL YOU WHAT HE THINKS YOU WANT TO HEAR, JUST LIKE THE REST OF THEM.
Sarah Palin is an unknown with a ton of personal charisma and a goddam drop-dead pair of legs. She might be a Fundamentalist who denies evolution in favor of 'creation science' (an utter oxymoron). Maybe she has a list of dinosaurs that Jesus rode, including the Jehovasaurus Rex and the VelociRapture. SARAH PALIN HAS REALLY NICE LEGS, AND THAT'S ALL I'M WILLING TO VOUCH FOR.
George Bush was inept, but he is/was not the devil. Don't blame him for everything. KNOW THE FACTS: KARL ROVE AND DICK CHENEY ARE AN ABOMINATION IN THE SIGHT OF THE WORLD. BAD, BAD, BAD GUYS. AND THEY ARE WILLING TO RAPE THE WORLD TO GET WHAT THEY WANT. Poor old W was a tool (in both senses of the word).

So what do you do? I hate to admit it, but I look at our government, our economy, our willingness to plunder the planet and our own futures for here-and-now profit, and I despair.
It's time for a change, I'll agree with Obama on that. But he ain't it. McCain ain't it. Democrats and Republicans only differ in who gets their palms greased.
Who is a change agent these days? The outsiders. The Naders, the Libertarians, the Ron Pauls of the world. But they can't even get a foot in the door, because nobody gives a shit. Until we give a shit, until we grow the collective cojones to force some REAL change we can look forward to more rape-n-plunder politics.
*steps off soap-box*
Thank you for your time.
~Jack

Politics Is The Stupiderest

2008-10-05T09:02:00.000-07:00

John McCain would sell his mother for a vote. Barack Obama would walk past a busload of burning orphans to get a vote. Joe Biden tried to sell his soul, but found out he'd already mortgaged it years ago. And Sarah Palin has an awesome pair of legs. I would so quick be all over that like "kapowie", yo. Oh yeah, she also believes that we are living in the Biblical End Times and she's not so hot on the whole "evolution thingie".
I despair.
This election merely determines which gang of liars will rob, rape and pillage for the next four years. God help me, I really believe that.

A promis is a promise so I promise
not to get it in your eye.
~The Riverboat Gamblers

But hope springs eternal. At least I'm going to see Cruiserweight tomorrow night in Virginia Beach. Yay.

Suck Music, Suck Media, Suck It.

2008-09-20T20:43:00.000-07:00

Are you a music consumer? Think hard about that last word: consumer. Do you buy the shit everyone else is buying? trust me, when you buy something off the "Hot Hits" rack at Wal-Mart, talent has nothing to do with it. You are consuming something on par with Cheetos: packaged, easily accessible, commodified. Don't worry about talent. Alesis makes a processor that does dynamic (on-line) vocal pitch correction...it also adds up to five harmony voices, with pitch correction and (get this) gender selection; that's just the kind of box a guy like me can afford. A real studio has Pro-Tools, a software suite that can make a puking sailor sound like Mariah Carey. Rythm, tone, timbre...none of that matters. Not when I can sample, correct and patch in the studio.
Formulaic used to be a disparaging term for standard pop. But these days it has become an accurate description of music, and the formula is financial. Ass-shaking? Check. Perfunctory duet with pop-Frankenstein of the opposite gender? Check. Pepsi commercial? Check. Pink Floyd saw it back with "Welcome to the Machine". The Machine has gotten faster and better and more pervasive.
My kids are Disney channel age, and I unfortunately see more than my share of Disney Channel. Disney spawns these little kids that sing and dance and make records; most important, these little commodities make money. Lots of it. American Idol? It's proven to be a cancer upon music. Everybody thinks they can be a star. The sad part is, they can. With money and gear and more money, anybody can be a star. Granted, at the OCD pace of today's music scene, it won't last long, maybe only a couple of weeks; but it can happen. It does happen. It's happening right now: some poor fifteen year old is shaking her ass in front of a mirror and lip-synching to whatever putrid shit Beyonce is putting out this week. The cult of celebrity has eclipsed the old standard of "rock star".
A final revelation of personal bitterness: Liz Phair. God I love Liz Phair. She used to be everything good about music. Intensely personal, foul-mouthed, low-tech...every song by God meant something. Sure she said "fuck" a lot, but she had her reasons. She toiled along in the indie ghetto for twenty years, and I guess she got tired of being outsold by every teen queen to pass by. Did anybody hear her last album? Yeah, I'm sure you did. Even if you've never heard Liz before, everybody heard "Why Can't I?" from the last album. The album that got heavy top-40 rotation. The album produced by the hit-factory of the Matrix, the same production team that gave us Avril Lavigne. I was sympathetic at first. I understand if Liz wants to make a commercial album and make some money. But the image make-over killed me. Here's Liz, a still gorgeous 4o year old, wearing the same clothes as Avril Lavigne and striking the same pose. Jesus, Liz is copying a twenty year old. Jesus wept.

I'm rambling. Ignore the foregoing sermon, but please don't ignore this: by everything holy in the world, if you give a shit about music, please go buy an indie record or go see some local music. Support somebody who gives a shit about music rather than celebrity. Go buy some Brandi Carlile or some Cruiserweight or Jill Stevenson. You'll be glad you did, and you'll make the world a (slightly) better place.
meh.
I've got a long sermon half-assed prepared, but I'll save it for later. For now, get your ass over to myspace or CDBaby or iTunes and support people who play non-commodified music. And say a little prayer for sister Liz; maybe she'll find her way back one of these days.

Non-Suck Music

2008-09-19T20:29:00.000-07:00

If anybody is into cross-dressing and good neo-punk like me, then the Rocky Horror Punk Rock Show is a wet dream. Don't miss Luckie Strike (now defunct, but tough in the day) and Tsunami Bomb. It's strange how well the campy bullshit of the RHPS soundtrack translates into the punk genre. I found it on iTunes (Satan) as a recommendation, because I'm one wicked big Me First and the Gimme Gimme's fan (thanks Scott) and they do Science Fiction Double Feature on the album. As an old-time veteran Riff-Raff, I can vouch for the concept's faithful rendition and bona fides. It makes me want to pierce my nipples and wear a bustier all at the same time.
I told you I was one well-rounded redneck.

New Depression?

2008-09-19T18:05:00.000-07:00

All this financial shit makes me wonder if that fat 401k is such a good idea after all. It seemed great when you could load up on tech stocks and make 28% without even trying, but now...holy shit. You realize just how ephemeral all that "retirement savings" really is. It's like this shit I'm writing: virtual shit.
So what are you gonna do when the bottom drops out and your savings are worth shit and nobody has any money and nobody has a job? Our grandparents struggled and got by. They headed West like old Tom Joad, or they wandered like Lennie and George, but they got by. I don't think our generation is capable of that kind of adaptation. I think the government has to fix this, or we'll all just flop like fish on a river-bank. We've lost any concept of self-sufficiency, of consequences. Give up my giant flat-screen TV and my cutting-edge cell phone? My iPhone? Jesus Christ, are you insane? You're talking about necessities; you may as well cut off my legs.
Chicken shit.
My great-Aunt Vinnie was one of those crazy old ladies that make you a little nervous. She was nice enough, but there was a hard edge to her that always made us kids nervous, like maybe she'd just up and come after us with a fillet knife for no good reason. She never did, but we stayed on our toes, just in case. Anyhow, she used to go to McDonald's and steal handfuls of the little ketchup packets. She'd stuff her big old-lady purse full of ketchup and salt and pretty much anything that wasn't nailed down. My mom said that growing up in the Depression had made her frugal, but it was still kinda weird. Eventually McDonald's had the last laugh when they went to those cheap little paper cups that you pump the ketchup into. Kinda hard to stuff that into your big old lady purse.
I wonder if our current hard times are breeding a generation of future condiment-thieves.

DFW RIP

2008-09-16T17:20:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace
1962 - 2008

And Thus the Name...

2008-09-15T18:59:00.000-07:00

So the kids are doing a magazine subscription fund raiser for school. Being a full-time worker guy, full-time Dad and full-time Mr. Mom, I sure as shit don't have time to go door-to-door, and magazines are just too goddam expensive to guilt the people at work into buying. So I ponied up.
Guitar World, Writer's Digest, and Armchair General.
Y'see, I really am a Renaissance Redneck.
Guitar World I'll read cover-to-cover, and maybe half-assed learn one of the songs. Writer's Digest? Yeah, I'll pretend that one day I'll actually finish something, God forbid actually publish. And Armchair General? Well, that one's just brain candy for my inner Tom Clancy military dilettante. Shit, maybe I oughtta name this blog Redneck Dilettante. Talk about two words that don't belong together.

Homesick Retard

2008-09-14T07:25:00.000-07:00

I'm taking an English grammar class this term. Did you know there's no longer a distinction between "right" and "wrong" when it comes to grammar? If you talk like a South Central gangsta, you're no longer an illiterate moron; nope, you are a speaker of AAEV (African American English Vernacular). Likewise red-necks and shit-kickers like myself. When we pop off with "ya'll" and "ain't", we're just practicing our Southern Regional dialect.
God forbid anybody is ever "wrong" these days. Maybe I want to rethink this whole second career / teaching idea.

Got a call from my Southern Regional Dialect-speaking kin last night. Apparently Hurrican Ike didn't quite make it all the way up to Dallas. It sure as shit did a number on Galveston. The scene of many a spring-break debauchery was pretty well wiped out, and the ugliness goes well inland.

All that news got me to thinking of a trip Allen and I took twenty years ago; Allen was the best guitar player I've ever had the honor of sharing a stage with, and an all-around cool guy as well. We road-tripped down to Houston to drop his daughter off with her mama, and we took the long way back to Weatherford. It took us the better part of a day, drinking beer and listening to Robert Earl Keene and Joe Ely tapes and stopping to pee in the bar-ditch every fifty miles or so. We talked about guitars, and playing in beer-joints, and debated the relative merits of Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl. That day was pretty much the apotheosis of everything that was good about living in Texas in my late-teens / early-twenties. Everything since has been a kind of down-hill slide. Don't get me wrong, things have happened since that are more important, more fulfilling, whatever; kids being born, new jobs, moving all over the country, seeing the world as a squid. But for just general contentment with my place in the world, that trip to Houston was the high point.