I would like to talk about an absurdity of which I've been dealing with lately.  I've been having a life altering conversation, melodramatic as all get out, with my brain.  I hope you already see the absurdity of this idea.  "My Brain" is essentially what makes "me" me, right?  The flesh and blood brain that holds the psychological concept of "My Brain" are one and the same, correct? So for the duration of this essay, ignore the reality imposed on existence by My Brain and Your Brain for a while.

You see, it's like this: for the duration of my stint here on earth (or Earth, for all those of you who may subscribe to the Gaia hypothesis), My Brain and the Lovely Miss L -- a personification of Loneliness which I distinctly remember creating at the age of six -- have been rather close companions.  She first appeared in my mind's eye in the guise of a dark haired eastern European woman with glasses -- heavily influenced by my infatuation with the cartoon character of the Baroness on G.I. Joe.  As I entered my teen years, Ms. L transmogrified into a cross between Christina Ricci and Janeane Garofalo.  Basically, Ms. L has always taken the form of whatever my boyish crushes were at any particular point in my life.  So what guise does she take these days? It's a  hybrid of Zooey Deschanel and Selma Hayek. 

Of course, the next question may be, "So why should I, as a reader of this dear blog, be concerned with such trivialities?"  And I would posit to you, "Because it's my blog, and you decided to read it."

But why have I thought it necessary to tell everyone my odd tendency to ascribe certain characteristics from celebrity crushes to an otherwise very staid personification of human emotion? It's easier for me to think in visual terms, which makes a lot of sense considering I've spent the bulk of my life pursuing a meaningful explanation of existence via the visual arts.  I am essentially a product of television and pixels.

So, after that rather brief exposition of sorts, here is a dialogue between My Brain and The Lovely Miss L., sitting at a rather trendy fold out table and chair set purchased from the fall 2008 Ikea catalog:

"Do you remember when you were seventeen and you had your first steady girl? You were so convinced you were rid of me."

"Yes, I remember.  You wouldn't leave me be.  I always felt your presence near us, like a ghost that wants to haunt someone, but loves them too much to actually do it."

"What do you know of 'love?' Your understanding of it is only based on rock songs that proclaim to be broken hearted. And you do realize, don't you, we are in the midst of a rather juvenile conversation?  You also used an incorrect pronoun to describe what was a singular entity.  You plurarized it."

"All points valid."

"So, my dear, why do you insist on keeping me around? What is it that requires you to be so near me?  I have attempted to leave you several times, but as any good friend would, I find it difficult to actually rend you from my life even though I should."

"But you have no life. You're a creation of my friggin' imagination."

"I could easily say 'ditto.' I won't -- even though I just did."

"I don't like your attempt at starting a circular conversation. STOP."

"You have complete control of us."

"That's true on a certain level. But when does one ever really have control over anything?"

"You control, rather intensely I might add, who you let in your inner circle."

"I do and I don't.  I suffer from a rather intense case of wall-building.  You know, analogous to Pink Floyd?"

"Yet another hackneyed musical reference.  But how does that wrest any level of control from your barrier-building? A musical recording, at its core, has no influence on anyone.  While it may affect emotions, a person has a say in how said emotions may or may not be expressed.  Basically, it serves as a 'suggestion' of what emotion you could possibly express."

"Someone had a bowl of hyperbole for breakfast, didn't she?"

"You're avoiding the subject. There have only been four distinct times in your life in which you let someone inside your, for lack of a better term, 'wall.'  I'll oblige and keep this PF reference going.  But don't tell me your pretentious enough to identify with the character Pink from the recordings."

"Not now, of course.  Unfortunately, there was a time when I would've immediately said 'yes.'  I would like to think I've progressed past the point of letting other's creative works define how I feel, Harold and Maude be damned."

"A fine film. I hear Zooey likes it."

"Where'd you hear that?"

"I made it up."

End conversation.

I've discovered that I've recently clambered into my "wall," or as I like to call it now, my "shell," once again.  What many do not realize, and it's a fact that could've saved many a relationship with me, is that I have streaks in which I withdraw into myself.  It's not that I avoid people for any specific reasons.  I sometimes just have to crawl back and recuperate.  It's a reconnection of sorts with my inner true self, if you want to get mystical about it.  Many, however, read it as a sign of disinterest and immediately assume my apparent distance is a sign things are going wrong.  I have never been able to successfully describe what is really going on to others.  I suppose this is a flaw I need to remedy if I wish to truly be rid of the personification of Lovely Miss L and the abstraction of My Brain.

I am simply a product of Manifest Destiny, the Protestant Work Ethic, and the RGB color spectrum.  I thought I'd try to end with something profound even though it's probably not.

I know I've been rather morose as of late, but I stumbled upon this article.  While it may be part entertainment and part advice, it actually makes a lot of friggin' sense.  If there is anyone out there wondering what makes me tick, I think the musings of Geekgirldiva are really rather awesome.

5 Tips on Proper Geek Male Maintenance (or How To Keep your Geek Male Running Smoothly)

You know, I have to do this.  You saw it coming.  I just know you did.  You can't back out now...!

It's probably the most inescapable event to happen to occur in my lifetime.  Others may claim that September 11th, 2001 is the most significant event in a generation, but I'm going to stake my claim on facetious historical premonition and proclaim the death of Michael Jackson as the most earth shattering event of the past thirty years (thirty being the operative number here, since I am a particularly selfish individual, and I must frame everything with me as the reference point - in this case, my age).  Perhaps it betrays my heartless nature, or perhaps it doesn't; I'm no objective judge of character, the very least my own.  But knowing that September 11 was the event that made warmongering okay again and an event that continues to result in the unnecessary loss of untold lives, and me still having the tenacity to proclaim the death of a single man more important the anonymous dead by media standards...there's gotta be something not right in me noggin, eh?  Or maybe this is my feeble attempt at channeling Jonathan Swift?  Aye. I've just destroyed the "gotcha moment" of my discussion, baby eating be damned.  Should I even continue? I must. I like to hear myself think.  Or at least to read my words on a screen knowing they once occupied the ephemeral place of Consciousness before being captured by digital code points and pixels for all to see and interpret of their own volition.

Since I've already tried to attach myself to genius already by mentioning Swift so early in this diatribe, I'm going to do it again.  You see, despite all his amazing talent, his far reaching effects in popular culture, his bizarre life choices - I've always felt I could identify with Michael Jackson on some level.  Like the millions upon millions of people already holding vigils and shedding tears over someone they never truly knew, I grew up as a fan of his music. 

I was a bit young for Thriller - it came out November 30, 1982, one day before my third birthday.  I do not remember that day, and I would be a fool to claim that Thriller was an important part of my life.  But according to familial sources, I was quite the fan of Billie Jean at the tender age of three.  If the song came on the radio, I would immediately light up.  A mere two years later, when the haze of memory begins, I do remember loving the song, along with Beat It.  The song that I owe a lot to ol' MJ is Thriller.  As crazy as this sounds, it was the music video for it that forged my lifelong interest in the macabre, horror films, kitschy irony, film, and even art.  I was an extremely shy child, and the first year of school I recall as traumatic; getting home to my old radio with the broken handle and tape deck that required one continuously hold the play button was literally and figuratively music to my ears.  It was a decompression method, before I even knew what that meant.

I remember recording the song off the radio.  I tried multiple times before finally giving up. I just couldn't get a version that didn't have the DJ talking over the beginning sequence, so I relented with the version with the annoying voiceover.  It wouldn't be until later that I would find out that the single version on the radio was shorter than the album version; it would be nearly ten years later that I found out Jackson himself didn't actually write the song himself (the writer would be Rod Temperton).  Of course, these are moot points, especially in light of the particular one I was trying to make.  I remember seeing a truncated version of the video on the local television station "Tulsa 23 Oklahoma's Independent" (later to become the hideous Fox news affiliate) in which on occasion they would have segments called the KOKI Music Break.  I remember the announcer putting special emphasis on the word "music" so it sounded like "muuuuuuuuusic break."  Thriller was my first music video.  As hard proof of my claim of influence, the Thriller video had zombies in it.  I grew up watching all sorts of horrific zombie flicks (last count, I've probably seen well over three hundred zombie movies; the images of flesh eating undoubtedly had their effect on my young brain).  I even had a zombie graphic novel published a couple of years ago.  (Which, fingers crossed, will soon be developed into a television mini-series!)

Of course, like many people, when Michael started becoming a parody of himself with all the radical plastic surgery followed by the child molestation charges, he lost his appeal.  It was the cool thing to hate the guy.  Besides, by that time in my life, I was a rebelling teenager, and MJ's music was too poppy and soft for me.  I had to have screaming and thundering guitars before I considered it good music.  He continued to be a media sensation, and even though I was no longer a fan of his, he was always on the periphery of my life.  I do recall actually taking time out of my schedule to watch the prime time debut of his video for Black or White.  I also recall thinking his tirade at the end of destroying the car with a crowbar was incredibly stupid.  I practically despised Michael Jackson.

That is, until he married Lisa Marie.  Although it seemed a very calculated move, the idea of the King of Pop married to the daughter of the King of Rock 'n' Roll was oddly cool to me.  I had already begun my musical obsessions, and popular musical history was a hobby of mine.  I remember thinking, and this is no fabrication or attempt to monopolize on current events, "What if he goes out like Elvis did?"  So lo and behold, all these years later, he sorta does.  Then I read Lisa Marie's blog on Myspace today.  She's perhaps the only person in history that can really understand what possibly made the guy tick.  It was this idea that made me kinda like the idea of their marriage.  And she seems to be suffering from acute regret over his death. 

I still for the life of me can't figure out why any of this matters. 

Why did I make the claim I could identify with him on some level?  It seems a rather weird thing to say.  I think it deals with his isolation and misunderstandings many people have of him.  I'm no fool, even though for some years I tried to absolutely deny it, but I have accepted the fact that nearly everyone I know thinks I'm, and this is the most common term I hear, "odd."  All the acquaintances I've known through the years have always expressed the sentiment that no one seems to be able to really get to know me and that there's some inexplicable element to me that people find strange, a good thing to some, a terrible thing to others.  As a matter of fact, I was told that I was odd today.  Case in point: I don't think there is any person that could tell you my true favorite color, my absolute favorite artist, my favorite meal, or why I like to see how many hours I can go without uttering a single word aloud.  (FYI: My record is thirty-eight hours.)  Many people have tried to get close enough to me over the years to actually know such things, but it seems in the end everyone gives up.  It's not a terribly difficult feat, at least it doesn't seem to me like it would be, but it may require a spirit of adventure.  Taking applications now...

Of course, I'm not as near as strange as Michael, at least I hope I'm not, but I could kind of relate to his sensibility of certain things, like the oddity of his music videos.  I mean, really...why did Thriller have zombies in it?  Why was Vincent Price in the song?  Because it was cool.  Why did Beat It's video have to be over an hour long and feature actual gang members dancing?  Because such excess and quirkiness, and references to West Side Story, are actually contextually important phenomena as seen from a mass media manipulation standpoint, something which MJ was adept at doing.  Why leak fabricated stories to the press that you sleep in an anti-aging chamber and that you bought the skeleton of the Elephant Man?  Because it just freaks people out.  I do things like that myself.  Okay, not to that extreme because I don't have the crazy amount of cash to throw around, but I've always imagined that if I were insanely wealthy, I'd be an eccentric millionaire, nay billionaire!  I mean, how cool would it be to actually have the Joseph Merrick's skeleton?  I've always had a keen interest in the Elephant Man ever since I saw a television movie of his story.  The actor playing the Elephant Man actually had no makeup or prosthetics, and you were supposed to imagine how deformed he was.  Of course, David Lynch's 1980 film about him also blew my mind. 

Now, I can't wait for the Michael Jackson incognito sightings and ghost visitations to begin.  Long live the King?  I end with the refrain:

I still for the life of me can't figure out why any of this matters. 

The following is a last minute posting before I leave on a road trip to Cherokee, North Carolina.  It contains thoughts of a very revelatory nature, something I'm actually not very prone to do despite all the personal blogging I seem to do.  I may even delete it before many of you get a chance to read it! But I'm moody and "emo" tonight.  So...blah!

I've been suffering from an intriguing bout of loneliness lately.  I thought I had it licked, as it were, but it always comes around again to haunt me.  Ever since I moved back to Oklahoma, my friend pool seems to be growing smaller and smaller.  I had a free day to spend today, and as soon as this idea truly made itself apparent to me, I discovered I had nothing to do and nowhere to go.  This is the same situation that happened to me during the Memorial Day weekend when I had four days off of work.  It seems that outside of anything job related, I absolutely have no social life. 

Just a scant two or three years ago, I could always call someone up, and go out and do something.  Now it seems I don't even have that luxury.  As I discovered today, there was absolutely no one I could call up and go hang out with it.  I have no siblings, and I don't know my extended family all that well, so visiting them is a bust.  I don't even get invited anywhere anymore.  I'm not sure what's happened to me...it seems I'm increasingly becoming more and more isolated.  I used to pride myself on being able to handle solitude, which is something I'm admittedly better at than most, but lately, it's been weighing me down considerably.  I feel like I'm beginning to internalize that something's "wrong" with me. 

Of course, I may be exaggerating the situation a bit, as I'm prone to do.  I know that part of my shrinking friend pool is the result of the simple progress of life.  Most of my friends are now married, going to get married, are serious with someone, or just simply live very far away.  It seems, though, that as people move on and start their lives, I'm increasingly becoming the ever present "single friend."  At first it was kind of cool.  I was the rebel, the one that refused to give in.  But my isolation has started to seep into my being, and it has become a constant companion, an unsettling presence that just won't let go. 

It's not like I don't try though.  Within the past six months or so, for example, I have asked several people out on real dates, i.e. not just a simple friend outing, and I've been set up with women by other people.  Every single one of them either turned me down or backed out.  The reasons were various, ranging from the standard, "You're nice, but not my type" to "You're weird" to "You're too smart" to "I don't know how to talk to you."  So here's the question.  What exactly is wrong with me?  There must be something that's so obvious to everyone but me.  I'm just a regular guy like anyone else, with the exception I do have very different interests than most people in the area.  Here's a short list:  I don't attend church regularly, I don't vote Republican, I don't enjoy going to bars, I don't watch sports, I don't really enjoy any outdoorsmen-like activities, and I don't particularly enjoy country music.  What do I enjoy? I enjoy films (including the occasional mindless blockbuster but mainly relegated to artful, serious film, both foreign and domestic), I like museums, I like to go to concerts (but not country), I like art, I like to write, I enjoy reading non-fiction, I love fancy restaurants, I enjoy intellectual conversation, and I have a very odd sense of humor. 

So...maybe I'm not a regular ol' guy?  Looking back through the years, I have noticed a trend, an important trend: the only places where I seemed to be truly content and happy were when I lived in major urban areas.  Maybe I should consider making a move?  I don't know.  Perhaps the intensity of the solitude is distorting my decision making skills because it's a Saturday night and instead of being out among my peers, I'm sitting at home typing on a computer about how lonely I am.  Perhaps in the morning this feeling will have subsided.  I'm driving to North Carolina tomorrow after all!

But during the course of my solitaire playing nights, I have become very impressed with a few pieces of artistic expressions that deal with loneliness.  As such, I'm in the position of channeling my current solitary energies into artistic expression as well.  The first strong meditation on loneliness I found was in the guise of a film.  Casa de Areia (The House of Sand, not to be confused with the Jennifer Connelly film House of Sand and Fog, a mediocre picture at best) is a Brazilian film about a mother and daughter and how they deal with isolation, both emotionally and geographically, through generations.  It's a lushly filmed production, and the philosophical underpinnings are tragic yet comforting.  Highly recommended.

The other piece is, again, a film.  This time, it's a French production called Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (the Umbrellas of Cherbourg).  It's a musical, and typically I'm not a fan of musicals.  But the film is artfully directed, and every single line of dialogue is sung.  It tells the story of two lovers and of how real life intrudes and can destroy the most benign of puppy love romance.  The ending is subdued, yet spectacular.  Plus, the theme song "I Will Wait for You" is absolutely heart rending.  That song alone is worth the price of admission, well, er, uh, that is if you find the film playing at a local cinema.  It was released in 1964 after all.

The third and final mesmerizing expression of solitude is the album Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire by Eels.  E, the lead singer and songwriter for the group, tends to be a melancholy fellow, and his previous album Blinking Lights and Other Revelations was another masterpiece of solitude.  It seems in the intervening years since, E still has yet to come to grips with his lingering quiet reality.  Hombre Lobo is a collection of somewhat bluesy, lo-fi, guitar driven pop.  The highlight of the album is "That Look You Give That Guy," a simple yet brilliant rumination on petty jealousy. 

So...this blog turned out to be about music in the end after all, my grand obsession!  That begs the question that the John Cusack character in High Fidelity poses (I only mention the film because I haven't read the novel on which it's based):  "Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable? Or am I miserable because I listen to pop music?"

I'll probably be embarrassed and regret posting tonight's musing for all the world to see, but I have decided to spill my guts regardless of what consequences may result.  I always have the option to delete it, eh?  And in case you're wondering: This melancholic outpouring was not induced by sinister liquids!  I am in full possession of my mental faculty.  The mood was, in fact, caused by my tendency to think too much.  Pondering, pondering, pondering an endless night!

Ah...summer is once again edging ever so closer to us.  And I'm not too excited about it.  Ever since "growing up," and no longer having the fortune to take entire summers off without work or school, the season has lot much of its allure for me.  When I was a child, I longed for the summer to arrive so I could spend afternoons at Spring Creek, swimming all day and living life wistful and care free.  I was quite the skilled swimmer.  I could dive off of anything, I could swim underwater great distances...I could do all kinds of water-related tricks.  It was one of the few physical activities in which I actually had prowess.  I couldn't ever throw a ball or catch one, but if it came to swimming, I could do it.  And one year, about ten or eleven years ago, I just stopped.  I haven't been swimming ever since.  I pretty much abandoned trips to the creek ever since (growing up in rural Oklahoma, I rarely went to rivers or lakes; it was always "The Creek" for me).  So these days during a typical summer, I'm relegated to the sidelines, just as I was in gym class all those years ago (no, I'm not bitter. Ha!).  I don't spend my days lounging by any body of water, and I don't spend any money on things like sunscreen, styrofoam products, or inflatable floating objects.  Since those that know me well know I don't normally participate in such activities, the invitation to any such gathering is always non-existent.  But you never know...I could surprise you.

But as such, I usually spend my summer reading.  I've always been a bookworm, and even during those elementary school days, I would still spend a lot of my summer reading.  When I started college (it's quickly becoming further and further away in the timeline), my summers were spent catching up on pleasurable reading rather than all the academic pursuits.  Now that I'm finished with formal schooling, I still spend an inordinate amount of time reading.  When I completed grad school two years ago, the amount of required reading I had to wade through actually lead me to cut back on my reading as I tried to experience "real life."   Having enough of reality kicked in me, I slowly eased back into voracious reading.  Though I'm nowhere near the peak of my reading prowess, I have gone through quite a number of books this year.  And this is where I proceed to list them, name dropping to make myself feel intelligent, pompous, and important:

You Can't Win by Jack Black (not the comedian, mind you)
The Art of Lying by Kazuo Sakai & Nakana Ide
All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen
How to Read Novels Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster
The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology by Todd Oppenheimer
Evil: An Investigation by Lance Morrow
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature by Steven Pinker
The End of America: Letters of Warning to a Young Patriot by Naomi Wolf
Post-Capitalist Society by Peter Drucker
What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank
Grendel by John Gardener
Somebodies and Nobodies by Robert W. Fuller
Exterminator by William S. Burroughs
The Slave by Isaach Beshevis Singer
Dali on Modern Art by Salvador Dali
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Justine, Or Good Conduct Well Chastised by Marquis De Sade
Anathema by Neil Stephenson
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Guerillas by V.S. Naipaul
The Double by Jose Saramago

Other than the immediate glaring lack of female writers, excepting Naomi Wolf, I would say it's a varied reading list.  For what it's worth, I intend to make amends for the lack of women writers in the second half of the year.  So don't worry!  For the most part, though, I'd also say that the reading material isn't exactly what normally could be considered "fun."  I, however, make no apologies for my reading tastes!  Having said that, though, I've been in a mode lately of trying to "get out more" because I'm rather feeling stuck in a social rut.  Part of that effort also applies to my choice of reading material.  I would like once to be able to converse with the inevitable stranger at the airport who poses the question, "what are you reading?" More often than not, when I answer that question, the conversation goes back to something like, "So have you read the new Grisham/Clancy/King/Collins/Steele/etc. book yet?"  Or even better, "Have you read the latest selection from Oprah's Book club?"

I'm not saying I'm on the verge of "selling out" with regard to my reading tastes.  I'm just considering a different genre of books for my summer reading.  Don't get me wrong; at one point, I could proudly proclaim I had read every single one of Tom Clancy's and John Grisham's novels.  So I'm not a total book snob.  But one effect of grad school, though, at least on me, was the quest to search out more "scholarly" writings.  That's a vague term, but having been in academia for so long, reading something other than something "serious" was taboo.  I remember just freshly out of grad school, I tried to read the Stephen King novel Cell.  No matter how much I tried, the pretentious side of me kept saying I was wasting my time and I should be reading more intellectual pursuits.  So I Immediately picked up Like a Loaded Weapon: the Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America by Robert A. Williams.  That was immediately followed by Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag, The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzche, Film Theory and Criticism edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, and Fossil Legends of the First Americans by Adrienne Mayor.  After that stint, which I completed in rapid fashion, my brain totally went on overload.  It was after this batch that I decided to go on the "real life" kick I mentioned earlier.

Now about a year and a half later, I'm once again on the edge of falling into that territory.  It's not that I really mind, but sometimes I would like to engage in lighter pursuits.  So now here's my dilemma.  I just finished Jose Saramago's The Double.  I've never read any of his works, and just on an off chance, I picked it up a couple of weeks ago.  I immediately fell in love with his power of prose, despite the fact that it was a translation from the original Portuguese.  So yesterday I picked up another novel of his at the bookstore, The Cave.  Easy enough right?  Wrong.  Additionally, I picked up From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris, one of the books in the currently hot Sookie Stackhouse novels.  Sookie, for the uninitiated, is the heroine of the HBO television series True Blood, of which I recently became a humungous fan!  I had never heard of the book series until I started watching the television series, so I decided to try out the source material.  I also have a copy of The Autobiography of Mother Jones I've been meaning to read.  So now I'm torn between the three.  If I were to stay with my light summer reading idea, I would clearly go for the Sookie Stackhouse novel.  But my infatuation with Jose Saramago's prose and my left wing political leanings make me wanna so bad read up on Mother Jones in her own words.

What should I do??

I am simply...happy.

I miss conversation.

For the past week during my post-work hours, I've been devoid of conversation.  If I'm really honest, it's been much, much, MUCH longer than that that I've been devoid of true, meaningful conversation.  I go home, maybe go for a jog, and eat a modest dinner.  I typically don't utter a word aloud until the next morning when I arrive at the office.  The one constant companion throughout all this is music. 

My love affair with music began at a very early age; I recall listening to my father's music as he worked on cars in his garage.  It was a mish-mash of classic country, such as Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Hank Williams.  For good measure, some good classic rock was included, too - the likes of Zeppelin, Buddy Holly, the Beach Boys, and Chuck Berry I recall fondly.  From there my interest only increased.  I grew up as an only child, and for the first part of my life, I lived basically with my imagination as my only companion.  I did not live near children my own age, and as a result, I formed a special bond with cassette tape recordings and a large pile of dirt - the result of earth moving equipment which cleared the plot where my parents settled - that I fondly named Monster Island.  It was here I would spend countless hours alone listening to second hand tapes from yard sales and thrift stores while playing with action figures.  The first two tapes I ever purchased with my own money - earned from picking up aluminum cans - were the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill and Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet. Both were released in 1986 when I was the tender age of seven.

When my teen years arrived, I quickly was drawn to the darker and introspective side of music, resulting in a rather "scary" taste of sounds especially for the small northeastern town in which I lived where gospel and country were the accepted norm.  I was intrigued by the technical instrumentation and less than pleasant lyrical subject matter of Metallica.  I truly felt, or at least I thought I did at the time, the despair of Kurt Cobain's diatribes of alienation.  I latched onto Nine Inch Nail's Pretty Hate Machine with vigor.  And this is just a smidgeon of the music I was into.  I could pull the "hip" factor and list dozens of alternative and independent records I was into collecting, but if you've read this blog long enough, you probably are already familiar with that part of my obsession.

The love affair continued throughout college, and many of my albums from those years hold special significance to me.  They form a very passionate part of what was to become my fully formed identity.  Any time I hear the croon of Morrissey, the fey contemplation of Belle and Sebastian, or the quirky wordplay of the Magnetic Fields, I can't help but feel it right here *taps chest with my index and middle fingers*.  But truthfully, nothing affects me more than the fuzzed out guitar and the searching vocals of Neil Young.

Often, when someone poses the simple question to me of "What's your favorite band/performer?" I cannot answer.  Tonight I can.  It's gotta be Neil, man.  It may change tomorrow, next week, next month...but for tonight, it's definitely him.

It's difficult for me to definitely say which album of his is my favorite, but it's heavily weighted towards Tonight's the Night.  It was recorded during a time of great duress for the band, and it shows.  Some of it is sloppy, but, damn, man, it's packed full of genuine emotion.  Sometimes it's excruciating to listen to, not because it's awful, but because of the searing pain artfully expressed which underlies the recording.  At times Young's voice even breaks, and you can hear the cocaine and booze flowing through the guitars.  So for the past few days, I've been spending most of my evenings with Neil.  While we can't converse, at the very least, he's communicating something to me through the annals of time.  Or something like that.  Heh.

On this particular evening, unlike the past few nights, I decided to focus in on one particular album.  I've just been putting on the "Neil Young" playlist, hitting random, and enjoying.  But for this evening, accompanied by the electrifying Crazy Horse, I've been enthralled by Young's recording Live at the Fillmore East. It's a partial recording of a show at the Fillmore East in 1970, and it was only officially released in 2006.  Many fans have been demanding a professional recording of the show for decades (apparently bootleg recordings exist), and 36 years later, it finally arrived, albeit in truncated form.  The original show consisted of a two performances at the Fillmore, as was common at the venue at the time, featuring one set of acoustic and one set of electric.  This recording is of the electric set.  (FYI: Miles Davis was the opening act for the show.  Miles is another favorite of mine...Another FYI: When I was interning in New York, I actually made a pilgrimage to the site of the now defunct Fillmore East, in the East Village of Manhattan.  God, I miss New York.)

For those unfamiliar with Neil Young and Crazy Horse, their live shows are an aural treat.  If one is into scorching guitar solos and heartfelt jamming, there's nothing like a Crazy Horse show.  Interestingly enough, Live at the Fillmore East consists of only six songs, but the entire recording is around forty-three minutes.  The standouts are two very extended performances of the classics "Down by the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand," clocking in at 12 minutes and 16 minutes respectfully.  Also included is "Winterlong," one of my favorite songs ever, whether it's performed by Neil Young or if it's the cover version exquisitely redone by the Pixies on their B-sides collection. 

I was in a particularly pensive mood this evening, and even though the Fillmore East concert is rather upbeat, it still resonates with an unstated sense of longing.  This is a trademark element of Young's music, so inside the staccato melodies of the dueling guitars, you hear the energy being put into the songs.  I sat on my couch and just let the friction of the distorted notes seep into my ears.  Every unintended harmonic strike, every extra hard downward strum, and the whole force of electricly tinged string vibrato I felt with what I can only describe as a "mellow intensity" - a conflicting mix of wonderment and sadness that oddly resulted in a soothing temperament. 

The one song that seemed the strike me the most, however, was the opening number: "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere."  The opening lyrics are deceptively simple:

I think I'd like to go
back home
And take it easy
There's a woman that
I'd like to get to know
Living there

Everybody seems to wonder
What it's like down here
I gotta get away
from this day-to-day
running around,
Everybody knows
this is nowhere.

And just like my encounter over the weekend, I was faced with a profundity hidden in simplicity.  Everybody does know this is nowhere.  When you figure that out, nowhere can really be an exceptional somewhere.

So...I miss conversation.

I had the fortunate opportunity for a soul-searching conversation today.  The dialogue, as I was well aware of, could've swung either way: sunshine-ily good or freakishly bad.  In all honesty, though, I've always been prone to introspection and self-reflection (which are two different things despite the similarities), so any bout of penetrating conversation is usually welcomed despite any uncomfortableness that may or may not come out of it. 

I must admit, as much as it makes me cringe, there were indeed several moments of "uncomfortablability;" so much so, in fact, that I just took the liberty of inventing a word that doesn't exist but could possibly exist just so you could feel a small dose of the too-close-to-home unease of which this dialogue spurred.  I suppose I should say it was soul-searing rather than searching.  But I do exaggerate from time to time...

It began as such:

I had spent my morning innocuously enough: I woke up early, had a small breakfast, went for a jog, washed my car, did laundry, and ironed my shirts.  By noon I had completed what has become my usual Sunday routine.  Being of bored mind and of bored body, a state of affairs in which I've found myself increasingly being trapped in as of late, I decided to take a drive to kill the rest of the day ("kill" being the operative word here). I often do my best thinking on solitary drives, my thoughts being helped along by the mosaic of songs that live on my trusted companion, the iPod.  (Who says machines can't love you?)

As luck, or fate or Karma or whatever you want to call it, had it, I had no destination in mind.  I was torn between traveling to the northeast or heading west.  The northeast route held a very scenic view although it was probably mired by the presence of people as the road passes by a popular river.  Going west was equally depressing, as it held no frontier left to conquer.  So I opted to go straight north, back towards where I grew up. 

Traveling on the back roads of where I spent many a teenage night doing what identity forming teens do, I, of course, was flooded with memories of a stupidity laced past.  Such times typically live on as halcyon memories when the specter of age starts to really weigh on the mind, so my young stupidity brought a knowing smile to my mind's eye.  I continued my trek down these ghostly trails, and I happened upon a creek-side hangout I remembered from my days' past.  A vehicle was pulled off to the side, and the hood was up.  White-laced steam was escaping into the near-summer warmth, and the smell of anti-freeze broadcast to all passers-by that the motor overheated.  I pulled over, which was odd, as it's not in my temperament to often offer roadside assistance for the simple fact that I am by no means a mechanic. 

As I stepped out my car, away from its comfy air-conditioned interior, I immediately recognized the figure before me.  It was an old friend of mine, someone with whom I shared some of those stupidity laced teenage nights.  She glanced at me, then back under the hood of car, then quickly back at me.  It was obvious it was the double take reaction; she recognized me, but it took a second to register. 

The memory of her had slipped my mind; her presence as an artifact of my life was stored away in a place where, had I not seen her today, I would have totally forgotten about her.  We shared no special bond other than we hung out with some of the same people, and from time to time we'd have some good laughs together.  So it was a surprisingly nice reunion, but nothing on the scale of meeting a long lost unrequited love.  She sheepishly said, "Uh...I need a ride."  I said sure, but I asked to look under the hood myself first.  Not that it would do any good, but it felt wrong just leaving the scene without first taking some kind of inquisitive look.  I satisfied my curiosity, and I learned nothing of what had caused the dilemma.  We got in my car and away we went.

As can be expected, our conversation was stilted at first.  It was filled with references to the weather, specifically of how much rain we had received as of late.  Then she mentioned how she should've had her husband take a look at the car before she left.  That bit of information opened the way for further discussion. 

"So, you're married?" I asked.  It was the obligatory question.

"Yeah.  I met him in college.  He's from Louisiana," she replied.

"What's he think about Oklahoma?"

The conversation followed this train for a while, as she regaled me with tales of their stormy beginnings, and of how they overcame their differences to fall madly in love with each other.  It was the stuff romantic comedies are made of.  This was followed by the story of the births of her two children, both events which were highly eventful and therefore extremely memorable.  I won't go into details, but her stories involved a bulldozer, a Holstein calf, and a gunshot.  It could easily be the stuff of a major studio film starring Mr. Popular Actor and Ms. Popular Actress.

The overview of her life since we last met had ended, and unsurprisingly it turned to what I had been up to.  I gave her my standard spiel of how I went to college, lived in several different states, and after what was essentially a ten year absence, I returned home.

We arrived at her house, and I was about to leave.  She wanted me to meet her family, so I was invited inside.  Her family was the image of happiness and contentment.  The children were beautiful, and her husband was a ruggedly handsome fellow, complete with a deep southern drawl.  This intrigued me as nearly everyone I know that had decided to partake in the matrimonial life were miserable as possible.  Seeing a couple that was actually happy blew my mind.  There was always the possibility it was an act, a big, well-orchestrated sham.  The cynic in me immediately made its position known to me.  But there was something different about this situation.  They had an intangible "something" that seemed so genuine.  So pure.

Her husband told me to stay and visit as he went to go resolve the broken down car situation.  She fixed lemonade.  Even that itself was so surreal.  My primary reference point for life events, like many of my generation, is from movies.  And the fixing and serving of lemonade was, again, something straight out of a movie.  I half expected her wise old grandfather to pull in and offer me sagely advice.  That didn't happen of course, and I held onto that as a reminder that this was reality.  But as much as I had tried to steer it away from myself, the conversation inevitably made its focus on my life.

She asked if I was married, and I said no.  She then asked if I were divorced, and I said no.  This was followed by the only other possible question: was I seeing anyone?  Again, the answer was no.  She seemed quite shocked at this situation.  I told her if she really knew me, she wouldn't be so surprised.  Then she let me in on a funny little secret.  Way back when she had a huge crush on me.  This had taken me by surprise; I'm notoriously bad at gauging such sentiments, so her revelation caused me to falter in my guarded, yet amicable, facade. 

"I knew I could make you blush."

Indeed, she had.  But obviously, that was so long ago, well over a decade, and she had merely mentioned that fact to purposely make me drop my guard.  The tactic had worked.  Wonderously so.  I told her she should've said something at the time.  She said she was shy and scared of me (oddly enough, a sentiment which seems quite common).  I then proceeded to lay out a joking alternate reality in which we dated, but then her Louisiana gentleman still came along and stole her away from me.  It was all good humored, and self-effacing, a skill which I have nigh perfected over the course of my three decades.  We had fun embellishing the story, going back and forth with each of us adding an element to the far flung tale, with it culminating in a fist fight between me and her southern gentleman atop the water tower in Locust Grove in which I fell to my death by being impaled by a church steeple.  

After settling down from the laughter, a laughfest just like we used to enjoy, she again steered the conversation back to my dating status.  I thought, oh no, here it comes: the setup.  But she didn't go that route.  As luck would have it, she majored in psychology in college, and she focused her expertise on me.  I was prepared for a pop psychology session, one in which in a very Dr. Phil-ish way she'd reveal to me my problems in the most common sensical manner.  It turned out to be nothing of the sort. 

She began by telling me of the many stories and rumors she had heard about me over the years.  Apparently I've been quite the topic of conversation, and the mystery of which I shrouded my life had fueled much speculation about me.  Here's just a short list of the things she said people had said about me over the years: 

I was living in L.A. working as a ghost writer for a television series; I had moved to New York and was a famous artist but I was using a different name; I was married, but my wife left me for a lesbian; I was working for Nickelodeon as a storyboard artist on Spongebob Squarepants; I was a professor of digital media at the University of Texas; and my personal favorite, I was killed in a car crash on a Pacific coast highway.

The funny thing about all those rumors is that held within each story was one element that was somehow related to truth.  Obviously, these elements were stretched to the very extreme limits of plausibility, but such stories are the results of a well oiled gossip machine. 

After relating to me all these stories, she focused in on something that I didn't realize.  As previously mentioned, I'm not very skilled in assessing how others view me; based on several circumstances, I've lived under the impression that I was a rather misunderstood person, and not that well liked.  Again, this held a small pinch of reality; and just as before, my vision of things was greatly exaggerated.  She described to me just how a majority of people we had known really perceived me.  True, there were factions that truly hated my guts, but for the most part, it seemed I was an object of mysterious fascination.  I just had the dubious distinction of being unapproachable because of my rather closed demeanor.  It still is difficult for me to accept the idea of being a "fascination" for some people, but the crux of the matter is that she's not the first person to explain that idea to me.  As a matter of fact, my best friend (who just left for another part of the world for a while) told me the nearly the exact same thing.

I'm not exactly sure what purpose this serves by telling this to you as a reader of this electronic tome-in-progress.  But I believe it puts a new perspective on my view of my situation.  For you see, next month will mark two years since I've moved back home.  While I have enjoyed success career-wise, and I actually do love my job, my personal life has been admittedly rather lacking.  I had assumed things would be quite different for me by now.  I'm not sure exactly how different, but I imagined something that is not "this."  This chance encounter fueled by lemonade reminisces registered like a light bulb above my head.  I haven't had an epiphany of this sort in some time; the question, however, was, what exactly do I do now? 

I posited this to my friend with the Louisiana husband; she answered me with a very simple, yet profound, statement.

"You make the world different by being where you want to be."

First observation:

I was in Wal-Mart today, and I heard the following statement from a fellow customer as I passed the plantains:

"Damn, those are some crazy-ass lookin' bananas, yo!"

That gave me a pretty good chuckle.  On my drive back home, I was hit by a hysterical wave of laughter when I played that scene over in my head again. 

I really needed a good chuckle this weekend.  Thank you, kind stranger.

Second Observation (though it's not really my observation):

I know she's off the political radar these days, but Cindy Sheehan is still out there speaking her mind. I love it when people keep on the fight like she does.  Here's a link to an article of her's, one that's very poignant during this Memorial Day holiday.

The Day of the Dead

This has been my return to the blogosphere for this month.

It should come as no surprise to many of you that it's always been an ambition of mine to write a novel.  I'm also naive enough to try to write one of those "great American novels."  I doubt it'll happen.  But because it's a stormy Saturday night, and I'm bored, I thought it would be fun to post one page from my novel in progress.  Actually, this is the first page.  The rest of the novel thus far is essentially nothing but notes and scenarios. 

It's tentatively titled "Help, I'm Alive."

***************************************

"I'm caught between the esoteric and the humdrum," he thought to himself.  

He still couldn't shake the yearning for that cigarette.  He couldn't understand exactly what had transpired, but dammit, he had to have another.  Each drag filled him with an ecstasy unknown by the religious or the secular.  A Small Nagging Voice, recessed as these voices were in the proverbial "back of the mind," kept telling him what was really going on.

He refused to believe it.

He flipped open the pack and with a short, fast flick, a cigarette had readied itself for his grubby tobacco stained fingers.  He pulled it from the pack, and methodically put it to his lips.  He took every care to not bend the cigarette, to make sure that even the most miniscule flake of tobacco did not escape the unfiltered end.  He had to savor every little bit of the nicotine.  There were only fourteen left in this pack.

The Small Nagging Voice said, "C'mon, man, you gotta believe me."  If what the voice had been saying was indeed true, then he was about the lose the only true love his miserable bastard life ever allowed him.

"Shut up!!" he said aloud.  If he were in a respectable place, he would've embarrassed himself.  His current environment paid no mind.  All the other "gents," as he liked to call them, were entranced by other things.  After all, they were getting silicon-laden breasts mashed into their faces in exchange for various denominations of currency.  The rapidly alternating purple/pink/red/blue light combinations that flashed on stage created small, cynical symphonies of refraction in the twirling smoke.  The women on stage shrouded themselves expertly within the darkness coupled with stage banter; any true revelation from them would result in immediate discomfort for the audience.  For him, these women and this place were the nearest to perfection he had been since the accident.

The music in the room was a shearing mish-mash of grinding guitar and thundering drums.  Each beat sent a stir up his spine.  He took a pained, slow drag on the cigarette, and a sinuous wave of pleasure made it's way out from his lungs to every limb and appendage on his body.  It was a tingling sensation, almost like when one's foot falls asleep, but combined with erotic stimulation.  He had smoked all sorts of things in his short life, but nothing, not hashish, not crank, not weed, not even his buddy's special "home blend" had caused this kind of sensation.  And he still refused to believe what the Small Nagging Voice told him.  All the rules of logic, the laws of physics, the language of mathematics and whatever other laws one could conjure up refused to allow what the voice said to be true.  It had to be a fallacy.  For it it were true, it would defy the very law of existence; the foundations of the universal fabric would cease to operate.

And yet, if he were to accept that the spirit of his girlfriend were indeed trapped in his pack of cigarettes, it now meant that only thirteen opportunities were left to experience her love.



***************************************

I saw Bruce Springsteen in concert the other night…

Now, I’m about to repeat a statement that I’ve said in one form or another on this blog for (gasp!) years now.  I’m addicted to music.  It’s an extremely important element of my life, like air or water (excuse the hyperbole).  As such, it should come as no surprise that I’ve been to many concerts in my life.  And for those readers that know me well, you will recall that I have a very particular taste in music, a taste I like to call eclectic rock.  It’s a generic term I’ve come up for my own reference, and it reflects no standard terminology that can be found in your favorite music journal, blog, magazine, or whatever. 

While I like to pride myself on my diverse collection of music, the majority of it consists of various genres of rock.  For example, there’s alternative, emo, indie, heavy metal, classic rock, oldies, krautrock, electrock, glam rock, thrash, progressive, psychobilly, mathrock, shoegaze, grunge, punk…you get the idea.  The list could go on and on.  Only a very minute portion of my collection is made up of other genres such as hip-hop, soul, classical, jazz, and yes, even country. 

So it only makes sense that most of the concerts I’ve attended in my life have been mainly in relatively small venues.  I do not attend very many large scale shows.  The biggest acts I had seen until Tuesday night were probably Green Day and White Zombie (not at the same show, fortunately).  Most of the other shows were small intimate affairs, so small that I could meet, and very often did, the band after the show.  At one fateful show for the Donnas, I was fortunate enough to be hugged by Donna R (gush) and Donna A.  My friends and I even helped them load up their tour van.

So to date, my Top Ten concerts have been, in somewhat preferential order:

10. Minus the Bear
9.   The Fiery Furnaces
8.   The White Stripes (pre-fame)
7.   The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
6.   Cat Power
5.   Le Tigre
4.   KMFDM
3.   The Magnetic Fields
2.   Weezer (8 times!)
1.   Belle and Sebastian

Now, I must make the announcement that this list must change.  Sorry Minus the Bear, but the Boss is gonna push you out of the Top Ten.  Springsteen and the E Street Band replaces Belle and Sebastian as the best concert I’ve ever seen.  This, in effect, moves every show down one notch.  At one time, the mere idea that any concert could push my dear Belle and Sebastian out of the top slot would have been sacrilege.  Indeed, it still makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable that it happened.  Or rather, that I allowed it to happen.

But you see, my friends, it’s like this.  While I love Belle and Sebastian dearly, and they will always remain one of my most favorite groups ever, as performers, they do not simply have the stage presence as the Boss.  As a whole, I prefer the catalog of B&S to that of Bruce Springsteen.  This is not to say that I do not like the oeuvre of said Boss, but B&S has a certain quirky, literary, and dare I say it, hipster quality that the Boss cannot simply match.  In short, B&S appeal to my intellect – to my annoying, indie hipster tastes.  Bruce Springsteen, on the other hand, appeals more to my gut emotion, that visceral part of me that relates to humankind at large.   Well, at the very least, the “American” part of me, since to most critical summations, Bruce Springsteen is a uniquely American songwriter (versus the Glaswegian edifice of B&S). 

I did not know exactly what to expect at a concert such as Bruce Springsteen.  I had never seen such an iconic figure live before.  He is a performer with whom I have a certain lifelong relationship.  The year 1984 was seminal year of my life, as it was the year I entered kindergarten.  This means it’s also the default date with which it seems my memories form.  True, I do have earlier memories, such at age four spilling puzzle pieces from the kitchen table to the floor because I threw my arms up in triumph as I heard Bo and Luke Duke scream their famous “yeehaw!!” guffaw as they ramped the General Lee into the air as they were wont to in every episode of the Dukes of Hazzard.  Or the time I vaguely remember, probably around age three,  having a nightmare that Lou Ferrigno’s Incredible Hulk was under my bed and I woke up crying.  (As an aside, I find it intriguing that some of my earliest memories are connected to television.)

But back to 1984.  That’s the year, of course, that Springsteen’s album Born in the U.S.A. was released, and being such a monster hit, one could not escape the thunderous, eponymous single and all the others that accompanied it.  I remember hearing it on the radio one fall morning when I had the rare opportunity to be driven to school instead of catching the bus.  My father was a road construction worker, a heavy equipment operator to be exact, and I remember that day he was off work because it was raining too much.  My parents, of course, were quite young, and it was not uncommon in those early years for either of them to crank up the radio anytime we went for a ride in the car.  The radio was on, and I remember being struck by Born in the U.S.A.  It is the very first song that I remember specifically liking.  It wouldn’t be until many years later when I actually understood the politcal context of the song, but even at that early age, I was drawn to it. 

So from that point forward, Bruce’s music always had a presence in my life, albeit most of the time at a distance.  I remember falling in love for the first time and how the song Bobbie Jean seemed to sum up the feelings after everything went to hell.  I also remember finally understanding the freewheelin’, exposition of youth that was contained in the anthemic Born to Run and Thunder Road when I was a dissatisfied seventeen year old.  Heck, it wasn’t only until about three years ago while speeding up the interstate to Sacremento that I fully “got” Rosalita. 

Seeing these songs performed live, as well as many others that I had grown up with, and hearing them being sung along with literally thousands of people was quite an intriguing experience.  The experience of actually being in the moment with that many people, and such a diverse crowd at that, simply cannot be beat.  Not only that, but ol’ Brucie is still quite the showman!

Who would have thought that being such the indie snob that I am, a mainstream performer would become my new number one concert experience?  I never seen it coming.  I was ready to go enjoy the show on a small level, and then do the pretentious belittling of the performance afterwards.  But I can’t.  I just can’t.

This weekend I realized that for the first time I started to show my age.  It wasn't as odd as I thought it would be either.  I always imagined that one moment, that singular second of time in which one realizes, "I'm not a kid anymore."  I always thought it would be a major quake, a moment so jarring that irrevocable damage would destroy my sense of self.  But it wasn't anything of the sort.  It was more like, "Meh."

My story begins in Hot Topic.  Yes, that Hot Topic, the store where all the faux punks and eyeliner kids shop in the mall.  What possessed a thirty year old go to into such a store, much less a thirty year old that sorta dresses like a yuppie now?  Before I answer, I suppose my story should start some time before this weekend's trip to Hot Topic.  It should go back fifteen years ago, when I was, you guessed it, fifteen years old.  

Like many a fifteen year old, I was quite unsure of myself, lost in all the normal adolescent teenage confusion.  A song could've easily written about my experience, and indeed, if one listens to any amount of halfway popular music you know that such a song has been written thousands of times.  I was not unique in my experience, looking back, even though at the time I felt like I was the most persecuted person in the world.  I stayed in this phase until I was about ninteen years old.  I was withdrawn, distrustful, and generally anti-social.  Not enough to be diagnosed with anything clinically, but it was enough to be a cause of angst and ennui.  So it should come as no surprise, dear readers, that during these years of rabid self imposed "darkness" I embraced that little subculture that has popularly been called "goth."  

Oh, I was far from being a "true goth," whatever that means.  I never had the eyeliner, the black nail polish, the chained outfits; but I had plenty of friends that did.  I knew enough, at the time, to know that it wasn't Marilyn Manson and his ilk that was cool.  It was really Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees, Bauhaus, the Smiths, and the Cure...that was where it was at.  For a while I even sported the infamous black trench coat and black clothing long before such attire gained the Columbine notoriety.  I had a closet full of licensed band t-shirts, a collection I was quite proud of, ranging from old school punk forefathers the Velvet Underground to the thrash metal of Dirty Rotten Imbeciles.  But nowhere did my collection instill in me the most pride than that of my KMFDM tees.

For the uninitiated, KMFDM is a German industrial rock band, formed in 1984, the year I started kindergarten.  Their name stands for "Kein Mehrheit Für Die Mitleid" which translated from German means, "No Pity for the Majority."  (It does not, as the legend goes, stand for "Kill Motherfuckin' Depeche Mode.") I wouldn't discover them until six years later with their album Naive.  (Note: I was quite a feisty eleven year old.)  So basically, I've been a fan of theirs for nineteen years, having collected all their albums and seeing them numerous times in concert across the country.  (Of course, seeing them in New York City is one of the highlights of my life!)  The group is often seen as a stalwart of the so-called "goth" culture, but the very act of my stating that is wrong on so many levels.  I could go into a lengthy discussion of how wrong that statement really is and how it makes me cringe, but I'm only dealing with generalizations at the moment.  So stick with me...I'm about to make my point, I promise!

Again...why Hot Topic?  I knew it would be the one place I could purchase the latest KMFDM CD.  Not only am I a fan of their music, I'm a fan of their album art, most of which has been created by a single artist that goes by the name of BRUTE! (exclamation included).  BRUTE!'s art graces their t-shirts, a collection of which that one time I had every single t-shirt of theirs.  I could have easily downloaded the latest release, but I still enjoy thumbing through their liner notes, lyrics, and actually being able to study the fabulous art of BRUTE! on the cover.  

So...I go into the Hot Topic in Fayetteville, AR.  I'll spare the details of why I was there, but it was a unique experience.  The stereotypical image of the "goth" is usually very cold and stand offish.  Based on experience, it's so not true.  "They" (I really hate categorizing people like this, but again, these are just generalizations) are some of the friendliest and liveliest people I've ever had the pleasure of knowing.  So I wasn't at all surprised by the friendly banter from the clerk when I paid for my CD.  What was intriguing, though, was the deep southern accent she had.  The image of a purple haired, super heavy black eyeliner, chained adorned late teen or twentysomething with a hick accent was oddly awe inspiring.  What was even more intriguing was the terminology she employed.  She used typically southern words when addressing me, calling me "Hon" and "Sweety" in the familiar tone.  There was no formality in the least.  We discussed the CD I was buying, and she said it was perhaps the best of their career.  I responded that I hadn't listened to it yet, but they have not failed to disappoint me in nearly twenty years.  

And that's when she gave me the most concerned look.  "Geez, how old are you, hon?"