My First Mac

The Year . . .

I shit you not . . .

1986.

Orwell was wrong.

(which is a joke you would get if you were alive then and got to see the Macintosh commercial)

We had sold our dust collecting grand piano and bought a Macintosh Plus. Along with an Imagewriter II printer and so much pirated programming that I'm almost ashamed to admit it.

Almost.

I remember building the desk for it. It was the first thing I ever assembled of such magnitude. It required reading instructions, using tools, and carefully applying little wood colored stickers over the screw holes. That desk lived for the next 18 years. It was moved and reassembled 10 times from apartments to houses to apartments to houses to a garage to storage to an apartment to the dump.

During its long and beautiful life, it was the showcase for two Macintosh computers. The Macintosh Plus and the first iMac. Red.

No PCs.

It was at the Macintosh Plus that  I first learned to write. Where I first learned to use swear words. It was the computer I was sitting at during the earthquake of 89, it was the computer I used to write my first college essay.

Think about that. I did my fifth grade homework on the same computer I used to write deconstructions of Shakespeare's sonnets.

The Imagewriter II, a dot matrix printer, was still operable in 2009 when my mother finally had to toss it because there isn't a single computer interface that uses the cable.

The Macintosh Plus had 1k of memory.

1 fucking k

That's one Kilobyte of memory.

Imagine this. Download a song from iTunes. Say you have a hankering for Ozzie and you just need to hear Crazy Train. That's 9.8 MEGABYTES of information. If you do the math, and I know you won't, maybe Matt will, but he doesn't really need to, it would take 9,800 Macintosh Plus' to store Crazy Train.

We only had one.

We were poor.

But that computer lasted over 10 years.

In perfect working condition.

In contrast the only PC I've ever owned lasted three years and nearly destroyed my first album.

In over twenty years of having a personal computer in my house, I've had four Macs. The first taught my brother to read. The Second introduced me to the internet. The third got me through college, helped me write a musical, recorded an album, made my wedding video, and the one I have now has only begun the work that I want it to do.

Steve Jobs died today.

Younger than my dad.

With children young enough to still play soccer.

And in all the blogs you're gonna read, you're  most likely gonna hear about his brilliance with innovation. A brilliance I can attest to since right now I am sitting at my desk with my iMac, iPad, iPhone surrounding me.

Cause I have to write, take phone calls, and check my fantasy football status, all at the same time.

I would have my iPod too, but I only use it now when I am jogging.

So Yeah, you're gonna hear a lot about how innovative the man was.

But here's my favorite story:

The CEO of Nike is in an elevator with Steve Jobs.

Thinking it's kinda cool to have this kind of access to the great innovator, he asks Mr. Jobs what he should do with his company.

And Steve Jobs replays:

"You make a lot of good stuff.

and you make a lot of crap.

get rid of the crap"

end quote.

This is how I want to best remember a great American whose life was cut tragically short.

Here's what I want you to think about every day of your life. Here's what I want you to think about when you write that next paper, when you choreograph that next dance, when you write that next song, when you go to work feeling as if you have no control over your life at all. Because innovation is really neat, brilliance is fine and dandy. But if you want to really make a difference in your life and all of the lives around you, think about this:

We do a lot of good.

We do a lot of crap.

Do less crap.

Moves Like Jagger

Me: I'm starting to really hate that new Maroon 5 single.

Taylor: "Moves Like Jagger" . . .  why?

Me: Cause he doesn't.

Taylor: Oh

That was kind of a conversation killer on the way to drop my son off at the dorms. Taylor doesn't do idle chit chat unless its 1:15am and there's a world wide web involved.

I was thinking about this at the beginning of our drive after reading an article on the 20th anniversary of the release of "Nevermind" and the Nirvana/grunge explosion. 

I was younger then than he is now.

We stood in our combat boots with multiple layers of clothing. Long sleeve flannel shirts and army surplus jackets.

Here we are now. Entertain us.

Now its skinny jeans, V-Neck T-shirts, 

OMG. LMFAO

We both, however, are stupid . . . and contagious.

As we drove in silence, Taylor flipped through his radio presets.

I counted eight Pop radio stations he flipped through, and I am not shitting you, we only heard four songs the entire drive.

1. Friday Night - Katie Perry - The joke with this one is that the first time I heard it I could have sworn it was a cheap Katie Perry knockoff. I thought it was lame and dirty and didn't have the wink and nod of her earlier work. So how red faced was I discovering that it was actually Katie Perry and how sad to see a cute little pop star becoming a knockoff of herself.

2. Drink to That - Rhianna - Lame, but at least the auto-tune kept her usual chalkboard scratching flatness at bay. And then there was the Avril Lavigne sample in the chorus that made me wonder if bubble gum pop has gotten so bored with everything else its decided to start sampling itself. It may one day become so self contained that producers and artists will just start releasing their iTunes playlists instead of albums. 

3. Someone Like You - Adele - Good song, Well produced. Heard four times during a 45 minute drive.

4. Moves Like Jagger - Maroon 5 - After making my little quip Taylor scrolled through his presets until he found a station playing it. Not sure if it was serendipity, but there might be a conspiracy here. Maybe radio stations only play the top five hits so that new songs are as accessible on the radio as their are on Youtube.

Find the song you want and ignore the advertising.

Here we are.

Now.

Give us what we want.

Or someone else will.

So when we get to a song such as "Moves Like Jagger" I start to become an old fuddy-duddy.

Cause he doesn't.

Not only does Adam Levine of Maroon 5 NOT move like Jagger, I'm sort of confused as to why that would be something to openly discuss.

And not kinda creepy.

Telling another person that you have the moves like Jagger should illicit a furrowed brow, a soft tilt to the head, and a look of the eyes that clearly says "Please, you will have no chance of getting laid again if you even begin to think its a good idea to stand up and demonstrate."

Jagger is, and should be, the only person who can get laid moving like Jagger.

Maybe our dear Adam woke up on the floor of his hotel room using a V-Tshirt as a blanket and a pair of leather pants as a pillow and thought to himself "Hmmm. This makes me think of Mick Jagger. I must write a song about him. And use his last name for a lyric. A lyric that won't sit very well in the melody line."

And he continued:

"What is it about Jagger that makes him worthy of homage? Is it his lyric writing? No that can't be, he's not evening singing words. Is it his dynamic vocal range? Nope. If he's ever spread out an entire octave it was only because he fell off the stage and hurt himself. But Jagger wouldn't do that. Nobody moves like Jagger. I wish I could move like Jagger. Then I'd get laid. Chicks dig Jagger for how he moves. And for his V-Neck T-Shirts and leather pants. What's that awful taste in my mouth?"

I could tell him what that taste was. Its the taste of a bad idea that turns into an obsession.

I know that taste because I've had lots of songs like that.

Thankfully I'm not a pop star. Because I would be horrified to have to sing some of those bad idea songs for the rest of my life.

If the devil were to tell me that I could have a wonderfully successful career, and that he wouldn't take my soul, but that he would insist that twenty years from now I would find myself in a Carson City casino singing "Moves Like Jagger" night after night,

I might have to ask him if he would reconsider the soul.

So as Taylor and I finished unpacking the car and loading all his shit into his dorm room I was just about to  place my arm around his and give him some advice.

Son, I would say. You will be here for at least nine months. If you have any chance at all of getting laid, do not, under any circumstances, tell someone that you move like Jagger.

But just then two incredibly cute girls rushed into the room screaming his name and gave him full body hugs, and causally invited themselves to lunch with him.

So,

I'm thinking,

maybe he'll do just fine.

The Pantheon

Cole Porter. John Lennon. Amadeus. Leonard Cohen.

These are the people I'd like to meet in heaven.

Will they be in the same room?

Will they be in the Pantheon of songwriters?

Will I be allowed into the room?

Will I have to show my ID? Will I have to display a lexicon of my work in orderer to enter or will I be allowed to glide in like Jay Zee at the hottest night club in Manhattan?

Or will I be standing out in the cold waiting for a look of encouragement from some heavenly bouncer?

I'm not sure.

I'm thinking about the greatest tragedy of life.

The tragedy of never being able to prove oneself.

Will my work ever be able to stand up to the rest of the Lexicon, or will it merely be a footnote of some family tree of which I am a single branch?

Will my son ever venture into my lexicon?

Or will he be so bored of Daddy's dreams that it will be placed kindly into a box and left on some shelf in the garage only to be shuffled into the garbage pile that my grandchildren have made?

When my great grandfather died, I was nothing.

When my grandfather died I was in my mid twenties, and there was nothing left of him to give me but a few anecdotes and a pile of motorcycle parts.

When my father dies, I have recordings, memories written in ink, memories written in  cyberspace. Pictures and items of great personal worth.

My son will at least have those when I too die.

But what will become of them?

What will my grandchildren know of me?

Most likely every little.

And their children even less.

Unless.

One day. By pure miracle.

My work trancends my family and friends and finds a home among the pop culture for which it was written and to which it belongs.

But that is a dream.

A dream which can never be fulfilled, but a dream which sustains me none the less.

I believe I can hang with that crew.

the Pantheon of great songwriters.

And not feel myself the foolish man I feel myself today.

Because when everything is stacked against me.

when Life shreds its secret and tells me that I am just a small bit of material in a vast universe of matter,

I still dream.

So dream. Everyone.

dream.

What does "Please" mean?

So Calvin asked me this question:

What does Please mean?

Its a polite way of asking someone for something.

Cause really? What the hell does "Please" mean?

But then I had to put my thinking cap on because he gave me that insolent little look the proves he knows I was giving him a non answer.

The kind of answer that ranks right up there with "Cause I said so."

Well Calvin . . .

I breathed.

To Please some one means to make them happy.

So when you say Please, you are really saying, "Would you do this thing for me in order to make me happy?".

So how come its magic?

Cause I said so.

And this developed into a long conversation over what my role is as a parent. Apparently, Calvin is of the view that my job as a parent is to make him happy all the time cost be damned.

And I had the fortuneate task of informing him that it is my job to make sure that he has food and a place to live.

The gap between our understanding of my role was far too wide for him to comprehend.

So then is it mommy's job to make me happy?

No sweetie. it is mommy's job to make sure you have food, and a place to live, and that that place is clean.

Is mommy's job harder?

Yes.

Is it because she loves me more?

Yes.

I love the fact that Calvin keeps a running tab on all the nice things Joann does for him, and a secondary list of all the things that I force him to do against his will.

When is mommy coming home?

Not for a few more hours.

That's too long. I want mommy.

Why?

Cause she loves me more.

Does she take you swimming?

She would if she were home more.

Can't argue with that.

And here's the thing: Our relationship has become adversarial. I am the dragon. He is the princess. And Joann is the knight in shining armor. Except in this little teleplay the princess has a homemade Katana and has no fear of swacking at the dragon until the knight arrives.

And to push the metaphor even further, let us say that the dragon is also an artist and falling head first into a very complicated project and simply doesn't have the patience he normally would, to devote his attention to the needs of the princess.

And this makes the princess very angry.

And since the princess has spent the entire summer locked in the tower with nothing but video games and swimming pools, its become quite the shock for the little princess to suddenly be thrust into six hours of school each day.

The princess is not happy with the dragon.

The knight's not much help either.

And when the knight and the dragon talk all they can talk about is how much easier it will be when the princess's older brother has gone off to college and the princess has finally accepted that there is no alternative to school.

In the mean time, the dragon's got major rehearsing and recording schedules to manage. His money job is dependent on the Holiday Season, so he has to gear up for that, and the lawn is yet again in desperate need of mowing.

Not to mention that both the knight and the dragon have to lose another 11 pounds.

Dieting makes even fantasy characters a wee bit more cranky than usual.

So we are all on edge.

Except of course the princess's older brother, who at 2:00pm, is still in bed.

Does the dragon want to stay in bed till 2:00pm?

Yes, please.

It is a small world after all is said and done.

Yeah. That never would have made a good lyric, but contract a few words, discard the ending, and you've got the title of one of the most maligned verse/chorus songs of all time.

I was on that ride on Wednesday. Much to the immediate displeasure of Calvin, who whined and complained all through the line and then closed his eyes and covered his ears as we made that joyously air-conditioned boat ride through pure gleeish schmaltz.

Disneyland is no place for children.

At least my children.

I've had an easier time getting him to eat broccoli then I did making have fun at Disneyland.

Next vacation will be an asparagus festival.

But as we rounded the second or third bend, I stopped being frustrated and turned my thought towards the music. At first I found it fascinating that each section was almost seamlessly integrated between the sections. It occurred to me that each section had a different recording of the same song, in the same key, at the same tempo and yet they were all vastly different stylistically and as you passed from village to mountainside, each recording flowed into the next.

How much equipment was needed in the sixties to make that possible? Remember this was an era where the Beatle could record an entire album with just four tracks.

And then I started to listen to the craft of the song. How perfectly clever they were. Not a lyrical line missed or extended. The melody flowed perfectly. How the second part of the verse makes a perfect little dance around the circle of fifths. How the key was selected at exactly the right place for the limited range of a children's choir.

(My biggest pet peeve of children's theatre is how badly keyed it is for children's voices. Twelve year olds should not be doing Sondheim, I don't care how fucking cute "Into the Woods" is.)

I was mesmerized. Fascinated by the craft. I did a quick little google search to see who had written the song and I came across something surprising.

"Its a Small World." was written by the Sherman Brothers. One of the most prolific songwriting teams in movie and television history. Their father Al Sherman was a writer in the Tin Pan Alley days and encouraged them to write.

I won't bore you with their biography. Besides, I was looking at wikipedia and some of it has to be wrong, but it was extensive. And it really got me to thinking about how the day of the pure song writer is over. How the craft slips ever further from substance into style.

Sure we can't replicate those perfect rhymes any longer. They've become cliches. But Rockstars did something to the craft that is irrevocable. They discovered that money is in copyright. And if they didn't write their own songs, they were loosing out.

Teenage angst pays off well.

So sang Kurt Cobain.

Good line. Lame lyric.

And I've said it before. I'd much rather be a master of the craft than a Rockstar.

"Here Lady Gaga, record this, trust me, they'll love it"

I had a conversation once with another songwriter who was talking about vetting offers from a recording company.

"I couldn't take anything less than a million dollars. Anything else wouldn't be enough to risk my job."

To which her boyfriend leaned over and said,

"You're talking to Josh. He would sell a song for a turkey sandwich."

And he's right.

Let me illustrate:

Recently an old boyfriend of my wife's has made it into the tabloids. I won't bother you with his name but lets just say he's a fifty one year old actor who has had a few big successes, and pops up here and there.

Well this fifty one year old actor has just gotten married to a sixteen year old girl.

A sixteen year old girl with a website showcasing her talents as a singer. A pop singer with breast implants and enough auto-tune to correct scoliosis.

And my first thought wasn't "How Obscene!"

My first though was "Yeah, she's gonna need a real songwriter, and I wonder if my wife still has his email somewhere."

Cause I'm a pig. And a bit of a whore.

And I could really use a turkey sandwich right now.

And it turns out that this fifty one year old ex-boyfriend of my wife, has his own production company.

I'm starting to feel a little momentum.

I know a girl, who knows a guy, who married a girl, who will never be a pop star, but obviously has some money, and could open the kind of doors that lead to real pop stars. The kind of pop stars that have no problem paying for a song with a turkey sandwich.

Notice how I didn't wake my wife up at this point to show her the news.

I wanted to get a little deeper into the story.

On further review of the You Tube videos I recognized a canned drum beat from GarageBand.

Wait, I said. This wasn't a money production. This was someone trying to break out of the porn industry with a three year old MacBook Pro, and a 16 year old girl.

And then I raced to the website of the production company.

Maybe there's some money there.

It's mission statement: "To let artists dream . . . "

Ouch.

And it got worse.

Current projects included (I shit you not) a series of children's books based on the adventures of his chihuahua.

So there's no real opportunity. Even when the songwriter knows a girl, who knows a guy, who has probably reached the tail end of his fame with a slapdash marriage to a sixteen year old girl at a Vegas hot spot.

I wish them love and luck all the same.

And as I clicked out of all the different websites and was about to clean my browser, I saw a little picture of Ringo Starr and the bottom of one of the articles.

A connection to Ringo Starr singing one of his first hits after the break up of the Beatles.

"You're 16."

If you're unfamiliar with the tune, do as I did, look it up on you Tube. It contains the lyric "You're Sixteen, You're Beautiful, and You're Mine."

And there's three points I'd like to make about the song "You're 16."

First, it was a hit by several singers going back to the sixties. Which kind of solidifies the fascination that famous grown men have for girls at that age. (I find them mostly vapid, but I'm not famous)

Second, Ringo Starr's recording of the song is actually the only hit song in recorded history to feature a Kazoo solo.

And Lastly,

you guessed it,

It was written by the Sherman Brothers.

Man in Transition

I stare at the face in the mirror. The one everyone else sees, but I can only glance at. The skin once smooth now creased with a million smiles and a thousand furrowed brows. There is very little boy left in that face. The boy exists now only in the gleam of the eyes and the tilt of the head.

This man is still as angry as the boy. Still as confused. Still burning with the fury he felt ten twenty years ago. Still as insulted by cruelty and injustice. Still yearning for peace. Still embarrassed by his clumsiness, his awkwardness, his narcissism, his laziness, his procrastination, his unmet potential.

The man dreams the same dreams as the boy.

He still fears the same fears.

He still doesn't like dogs.

But there are dogs he likes.

He wonders as he stares at this face if the face is the only thing that separates the man from the boy.

Is the only difference between that face and this face time?

Hmm?

His wife says the man is much sexier than the boy.

He tells her to prove it.

But she's tired.

The girl is a woman. And a woman needs rest.

But the man is better than the boy. He's not as fast. He's not as strong. But he's quicker with a joke. He's better with a song or with a tale. He can look a girl in the eyes and tell her what's on his mind. And he knows exactly when that's not appropriate.

He doesn't panic as much as the boy.

He's been places and done things. What once was daunting, is now common place. What once was impossible is now muscle memory.

And the man knows who he is. What he has become. If given a choice, the man knows who the boy would want to grow up to be.

Because he grew up to be the man.

Yet I stare at my face in the mirror with shock and horror.

Rather than with pleasure and grace.

Because the boy wasn't ready to be the man.

And then I pick up my guitar and realize I can't even play like the boy used to play. And when I sing I can't sing like the boy used to sing. And when I joke I am taken seriously. And when I speak people become solemn.

But then I look across the room.

I see that the baby is no longer a baby.

The baby is now a boy.

And the boy will never become a man.

If he has a boy for a father.

So I pick up my guitar again and realize I can still play like the boy. But better. And when I sing, even if I don't have as many notes, each note has depth. And when I joke, people laugh, unless they're still boys and girls and then they probably didn't get the reference in the first place and it makes more sense to hang out with people who do. And when I speak, people become solemn, not because of my age, but because the man exudes a power that the boy could only dream of.

And I still have the boy's dreams.

Which keep me alive.

And I still have the boy's fears.

Which give me ambition.

And I still have the boy's eyes.

Which can send a message of love across a crowded room.

As I have been writing. The baby became a boy. The boy became a man.

And the girl became a woman becoming tired.

May She Forever Let Me Know

I'm a damn good teacher.

Its why I have the job that I have. I might not be the best employee in the world. I might be a little too open about the mistakes I make, too honest about how I feel about things, but I can command a room, get people to listen to me, and have them walk away feeling as if their time was well spent. I can make a paradigm shift seem like a walk in the park, and filter details on a need to know basis.

Its really the only reason my boss likes having me around.

Wasn't something I was born with. But like cooking, its something that I wanted to do and I spared no lack of energy learning how to do it.

For as the saying goes:

Teaching like cooking like making love should be approached with reckless abandon.

Or something like that.

Ask Julia.

So, teaching a class today and my phone buzzed.

I didn't check who it was, I just casually switched the phone off so that it wouldn't buzz again and continued delivering my speech.

Usually when my phone buzzes, its my wife sending me something sweet/funny/dirty/cryptic. Those can wait for a better time.

And there's no better time than when the computers fail and we have to take a ten minute break in order to sort out the glitches.

Which happens all day.

So the computer crashes (damn you PC and your cheap fucked up alternatives to an actual working system), and I check my phone.

Instead of being from my wife, there's a string of texts from my sound engineer wanting to set a date for working on the new album.

OMG. I'm actually gonna start working on music again and the thought fills me with joy. For it has been too long since I've not only worked on the album, but too long since I actually wrote about the musical portion of my life. Its as if the context of my life has strayed from dreams and become mired in reality.

And reality is no place to live.

I'm so excited I reply right away. How about next Tuesday? Five O'clock? The answer is swift, as if he knew Microsoft was going to crash at that exact moment. See you then. And my posture takes on a whole new dimension of confidence.

For I am not a working stiff. I am pre-Rock Star and its time to show everyone in the room that this little training is far beneath my scope of life, yet I am happy to do it as long as it pays the bills. You're not getting the beaten down version of me, you're getting the pomp of a man who has strength and ambition, you're getting a performance of a man in his prime.

The training goes well. I hope they learned. I hope they trust I know what I'm doing. I dream that they could feel my air of confidence and that that air has wafted into their souls and filled them with peace. For I have given them the real me. The me who lives in many worlds.

But the me who lives in many worlds is a farce.

Its scientifically proven that there in no such thing as multitasking. What we think of when we think of multitasking is actually a physically and emotional draining skill of re-prioritisation.

You can't do two things at once.

You can't be two people at once.

You can however switch between the two quickly.

But you blow twice as much energy doing so.

So you can't do it for long.

And eventually, the two things become weak shadows of themselves and nothing is done well.

Artists know this. Which is why in every other aspect of their lives they are complete assholes. You can't be a good Husband/Father/Employee/Artist. You can only be a good artist and shitty at the rest.

I've defied this logic for as long as I can.

but my wife knows better.

Four months ago I showed her the recording schedule I had mapped out for my the new album. She immediately noticed the lines throughout April, May, and June for recording and mixing.

No, she said.

What? I replied.

Those are the months we need to help Taylor find a college, the months where we need to get him settled for graduation. There are parties to plan, weddings to go to, finances to adjust, cleaning to do, a five year old to keep busy.

No, she said.

Why? I asked.



Because I need you.



And so I stalled everything else.

I put my engineer/producer on hold.

I went from writing once a week to every other week.

I etched vacation into every work crevice I could find.

She knows I can't be everywhere. Everyone. And she knows I would have tried. But she didn't want me to try. She wanted me to be there for her, for the family, for this one moment in time when we can relish our triumph of delivering Taylor into the unknown world with the best possible foot in the door.

And I was okay with that. Because when it becomes my time, I know that she will watch my little artistic ship sail and eagerly await my return.

But when I tell her that I will be meeting with my engineer this Tuesday, she looks at me funny.

Damn,

she says.

What?

I ask.

Katie was going to come over for dinner that night.

Oh. I say. No problem, you'll just have to make dinner.

Hmm. She says. Maybe she can come over another night.



Because when it really comes down to it, my boss needs me to teach.

And my wife needs me to cook.

Unless she needs me for something else.

And hopefully,

she will forever let me know.

That's Me in the Corner

Don't be such a snot bubble.

Dad, there's no such thing.

Of course there is. In fact, I majored in snot bubbles in college.

No . . . You didn't.

And he was right of course. I never majored in snot bubbles. What little college I did finish was devoted solely to the theater. Instead of Speech, I took Voice. Instead of PE, I took fencing and dance. Psychology was devoted to the scansion of plays, history was Henry V, mathematics was lighting design and four part harmony. Women studies remained the same, but Ophelia was my model and Katherine my muse. I walked away with a certificate of completion, a strong diaphragm, and an identity crisis.

Ten years later, having a pint with an old friend (Well, porter for me, a big tasty glass of water for Jon), I was asked if I ever had any desire to return to the stage.

Sometimes, maybe, not really.

Not sure if I would let a juicy part slip through my fingers, though. Maybe Hamlet or Iago. The Emcee in Cabaret, or Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar. I would jump at the chance to see my own failed musical staged, and I would be hard pressed to say no to an invitation to participate in just about anything involving those long lost friends whose blood sweat and tears have mingled with my own. But the pursuit of stage is a singularly devoted one, and my life is too precariously balanced to invite that level of obsession.

After we finished our meal (pizza for me, salmon salad for Jon) we drove eleven blocks to a see a preview of a new play opening that weekend. The space was special to Jon in that he is a resident artist of the theatre group, and his fiance designed the set.

The set was pretty stunning. A center stair case spiraling into a stratospheric oak tree. Intricate levels of staging areas, lots of eye candy, compact enough to be intimate, grand enough to create distance. It's a shame that the play wasn't rewritten to make better use of it.

The play, a two actor mishmash of themes. Love, sex, poetry. Life, death, birth, sickness, rebirth, crazy talk, brief violence and mild nudity. Or is it mild violence and brief nudity? Poetry as dialogue, stage direction as dialogue, list upon list upon list as dialogue.

The story, a tale of boy meets girl, girl gets stabbed by an environmentalist, girl gets sick, girl turns into tree.

And herein lays the problem.

We have all read "The Giving Tree."

It is rooted in our soul.

Chuckle, chuckle.

However, as any agronomist will tell you, a tree isn't exactly the nurturing mother earth life giving creature its made out to be in transcendental poetry.

A tree,

is in fact,

a weed.

That's right. A big weed.

A water hoarding, nutrient zapping, soul sucking weed.

And had the writer taken a botany class, and possibly been blessed with a sense of humor, this play would have had a good guy, a bad guy, and a truly original metaphor that might have propelled it into one of those great nights of theatre.

Alas.

But I'm not a theatre critic. Nor should this influence anyone. And I haven't really gotten to the meat of this weeks tale.

In order to stay on track, we have to introduce a new character.

The female lead of the play.

And there is something not quite right about her.

She is pretty. But not second look pretty.

She is thin. But not athletic, or grotesque thin. The kind of thin a girl in her thirties gets when she works all day and all night, and doesn't see the sun light and doesn't eat enough food.

She smiles a hard smile, she moves with the elegance of a former dancer, and her eyes betray a frightful lack of confidence that I've seen so many times before in the nightmarish hallways of audition purgatory. There is no Bachelors from Brown or MFA from A.C.T., that could ever erase the wall she has built to keep the cruel real world at arms length.

It was her first line that gave her away.

After a painful emotional roller coaster monologue from the male actor, she has this one line:

"Shut up."

That's it.

"Shut up."

There are a million ways a wife can tell a husband to shut up, and even after a decade with my wife I am still learning new ones. There are tones and nuances of voice that speak volumes. Anywhere from "Shut up and kiss me." to "If you don't shut the fuck up right now I am going to stick this fork in your eye."

But the "Shut up" delivered by the female lead actor, wasn't any of those. And every subsequent line of dialogue and awkward physical seduction proved that this poor lady has never made the real human connection needed to deliver the line with the gravitas required.

For the actor's life is no life at all.

A fairy tale cocoon of comedy and tragedy.

Men have it much easier. For our identity is facade.

Woman is labyrinth.

Only for our female lead and the others who have trudged this trail of hopelessness, the labyrinth goes nowhere, for it has never been anywhere.

In a few years she'll start teaching. She'll attach herself to a community theater. She play as many of the roles as she can as she ages from Dorothy to the Wicked Witch.

She may have children, but most likely cats. She'll travel the world. She'll have friends. She'll know what good wine tastes like, but she'll always come home to the half filled bottle of the cheap stuff.

She'll never regret her decision to devote her life to the stage. But she'll never know how to tell a man to shut up the way my wife can. And her performances will forever lack the depth of the true human experience.

I chose differently.

Mostly cause I was hungry.

Which leads me to the climax of my story.

In a few short months, Taylor will begin making those kind of choices. Each path along the way is filled with broken hearts, broken dreams, devotion, obsession, tragedy, comedy, and a whole lotta farce. I don't understand him the way I do most people. I don't know how to empathize with him the way I can with someone I just met. Think of how eerie it is to be the central male figure in a boy's life for over a decade, and not have the faintest idea about what makes him tick.

So I don't know which kinds of choices he'll make or how to guide him through that process.

I tease him. But I have to stop because his facade is wearing thin.

Who knows which melting pot he'll find himself in.

Right now, he wants to be a Forensic Scientist. Which means his classes will take him through a myriad of chemistry, physics, biology. I can offer no support other than to eat well and get some rest. Go for a walk. Turn the headphones down a little bit.

Calvin is easy. He wants to be a ninja/Jedi/pirate/wizard.

If a certificate of completion from a now defunct acting program taught me anything at all, it was how to grow up to become a ninja/Jedi/pirate/wizard.

But Taylor is going to be needing a graphing calculator. He's going to be reading books that have words I don't even know and couldn't put into a sentence. His whole world is flying beyond my intellectual grasp.

If I was the father of our female lead when she was eighteen, I would at least have some sense as to where her life was taking her, we could at least have casual conversations, I could be a help, I could be a support, I could offer my advice when needed, and keep my mouth shut when not, and I might even know the difference. But then again, maybe not.

He will be dissecting things.

Somewhere along the line, he could be extrapolating cause of death scenarios from the mucus membranes recently deceased cadavers. And he might be excellent at it.

He could enter a world where people are the masters of mucus membranes and what effect they have in life or death situations, where I would just have to stand quietly in a corner with my thumb up my ass, waiting for lunch time to come around.

Cause I'm hungry.

He could be so proficient in extrapolating cause of death scenarios from the mucus membranes recently deceased cadavers that he may . . .

in fact . . .

Major in Snot Bubbles.

And I couldn't be any prouder than if he actually grew to be a ninja/Jedi/pirate/wizard.

Double Tap

That was how the execution was first described.

Tap.

You're most likely dead.

Tap.

You're hella dead.

To use my late eighties Californian vernacular.

I'm not gonna weigh in on the pros and cons, the right versus wrong, or raise my fist, or thumb my nose. But I will say this; the double tap, aside from being a well respected method of execution, is also a social convention we use every day.

Hi. How you doin?

As in, Hi, I want to let you know that you are now in my social circle. How you doin, it is important to me that since you are in my social circle I want you to feel loved.

Excuse me? Are you using that chair?

Can I get your attention and let you know that I too have needs. Needs that right now can only be met because you clearly have one more chair than you need, and I, have one less chair than I need, and even though I'm not evangelizing a socialist world order, it would be nice, just this once, if you would be so kind as to share the wealth.

Honey? When you pick up water, could you also get some soap?

This is my wife's double tap.

Because at no point had I considered picking up water today. In fact I had no real intention of doing anything today. But rather than asking me if I would go pick up water and soap, which might solicit a negative response, she used the passive aggressive voice, which made it seem as though I would be doing her the simple favor of picking up soap since I was going to the grocery store anyway to pick up water. The first tap is only implied.

Tap. Tap.

Knock. Knock.

Bang. Bang.

Vroom. Vroom.

Cough. Cough.

The list goes on and on.

On and On.

etc. etc.

To quote "The King and I"

This also leads me to think about how socially ingrained series of numbers can be.

Three, aside from being the magic number, is also the basic form of all list comedy. A form I use all the time. Its used in speaking to an audience. Its used for childhood discipline.

One! Get your clothes on.

Two! Get your clothes on.

Three! I am getting up off this couch and am gonna chase after you and when I catch you, you're gonna be sorry, and etc. etc. . . .

Three Blind Mice, Maids from School, Little Pigs, Amigos, Musketeers, Penny Opera, and the rate at which famous people or loved ones die.

Four is the basic stanza of lyricism. Five is a limerick. Six is two haikus (but that really brings us back to three).

Seven is lucky. But that's about all. And the rest of the numbered series stretching out into infinity are just too difficult to grasp. Unless you're a nerd, and if you are, can I use that chair?

One is pretty powerful too. As in this piece of advice I will be giving to my step son as he begins his college career:

Do not eat the second brownie.

I am sure that there are a lot more important pieces of wisdom I can impart. Plastics. Wear a condom. Don't drink and drive. (Which may seem like a double tap, but the usage of the word "and" implies that you can drink and you can drive, just don't do the two things together.)

Neither a lender nor a borrower be, be true to thine self. But Polonius gets stabbed to death while hiding behind a curtain, and I have much bigger plans for my future.

Besides, he was a bit of a fussbudget.

No, what Taylor really needs to understand is that one brownie is enough. Everyone I know can tell the tale of the second brownie and the very bad that follows. Cause we all thought the same thing:

"This one isn't working,

I should have another."

And it is always a bad decision. Always.

Yet, now with a more reflective voice, he is not likely to heed that advice. We all need to learn about the second brownie in our own pathetically personal way. We all need to be doing something when that second brownie hits. Something that will forever be etched into our psyche. We all need to lie on that dirty dorm room carpet, terrified that we are so stoned that every breath takes all of our concentration. Hopefully that room will be filled with sensitive art majors who only want to protect us in our time of need, and not the room where there is loud music and an abundance of permanent markers.

People have lost eyebrows because of the second brownie.

Taylor's gonna be an Aggie. That's right. Checks have been signed, credit cards charged, and tonight we get hoodies and pennants emblazoned with the UC Davis logo. He's going to be introduced to the whole wide world of college life splendor. And he's finally going to take ownership of the kind of social fuck-ups that separate boys from real men.

I'm proud. I'm jealous. I'm scared and I'm absolutely powerless to influence the choices he makes from this day forward.

For his life is the Titanic.

And I am the little rudder that couldn't.

So when I tell him not to eat the second brownie, it is possible that a single declaration will not suffice. Maybe a first year college student requires the same kind of force a world Super Power needs to send a terrorist icon into oblivion.

I think I'm gonna need the Double Tap.

Here goes.

Ready?

Taylor . . . Do not eat the second brownie.

Trust me.

Fear and Corn dogs in Captivity

Are you excited to go to the zoo?

Will there be cows?

I don't know.

Cause I'm not going to the zoo if there's gonna be cows.

Kay.

I'm far from delighted to admit that the fear of cows isn't exactly a new thing in my house hold. Walking home from visiting his preschool Calvin suddenly stopped, screamed and ran to Joann and I in clear panic.

What the fuck?

We thought.

What's the matter?

We said.

I can't see it. I can't see it.

What?

The cow.

There isn't a cow.

Then what's that noise?

We paused for a moment. Listened to the air rustling the wind. Then listened to the air rustling the wind chime. The wind chime hanging from the awning of a little cottage on our right. And we knew instantly what he was talking about.

The wind chime sounded like a cow bell.

Not just any cow bell, but the exact same pitch of cow bell that signals to an avid "Slingshot Cowboy" that there is about to be a stampede. A stampede where furious cows with deep red eyes charge the player in all their pixelated fury.

The first time Calvin played this game, which no respecting parent would allow their child to play since it simply consists of launching rocks at grazing cows, the first time he played this game and the angry cows stampeded toward him, he threw the iPhone ten feet from where he was sitting and ran to find us. Eventually he found a unique love for the game where he was satisfied with launching the rocks, but would close his eyes and turn off the sound at the very moment the cow bell chimed.

Is it over?

He would ask.

Sure, I would say.

So when the wind chime scared him out of his pants, we thought it far too funny to give it any concern. We had and have other concerns, and really, what are the odds that Calvin is going to need to stand his ground during a conflict with a charging bull?

And so when he mentioned his fear of cows as the number one concern when attending a field trip to the zoo, I realized something.

I kind of don't care.

Central to his challenge in life is going to be fighting his flight response in the face of the unknown and poorly perceived.

Who am I to stand in his way?

How many times is someone going to tell him that butterflies are not dangerous?

It's not gonna hurt you, its not gonna hurt you, its not gonna hurt you . . . etc.

Doesn't work.

Never did.

Try it yourself.

The apathetic approach is far less stressful and effective.

Dad! There's a bug!

Here's a fly swatter son. Kill the fucking thing or go inside, I don't care which.

It has a 50% success rate.

Just slightly above Prozac.

And self indulgence does not require a prescription.

I was thinking about this a lot today as I dragged my struggling son from exhibit to exhibit. Watching animals in a zoo fills me with a powerful ambivalence. The tree hugging side of my psyche wants tigers to run and birds to fly, and monkeys to masturbate in private.

The logical side of me thinks that if you could ask a two toed sloth if it would prefer the jungle to a nice cozy tree limb and three squares a day you'd probably get the kind of violent eye roll exclusive to teenage girls.

Most of those animals would be unable, for whatever reason, to go home again and enjoy the freedom of survival.

And, really, they can't feel any more trapped than I do when asked to participate in a conference call.

We all exist in our little cages. And I'm not pointing out anything poetically new. The cubicle metaphor has been mined and mined and mined again. Still . . . I was thinking about all the little cages we build for ourselves and wondering how stressful it has become rattling our tin cups against the bars.

I wanna be a rock star. I want to redecorate the house. Why is there never enough money, food, books, time, sex, sleep, clothes, friends, time, words that rhyme with tertiary, time, wine, money, sex?

Hey Mr. Lion. You wanna pop outta that cage?

Nope.

You sure?

Yup.

Don't you wanna run around, scare a few kids, and stalk something?

Nope, dude, I'm cool.

Don't you wanna sneak outta that cage and take a big fat bite of a freshly deep fried corn dog covered with spicy mustard. Don't you want to burn the roof of your mouth and not entirely care until you've nibbled the crusted cornmeal off the end of the stick?

Seriously dude. I'm cool. Go bother the monkey.

Just don't shake his hand.

Freedom is apathy.

And I'm making corn dogs for dinner.

Middle Class Career

I don't normally read the arts section of my Sunday newspaper.

Most of the time the artists are droll and predictable and I spend the rest of the day in a huff of vernacular superiority.

Sometimes they are classy and exciting and I spend the rest of the day in a huff of insecure inferiority.

Either way.

I huff.

At first glance of the front page I was fully ready to be dismissive. A sea of orange augmented by the artist wedged between two columns, eyes pinched closed, mouth wide open as if screaming with great passion against a deaf world.

Oooh.

There's such a fine line between the passionate fury of an artist on the brink of creation, and the temper tantrums Calvin throws when I tell him he has to eat one more piece of broccoli before he gets his ice cream.

And frankly, I don't think I can tell the difference any more.

But I open up the paper anyway, cause that's where my crossword is hiding and I saw a second photo of the artist below the fold line.

Hey, I thought, I know that girl.

"Jules Baenziger, aka 'Sea of Bees' is the toast of public radio for her yearning beautiful songs."

The byline read.

Way to go Jules, I thought.

And then I almost felt a little guilty for my pompous first reaction.

Almost.

The article was a good one. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. And I was rooting for the protagonist the whole time.

Near the end of the article was a line that caught my eye.

Jules had asked her producer if he could make her famous.

He said he couldn't.

But he fully believed he could help her achieve a nice middle class career.

What a great answer. What a great image. White picket fence, bologna sandwich in a brown paper bag, peck the little wife on the cheek, and out the door you go. Except its Friday afternoon and not Monday morning. And your brief case is a Takamine 6-String, and your suit is made of felt, and your wearing a purple cravat where a tie would otherwise go.

Instead of dead animals and half burned drapes in a hotel, you leave a five dollar bill in an unused ashtray for the maid.

Instead of rehab, you see a physical therapist for impinged nerves.

I'm still not convinced there is such a word as "impinged"

So I finished the article. I downloaded her album into my iPhone. (Which apparently she released in June of 2010, and I was in such a fog I didn't know it.) I scrunched up on the couch with my earbuds in and the crossword puzzle on my lap, and sat for a good hour feeling relaxed and happy to hear a friend gaining a little traction on the oil slicked pavement of the road less traveled.

It was almost half a day before the melancholy began tapping its finger on the back of my neck. My own little middle class career rests on the shelf like the baseball trophy you get for participating.

Oh there are enough pointed little fingers to go around. I'm not dedicated enough. I don't sacrifice enough, I'm not talented enough. I was never in the right place at the right time. Except that one time, but I was surrounded by the wrong people. Either way the dream is just a dream, and my middle class career is a stamp collection. Its that thing that daddy used to do. Its not even a footnote.

What's funny is that my real rock star dream is really about the writing. I just want to be a songwriter. Rock's equivalent of a "Stay at Home Mom." Let the Lady Gagas of the world strut their stuff, I want to get fat and grow old. Watch my kids do the same. I want to drink tea in the morning, a coke at lunch, a nice glass of wine for dinner.

I want the phone to ring and the person on the line telling me that Brittany needs a new ballad and could I have it ready by Friday.

Can do.

I want to be that dead guy who only the people in the know will get misty for. I want to be that kind of footnote.

I want a garage full of classic muscle cars, and I want to walk to the grocery store.

But for better or worse, mostly worse, the artists who want to strut also want to write. Its where the money is.

Can't blame them. Can't blame the machine.

So now I'm stuck. What do I do, what do I do? If music was just a hobby I could leave it on that dusty shelf along with the boxes of old photographs and classic novels I'll get around to reading some day. If it was the driving force of my soul I would be touring the little night clubs of Europe sending Facebook updates like digital postcards. I would wear thrift store clothing and smell lightly of cigarettes and scented candles. I could live off of tortillas and refried beans and drive a van.

So what do I want? Where am I? Where am I going? Am I serious? Am I a dilettante? And just before all this self deprecating thought spirals out of control . . .

I tell myself to back the fuck up.

I'm not a victim of circumstance. In fact, I've been quite deliberate in how I've chosen to live my life. In fact this middle class suburban thirty something life is the great inspiration and not the ball and chain its been made out to be by lesser men.

Grow a pair.

Get back to work.

Calvin's hungry and I've got a four part harmony to work out. There's a lawn to mow and a guitar line to play and an early dinner and a drowsy novel and a 4am wake up call.

Live the dream, fat kid, live the dream.

And as for Jules,

or Sea of Bees,

thank you for your album.

(available on iTunes, Songs for the Ravens)

And may you too be so lucky as to live the deliberate life. Picket fence and all.

The Little Spanish Girl Makes Me Cry

Yesterday I got to deliver a speech to 300 teenagers.

The speech was a letter to my dead son.

Killed by a drunk driver on his way home from school.

There really wasn't a drunk driver, nor is Taylor really dead. For now.

The occasion was a mock situation at Taylor's high-school where students were removed from their classrooms and sequestered in a hotel for 24 hours. The rest of the class was read an obituary and a tombstone for the dead student was placed in the quad. All of this done in a effort register in teenage minds what it might be like if one of their classmates was killed in a drunk driving accident.

The episode culminates in a two hour assembly where police give speeches, the dead students read letters to their surviving loved ones, and parents read letters they've written to their dead children.

Kind of sad.

A little fun.

But kind of sad.

Two weeks ago, I was tasked with writing this letter to Taylor, including his obituary, because Joann wasn't going to be able to really participate in it at all. Way too sad. And slightly demented.

I approached this assignment with a pretty sick level of joviality, because, honestly, what parent out there hasn't imagined killing their children?

Especially step children.

Cause frankly . . .

Sometimes . . .

We all want to shake the baby.

But fantasizing about killing your children is a far cry from imagining they're dead.

As I learned.

It was a hard piece to write. I may have even gone through several drafts, where usually I'm so clean. (chuckle chuckle)

So I dug down real deep and produced a piece I was proud of, if nothing for the fact that there's not a single mom who could read it and not cry. It was so tear jerky that I was asked to read the letter for the assembly.

Sure, I thought. What could be easier than to deliver a speech to a bunch of half baked teenagers and crying soccer moms? I won't be the least bit nervous or swayed by the proceedings. I'll deliver the speech cleanly, with vibrato and strength. It will be powerful and stoic.

As we walked into the auditorium, my wife and I, we were handed the schedule of speeches to come. I was told that I was going on after one of the dead children, and that I'd know which one because she's going to be reading her letter in spanish.

Cool, I thought.

And most of the assembly went as I figured. The lights were dimmed, the police officers showed pictures of collisions, one had a personal story of regret. A few parents read their letters, a few students read theirs, and then came the little latino girl.

She began her speech with her eyes glued to the podium. Her words were clear, precise and delivered from a place of strength. But then she looked out into the crowd of parents sitting on the right hand side of the audience and her voice began to falter.

Her tone rose an entire octave and though I could only pick out a few words from the speech,

amor, corazon, muerte,

love, heart, dead,

I felt the panic of her message as she desperately tried to convey her anguish that her parents would never see her again. It seemed to me a moment of intolerable courage as she read the last sentence and pulled her eyes away from the page to address the crowd once more in silence.

The audience took a collective breath, and wept.

And then it was my turn.

Which sucked, because I too was in the audience.

And the little spanish girl made me cry.

And I was going to have to deliver a speech in front of 300 teenagers with an incredibly uncool lump in my throat.

Thank goodness for all that actor training I received in my 20's because I was able to get through the whole thing without blubbering or flubbing my lines, but I wasn't exactly the Prince of Denmark either.

I was more or less like Keanu Reeves in "As you Like It".

"I'd rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace . . . whoa"

But even though the speech wasn't a crowning achievement in the performance art of my life, the letter was a nice piece of writing which follows below. It will be the end of this little blog, because I don't think it deserves my snarky commentary. But try to imagine it being delivered a man in full control of his faculties rather than the weeping sissy pants that spoke it in real life.

Here it is:

Dear Taylor,

Yesterday, the house was filled with the sound of your voice. The pop music escaping from your ear buds. The click of the keyboard as you furiously type, hit delete, and type again.

The sound of your voice escaping your vocal chords as the music,

that only you can hear,

swells.

The sound of your enormous feet, like cinder blocks, plodding across the wood floors.

Yesterday, there was a book left on the counter. There were note cards with tiny ineligible writing, splashed across the dining room table. A black retainer sitting in the center of the cards. And yesterday I was furious with you for leaving these things around for me to gather up and pile in you room.

Yesterday, your brother asked where you were.

And I could tell him.

Yesterday, I was bragging to my customers how proud I was to have a son who would graduate at the top of his class. He would be going on to college, to his doctorate, to take life in both hands and deliver unto the world, a man of extraordinary greatness.

A man who has battled demons the rest of us didn’t even know existed. A man who could still smile, still laugh, while the world was collapsing around him.

Yesterday, you had dreams. Yesterday you had nightmares. Yesterday there were a thousand possibilities of life. And yesterday, we stood proud, that whatever life had in store for you, you would meet it with an unsurmountable optimism and grace.

Yesterday, I couldn’t find my iPhone charger,

and I knew,

I just knew that you had borrowed it.

You must have brought it with you to school.

And I will never find it again.

Because today . . .

today . . .

You’re dead.

And the house is quiet.

And there are no books, retainers, note cards, ipods, noises of any sort that would allow me to believe,

that any minute now,

you will come walking through those doors.

Since for as long as I can remember, I have loved you. I have taught you, I have hurt you, I have complimented and harangued you.

I have seen you in weakness.

I have seen you in strength.

I have sheltered you and thrown you to the wolves.

All of it done, so that I may one day see, what this great man before me, has to accomplish in the world.

But you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And any dreams that I may have had for your life,

have been swept away.

Your brother lies on your bed now.

Breathing in the scent of you.

Hoping to god that Santa will bring his brother back for Christmas.

“But its only April.” I tell him.

“I can wait” he says.

“I can wait.”

The Back Numbers

Dad?

Hmm?

You've got a lot of songs in you tonight.

Joann laughs.

There's a new song title for you.

Or at least a new blog topic.

And he was right. I had a lot of songs in me that night.

We used to have this routine following dinner. Joann would ease her way into the kitchen to start cleaning up the mess I made while cooking. I would ease my way to the couch, place the guitar on my lap and play. Calvin would run and get any one of the number of guitars he had laying about his room and we would play together until it was time to take a bath. It was a good routine, but like all good habits, this one broke under the stress of indifference. Music was left on the sidelines while video games and trashy paperback novels took its place. Netflix on demand didn't help either.

But last night was special.

Special because I had an idea.

Not a new idea. Just an idea that was starting to blossom.

But in order to fully appreciate the idea, we need to go back a few years.

Oh, lets say, a rainy winters day sometime in the late 1800s.

The scene: a library.

Our protagonist: Mark Twain.

The subject: Old Newspaper articles.

While trapped in the library on a rainy winters day, our protagonist sits in a quiet corner of some fancy library leafing through fifty year old newspapers when his genius is struck by the kind of lightening bolt that strikes genius hard.

Following some nasty business with his publishing partners, our protagonist has decided to invest his money in the only sure thing he knows. Namely, himself. In doing so he has decided to take on the mantel of publisher and weed the sticky fingered middle man out of the equation.

But in order to do it right, he has to some research.

Hence the library on a rainy winters day.

Hence ye ole newspapers.

And while leafing through stories on yellowed parchment, he discovers how fascinating it can be to read history in its present voice. Not just some scholarly write up of the past, but the telling of the tale through the urgency of those writers who are living the moment.

See the chief complication of magazines in that or any other era is how to get the readership to read from cover to cover. Readers want the sensational story, the weapons of mass destruction. And what could be more tantalizing in a voyeuristic age than sensational stories back to back with the guilt free knowledge of the future.

Notice how I referred to that time as a voyeuristic age? Well, every age is voyeuristic. And if you don't believe that, then you probably think porn was invented by the internet.

Which it wasn't.

Images of naked ladies predate written language.

You just don't see that side of the wall during the documentaries of french caves.

Anyhoo,

With idea in mind, our protagonist proceeded to name the thing.

He was to call his magazine "The Back Numbers" and it was to be filled with nothing but sensational stories. And would be read cover to cover. And it wouldn't even need writers or an editor. That part had been done. It was brilliant. It would work. But even our protagonist, with all his superstardom powers, couldn't get that humpty dumpty back together. And then the rain stopped.

Flash forward 100 years to 1991.

I was fourteen going on fifteen.

And had written my first song.

It was just a little guitar instrumental, but it had a beginning a middle and an end, and I was proud of it.

In the years that followed, I would write a few songs here and there, sometimes maybe three or four a year. After high school, I began writing in earnest so my little band could play stuff. It was the grunge era, but me and the boys were trapped in our classic rock roots, and having cursory knowledge of musical theory, we hated non-harmonic tones just for the sake of non-harmonic tones. We did own a lot of plaid shirts. And didn't wash our hair. And smoked a lot of pot. But we were more buddies than a real band. And we had seen Spinal Tap enough to know that drummers die in spectacular ways and we were too polite and socially conscience to allow that to happen to any of our friends.

It was during this era I wrote a song called "A Lot of Things" after a particularly embarrassing breakup.

It was the first song I ever wrote that other people seemed to like.

Flash forward fifteen years.

Joann is in the kitchen and I'm on the couch noodling on the 12 string. For giggles I start to play "A Lot of Things"

Crazy how I could still remember all the chord changes and lyrics. I must have played that song so much in the nineties that it had imprinted on my DNA.

What song was that? She asked.

Just a stupid tune from my teenage years. I replied.

I really like that.

Kay.

Later that week, during a show, I decided to try the song out again. I, of course, prefaced the performance by saying that his was a throw back to my early years, and to not take it too seriously.

I really like that song. My best friend said to my wife. He should record that.

And the sudden interest in a stupid old song of mine sparked an idea for the distant future.

Side note: When I day dream, I dream in four tenses. The past, the future, the distant future, and death. My mind is seldom in the present.

But the idea occurred to me that once I am finished with this project, maybe a fun follow up project would be to scour through the weather beaten gems of my past and recreate them with my more wizened ear.

I'll call the album "The Back Numbers"

Patent pending.

So yesterday with the wife taking a nap, Calvin fighting ninjas with his light-sabor, the eighteen year old adrift in the social networking ether, and me with no desire to be productive but needing something to do, I began to scour.

A box of old tapes. An ancient cassette recorder plugged into the computer. A hot cup of tea proceeding a couple of vodka tonics, I began the digital remastering of my past.

And now I believe in God.

With a capital G.

Out of more than thirty recordings of various songs and arrangements, there was not a single hint of the songwriter I would one day become.

At best the songs were derivative. At worst they were outright plaguerisms. My eighteen year old voice was harder to listen to than the eighteen year old voice bellowing Christina Agulara in my present day kitchen.

Oh sure, there were some fun moments. They way Aaron and I experimented with harmony. Jon's guitar solos. And it brings me a certain amount of joy to remember the promise of those moments. I can still see every recording session. Every performance and every painstaking note that we would comb through. My old man teaching me how to write a lead sheet, showing me how to use equipment, sitting on a stool and believing in me.

But here's why I believe in God now:

Had I heard then, what I hear now, I never would have continued.

I would have donated my guitar to the nearest homeless shelter and taken the road most traveled. Never would I have come here, to this moment. I would not be who I am, and the last fifteen years would not have had their chance to mark me as they did.

That is some divine intervention that is.

Or maybe it wasn't god. Maybe it was fate. But that's just another word for god. Or maybe it is just a genetic predetermination that's keeps my closeted CPA boxed and buried beneath old clothes.

Either way, just like Twain's genius idea never made it to print, my sorta interesting idea will never make it beyond an iTune's playlist.

And maybe I should be a little more forgiving of my own eighteen year old son, as my dad was to his. Because there is a lot of life for him to live between then and now. And maybe there is a sparkle of who he is to become in that obnoxious coat of many colors that we all seem to twirl at that age and my eyes are too dull to see it.

Hell,

maybe Calvin could be a ninja jedi after all.

iPad, Therefore . . .

Talked with a man today.

The man had been to the mall.

He had been to the mall to see the lines for the new iPad 2.

He asked the guy standing at the front of the line how long he had been there.

Since 4 O'clock yesterday.

The other man said.

That was 24 hours in line.

Waiting for a new toy.

I once stood in line for six hours for Rolling Stones tickets.

But we were right next to the beach.

And I spent more time hitting on girls with the possibility of Stones tickets than I did actually standing in line.

There were no takers.

Didn't have quite the social skills than as I do now.

Course I had better abdominal muscles. But his was the grunge era.

Abdominal muscles meant nothing.

Couldn't get laid in the nineties unless you wore plaid and could prove that you hadn't showered.

I liked showers.

I was not meant for the grunge age.

I ended up having to work the night of the Stones concert and only got to see the last half of the show.

Good show.

At least the last half was.

But it wasn't worth 24 hours of standing in line.

At a mall.

In Roseville.

Abdominal muscles or not.

The man and I had a good laugh.

But he was old.

And had to go home.

And I was left.

Sort of wishing I had been that guy.

The Guy who has 24 hours. And could justify spending them waiting in line for a new toy.

But the fact remains.

I don't need a new toy.

Or, more aptly put, I can't justify the need for a new toy.

See, I don't deny myself things. But if I want something I have to justify the need for it.

I wanted a mandolin.

Just to have another instrument to play with.

But really . . .

I have two twelve strings.

And three capos.

No need for a mandolin.

No matter that fact that I want one.

I don't need one.

and that makes all the difference.

So what could an iPad do for me that the iPhone cannot?

A whole lotta nothing.

But bigger.

And then I found out that the iPad 2 can run an eight track Garageband.

If I was eighteen, and I needed an 8 track, I could easily justify an iPad.

In fact when I was that age I spent far more on a digital 8 track than what the iPad is going for, so in fact, all I need to do in order to get myself an iPad2 is to pretend I'm 18 again.

But I can't.

My wife won't let me.

She thinks I'm much hotter in my thirties than I was when I was eighteen.

Tough to argue with that.

I think she's hotter too,

but she'll have none of that.

So no iPad 2 for me.

Which is okay.

for now.

Get Connected Wirelessly

So my last bit of writing I tried something different. I tried blogging directly from my iphone.

Which was great.

Except that it wasn't totally awesome.

It wasn't totally awesome because after about thirteen minutes I had only written about two paragraphs and my thumbs were starting to tire. I haven't developed the phalangial fortitude I would need in order to write an entire essay.

For this I blame history for not speeding technology fast enough for me to spend my youth texting from tiny little digital keyboards. I am also betrayed by the nail on my left thumb which I keep slightly longer than my right in order to pluck the bass strings on my guitar. I also blame my parents for investing their genetic material in a man with short stubby thumbs. I'm thinking of blaming the labor unions too. Somehow they are responsible for the complication of my latest whim, because the muslims are too easy a target.

So, this week I've been mulling over different technical solutions to a self imposed problem. Answers vary from giving up totally to investing half of taylor's college fund in a sweet new toy for my sweet fat self. But after explaining the cost of certain things to my greedy little sub-conscience, I decided to either suffer the indignities of having to walk all the way across the house to do my dirty work, or do no work at all.

Which turned out to be my 2010 plan.

And didn't go over very well.

So I could connect my iphone to my blog and now all I needed was to connect some type of writing instrument to my iphone.

Like a keyboard.

Like a wireless keyboard.

Like the wireless keyboard I am now using to write this blog.

How exciting to be able to work anyway I want from wherever I am. How lovely that I didn't have to rationalize an expensive new piece of equipment.

How depressingly sad to be a PC user.

Taylor just crept over and showed me that I can control the music from my iPhone from my wireless keyboard. I can dim the screen or brighten it. I can put the phone on sleep mode and reactivate it by touching any key. I can play, pause, fast forward, and rewind. I can raise the volume, lower the volume and mute.

Mute dude. Mute.

There's a button on the keyboard that looks like a speedometer. I press it. It does nothing.

Could be an altimeter and I'm too close to sea level to get a reading.

There are two blank buttons. F5 and F6. I doubt that by pressing them I will remotely detonate an improvised explosive device somewhere in the world, but I'm afraid to touch them all the same.

There is both an escape button, and an eject button. There is no practical application for these buttons while phone blogging, but they're nice to have for metaphoric purposes.

Anyway, now that I am fully plugged into the digital universe, I think its time to go outside and light something on fire.

I am a boy after all.

An Elegant Blogosphere

All I want is a quick solution to a universal how problem.

How do I do all the things that I want to do at the exact time and place that I want to do them?

More specifically, how can I write this blog whenever and wherever I want without the systematic problems such as fighting over computer usage rights from my stay at home step child, while simultaneously being available to defeat the level demon for my precocious but mildly inept video game playing five year old, or to just write without having to don a sweater in the meat locker of my garage based studio?

There is the simple and obvious answer of course.

Tell the world to stick it.

Be a total ass and demand that everything just get the hell out of my way. And put some socks on my feet.

But why assert my authoritah when technology can offer me an alternative?

Right now I am conducting this blog from the comfort of my couch with only my thumbs.

Cause it is now possible to blog from the iPhone.

And now I know I have to clip my nails.

I can now compose a short essay from wherever I am and whenever I want.

My wife just threw an Angry Bird toy at me.

And the Oscars are on.

Calvin needs me to fix his sword.

Maybe I should go the opposite direction and get a note pad.

A yellow one.

When the World Explodes

Dad.

What?

Dad?

What?

I'm talking to you . . .

What?

Will be be babies again after the world explodes?

Some people think so.

Will you make me a ninja axe?

I'll tell you what. I'll make you a ninja axe after you take a little nap.

Noooo. I don't take naps anymore. I don't like them. I like video games and toys and presents and sex.

What did you say? . . . take the lollipop out of your mouth. What did you say?

Sets.

What do you mean by sets?

Like the monster truck sets with the racing track.

Oh. Okay. I'll tell you what. I'm gonna take a nap and if you're really quiet, I'll make you a ninja axe when I get up.

So I can play video games and if they get too hard, I'll play something else.

Good call. Do you need something to eat or drink before I go take a nap?

No.

Okay.

I wanted Calvin to take a nap this afternoon cause he's been sick with what ever new virus is running around. Joann got it. Taylor got it. And it skipped me this time because it always skips someone in this house and the universe is insisting that I have shit to do.

So as I was laying there thinking about how I was going to make a ninja axe and then it occurred to me that I can't keep throwing softball answers to Calvin's questions of mortality forever. Actually, I can, and I probably will, but sometimes it would almost be worth it to have a religion that I could point to and say "Son, the answers to your questions are in this book."

"But dad" he would say. "This is a cooking book."

"That's right son" I would say. "Now turn the next page and let me show you how to julienne carrots."

It should be that easy. We have food, shelter, and Star Wars for the Wii. That should be all.

But it isn't.

And this question of when the world explodes is something he goes to sleep at night with. I think he sometimes uses video games and various home made weaponry in order to silence this nagging question of what lays beyond the here and now. He's making the painful steps beyond self awareness and into the great unknown and it fills his heart with dread.

And I sort of refuse to "Tooth Fairy" my way out of this one. And he'll forever be rejecting the fact that I don't know what happens when the world explodes, because I'm Dad, and I must be keeping something from him.

Maybe I should just tell him what I hope.

The when the world explodes. . .

there will be peace.

And I don't mean the black nothingness of the infinite sleep, I mean the fully conscience, reflective peace. All the good moments of our lives displayed before us. Stretching out into infinity. And that the whole purpose of life is to fill that infinity with as many loving and wonderful moments as we can. I wonder if he'll accept that as an answer.

Probably not.

Either way.

I still have a ninja axe to grind.

I guess this is goodnight.

The acting program that I graduated from in 1999 has been canceled.

Not much of a shocker.

Art costs serious dough, and the funny thing about intangibles is that they're . . . well . . . intangible. And when the bean counters finish their tallies it becomes obvious that they're gonna have to lose the foot to save the leg.

And I continue on with this metaphor by stating that you clearly can't walk without a foot, but in truth, you can hobble quite well until you can afford the surgery to reattach a new foot.

And their is always going be people waiting to give you a new foot.

Foot salesman are everywhere.

All they need is a barn.

Or something like that.

And my capitalist soul isn't quite ready to wax poetic on the need for arts education. In fact, live theatre is clearly a subsidiary front for terrorist organizations. What is the ascot scene in "My Fair Lady" if not a metaphor for the barbarian hordes crumbling the syncopated towers of American greed and elitism? What is "Rent" if not a thinly veiled shot at the small business owner? And Jennifer Lopez on American Idol is yet another example of a latino taking jobs away from hard working class Americans.

Or something like that.

Did I mention that the whole place was filled with homosexuals? Some of who don't even vote.

So to hell with your arts programs, your communist Chekov, your interracial Othello, your pornographic Fosse, and your unchristian jazz hands. To hell with your song and dance routines and your vision of a multimillionaire being taught humanistic lessons from a red headed orphan who is clearly both a drunk and a liar.

To hell with all of it.

Then my little intangible walks into the studio and sits on my lap. It's almost noon but he's still in his jammies because there was no school today and he's holding up his stuffed dinosaur which he makes me kiss before silently running out of the room.

He knows to be quiet while Daddy is writing, but he periodically needs a little love.

As do we all.

You see, in the fall of 1997, my first year in ATP, I met a set designer during a production meeting for a show I was desperate to be cast in. We both connected to the material and formed a bond because of it. Suffice it to say, I was cast and my arts education began in earnest on opening night. A year went by, I honed the craft, I made friends, I made enemies, I delighted some, infuriated most, and took the first of many awkward steps into manhood.

That year, the winter of 1998, I was helping to demolish the set of one of my favorite shows ever when that set designer walked in and looked at me with surprise.

"You've got long hair and a scraggly beard."

"I do."

"Keep it."

"Kay."

I didn't know it then, but that set designer saw something in my bohemian style that gave him an idea.

Six months later he called me out to San Jose to audition for a show.

During that audition, I met and fell wildly in love with a curly haired goddess.

She married me four years later.

And my little intangible was born two years after that.

I never became actor.

I stopped pursuing theatre six months after graduation. There were many reasons, but the biggest was because I had lost my way. Somewhere amidst the chaos and confusion, I had become an insufferable prick instead of a dedicated artist. I had found a voice and I didn't like it one bit. So I made the first foundational step of my manhood and walked away.

But I didn't leave empty handed. I had proven myself. I had learned to mesmerize an audience with my voice. I had learned separate confidence from arrogance. I had learned how to lead and how to nurture. I had learned how to empathize with anyone once given a few lines of dialog and a little body language.

I could go on and on pointing out every aspect of my professional and artistic lives that was either discovered or honed within those walls, but its sufficient to say that those two years were essential to the man I've grown up to be.

And my little intangible.

I guess he owes you a life.

And I promise to get him ready for when the barn is available again.

Goodnight.