Things I've Learned in College Part 11

- Isaac Asimov quotes from episodes of Mad Men apparently go a long way: "We are flawed because we want so much more yet we are ruined because we get these things and wish for what we had."

(I've had this quote repeated to me at least five times.)

-A class like "Politics of Inequality" will always consequently suffer from a handful of self-masturbatory fart-sniffer.

-In the year 2010, I find it odd that the term "ghetto" is still an acceptable phrase.  I heard three people use this term in the above mentioned class, and I almost raised my hand to contribute to this discussion (partially because I didn't really know what my white privilege-y ass, and partially due to the fact that I had relatives that actually suffered through real life ghettos).

-But then again, I thought it would be better of me to write down snarky comments and observations in the margins of my class notes instead.

-Self awareness: What I really learned in college was how to multitask paying attention and writing notes for my blog during class.  This blog will self destruct in five seconds.

Vinyl Recommendations

What I did on my summer vacation. 

By Mark Nowak

This summer I bought a shit load of records. 

(these are my favorites that I found)

Honerable Mention: Queen A Night At The Opera

10. Janis Joplin Pearl

9. Electric Light Orchestra A New World Record

ELO will continue to be the best rock and roll group ever. EVER.

8. The New Pornographers Twin Cinema

My favorite indie pop album that came out of the last decade.

7. Elton John Honky Chateau

After moving into my new apartment (which my roommate and I fell in love with) we immediately named the place "The Honky Chateau".  After realizing this I went back to the record store I came from days earlier and purchased this album.

6. Cat Stevens Tea for the Tillerman

(these next 5 actually jolted me when I saw them)

5. Santana Abraxas

This album is cliched by many stoners.  But it really is one of the best pieces of progressive rock.  So fluid and the latin influence of percussion is the cherry on top.

4. The Beatles Revolver

I can't believe I actually found this, and I can't believe I actually found this for under $10.

3. Merle Haggard Mama Tried

With the limited availability of classic country on vinyl, I was shocked to see this.  This is truly the most twangy the Bakersfield sound gets, even if the top of the album just has a random picture of a disappointed mother.

2. Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison

When I found this I made eye contact with Cash's pointing black ones, I immediately noticed how it cost as much as the three I was going to buy, proceeded to put away my other records, and went up to the counter with just this album.  

1. Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon

I'm pretty sure the entire reason I started collecting records was to eventually find this album, probably in my late 30s, and declare it to be the happiest day of my life.  I found this the week after I found the Cash.  It was the happiest two consecutive weekends of my life.

Country Music Part IV: The Triumph

Two weeks ago I went home.  My house had been in a disarray, I had recently snapped very abruptly out of a relationship that I still hadn't gotten over (although I thought I was doing really well), my job was new, my life – essentially, and to spare the boring details – had been changed for a shocking new/different appeal("better", I suppose is another adjective I could use, but I don't like to see things as better or worse than before).  I went home not really sure what to expect. 

I should back up quickly and say that the main reason I went home was my friend (pictured above on the left, his name is Matt) came home after his third year in the Marines.  When I arrived that Friday night, no one was home yet.  In fact, I didn't feel like it either.  A really wise person once told me that "Home is where your family is".  Unfortunately for me "family" was three individuals who in several days would begin separating.  And although this was a few days away, I had been aware of the situation for several years, and recently predicted the pinnacle (i.e. divorce) would slowly begin to take place

… just perhaps not days away. 

However the divorce in this story was not really my point, despite the occasional metaphoric sting that hits me square between the eyes (which I'll go back to later).  My point was the triumph.

When Matt came home that weekend he threw a huge party.  I, publicly declaring for the first time in several months, would get really really really fucking drunk and celebrate.  A huge barbeque was thrown in Matt's parents' backyard. A lot of people I hadn't seen since high school appeared out of thin air.  I learned how to sip whiskey.  I continuously would bear hug my old friends and attempt to maintain a non-slurred speech with adults in their 40s about how college is going.  I was shoveled into the back of a truck to sleep it off at another location.

For the rest of that week I drank like it was my freshman year, which at 21, had been accomplished enough times to realize that drinking in excess began to look less like the early stages of 80s hair metal and more like A Decade Under the Influence (look it up god dammit, it's probably the best analogy I make in this entire essay series).  But I continued on this path for many days, occasionally sobering up for a day and hitting it again for a couple more nights in a row.

..and the things that we did mirrored almost exactly what would have happened four years ago.  On the Forth of July we drank semi-cold Keystone Light and lit roman candles off with the embers of cheap cigars and chased each other around the yard with them while trying to balance our beers and cigars.

Matt and I stayed up very late that night (4:00 AM) talking about all the things we've felt and thought about our lives.  We both came to a great conclusion that we would make fantastic single fathers (my experience based off of my recent lack of faith in monogamy and the father/son dynamic shared by the Michael and George Michael in "Arrested Development", and his being a rugged individualism only experienced by a man who finished a tour in Iraq and was possibly leaving very quickly for Afghanistan).  We both saw ourselves having daughters. 

We were also the only two there that night.   Most of our friends had taken off by 1:00 and we were left there.  I told him about the blog I began writing a couple years ago and how I was trying to find a point to my discussion of country music, and how fucking chaotic the last year has been trying to keep a relationship solvent while not knowing how to deal with myself, how I let smoking, drinking, and overall debauchery go from a humorous narrative on life to my only resource.  He told me equally personal shit, but it would inappropriate to let it be known here.

The status of all of my friends as of July 10, 2010, when I left:

Matt:  Recently left for North Carolina where he will be stationed until he is deployed for Afghanistan in later part of this year.  Matt is so simple he appears to be complex beyond my cognitions.  His favorite adverb is "frickin'".  We've related quite well because his outlook on the Marines features a lot the same characteristics I feel about the incredibly liberal college I attend.

Quinn:  Perhaps my closest friend growing up, Quinn was unable to return home for this occasion as he recently started an internship in East Lansing, Michigan.  He was very upset that he couldn't make it home, and we neglected to Skype him the entire time we were all home.  He appears to be puzzled with his life.  Even though it's been six month seen I've heard from him (negating two phone calls), it's very clearly his main feature right now.

Kevin:  The oldest of the group, Kevin finally got his shit together last summer and transferred from a community college in Vancouver, Washington to Eastern Washington University where intends on becoming a cop.  He is perhaps the most stoic of the group.  He has morphed into an incredibly humble and mature person, oftentimes throwing me off with his personality.

Vance:  Quinn's brother and perhaps the most volatile member of the group.  He use to be a sex hound but in the last year has been dating a girl who both holds him down and drives us crazy.  It's tough to call her a bitch because she attempts to be so aggressively nice to us that we momentarily forget that she has turned him into something completely domesticated.  Not the "we miss him fucking everything that moves", but more so his free spirit, which has become a caged animal.

The week progressed like the aforementioned.  However we could tell something was off, or at least I did (sidenote: when I use the term "off" I usually just mean "different"). 

In my time shared with three of the four original gang (and one phone call to Quinn), they all displayed the original mechanisms of functionality that they, to me, were world famous for in the summer of 2007.

Coincidentally during the time I was home, my father and mother decided to separate (the politics of which, were relentless and incredibly aggravating).  A day later my grandfather was seriously hospitalized.  It was the first time I saw my dad officially uncertain about the direction of his life and the thousandth time I saw my mom aggravated (the difference this time was A. she didn't know where to go post-separation, and B. Her father was (unknown to us at the time) a month away from passing away).  I, like I was planning on anyways, decided to drive to my boys and start drinking heavily.

The drive there I decided that, maybe, it was time to lose my shit.  It's like when you wake up from drinking just too much enough that you might need to puke it, because you can keep moving to start your day, you just might need to empty the sickness.  That sickness that's just subtle enough to cloud things up or clear it out (at least until you finally getting around to fixing it).  I put Wilco on and started driving.  After the first initial thumps and progressions the beats were working like a bottle of ipecac.  I could feel the emotional vomit starting to swell in my eyes.  I brake and turn to the right into a church parking lot, where this will be the place I unload my feelings into a McDonald's napkin from the glove compartment.  I, at the time, was just glad I didn't have to demonstrate this ritual in front of anyone. I had the cloak of an abandoned parking lot and loud LOUD music.  As I was tapping my head on my steering wheel and bawling, I had a moment where I couldn't be quite sure what I was crying about.  At the time I knew that everyone deals with this type of shit all of the time.  To be put in this is much like everyone else these days.  Why did I need to cry? It was out of necessity.  Of course this shit happens, and yes I was kind of broken up about it, but I needed to puke it up, and this was the place to do it.

I landed sideways into the backyard I was too familiar with, and Kevin became a voice of reason.  I pulled him aside after stealing a cigarette from Matt and a beer to shove in my back jean pocket and divulged everything of the last two days (which, I came later to realize was my abandonment of this town). He told me, essentially, everything I needed to hear.

I spent the night driving to a bar in Hazel Dell, and when I got home, I elected to stay at my friend's house at 3:00 AM.  I woke up and slinked out of their house to arrive to something that was essentially pure chaos. 

The last days hold no real relevance, but this probably requires more explanation than anything else:

In this time between departing from all my friends I bought my first pack of cigarettes (after quitting) on a Saturday night in town.  For some reason I had always chosen my secret cigarette smoking hideout to be the parking lot of the Albertsons.  Fast moving road, a lot of darkness, safe.  It's where I've gone before.  During this time I had women texting me for a quick local booty call before I left the town once again (and hopefully for good).  I was so tired of my routine.  Every time I had come home (aside from the debauchery) I had a goal to visit with my family, play with my dog, say hello to my friend's parents, and get physical with someone from high school who still thought I was interesting.  My phone vibrates and I already know what's happening.  "Come out with us" it reads.  I decide to think on it, because I know where it's going, and I don’t really know if I'm really interested at all.  I drag on my cigarette and feel the warm small town air brush past my arms and face.  It's small town air.  Nothing can descibe its innocence.  You drive through it at night and you feel baptized.  It leaves you comfortable.  When I feel that breeze blow past me I distantly hear The Shins as I am driving over to Quinn's house after track practice in 2005. I smell cans of mint flavored Skoal as Matt insists that a pouch of chew is better than chewing straight tobacco in 2006.

I get back into my car and drive home. I go to bed.

The next morning was how to expect it.  My house is full of people who don't understand each other, and to a certain extent, weren't really interested in trying.  Everyone knew what they had done, and I really didn't feel like trying either.  I gave everyone a hug, and nodded my head to indicate that this would be the last fucking time I acknowledged cohesion.  The family obliged.

Before I officially headed toward the freeway home, I promised Matt and Kevin I would say goodbye before I left.  Because Matt lived closest I visited him first.  Like the original 2007 edition copy of Matt, he had spent the night drinking beer and rummaging through rural Washington (probably) trying to get laid.  I pulled into his driveway in my wayferer sunglasses, topsiders, and v-neck t-shirt as he comes to shake my had and greet me in his cartharts , TAPOUT t-shirt, and calf-high boots.  We stand in his driveway in the midday sun about what our plans are.  I told him I was going back to work and he told me he was getting stationed on the East Coast, how he was going to drive his truck across the country to get there. 

But I brought up the country music again, and to give me an idea about what's "good" now.  He was surprisingly right about it.  It made me realize that country music (real real) country music works in the same way the most independent labels here work, but in Nashville, and how the interesting and evocative lyrics do come out all of the time, but contemporary country to real country is like Good Charlotte to Sufjan Stevens.

But it really didn’t fucking matter.  I had already gotten my point to this whole fucking thing… and so to explain what the fuck even matters and how country music pulls this together is, well it doesn't matter.  The nostalgia was there but I didn't hear any Randy Travis while I was hanging out with my mom.  I didn't hear Garth Brooks blaring in the living room.  I found my country music in the firepits of my friends' backyards.  I heard hicks playing beer pong in the garages.  I heard my friends try and fuck with me to admit say that I like Keith Urban.

This was the triumph.

My youthful nostalgia of family and love and all of that came from nowhere.  But my friends, despite my thought that things would not come together, did.  They were different, but like a CD you find 5 years later in your closet, it provides you what you remember, and more importantly, what you need, even if you don't recognize the handwriting on the disk or the new beards/haircuts or the crazy girlfriends. 

I went to visit Kevin.  He was good to see, because after my point had come across, he only validated things further.  We had equally as good and supportive conversations, insisting that we visit each other over the summer (if we can pull ourselves away) like all promises we broke that one too, but we knew it, and it didn't make us less like friends.  I got in my car. I went home.

I sometimes do like Keith Urban.

Country Music Part III: Nostalgia

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Country Music Part II: The Beach and Hypermasculinity

The reason I took this long to finish off the second part: I went home for a week.  I spent my time with those people that offered that nostalgic outlook in the first place. At times we even divulged our thoughts on identity in the context of small town life. 

The Beach:

Jimmy Buffet arrived again.  Somewhere out of nowhere while I was still in high school, and his aura was felt in the scene. 

Now the baffling thing was at this time the transition I thought was going to come from elsewhere.  Big N Rich hit the market with "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy" which came off with more grit than most.  I remember at one point shortly after the song came out I was listening with an attractive girl in a Honda Civic and I said "this is going to be where country takes off again."  I was wrong, I was so dead fucking wrong.

Keith Urban and Kenny Chesney was where it was going.  Australians and assholes was going to be where it was going.

Now I'll not throw too many stones.  During my youth I indulged in pooka shell necklaces.  I thought them to be perfect to assimilate my rebellious attitude.  However, grown country musicans were wearing them with straw cowboy hats… and the beach.

Kenny Chesney went way out of left field and drove the market towards the relaxing beach mentality.  Coming up with shit like "When the Sun Goes Down" and "Beer In Mexico"

It's like they understood that the "rural" culture now afforded boats and water skis.

…now at the same time the market was going for really really fucking stupid songs like "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy".  Chesney hit this apex of crap that, while I was praying the dawning of country's second coming, made me realize that this is what it will be, a dichotomy of the beach and the shit.

Keith Urban is a transition of another part of the genre.  He was much less complicated, although I did like him.  First off, he's Australian, and while his music was compelling and easy to ride along with, lack a lot of genuine character.  This made him a great character for the mainstream as he didn't really try to hard to find an occasional guitar solo and an easy understanding of his lyrics, and while he was conveying his message, it was so neutral that it was easy to assimilate.

Hypermasculinity:

Toby Keith is much like myself, often misinformed and easily misunderstood to be a douchebag.  Toby Keith, while hit his high bar fucking HIGH has the misfortune of aquainting himself with other douchebags.

During 9-11 Toby Keith released a single "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue".  It was incredibly appropriate for the time.  Using lines like "Hey Uncle Sam put your name on the top of his list, and the Statue of Liberty started shaking her fist" put it as a pinnacle of nervousness turned patriotism.  To this day I still have fragments of respect for that song because it truly encapsulated the cold sweat people felt coming home from 7th grade to find out that two massive buildings have completely toppled.  Contextually, modern day sees this as something associated with the Bush administration, but at the time it was all but too fitting and completely on its own.  I've even hypothesized that popular culture like this song actually influenced the Bush administration, rather than the other way around.

Where it goes wrong is much like the way Merle Haggard followed up "Okie From Muskogee" with "Fightin' Side of Me".  It was, to put it poorly, like society unanimously was saying "we get it already."  To the country music establishment, which was completely ass-backwards, this was the cash for gold exchange they were looking for. 

Now remember the douchebag friends I was telling you about?  Yeah, that's Trace Adkins. Famous, among other things, for songs like "Ladies Love Country Boys", "You're Gonna Miss This", and "(This Ain't) No Thinkin' Thing", this is where that hypermasculinity comes into effect.  Well you know what, how about I just show you:

In recent years he's gone onto market himself more than his music, but his form of redneckery has made him a bit of evil genius.  He is a giant redneck with a ponytail and he will destroy you.  He is what the country empire eventually caved to, and with good practice.  My mom and sister recently saw both Adkins and Toby Keith in concert and they told me that he actually had Ford trucks on stage to work in as advertising during the show.  The Dixie Chicks had lost and the good ole boys had one, even if they were scrawny and Australian.

Tomorrow:

The Triumph of Brotherhood and Nostalgia

Uncle Norm

There are few people in this world that I really find to be truly genuine.  I mean in a way that cannot be more perfectly refined.  This is tough to find because you need to be able to define the person over the course of their lifetime. 

The most pure form of this is a relative named Uncle Norm.  He is a great-uncle on my mother's side whom has resided in Santa Barbara, California for the vast majority of his life.  Negating his time at an art institute in Los Angeles, his service in the Army Air Corps during World War II in New Mexico, and the various retirement travels across the country with his now deceased wife, the man has rarely left this town.  He's the kind of man who is recognized and greeted with a handshake whenever he takes us out to dinner by the owner of the establishment.  He speaks in a soft deliberate manner.  He shares that endearing quality most old men share of having a slight conservative tint and a preference of interrupting your insight on a topic to explain either another side tangent discussion or an (kind of) amusing story (likely involving a domesticated animal).  It really is a one-sided conversation every time, but it's the only time you wouldn't be annoyed by it.  He just really wants to show that he cares. 

His life revolves around quiet.  The only thing that interrupts this silence in the six years since his wife passed away is the new arrival of a constantly running oxygen tank generator that runs much like an air compressor would (and sounds equally as obnoxious).  Even as I type this I'm watching him watch the Dodgers play, and he has deliberately chosen to mute the television in exchange for subtitles.

-He makes a casual old man comment asserting that with all the money that Manny Ramirez makes, he could afford himself a "decent" haircut (as most men over 80 believe that dreadlocks are neither stylish nor respectable).  I (despite my disposition that dreadlocks are both disgusting and sophomoric, mostly because I see mostly white college students wearing them) counterpoint politely in saying that it probably costs a lot of money to maintain such a fashion statement (although with Ramirez's ability, I would imagine it might impede his ability to perform on the field).  He kind of ignores me, or didn't hear me.  I suspect he uses his hearing aide to ignore people who disagree with him or don't find him funny.-

The worst thing about Uncle Norm is how quickly I can have an existential crisis when I have a conversation with this man.  In the last couple of years he has developed an increasingly severe case of pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that will eventually take him to the end.  He is the brother of my grandfather who died a week ago, and he carries with him oxygen that keeps him from going into insane coughing fits that could, essentially, collapse his lungs.  He shows the signs of a man who was once incredibly mobile, but now is leashed to the top story of his beautiful home (built in the 1940s for $11,000, which is now estimated, due to it's property value and amazing view, to be easily in the million dollar range).

His home carries many photographs of him and his wife in their later years.  In fact, the greater amount of photographs in his home are of him and his wife.

He took us to a restaurant tonight as I watched him eat his lampchops and merlot very quietly.  Hearing the occasional "pssst" breaking in intervals to shoot oxygen into his nostrils.  It was the most intense silence I've felt in a long time.

When I was 9 years old I had a very intense existential crisis.  Not in a philosophical way, but in the summer of 1997 I very abruptly realized that I will die.  It would not be something that I could control, and it could, quite literally, happen at any time.  I suspect it might have had something to do with the media coverage that year the followed the release of the film Armageddon.

Watching Uncle Norm put this fear back into my body.  A nervous hot rushing wave of mortality that feels like a borderline panic attack.  Only today I realized that it isn't necessarily the fact that I would die that scared the living shit out me, but rather the idea of being that old.

Since my grandfather passed away last Friday, a mass collection of archival footage has resurfaced in the form of decades and decades of old photographs.  One specifically had "UN [Uncle Norm], 1944"  written on the back of it. It was of him dressed in a pilot's uniform in front of a small airplane.  After quickly calculating the numbers mentally, I realized that this photograph was taken when he was 21 (my age).  I looked up from this picture to see the same man in his late 80s with a plastic tube wrapped behind his ears and into his nostrils as he talks about a neighbor's dog whom he gives a treat to every time they stop by to visit.

The man has probably never harmed anyone in his life.  I'm unable to see a flawed bone in this man's body, and yet he is subjected to a life that does not seem fair in a society that expects karma.  I look at him staring intently Manny Rameriez's dreadlocks, and I can't seem to tell if he's happy or not. 

He may be hiding things so well that perhaps he is as unhappy as I suspect, but then again he may be living the life of total contentment.  Occasionally he will mention how deeply frustrated he is that he can no longer garden, but yet can never seem to speak ill of any of the cards he has been dealt.  This leaves me with a suspicion that he is one of three things:

A.            Miserable and waiting

B.            Incredibly well adjusted to life

C.              Purely an optimistic character

After coming home to stare at the Santa Barbara sunset and work off the buzz I obtained at the restaurant we ate at, my mother very sadly says "I just really wish Uncle Norm could live forever."  He is a man tortured by the involuntary reactions of his own body, and yet I can't seem to tell whether the look of malaise he wears during commercial breaks is really that or him just trying to decipher the difference between the Cadillac and Buick commercials (a topic he has many opinions on, although we both agree they are all essentially the same 30 seconds). 

To jump into this existential discussion with him regarding happiness in the bottom of the 7th inning of the game is ill-advised as he is clearly going to be too tired to answer cohesively, but I also fear that I may create a tear in time and space if I actually knew the question to the paradox that I have been fearing since the 3rd grade.

So I let Uncle Norm live his life, and I will give him a very big hug as a it may be the last time I do when I leave here in the morning, waiving furiously at him from the rolled-down window of our rented Camry.