Must Love to Travel
Online dating is such a pain in the ass. Sometimes I wonder if it’s even more annoying than the real thing, though since I’ve never really dated all that much I wouldn’t know. I’m sure you’re all shocked by that revelation.
Anyway, as if it isn’t hard enough to find smokers in this Godforsaken land of health freaks, everyone out there wants to travel. I have personally seen enough of this large ball of dirt to know that I don’t like most of it, and that’s why I stay in one place. Why on earth would anyone want to leave a sunny coastal strip in California to go and visit exotic places and see exotic people? Hell, if you really want to see that kind of thing just drive to L.A. There’s all sorts of exotic down there, and it won’t even cost you plane fare to go. I can name several places where one can even get some really exotic food poisoning right here in town from some of our really exotic restaurants.
That’s not enough, though, for the modern sophisticate. I read through the goofy profiles and it seems like everyone is all ready at any moment’s notice to pack up all their junk and jet off to some hellhole or another. They list all the wild and crazy places they’ve been or would like to see, which I assume is supposed to be impressive but really just gives me a damn headache. I can only imagine loafing around one day doing my favorite thing (meaning nothing) when potential girlfriend destroys my precious tranquility with the idea of flying to Papua New Guinea for two weeks, dragging me away from my house and my stuff. Folks, there’s a reason why I live where I live. I chose it. I like it. Seeing it every day doesn’t bother me a bit, any more than eating a medium rare steak with a baked potato every night for a year would not grow tiresome. I know what I like and I stick to it. Is that boring? Yes, but I am rarely in for any unpleasant surprises.
I find the travel destinations even more odd. I can understand London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, or any old major city in a post-industrial nation. Those places have cool buildings and museums and stuff. If I had a teleporter I’d go check them out, but sitting in a metal tube for a twelve hour nic fit is not my idea of a good time. The four hours it took to get to Chicago were pretty uncomfortable, but I managed. Tripling that sounds like a very bad time. But I digress, as always. Since Western Europe now has a “been there, done that” air about it, everyone wants to go somewhere new, at least if we define new as a rare vacation spot. So I constantly see things like “I would love to go to West Africa” or “I’m about to go to Guatemala for a week!”
Eh, no thanks.
What is there to see in those places? Nature and poor people. As far as nature goes, there is
plenty of it right here in the States. We have big trees and a huge coast in California. If you like mountains, we have Colorado. 
If you’re looking for something more interesting, there’s this little place called Yellowstone. Ever heard of it? I hear it’s quite nice.
As for poor people, I’m just going to be un-p.c. and say that there is nothing cool about them. When I say poor people, I don’t mean those neighbors of mine who stack six people into a two bedroom apartment. They at least have electricity and television like civilized people, and every few weeks I even see them grilling burgers by the pool. The poor people I’m talking about are the ones who live in houses made out of old tires and dung, no teeth in the family and a life expectancy of thirty. That’s not interesting. It’s depressing. The fact that they might worship rocks and hold ceremonies presided over by a sacred goat does not reveal some mystical relation with nature, it just means that they’ve never seen the inside of a classroom or even a book. When wealthy Americans go over to places like that and pay the locals a few sheets of funny money, it isn’t honoring them or helping them out as much as it is rubbing their noses in their own poverty. The only time that poor people are really interesting is when they’re stealing your wallet.
I like to keep my ugly Americanism right here at home, where I can be unpleasant to my fellow Americans. They seem to understand it and return the favor in kind. Now that I think about it, I guess it’s no wonder I don’t have a girlfriend.
Philbrick just got his money back from Harmony.com
My brother and his fiancée live in a very happening place, with all the buzz of life going on around them and an awesome view from the apartment. Standing on the roof of the building, we could see Lake Michigan, the Tribune building and the Water Tower while all the little ant-like people milled about on the street far below. If you’re into that kind of thing, it must be a very cool way to live, and my bro and soon-to-be sis absolutely love it. In fact, standing on the roof and looking about the town, I thought that I would love to live like that as well. It was when I hit street level that I knew that I was not a city boy. 
For example, my neighbors all recognize me, but we never speak to each other. It’s like the best of both extremes: they know who I am and where I live, so it isn’t like being part of a faceless mass, but they don’t show up on my doorstep with baskets of strawberries and bother me while I’m doing homework. We know each other in a sense, but we also have our privacy. All the big chain stores are nearby, so if I want to rent a movie, buy a book, pick up groceries, or order a pizza, no problem. What am I missing out on? Well, things that I thought I liked eight years ago, like clubs and bars and live music, though we have all those things within a ten minute drive. We don’t have hipsters, because no one around here could possibly call himself hip. He’d just look ridiculous. Ummm, what else? Nothing that I can think of, really.
foreign country, but I am blessed with being utterly unimportant in the grand scheme of things. If, for example, I’m wrong about something Hemingway or Spenser wrote, no one is going to die. I’ll just look kind of dumb, and while that sucks it carries no dire consequences. So, as usual, I’m crossing my fingers and expecting the worst. That being said, I’m still pretty relieved.
junior, and how they were probably about to enter into lifelong and lucrative careers, and I couldn’t help but…well…I know that envy is an ugly word in our “I’m okay, you’re okay” society, but yes, that was about the closest feeling I had. 
Soon enough, I wound up back in jail because I had no money to pay the fines for all of this bad behavior. I’m sure a lot of unfortunate stories start this way, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but I was just a naive young stripling and had no idea of how the world really worked. Anyway, I served my jail sentence and they let me back out into the cruel world of the Imperial City in much the same condition as I was in when I was busted. I was idling around the Market District one day, since I had nothing better to do, when a strange person approached me and told me to be at a certain place in the harbor around midnight. Since I had no parents or responsible guardians, hell, since I had no childhood at all as far as I could remember, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea to go off in the wee hours of the night and hang around the harbor, so I did just that. And that’s what led me eventually to the sorry state you see me in now. 
Then one night I came across this homeless guy sleeping near the harbor. I don’t know why, but I had this strange urge, like an itch. So I bit the guy, and while I didn’t feel quite as strong afterward, I certainly felt a lot better. Moreover, I looked almost normal again and people would talk to me. That was when I began to understand what had happened and that was when I began to lose control. 
I usually showed up to the warehouse around midnight to secure one of the ancient OSHA defying paper wrapping machines (and in the hopes that I could finish the job quickly,) but the paper’s press was some old thing that the owners had apparently bought from a Cold War era Yugoslavian garage sale, so six nights out of seven it broke down. Furthermore, the illegal immigrants who worked on the press were paid by the hour and so had no incentive to see timely production, so most of the early birds like me had a lot of waiting around to do. Luckily, there was an all-night indoor newsstand a few blocks away that sold magazines, cigarettes and porn and even had a smoking lounge, so while the press workers hit the machine with hammers and swore in Spanish there was somewhere to go. 
Every week I went back to the newsstand to see if a new issue of BID was out, and every week I left with Angry Thoreauean or Carbon 14, because Ben Is Dead had no real publishing deadlines. It seems like they just published the damn issue whenever it was ready. In fact, it wasn’t until almost a year later that a new issue finally hit the newsstand, and I took it home only to find out that it was their last issue. Yes, it would be hyperbole to say that I was heartbroken, but the feeling was pretty close. Here was something awesome that had been around for ten years and I only caught the tail end of it. 
The popular trend in reading literature from previous eras (especially pre-nineteenth century) is that those societies in which the works were written are so alien to us that we cannot understand them without an insane amount of research into what the people actually thought about themselves. I’ll toe that line in the classroom and on paper, but I really think that for the most part it’s a bunch of balls. Yes, we can’t expect as much sympathy toward women in a book that is four hundred years old and the religious folks at the time are still trying to determine whether or not women have souls. In addition, while I may personally wince when a literary character is thrown from a cliff for disagreeing with political doctrine, I know that such an act is actually meant to be viewed as one of justice and not tyranny, given the historical context. However, I am a uniter and not a divider (as someone said,) so I like to look for those things that never seem to go away, no matter how much time passes. Using the last two months alone, I would like to examine a few simple truths that I have found in reading old books.
The Faerie Queene: Successful politicians are often surrounded with useless sycophants. Queen Elizabeth turned this into an art form, and every goofy boob who wanted her attention wrote poetry and letters professing undying love and devotion to her. Of course, her more reliable allies often disagreed with her and were subject to her tantrums more often than the sycophants were, but I think Liz ultimately knew the difference between the two. Edmund Spenser was one of the sycophants, as the massive six-book epic The Faerie Queene makes clear. That the queen knew that Spenser was a sycophant is obvious because she sent him off to be an administrator in a dumpy backwater known as Ireland instead of giving him a position in her court. Spenser hated Ireland and the Irish, and the feeling was mutual: an angry mob torched his house when he was on vacation. Spenser would eventually write some thinly veiled swipes at Elizabeth in his work. Lessons? 1. Power attracts sycophants like flies to shit. 2. A wise person can see the difference between a sycophant and someone who is truly loyal (and useful.) 3. We can’t all get along. Sorry. 4. Finally, a politician’s most vocal supporters may harbor some pretty nasty grudges against him or her.
The School of Venus: This is an English translation that came out around 1680 of a French book called L’Ecole des filles. It’s a dialogue between a young virgin (at first) and her slutty cousin, wherein the older cousin, Frances, tries to procure her cousin Katy for a slimy suitor named Roger. Frances tells Katy all about sex in the most graphic details, using terminology that I did not know existed back then. Katy then goes and has an affair with Roger, and Katy recounts her adventures in equally lurid detail. The two discuss numerous sexual positions, masturbation with human-sized dolls and dildos (for those who can’t afford a doll,) the beauty of hypocrisy, and the sexual practices of nuns. To make things even better, The School of Venus has pictures. The lesson here is obvious. There is something strangely democratic about porn. This particular book was sold to anyone who could find it and buy a copy and it’s easy to assume that the aristocracy would have enjoyed something like this just as much as a brewer or a ditch digger, provided that the ditch digger knew how to read (of course the pictures would have made up somewhat for a deficiency in that area.) This item was probably quite popular, even though no one actually owned a copy (wink.)
I never did finish Ultima VI, though, because even when I decided to play it seriously the game blocked the ending from me because I had been such an evil knight. Sorry. I don’t mind being the good guy if that’s how the game works, but if given a moral choice my virtual alter ego is almost always a sociopath.
I get caught frequently and have to restart from a saved game, because the guards in this game are rather ruthless and will either take the character to jail (where he loses all his stolen goods,) order him to pay a fine (and take all his stolen goods) or kill him, depending on the response I have him give when he is arrested. Even a nimble Wood Elf like Dolemite cannot outrun the police in this game, and they are nearly impossible to fight at my level. So thieving has been trial and error so far, but if it is only one fraction of the game, I suspect that this game will be full of stuff to do. This is a good thing, because the longer it takes to complete one game the less likely I am to buy another.
Perhaps I’ll write about the game at another time, but so far I’ve only put about an hour into it, so there really is not much to say. I’m getting my ass kicked by a bunch of unruly skeletons with maces and battle axes, and since I know very little about the world of role-playing games I don’t know how to increase my character’s mojo and today, well, today I’m supposed to be reading Roxana and writing this column, so this game will take some time. 
This morning, with my head slightly cooled, I started doing some research and found out just what a pain in the ass our brave new world is becoming. Apparently, a television is no longer simply a television, just as the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 are not simply video game consoles. It seems that high-definition is some sort of way of life, and it is no longer good enough that the TV just does its job. Plugging in one of these new-fangled televisions now requires a bunch of external junk that when added on to the initial price makes the whole thing ridiculously impractical for someone living on my nonexistent budget. Just as the Xbox 360 is some sort of media center with all kinds of expensive things I can add to it to make it file my taxes and do my laundry, HDTV is something that could easily take over my entire apartment. This is the problem with upgrades in technology. One would think that aside from making something that already exists cooler, it should also be easier to use. Instead, technology just becomes more and more complicated. Aside from price, until this new technology can be as easy to use as the old technology and improve upon the quality, I’m sticking with my boring old LDTV, even if it doesn’t look as cool when I’m eviscerating zombies.
In the former, I am close to the end of the game and this sort of thing should be expected, but in the latter, I am only on the second mission and I can’t even break into the stupid casino where the main action is supposed to take place. Aside from the fact that this shows just how unfit I am for the military or law enforcement (at least as a tactician,) it is also beginning to cramp my enjoyment of the games. This is especially true of Rainbow Six, in which even the first mission turned into a lousy, aggravating slog that I was more relieved to finally finish than anything else. After being killed by crouching unseen shotgun guy for the one-hundredth time I was about ready to throw the controller through the television, and even after figuring out how to kill crouching unseen shotgun guy there was a whole room full of crouching unseen machine gun guys just waiting to make my life as a virtual counter-terrorist operative miserable. After a while I begin to wonder if it would just be better to play as a rookie and enjoy the game. 
(English majors in the house, please back me up on how bloody dull this book is.) Anyway, my experience in this class is like being the newbie in some sort of hardcore tournament. While I am simply trying to get the plot of the thing down, the rest of the class is breaking down every sentence in order to duke it out over specific personal agendas. We have the guy who wants to prove that everything in the book somehow relates to the American colonies and syphilis (true story,) the woman who wants to find rape and sexual violence in everything, the woman who is obsessed with revenge since she is writing a dissertation on Hamlet, the guy who tries to use as many big words to say as little as possible, and the woman who simply disagrees with anything that anyone says. This final one sits next to me and whispers about how stupid everyone is in my ear, which is distracting in more than one way. Meanwhile, I sit in uncomfortable silence and watch my participation grade die because I can’t figure out what the hell everyone is going on about. 
When I first started reading FTTW, I noticed an interesting fixation with zombies among both the editors and contributors, and seeing as how I like zombies as much as the next well adjusted and healthy guy, the whole walking undead thing was one of the many grand oddities that kept me coming back to the site. Now I can finally give back to this wonderful community by adding my own zombie contribution. 
I am less than a third of the way through the game and I have already had to fight a gang of escaped convicts in a jeep with a heavy machine gun attached to the rear end, a psychotic clown wielding two chainsaws, an overzealous grocer armed with a shotgun and a fully tricked-out shopping cart, and a religious cult. Add to that the swarthy man and his equally swarthy sister (who chased me down in the mall on a motorcycle,) the characters that reveal that the mall was built on top of a…oh, why bother, you already know. 
My gaming life, much like my love life (when one exists) is usually intense short-term serial monogamy with the vague and unlikely possibility of a romantic flare-up after we have gone our separate ways. With this in mind, allow me to introduce my new sweetheart, 
gets to use a weapon called the Hammer of Dawn, which fires a huge laser beam from the sky and fries large enemies. There is also the Torque Bow, which fires arrows with explosive heads. Eat your heart out, Ted Nugent. Finally, the gun that is used most often is the Lancer, a really big machine gun with a fucking chainsaw attached to the end…Sorry, I had to stop typing for a moment. This attachment is very handy at times when an enemy gets too close, as Marcus can lay into a mutant with this little bayonet and spray gore all over the camera. When he or one of his AI buddies uses the chainsaw, one of them will often grunt something along the lines of, “That saved some ammo.” Yep, these guys are that cool. 
The appointed time came and I met the ex at a Mexican restaurant nearby. We ate our burritos and chatted about music, movies and other such things that people talk about when they don’t really want to talk. We were surrounded by groups of people doing the Sunday afternoon at the beach thing, chatting loudly, drinking wine and fawning over small dogs out with their owners. After we finished our burritos the waitress shuffled us out of the restaurant quickly, and we decided to go for a walk on the beach because there was really nothing else to do at that point. 
Mr. Cleland’s Book, told from the perspective of a Whore by the name of Fanny Hill, is replete with tales of the most unnatural acts, Viz. self-love, acts between two members of the same sex and other such grotesqueries that I shall not describe in detail lest I become implicit in so soiling the moral fabrique of you, my dear Reader, as the abominable Mr. Cleland has so clearly sought to do. I know that we English could not possibly imagine such deprav’d and contemptible acts as those which take place within the pages of this Book, so I suspect that Mr. Cleland is a nom de plume, either of some wanton Frenchman or an agent of the Romish Church, seeking to corrupt and undermine the principles of this fair Sceptr’d Isle. The very fact that this Mr. Cleland would stoop to speak from the voice of an English woman is all the more loathsome, for to impute this kind of ill behaviour and rude manner of speech on one of our fairer sex is to tarnish the moral nature of both our Nation and her women. 
I wrote here a few weeks ago about a protest that the Legion of Bored Students threw in order to skip class and make a bunch of noise. Well, they had another one on Saturday, probably to make room for those who wanted to protest something but actually had to be somewhere during the week. I figured that by Saturday night there would be something up on the Web regarding the whole thing, so I ran a Google News search to see if anything had been set on fire. The Google News affiliates were silent, as were the blogs (which surprised me,) but an interesting bit of news came out from a few days prior that I had completely missed. Apparently, there was a gang brawl among a bunch of junior high and high school students in what we quaintly call the “downtown” area of what is really just a big suburb, and the brawl ended with one death and one murder arrest along with the lockdown of several city blocks. 
They oughta round up all these Mexicans and send ‘em back to Tijuana. Don’t these people know that without us they’d all be speakin’ German?” Type 1 of course has no clue as to the national origins of those in question or their status as immigrants. They may be fifth generation Americans from middle-class homes, but why bother even thinking about that possibility when you are a dumb, ignorant prick? 
Type 4: The Blamed: “I am a parent! I teach my children to have values!” “I am a teacher! I don’t get paid enough money!” “I am a police officer! We were on the scene within minutes!” The blamed then deflect the blame onto one or more of the other groups. Because, once again, things really are that simple. 
Suddenly I was menaced from three sides: a woman, fortyish, with three ferocious chihuahuas on one side. On another, a high school kid with eyes red like flame asking me for a cigarette or some spare change. On the third, a homeless man ranting about technology and Armageddon and Jesus. I could not run, for I was surrounded, nor could I fight for I had been eating nothing but pasta for three days. Panic mounted.
Many people talk nowadays about messages everywhere, inside the organism a hormone is a message, a beam of light to obtain teleguidance to a plane or from a satellite is a message, and so on; but the message in language is absolutely different. The message. our message, in all cases comes from the Other by which I understand “from the place of the Other.” It certainly is not the common other, the other with a lower-case o, and this is why I have given a capital O as the initial letter to the Other of whom I am now speaking. Since in this case, here in Baltimore, it would seam that the Other is naturally English-speaking, it would really be doing myself violence to speak French. But the question that this person raised, that it would perhaps be difficult and even a little ridiculous for me to speak English, is an important argument and I also know that there are many French-speaking people present that do not understand English at all; for these my choice of English would be a security, but perhaps I would not wish them to be so secure and in this case I shall speak a little French as well.
Dear K___,
Perhaps part of the reason you feel so old is that your boyfriend is barely old enough to walk through a casino in Vegas. I know, I know. When you got together you were attracted to his Perry Farrell wannabe charms and the fact that he is in a band, and it might have even been appealing at first when he left you those embarrassingly heartfelt declarations of undying love all over every online forum, but now you are both showing your ages, or at least the difference therein. Well, we all make choices in life. Not that I am completely unsympathetic toward the guy. I only see a bit of it when you email me at two in the morning, probably drunk, but this poor wretch bears full witness to the hornet-infested viper’s nest behind your heavily pierced (and certainly not unpleasing) façade. I can only imagine what it must be like for him to try to console you as you lay curled up in the fetal position and weeping while his balls resemble those of a Smurf. Then again, maybe all this is for the better. You caught him at an early age. An older guy would have run for the hills somewhere between the first manic and the first depressive. 
It’s a damn funny scene and the ironic pitch of just what a jackass the character is is perfect. The professor who read the passage, though, read it in a completely flat voice, skipping over every mention of the “n-word” like we were all a bunch of impressionable youths (even though we all had the book right in front of us) and treating the whole passage as if it had absolutely no comic intent. The message is clear: if the book is not a stinging indictment of American society that is so obvious it feels like being beaten with a phone book, it is not worth consideration in the academy. And we don’t want no stinking humor. 
Thursday afternoon the tranquility of my stucco tower was interrupted by a war protest. Apparently, from what I have gathered, somewhere between seven hundred and one thousand people held a protest at the university along with a general strike. I only witnessed the very end of the thing, arriving on campus to attend a lecture on an eight hundred year old manuscript (yep, my life is that interesting,) so all I saw was a bunch of people wandering across the quad, some holding signs. I found out soon after that the protesters had blocked off part of the highway leading to the school, where CHP and local police in riot gear greeted them. Two people were arrested for crossing police lines; a former student and a professor of Women’s Studies (make of that what you will.) 
Anyway, I originally had two other titles for this piece: “No Thanks Guys, I Already Have a Girlfriend” and “Anatomy of a Protest.” The first alternate title will become clear once I explain the second. As I sat and ate an early dinner I watched the group mill about and created within my fevered imagination a portrait of exactly who these protesters were. The following is totally unscientific, uses no statistics, detailed observations, interviews, or media reports. It’s just a guess, really, and perhaps not even a very educated one, but that’s why I write on the internet. So, without further ado, here is my anatomy of a protest. 
Old Hippies. “Man, this is nothing like the sixties, man…” Probably between fifty and seventy-five in attendance would be my estimate. There are two kinds of people in this world who love college so much that they never leave. The first kind become professors and the second are the hippies who live on some convoluted form of disability and stay in the college town for the rest of their lives, hanging around and looking stupid. These are the failed Ginsbergs and Abbie Hoffmans of the world who are so fried on drugs that they continue to bask in the false sense of their own relevance. I’m not too familiar with the East Coast, but in California the perfect places to see this specimen of humanity are Venice Beach and Berkeley. A few live in my town as well. 
Single Men. They’re horny as hell and they’re not gonna take it any more. Sure, they’re also against war and injustice and all that, but first things first. The single guy goes to these things to meet single girls for free. He has had no luck in the bar scene, club scene or beach scene (due to the heartbreak of psoriasis,) so this is his one chance to show that he’s into really important things by dressing up in protest gear and trying to make more noise than all of those other single guys. I’d place the number of guys doing the protest mating dance at around two hundred to two-fifty. 
Greetings once again, dear friend. As you know, I have once again joined the "world of e-mails and passive aggression," as E.M. Forster so aptly put it. After the pleasant solitude of this last weekend (disrupted by Aunties antics,) this world is most trying. Last night a gaggle of women brought their screaming, bawling brats into my workplace just as I had taken my break and was outside reading my beloved John Milton. As you can well imagine, attempting to read poetry with screeching humanoid offspring in the background is rather difficult, and retiring to the break room offered no relief, as I could still hear the row. Most aggravating, I must say, especially since it occurred during the only ten minutes of peace upon which I normally can rely. I spent the rest of the night in the office, annoyed but not particularly anxious to return to my living quarters, for reasons that I will further outline. 
chocolate milk. I first suspected that it was Auntie, but she is still passed out from the other night's dreadful episode. I then thought that possibly the ignorant popinjay who lives next door may have broken into the house for no other reason than to cause mischief. However, all the entrances to the house were locked from the inside. 
quite excellent soirees, so I thought that this request was not too difficult to meet. Besides, my continuing difficulties with S. and Auntie have made life as a willful recluse more of a bother than it is really worth. (In answer to your question, Auntie finally did wake up, though she does not remember that nights events and demurred when I inquired about her reference to Pericles. Let it be said that I am still a bit suspicious.) 
immediately that this audience would not appreciate the fine music of Mr. Welk, I placed a jazz album onto the gramophone and resigned myself to a dismal evening. 
1. Dean Wareham and Galaxie 500 - I should start the list with the least offensive of the bunch. In 1991 Dean Wareham left Galaxie 500 right at the end of a tour where the band opened for the Cocteau Twins. He just sort of left his two college buddies in the dust at the prospect of forming Luna and achieving Elektra status. Naomi Yang and Damon Krukowski, the bass player and drummer respectively, eventually started playing again, appropriately enough as “Damon and Naomi” and now Dean Wareham plays in Dean & Britta after Luna’s split-up. The details on Galaxie 500's split are a bit fuzzy, but the fact that the three haven’t gotten back together while the rhythm section has formed their own group and continues to play is somewhat telling.
2. Bob Mould, Grant Hart and Husker Du - I read an interview with Sugar years ago in Rolling Stone and I remember one of the members saying that Bob Mould needed a lot of “personal space.” There was also a sort of tone to the whole article that suggested that Sugar was really nothing more than the Bob Mould Band. Thus, I had always assumed that Mould was the difficult member of Husker Du and the reason the band broke up. Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that I was only half right. Bob Mould was a pain in the ass, as well as a speed and alcohol abuser, but it turns out that Grant Hart was also a junkie. This lead to “creative and personal tensions,” which is always a nice way of saying that the two were at each others’ throats. The band collapsed after their manager committed suicide and Mould became the de facto manager. Bass player Greg Norton, clearly the most sensible member of the group, now owns a restaurant with his wife. This entry alone pretty much destroys my introductory paragraph, but thankfully I really don’t care. I mean, technically they both sang, so I guess I could say that in this case the singers broke up the band.
3. Shane MacGowan and The Pogues - This is not technically fair, since The Pogues didn’t actually break up until 1996, but I needed to throw in another band to make it five. Also, in my opinion, The Pogues were over by 1989, the year that Peace and Love came out. That particular album had, if memory serves me correctly, exactly two songs with Shane MacGowan on lead vocals. And his singing was terrible. It sounded like someone torturing a bullfrog, even though the songs themselves were quite good. The irony of The Pogues is that the better the band learned to play the worse their original singer sounded until they finally got rid of him. Still, no matter how much they improved musically, they were never the same without him. (Addendum: apparently MacGowan did reunite with The Pogues in 2006. The above comments still stand.)
4. Morrissey and The Smiths - Wikipedia once again cites “personal differences” between Morrissey and Johnny Marr as the reason for the breakup of The Smiths, but this time I call bullshit. Can you honestly imagine what it must be like working in a creative capacity with Morrissey? Can you imagine doing a high school chemistry project with Morrissey? Can you even imagine having dinner with Morrissey? “Please make sure there’s no beef broth in the soup, because that’s muuuuuuuurderrrrr...” It seems as though the other members of The Smiths have managed to work well with others in subsequent years. Johnny Marr even managed to work with Neil Tennant of The Pet Shop Boys, and I’ll bet Tennant’s not exactly an easy fellow to get along with. Morrissey continues to do solo work and it’s gone steadily downhill since Viva Hate, which really wasn’t all that good to begin with. Here’s a quote from Morrissey when two of his former bandmates took him to court: “The court case was a potted history of the life of The Smiths. Mike, talking constantly and saying nothing. Andy, unable to remember his own name. Johnny, trying to please everyone and consequently pleasing no one. And Morrissey under the scorching spotlight in the dock, being drilled. ‘How dare you be successful?’ ‘How dare you move on?’ To me, The Smiths were a beautiful thing and Johnny left it, and Mike has destroyed it.” Can you blame Johnny Marr for getting away from that?
My dad’s a pretty big music freak, so I got a good dose of the avant-garde from an early age. He had records by Love, The Mothers of Invention and H.P. Lovecraft, just to name three. Along with that were the more mainstream acts that I still like such as Bob Dylan, The Who and The Rolling Stones. This is a pretty good foundation for a young music lover and a budding (self-described) rebel in my arrogant opinion. Since I had no older siblings, I had to rely for a few years on the music that pissed off my dad’s parents before I could find some that would irritate him. 
when Cobain killed himself. Just another dead rock star. Unfortunately, he had become in the span of his career the “Voice of a Generation,” meaning the voice of middle-class white kids in a certain age demographic which just happened to correspond with mine. What gives? I never asked for some self-indulgent hippie to speak for me. I was angry, not depressed. And certainly not suicidal. 
are. The Patti Smith Group released their last album the year I was born. The Replacements turned into Paul Westerberg sucking solo. Ditto with The Smiths and Morrissey. 
In the grand scheme of things, the world does not really need college students, and I daresay that the last thing the world needs is more college students, especially humanities students like me. We need people to take out the trash, stock groceries, run global corporations, create wonder drugs, etc., but the market is showing that there are too many people out there who majored in Urban Hip-Hop Studies or Global Peace and Happiness. The only things you can do with degrees like that are activism or finish grad school to become a professor and add another layer to the Ponzi scheme. 
Recently at my school, the student council did something so utterly frivolous and moronic that it almost seemed like a Dada-type joke. Last year, a company decided to renovate some housing near the campus to create student housing. This jacked up the rent on what had been low-income housing and a bunch of people were evicted. The student council passed a resolution (I hate that word) to pull funding from any entity that did business with this company. First off, in their rush to do the politically correct thing, the council failed to notice the irony of the situation: the housing was renovated for student living. The students are the ones demanding more and raising rent prices. For God’s sake, it’s a freaking college town. Students are the very reason that this particular neighborhood exists and the company was catering to them. Well, at least this boosted the council’s self-esteem, which we all know is far more important than anything else, like, say, advocating development which would lower housing prices overall. No, we wouldn’t want to build more houses. There’s a rare species of dung beetle in that undeveloped area and we wouldn’t want to disturb its natural habitat and cause a nuclear winter or something. 
Greetings and warmest salutations, dear friend. Although it saddens me to be apart from my loved ones, I do so value solitude and the repose that my current situation affords. The comfort of my small office and computer with the blinds drawn leaves me without an unpleasant view of the garden and nature outside of the window. I read in peace and listen to music, and all seems well with the world for the present. Auntie fritters about to and fro, playing her abominable bingo games on the Internet, but we have a quite pleasant relationship, as we see very little of each other. The situation is altogether agreeable. 
Unfortunately, my night concluded in a most distressing sequence of events. As I intimated in my last letter, Auntie has some trouble regarding movement, owing to arthritis or some such malady. Therefore, her doctor has prescribed her some form of painkiller or muscle relaxer, I am not entirely sure which. I had repeatedly warned Auntie not to mix these pills with her nightly martini, and though she told me she would take my advice, I think that either the martini or the pills at some point numbed her ordinarily good judgment, and she took the one with the other. 
I’d rather not date anyone in the same department because that could cause major drama. On the other, I am too old to date anyone who is either not old enough to drink or not old enough to know when not to drink. This makes the college pretty much off-limits for anything other than academic pursuits. The solution, then, lies with the townies. 
Of course there are the worst case scenarios. She could be an axe murderess, her photograph may have gone through ten Photoshop filters before she posted it or she might be a hooker. This, of course, is no different than any other dating situation, though, and it’s why you always meet the person in public and in broad daylight a few times before even thinking about getting serious. Yes, I am a bit of a prude, but I still have both kidneys, thank you very much. 
“open relationships” are fine while I would never go for such a thing. Or that this person wants a guy who pulls in over one hundred grand a year while my broke ass is living on frozen pizza and student loans. The computer is simply too stupid to know just how important these kinds of differences really are. Besides, even if the computer matches us up to one hundred percent (which I find statistically impossible, but I’m no math whiz,) who is to say that I want another version of myself anyway? One of me is more than this world really needs, and good lord I would probably strangle my own twin. 
Simon: Thomas, I’m afraid it’s not me. You see, the author is writing this piece on New Year’s Day and is therefore somewhat hung over. That’s why it’s so cloudy outside and our parlor is in disarray. 
Thomas: Why does the dilettante do this? It seems like a lot of work for absolutely no reason. 
As an undergraduate I never schmoozed because it was not important to actually get to know the professors. I turned my papers in on time, studied for exams and crossed my fingers when the grades were about to come in. Grad school is different. I have to be “collegial.” This is not the natural role for an introverted bookworm, but there are things we all have to do in life and I am slowly training myself to do them. Things like attending department functions. Or sitting through four hour lectures on eighteenth century novels that nobody told me to attend. And, finally, the holiday party, the subject of this festive week’s post. 
Here’s the thing: I know full well that no one was paying any attention to me, but like I said I am very self-conscious, so even knowing that no one cared whether I sat or stood did nothing to help my mental state at that moment. I finally knelt down where I was standing just so no one could see me, and found out that I had been standing next to a trash can. So, I was sweating profusely and kneeling next to a trash can where people occasionally leaned over to dump their half-eaten food. 
For the first time since Monday I left my block to put air in the tires and get some change for the laundry room. My God, people actually exist outside of the telephone and computer. Who would have thought? 
3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: This quarter I had to read Jane Eyre for the third time in my life. Next quarter I’ll have to read it again. What the hell is it with this book? While it is not the first of the proto-Fabio novels, it is certainly the most popular. Florence King wrote something once about how the formula for the romance novel is to take a mentally unbalanced squire and a young maiden (usually lower class) and have them somehow fall in love. That’s Jane Eyre in a nutshell. Add to that the fact that it has that creepy old dude marries nineteen-year-old girl thing and you’ve triggered my gag reflex. 
1. Hamlet by William Shakespeare: I just don’t get why this one is so important. Dude, if you’re gonna murder your uncle man up and do it already. “To be or not to be?” I don’t give a shit, Mr. Prince of fucking Denmark. You’re boring me. Macbeth kicks this play’s ass all over town and yet this is the one we always have to read. At least with Macbeth we get all sorts of murder and intrigue. If I’m some dumb groundling out to hit the theater in Elizabethan England you had better believe I’m going to want some gory entertainment, not some boob philosophizing about the meaning of life. More proof that Macbeth is better than Hamlet: Mel Gibson and Kenneth Branagh both did versions of Hamlet. Roman Polanski did a version of Macbeth. 
Thomas: Simon, I do not know why I put up with you. We have not spoken in over a week, and I grow weary of standing in this room waiting for you to talk. You were about to say something about what you call the artiste, and then you simply stared blankly at the floor. Speak, already!
Thomas: Why on earth would anyone want to be an artiste? It sounds dreadful.
Simon: Yes, and the result is almost always disastrous either for the artiste or for society at large. An example of the former is Jack Kerouac, the latter, Allen Ginsberg. On the other hand, the commercial artist who tries to become an artiste is bound to turn into a laughingstock. Case in point: Madonna.
Simon: Yes, and I still stand by that statement. However, that is not to say that I am pessimistic about every facet of today’s artistic climate, rather just a bit disgruntled. Perhaps when I lash out in my aggravated narcissistic belligerence, the finer points of my attitude are lost.
Simon: The commercial artist is something of a weak demigod, or if you will, a cardboard icon. He stands precariously between two vicious and fickle masters, the market and his corporate handlers above, and the public below. If he loses favor with either of these forces, he will be destroyed. He stands atop a flimsy pedestal, at the mercy of sales and public opinion. In most cases, he struts and frets his fifteen minutes upon the stage in a nearly godlike fashion, until the inevitable backlash, which strips him of this status and leaves him forgotten at best and reviled at worst.
Simon: Thomas, you need not feign such naiveté with me. A dancing bear with a ring through his nose is just that. The commercial artist who makes his name through outspoken political views or the championing of causes is still at the mercy of his corporate puppeteers and the fickle public. In fact, his position is even more precarious than that of the purely “pop” commercial artist. If a nitwit like Britney Spears decided to take up some cause like PETA, no one would bat an eyelash as long as she continued to spin out the same useless tripe on record. However, the political commercial artist is locked into his image even more than today’s flavor of the hour. Imagine, for instance, what would happen if Eddie Vedder decided that not only did he have a decent childhood, but that he was going to become a Republican. Or, while not necessarily political but related to the topic at hand, imagine if Trent Reznor decided to write a happy love song with no anger or ironic twist, and play it on acoustic guitar. The disruption in the vacuum between the ears of his pierced and tattooed admirers would cause a collective outburst that would make the Hajj look like a pleasant walk on the beach. The political or social commercial artist is therefore so locked into his own image that he cannot escape it for a moment. His fans know this intuitively, his record label knows this explicitly, but he must feel this most acutely. He is incapable of change. As Eminem says, “I am whatever you say I am.” This is why the most fortunate commercial artists know their inherent lack of substance on some level, and therefore exploit image to the hilt. I point you to David Bowie and Prince. Both realize that image is the name of the game, and are free to change their image at any whim. If either were to take the stage tomorrow donned in a tuxedo and singing jazz standards, the public would love it, because it would be just another example of attention-whoring pop tarts doing what they do best. Whether or not I take them seriously, I respect their inherent understanding of the way stardom works. 
A midget in a cowboy hat appears before me, with eyes of fire and hovering six inches from the ground. At first I think it is a vision from our Lord, but then I realize that he is just a regular at Saddle Ranch.
From my mouth comes, "Do not question me you smug little prick, for I am the Lord, and verily I say unto thee, get thee to the parking garage and do not look back. The end is nigh. Okay, so maybe not the real end, but things could get ugly around here, if you get my drift."