99 Luftballoons (Jah, Baby! Rock Und Roll!)

In the Eighties, Germany was Korea...

I say this because, as I realized during a conversation recently, Psy's massively stupid hit song bears more than a passing resemblance to the German-only pop hits of the Eighties (Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus" and Nena's "99 Luftballoons"). I can explain the popularity of those songs back then (everyone was on cocaine), not so much "Gangnam Style" today (do people still do cocaine?)

It makes sense that we as Americans would embrace the more stupid aspects of foreign cultures, in the mistaken belief that what becomes popular here is exactly what the people in France or Germany are getting down to. I can remember when a rapping French baby had a hit song over here, and this was in the grunge-laden Nineties. Jordy, where have you gone?

It's all part of our inherent lack of self-esteem as a country, because we're still relatively young compared to some ancient civilizations and so we make the mistake of thinking that something with a weird accent to it must be more sophisticated than anything we can produce. That helps explain the brief moment of Roberto Benigni over here, for one thing.

But we have plenty of stupid pop music over here. Take Rihanna's new song "Diamonds," for example (take it far, far away). We don't need Gotye's Australian-electronic shitstorm "Somebody That I Used to Know," though you wouldn't think that from all the times I heard that on the radio this year (recently it started cropping back up on radio after a brief hiatus. I still want to punch the guy in the face, but less violently so).

Psy (or PSY, because I'm guessing he's super-excited and thus renders his own name in capitals, though I draw the line at adding an exclamation mark at the end) is Korea's answer to Gotye, I guess; in fifteen years, both of them will be on yet another VH1 "where are they now" marathon (if the latest season of "Basketball Mob Wives LA of Atlanta Love And/or Hip-Hop" takes a breather over the Christmas break to let those horrible, horrible people get on with their horrible, horrible lives), and we'll all laugh at the time we thought they'd have a longer lasting career. Because honestly, no one listens to Falco without a large dose of irony, and that's the way it should be.

The Year (World?) in Review, Gangum Style

It occurs to me that, as ancient Mayan prophecies foretold, we are in an age which is perilously balanced between the known and unknown, the waxed and Kardashian-hirsute. Doomsday is supposed to be next Friday (or Next Friday, I think), so just in case this really is the end of the world as we know it, I feel fine in saying that 2012 was a banner year for yours truly.

Think about it: I got to try out for "Jeopardy" (and travel to one of the most beautiful cities on earth, New Orleans, to do it), and whatever happens with that (which, assuming the world ends on the 21st, is nothing), I still came out pretty far ahead of where I'd come out before when I did the online test. I remained gainfully employed (always a plus since the two-for-one job losses of '10), and I continued to humbly be the best gosh-darn Uncle Bubba to my lil sweet niece.

I didn't write that novel, not yet anyway. Kinda hurt that my computer died in late June (or that I murdered it...you know, it's a matter of semantics). But I read a lot of really good ones, after steering clear of novels more or less as an after-effect of reading so much of them in college. Michael Chabon hit one out of the park with Telegraph Avenue, and I started really getting into Graham Greene and Walker Percy. If 2013 comes to pass, I might just tackle the Great White Whale of American literature...David Lee Roth's Crazy From the Heat. Or Moby Dick, one of the two.

Non-fiction was also heavy on my reading list, with this-year-specific shout-outs to David Byrne's How Music Works in particular (also, Pete Townshend's memoir, long-delayed, was worth the wait). Music played a big role in this year, just in the sense that I made a lot of mix CDs (including two for a girl who said quite rightly that my taste in music is awesome), but I lost that ability when my computer died (or was murdered...you know, it's not like Matlock is on the case. Let it go). But I still get to listen to a lot of it, via these things they call "CDs" and "radio programming of popular-music varieties."

We lost some good folks this year, famous ones that I miss will be Adam Yauch and Levon Helm. Also expiring this year: Mitt Romney's political career and the overall chances that the Republican Party will be relevant any time soon. I had to go there.

The Giants won big, both of them (New York in football, San Fran in baseball), I hope the New York ones repeat as Super Bowl champs. I spent thirty-five dollars on an Eli Manning shirt in New Orleans, high off the buzz of my Jeopardy audition. I don't regret it, nor do I regret buying Tom Sancton's Song for My Fathers, which educated me about New Orleans jazz.

So yeah, it wasn't all rainbows and unicorns, but it wasn't all doom and gloom, either. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. If the world is still around on December 22, I'll be even happier, because I feel like I'm actually starting on something as opposed to coming to the end of something. What that is is still up in the air, but I'm hopeful. Unless the Mayans (who couldn't predict their own damn future) get it right...

Take Five

A friend of mine on Facebook recently caused a storm by saying bad things about On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye. I say she caused a storm even though she was being sarcastic (mostly about guys who say such books are their favorites being emotionally stunted morons). There is much truth to this.

When I was about fifteen or so, Rye was my favorite book because it "spoke to" me. Nowadays, if I tried to read it I'd likely get pissed five pages into it and wonder how the hell this Holden Caulfield manages to tie his own shoes in the morning, much less conduct himself with anything approaching lyrical resonance in his monologues. I love Salinger, I revere his work, but I don't think the book works as well when you're grown up and dealing with all the real-world problems that come with it. Besides, most of Nine Stories is better.

Now, On the Road: Jesus Christ, really? I understand what Kerouac was going for, but talk about making something out of nothing. Maybe I wasn't the right age to read it (I was about thirty), but this book was annoying, especially the Neal Cassady stand-in. I have never wanted to punch a literary character repeatedly in the throat more than him.

No, books like that don't move me, or move me anymore. As I get older I'm getting into other stuff. Mostly this has meant Graham Greene, who lived through the bulk of the twentieth century and described more of the weird, sad, and depressing aspects of it better than anyone who's ever lived. It also means Walker Percy, whose work sometimes goes over my head but the overall atmosphere of it (laughing at the absurdity of modern life) I totally dig. I'm even working my way through Jane Austen; I've got Northanger Abbey now, and Sense and Sensibility I'm saving for last. I also love non-fiction: George Plimpton, A.J. Jacobs, and the like. Plenty of good stuff besides that atrocious On the Road.

Well, I find it atrocious, anyway. I love how there's a version out "based on the original scroll" that doesn't feature chapter breaks or paragraph breaks. Oh goody, I can immerse myself in Sal Paradise's bizarre and rambling worldview. Whoopee!

In the end, my opinion is about as valid as anyone's, and I doubt I'll sway too many minds with this. Read On the Road for yourself, if you must. If you get any enjoyment out of it, you're a better person than I. I'll take The Power and the Glory or Love In the Ruins any day over that.

"You Can Close Your Eyes," James Taylor

I'm going to try and revive the "songbook" here and there, with songs that crop up on my mix CDs (or in the case of some of them, crop up and crop up and crop up...I must've went through a phase when Travis' "Sing" was my favorite song, judging how many times it crops up, usually at the beginning).

Anyway, this was something that I got off a mix CD from a friend I'd made online, at a forum devoted to The Office. Swapping music is perhaps the most fun and/or disarming thing to do for someone, because it's saying "this is me, based on my record collection." And once upon a time, I'd be wary of anyone who had James Taylor in his or her record collection.

But the song itself, like much of Taylor's work, is deceptively simple, and it's a great example of the "I'm not really good with emotions" genre of literature, something that has been the cornerstone of Nick Hornby novels and so forth. Romantic longing in men is sometimes trvialized in pop culture, because women assume quite rightly that often times the heart we're thinking with is in our pants, but guys do have feelings. We just sometimes can't communicate good, and junk.

I have been guilty as much as any modern man in letting good things slip away, or trying too hard and running people off. And I don't just mean romantic possibilities; many former friends probably cringe when I crop up on their Facebook feed simply because I updated my status with a "witty" saying or decided to "like" yet another Walker Percy novel. I get it, I can be intense and needy and eager to please and about as annoying as a yapping dog at your heels if you don't pay attention, then wonder why you're mean to me. It is my curse.

But sometimes, you have moments of perfect clarity, and I had one about a year ago today. I was at work waiting to use the restroom, and a girl that I'd known since I started there, a girl that I'd admittedly had a crush on without thinking anything could come of it (because she was devestatingly attractive and therefore dating someone when I met her), was petting the dog of a mutual co-worker. I don't remember our conversation much, it wasn't anything memorable, but I knew that, at that very moment in time, there was nowhere else I'd rather be. And the beautiful part of it was that all the anxiety, all the trying hard that I normally do, that didn't crop up at all. I was just there, watching a beautiful girl pet a dog, and I was set.

I don't know if there's a future there with that particular girl (a lot has happened since then), but I'm working on it. And if it doesn't come to pass, there's always the opportunity of someone else, even if I'm not yet ready for that. The thing I've learned this year, what with Jeopardy and everything else, is that as long as you're still trying, you might have a chance to do something really awesome, to have a positive impact on someone who might have never known you existed otherwise. That's a pretty good thing to know, and keep within sight, when all the crap of the world intrudes on those perfect little moments.

A Fan's Note

Well, if you know me, you know what team I follow, college-wise, when it comes to the sporting life. And thus, you're well aware that I might understandably be in less than a great mood this past week.

Because my team got beat.

Not abysmally, at least (not like last year), but our in-state rivals do indeed have something called "bragging rights" over us for the next year, as they've had the previous three times the two giants of the college gridiron have met. Bloody hell, you'd think the opposing team's fans would learn to be classier about it.

But you can't teach class to some folks...

In the end, I feel a weight lifted off of me, in this respect; I can watch other teams in the college sporting world and not give a damn one way or the other about the situation, because when you don't have a dog in that fight you can sit back and watch two teams try their mightiest not to repeat the Alabama-LSU "Field Goal Competition" of last season. That was an underwhelming four hours of my life I'd like to have back.

Being a sports fan is a bit like being in a cult; after a while, the kool-aid doesn't work anymore and you wake up with a sense that maybe you could be doing more with your life. Books could be read; families could be together; life could be richer and more meaningful.

Then the next season begins, your team starts to do good, and you get sucked in all over again.

Thank goodness for Jane Austen; I've been reading Persuasion this past week, to take my mind off the football mess (sports books are no longer appealing to me, might be a while before I want to read any), and as ridiculous as I find some of the aspects of her books (people in the nineteenth century sure didn't know how important a good punter could be to pinning the opposition back beyond their own twenty-yard-line, for instance), they're just diverting enough to get the sour taste of defeat out of my system. And hey, I still got my New York Football Giants; they crushed the Packers Sunday night. Go Big Blue!

Oh good, it's not even bowl season yet...

A Manson Family Thanksgiving

I face a moral dilemma, folks: I want to read the book Silver Linings Playbook because the ads for the movie have caught my interest (and not just because of Jennifer Lawrence, though when I see her I feel emotions I've not felt for a long time towards an actress I will never meet...I've said too much!), but the only copy of it I've found so far has smartass Bradley Cooper's mug on the front cover. I do not care for Mr. Cooper, while acknowledging that his dickhead persona is very effectively used on the big screen.

Anyway, Thanksgiving approaches and, like a motorist passing a wreck on the freeway, I can't turn my head away from what promises to be a truly terrible Turkey Day. I say that in the hopes (perhaps) that by doing so, I will cause the opposite to happen (i.e., my family will not devolve into a hate-filled room of banshees screaming and yelling about things that happened long before I was even a gleam in my mother's eye). I doubt it, though.

At any rate, though, I am sure anyone here can relate to the way in which the end of the year approaching has a way of causing you to reflect, especially (what a shock!) what you're thankful for. I'm thankful for my family, as crazy and upsetting as they can be, and I'm thankful for my friends. I'm thankful for my job, my bills (hey, they keep me from blowing my money on stupid stuff, like more stuff that requires bills), and I'm thankful for the opportunity I got this year to try out for Jeopardy in New Orleans. I'm waiting for your move, Trebek...

It's a Marvelous Night for a Moondance

Whew, America...just, wow. Thank God.

The election is over, and I'm not afraid to say it: I'm damn-glad-ass happy Barack Obama is back in office, for four more years. No, he ain't perfect. Yes, he's fucked up along the way, and there is still a lot of work to do. I just feel better about that work getting done with him in charge.

Nothing against Mitt Romney (who, let's be honest, is probably a salt-of-the-earth guy, even if his salt is a little more refined and harder to get for people outside of his tax bracket. I kid), but I really wasn't sure about an America in which we said no to Obama after only one term. It was a ground-swelling event for him to get elected the first time; I remember arguments with family members who, while not racist in their hearts, probably took the idea of a black man being in charge about as well as you would expect white Southerners of a certain age and generation to take it. I related to Obama because I grew up without a dad in the picture, just my mom and her parents, my maternal grandparents, as my family (well, we've got a shitload of relatives, but in terms of immediate family, for a long time it was me, my mom, my grandparents, and my aunt and uncle who were only a few years older than me and thus like older siblings).

I stayed up until two o'clock in the morning to watch Obama's speech because on some level, I didn't want to go to sleep and wake up to Florida in 2000, when the shit hit the fan and we entered what would become, in my humble and well-informed opinion (I'm a history buff), the worst period in the history of our nation. At least Nixon got close to getting impeached; George W. Bush was inexcusably inept except in the arena of making us more divided. That shit-turd jackoff will rot in hell for starting the Iraq War. I took his victory in '04 even harder, which is why I can sympathize on some level with the torrent of self-abuse and grief on the GOP side of things. But shit happens.

Sean Hannity, who really isn't relevant anymore anyway, now blames America for re-electing Obama. Donald Trump is apoplectic, Bill O'Reilly is splotchy with a chance of rain, and the entire right-wing movement in this country has to be shaking its collective head in disgust at what it sees. God, it's great to be an American right now.

Patriotism is not a provinince of one party or another; as someone who first would've classified himself as a Republican (everybody else was around me, and I grew up when Reagan was president, so it was only natural) and then found himself more in line with the Democrats (Bobby Kennedy is a personal hero of mine), I know there are good, decent, hard-working and ethical people on both sides of the debate. Then there's your Rushs and Glenn Becks of the world. If I seem more aware of the right-wing hypocrites, it's not because there aren't any on the left. I just can't think of any prominent ones. By all means, let me know what left-wing equivalents there are to Sarah Palin and her ilk.

The Germans have a word for taking pleasure in other people's pain (schadenfreude, I think that's how it's spelled); in that case, Fox News is my bitch. You have never seen a more low-rent and distasteful enterprise in your life (the old Star Wars line about Mos Eisley comes to mind). To see them weeping and gnashing their teeth...well, I just wish Hunter S. Thompson was around to see it.

Four more years, no they're not going to be easy. And no, I don't think everyone will be farting lollipops and unicorns by the bushel. But I have hope for America, a hope that took a beating over the past election cycle because it seemed like cynicism was going to win. For now, that tide has been beaten back, and if we're lucky we can outgrow the downright childish behaviour that certain political hacks mostly on the right seem to feed on. It's our country, dammit, now let's make something of it.

God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America!

If the Mitt Hits the Fan

My sis asked me if I was planning to move to Canada if Mitt "I'm smiling to hide my death-ray apparatus behind my eyeballs" Romney wins this Tuesday and gets into the White House. It's a fair question, but I don't think it will be too bad if Mitt gets in.

George W. Bush set the bar pretty damn high when it comes to presidential incompetence. I think any idiot with half a brain could do a better job than that peckerhead.

No, the election isn't bothering me too much, not because I think it'll be a slam-dunk for my boy Barack (I wouldn't put too much stock in white people forgetting how much they hate black people when they get into the voting booth in certain states, including my own), but because in the grand scheme of things, it's rare that anyone beyond the people who have to deal with a new president (Congress, the media, DC's finest escort services) are directly affected by such a sea change. And when they are, brother, it's because either the guy in charge kicks ass (FDR, JFK) or because he kicks ass in a bad way (Harding, Nixon, Dubya).

Just go out and vote, dammit. No matter who you're voting for (even if you're writing in "Ron Paul"), you don't get to bitch and complain about it for four years unless you do. Obama is the first president I helped to elect (I mean, I'm pretty sure I'm the one white guy in Oconee County who voted for him in '08), and while I don't think he's done a super-fantastic job, he's not the root cause of the dysfunction in this country.

Big pause:...we all are the reason.

Think about it: we live in a culture of instant gratification. You send an email or a text message, you expect a prompt response (even if the person you're sending it to is in the middle of operating on someone's heart). You want your food and you want it now, and waiting an extra 2.5 seconds is un-freaking-acceptable. I'm just as guilty of it as the next guy (especially the texting part: anyone who has the misfortune to have given me their phone number after I discovered texting can testify to this). We are often the cause of our own misfortune.

So I don't blame Obama for my shitty economic outlook (he wasn't the one who got me fired from the library, for instance. That was Classic Trevor Self-Destruction). Though I do blame him for my shitty romantic outlook: all the women I fall for are in love with him.

Just kidding...anyway, Donald Trump has gone a long way towards proving that, when it comes to jackasses, there's not a lot of difference between him and the much-poorer guy who says stupid-ass things to get attention (such as your humble blogger). In case you didn't hear, he made some bullshit threat for Obama to release his college transcripts and he'd donate five million to the charity of Obama's choice. Here's a thought: give that five million to New York, New Jersey, and the surrounding burroughs affected by Hurricane Sandy. Then shut the fuck up.

You'd be doing the world a favor if you got rid of that comb-over as well, Trumpy.

Hoop Dreams

I'd like to talk about basketball, because if you knew me in real life that's the last thing you'd probably expect me to obsess over, sports-wise (well, that and NASCAR, golf, or hunting. Oh, and fishing, bowling, or spelunking). But, it turns out that I am kinda a hoops geek. The answer eludes me as much as it does you.

I think there's something to the dual nature of the sport (glory-hogging individuality and team-oriented selflessness) that appeals to me, or the sides of me that would be attracted to either side of that coin. Unlike in football, you can see the players mask-less and helmet-less, and unlike in baseball there's no clear hierarchy unless you're paying attention (and to be honest, I usually am not. I couldn't tell you what a point guard is in the NBA). And it's not that I even enjoy watching hoops on the telly; apart from the Finals, I can't really sit through an entire regular-season game. But put a book about the sport down in front of me, and I'm entranced from cover to cover.

Weird, huh?

Right about now, it would be appropriate to reveal that, somewhere buried in the depths of my stillborn computer, there lies a manuscript (only a few pages, nothing much beyond a few false starts) of mixed fiction/autobiography entitled "The Loneliness of the Trash-Can Basketball All-Star." If I ever get my computer fixed, or another computer, I'm not sure if I'll use the same set-up or title (because like I said, false starts). But I am quite obsessed with throwing items of trash (usually rolled-up paper towels or empty soda bottles) into trash cans in a manner that suggests Michael Jordan...if Michael Jordan were under six feet, white, kinda pudgy, and near-sighted.

My romance with basketball is not a contemporary one; not for me the Lin-sanity of last season (though I did push the "like" button on the Facebook Jeremy Lin app because I'm a sucker for online crazes). No, I prefer the hardscrabble days of West and Wilt, Russell and those eleven championship rings, and Jordan in his greatness. I've read books about all of the following, as well as Bill Simmons' simply-titled "Book of Basketball" (which I recommend as a great primer on the history of professional hoops), and books about the college game. In fact, right now I'm on a quixotic mission to track down a copy of "The Open Man," Dave DeBusschere's diary of the 1970 Knicks championship season, simply because I saw it mentioned in "When the Garden Was Eden" (an excellent book about that same Knicks team of the Seventies). I don't even have a dog in the NBA professional fight (though the idea that LeBron now has a ring with Miami is galling, to be sure).

Basketball will never be my favorite sport (baseball, which I also love to read about) or second-favorite (football, college and pro). But it is the one that, when I'm daydreaming or remembering climactic scenes from the Michael J. Fox verison of Teen Wolf, I could see myself playing, albeit minus the lycanthropic transformations mid-court. Okay, maybe a little of that sneaks in, but only after I've been fouled. Basketball on the page fascinates me as few other things do, and I'll be damned if I can explain it. But it is a beautiful game to read about, that's for sure.

Ghosts of Octoberfests Past

This weekend is the annual drinking fest/excuse to get drunk known in these here parts as "Octoberfest," which is German for "wait, we invaded Poland again? Why did we ever elect that funny-looking guy with the Chaplin moustache again?"

I do not plan to go (which is not the same thing as saying "I'm not going," because often it seems I tend to do the opposite of what I planned lately, and I'm working on that), because I have often come away from Octoberfest in the past with one of two things: an upset stomach from the questionable "German" cuisine found herewithin, or a huge sense of disappointment. It is the latter that I will address now.

For a growing boy with growing acne scars, the Octoberfest weekend seemed to offer a chance to break out of the confines of my normal, humdrum existence as "the medical oddity of the Walhalla Greater Educational System" (in that I seemed to have few friends, no game with the ladies, but plenty of pizza-reminiscent boils protruding from my face, each mini-Vesuvius tender to the touch) and perhaps become a super-stud, or at least "attractive to older girls whose boyfriends snuck them a beer." My interest in girls began to rise right as my interest in riding the rides available began to peak, though I retain a fondness to this day for the questionably-maintained "swing ride." This was a contraption that spun you around and around, rising you higher and higher until you noticed that the scary-Vietnam-Vet-looking guy who ran the machine was off on a smoke break and you'd gotten sick of the combination of fried donut holes before the ride and the repetition of Def Leppard hits during it. Good times, good vertigo-inducing times.

I spent one memorable (in a bad way) Octoberfest stuck til closing hours because the woman who was my friends' and mine ride (no, not like that; she was kinda gross looking) was busy chatting up potential serial killers who wanted a ride (yes, now I mean it like that). Another memorable (in a bad way) Octoberfest was when I drank some of the watered-down swill they sold in the tent and I realized that I'm a cheap drunk. Okay, maybe that was a good development, but it wasn't so much for my sister, who gave me a ride home and tried to cover up my drunkeness from my grands. Epic fail.

But I do have good memories, where the possibility of bliss lasted long before the eventual pin-prick of reality let all the air out of that balloon. Strangely, my favorite memory doesn't involved a failed attempt to score a hottie; one year, at the height of the Barney craze, some poor soul thought they'd dress up as the purple dinosaur to entertain the kids. My friend Chris and I were not kids, but we did have water pistols. We shot Barney a couple of times, made some kids cry. I'm not proud of it, but I actually look back on it now with whimsy. I can say that I assassinated Barney in a sense. Going up on the resume now.

But alas, most of my memories of Octoberfest (like the one immediately after my drunken one, where I went in the hope of running into yet another unobtainable beauty and came up snake-eyes) are ones of "meh." After you stop being a kid but aren't old enough to drink, it can be a post-childhood hell of mistaken signals and misheard directions that mean she will *not* be joining you in the Beer Tent after all. When you can drink but choose not to, and teenagers annoy the hell out of you, it's just about going there so the kids that you're uncle/cousin to can have a good time, and they went last night without me. So no, I don't plan on attending. Besides, the one girl I'd want to run into there isn't going to be there. She's in Greenville now. So no Octoberfest for me, bitches. At least, I don't *think* so...

33 1/3

This past week, I observed my birthday by leaving work early (with their consent; when you leave early and don't tell anyone, it tends to piss them off), and lighted out for the territory between darkness and light, between civilization and madness, between good and less good (evil is too strong a term), between all that is wonderful and luminous and all that is cast in shadow and likely an alien looking to munch on your entrails when you turn around the corner. In other words, I went to Anderson.

My adventures there began with a stop at a record store where I bought a used copy of the Grateful Dead's greatest hits. Truth be told, I've never bought into the myth of the Dead, travelling caravans full of nake hippie chicks or no. Interminable live jamming has never appealed to me as something to either listen to or sit through, and so when I want something by the Dead, I want the studio records, which have some truly beautiful songs that I can enjoy without an endless guitar-and-woodwind solo or two. Then I proceeded to a used bookstore there that I frequent often (and which I will abstain from identifying here). While looking at the sci-fi section (someplace I'd never usually venture, but I'd been thinking about giving Ray Bradbury a try), I kept on walking down the aisle past the paranormal until I was confronted with a shelf I wouldn't have expected: erotica.

Erotica? In Anderson, South Carolina?

Just to be sure, I perused a few pages of each and every volume to be sure it was just as disgusting and degenerate as I thought it must be from the lurid cover photos and saucy descriptions on the back cover. Yes indeed, this was filth of the second-highest order (not quite Cinemax-after-Dark filthy, but you get the idea). I was shocked (shocked!) to find that there was gambling going on at this establishment, in other words.

No, I did not buy any...but funny story: On the way out of town (after visiting the mall at two in the afternoon and being reminded of a zombie movie with the absence of sentient beings in any of the shops), I ran into smut yet again. Not twice, but thrice!

Another bookstore that I frequent (and again, shall remain nameless) called to me, and I decided to look at the slim nonfiction section they had. Wouldn't you know that, when I turned around from considering a Bill Bryson book, I came across yet another "erotica" section (though they labeled it "steamy romance," because good Southern Baptists don't read erotica)! Once again, I checked to make sure these were as filthy as I thought they'd be (we have to protect the children!) and left in a huff. Well, if you can be said to "huff" by picking something off the nonfiction shelf, purchasing it, and thanking the pleasant lady behind the counter.

But wait, there's more: in a thirft store I stopped at in West Union (!), do you know what I found lurking in amongst the Republican diet books and John Gray self-help manuals. Yes, smut! Vintage Seventies smut, at that (the kind where the guy has a moustache and a Camero, in that order). For some reason, I think the people working there don't actually bother to see what books someone brings in for donation, because West Union is full of good church-going folk (all two of 'em). Apparently I had a nose for smut that day, as well as the hands to pick it up and flip the pages, the eyes to see and comprehend the words, and the class to put the books back after deciding that no good hiding place would suffice in my abode in which I could keep them from innocent eyes. For shame, America!

I blame Obama....

Chipper Jones and The One-Game Playoff of Doom

Last weekend, I saw my little sister all grown up, getting married to the father of her baby, and (with a modicum of family drama) get through a wedding day that she deserved. She's still the little baby who spit up on me the first time I held here, twenty-four years or so ago. But I still say she did that on purpose...

And now I look forward to a milestone all my own; in a few days (Tuesday, actually...don't know why I'm being so vague about it) I will be thirty-three years old. Jesus started his ministry at thirty-three; I'm not that ambitious. Plus, I don't have twelve close guy friends who would listen to me even if I formed a philosophy based around basic respect for every human being regardless of their "standing" in society. They'd just grab another beer and see if the Panthers can get the point-spread.

Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they're missing by not being Giants fans...

Thirty-three is an age that doesn't necessarily have to mean anything (the ones like thirty, forty, fifty, and so on, get all the press), but I do want it to mean something, just for me. I'm well aware that I tend to stand in my own damn way when it comes to achieving things that I want to achieve. For instance, I have long dreamed of becoming intergalactic bounty hunter Boba Fett, but rare is the time when I've actually tried to do anything about it. This year, I'm finally getting that live-sized replica of the Slave I I've had my eye on.

I've always had the vague notion of writing for a living (see as evidence "blog, this one"), but maybe now would be a good time to really buckle down (sans my own PC, as it were, but still) and give it a real try. If anyone knows of a newspaper that needs a crotchety thirty-three-year-old, let me know. I used to write for a pop-culture weekly, and it was the most fun I've had in a while.

Anyway, I would like to try harder this year, unless the Mayans were right and the world ends on December 21. I'm sure Fox News will somehow blame that on Obama.

Let's ask a Mayan...

Cardaphobia

This week I got an early birthday present, in the form of yet another card I don't need, from a gas station I tend to stop at early in the morning to get my prerequisite soda and healthy breakfast snack (usually it's one of the two green sodas, Mello Yello or Mountain Dew, and a packet of Lance crackers. Coronary at 33 sounds likely). I took it not to be rude and say "no, my wallet is full of useless discount cards already!" But my wallet is in fact full of useless cards already.

When did discount cards become the new thing to unload on regular patrons at a business? If the discounts actually saved you money right then and there (as opposed to "racking up points in the near-future, after the Great Dragon Apocalypse of 2017 has rendered life above ground perilous for humanity and thus you really don't need to drive to work today"), it would be okay. And yes, the few cents I save with some cards does make me feel better about being such a cheap, cheap bastard.

Sometime while I was busy reading Gravity's Rainbow for fun, extreme couponing became all the rage, and not just with seniors who are afraid that a black man in a white house will take away all their pills (or have a robot attack them, for my fellow Classic SNL fans out there). Saving money is the new spending money, but extreme. If anyone needs to save money, it has two thumbs and is this guy. But still, when I need a card to save a penny on some Bandaids at CVS, something is wrong with America.

My Best Buy credit card died a while back because I didn't use it much, and now they've sent me a new one, extending my credit. For what purpose other than to engorge me on flatscreen TVs and 3-D DVD players, I know not; my relationship with technology is a bit like Andy Rooney's was with eyebrow trimmers. But the card is active, and there are all those One Direction CDs coming along...plus the DVD/t-shirt combo for "Best of Kenny Loggins: Live at Red Rocks." I mean, c'mon...it's Kenny Goddam Motherfucking Loggins, for Christ's sake.

My debit card is about the only piece of plastic that always comes through in a pinch, though sometimes that pinch becomes a bite on my rear end. Plastic cards will be the death of America, I say, a plot by the Illuminati, the Nazis, the Chinese, the Better Business Bureau, the GOP, the FBI, the CIA, and AARP working together to rob us blind.

Perhaps I've been sipping too much Go-Go Juice...

Suck It, Zuckerberg

I just finished The Boy Kings by Katherine Losse, a former insider at Facebook, and it helps confirm a belief that I've had ever since seeing The Social Network: Mark Zuckerberg and his helpers are exactly the sort of people who would start a social-networking site, because they lack the real-life skills to actually make social connections in real life.

Maybe that's a bit harsh, but I think the cold, utilitarian mode of the website doesn't leave much room for human interactions, and for a long time I was cool with that. Because, cavet emptor, I'm exactly the sort of person who would be attracted to a website that keeps people at arm's (or computer screen's) length, even if I see them in real life.

My own Facebook story goes back to 2006, when I was starting back at college and everyone at Clemson was asking me if I was on Facebook. I had a MySpace account because, for the years when I wasn't seemingly moving in any forward motion towards a life of my own, it seemed like I would be left behind in the rush to become something, and I was insecure enough to think that an online profile, however miniscule, was preferable to no online identity at all. You can be anything you want to be online, the internet seems to promise, taking the place of traveling roadside elixir salesmen in talking up the tonic that is online communication. It's just a click away.

So I joined Facebook and haven't looked back...except when I have, and wondered what I became.

Facebook in those days was more user-friendly (sorry, but Timeline is shit. Absolute horrific horseshit, and reading Losse's book confirms for me the belief that Zuckerberg et al. don't give a crap what we as users think about it), and I used it alright. I sent friend requests to people I barely knew from some English class where we might have one social interaction tops, whilst discussing Wuthering Heights. But online, we could become "friends," which meant something (though I don't know if any of us ever knew just what). We could write on each other's walls (my inner comedian could be released full bore on display for the world), send messages if something more private needed to be said, and God help me I poked poor girls to death when that was still a thing (is it? I haven't poked in ages, and don't intend to start back now). But I don't know that it really solved the existential loneliness I felt at both being part of the circle and being apart from it. I didn't live on campus, and I had a job, so my weekends and "free time" were not my own. In those early days, Facebook more often than not made me feel less of a loser because, while I didn't have the time or resources to hang out as much in real life with my friends, I could still stay "connected" to them, revel in the same Beer Pong photos as they did, and it was okay.

Facebook, to be fair, is not evil; no technology is, unless the person using it does so for evil purposes. But it does facilitate something that the internet is infamous for, the sense (however real or imagined) that actions don't have consequences. You can poke someone, the internet says, and they might respond, but it doesn't mean that it has to mean anything (unless you're flirting online, then it's loaded with all sorts of meaning). The internet is meant to be a conduit for communication, but the extent to which we let it replace real-time, face-to-face (as opposed to Facebook-to-Facebook) interaction says a lot about us individually. There have been times when I thought nothing of sending a post to someone that could be misconstrued, or read wrong (I have a sarcastic sense of humor, something which can get lost nuance-wise in the cold, digital display of the spoken word), and there have been times when I thought that Facebook told me more about a person than he or she (usually she, because like every guy I've tried to friend-request girls I liked, and most of the time they accepted, and this led to me imagining all sorts of things that weren't there because it was easier to write on their wall than talk to them in person) said to me. Facebook enables that part of us that's afraid of rejection, that wants to be loved without doing the hard work of connecting for real.

Now, to be fair, I don't intend to delete my Facebook account anytime soon: for one thing, I do have honest-to-God connections with real people that I know in real life but don't get to see anymore, and in that sense social networking really is social. Keeping up with someone's life might still creep me out a little bit (or appeal to the creepy part of me, whatever), but for people who were or are important to me whom I don't get to see for "real," it comes in handy. And while I've never met A.J. Jacobs or Will Leitch or any of the other famous people who accepted me as a "friend," I admire their work and hope that, maybe, in the course of my chosen desire to write for a living (I was interested in sharing myself that way long before social networking came along), I can field friend requests from people who read something I wrote, liked it enough to seek me out, and merely want to show that they like my style (without being prone to breaking into my home at three in the morning because they think we're "soul mates"). The internet still works in making me feel less lonely, less disconnected from the real world (i.e., anything that's not Walhalla). But I'm more careful about it.

I tend to spend less than an hour online every weekday, checking emails in case something important happens (usually not; like you, I get all kinds of spam promising a larger penis. How did they know that I had that problem?). I spend maybe five seconds checking my Facebook if someone posted on my wall or sent me a message, a few minutes more thinking up a witty saying or real-life emotion to do as a status update (as of this writing, and due to a week of listening to Talking Heads, it's a song quote), and maybe gaze longingly at pictures of my niece, who is one of the best things to come into my life in a while (there are a few others, but I won't name them here). I'm good with a few minutes spent there, and yes I'll post this link to my wall, so other people can find it and read it at their discretion. I don't worry so much about "dying unappreciated" as I did when I was younger and more pretentious. But I do still want to see a book with my name in the author's place someday, fiction or non-fiction (or both, as all the anti-Obama books seem to me). So after saying all that about Facebook, I'm gonna post this to it anyway. Humans are contradictory animals, something that I don't think Zuckerberg and the techno-geeks can fathom. You can't solve us with a mathematical formula; we just are. So suck it, Zuckerberg, for creating this addictive and now-essential tool that we all use, even when we hate ourselves for using it.

Jesus Christ: The Greatest Pro of All

I took that title from a line in Walker Percy's Love In the Ruins, which I bought a few weeks back and read over a couple of days this weekend. Hooray for putting things off until you don't!

Anywho, I have TV again...or at least more variety. Allow me to elaborate at length:

At the tail end of the TV season last May, a thunderstorm came along and knocked out a significant chunk of my channels. This was no problem initially because, as I said, the season proper was winding down, and summer reruns and summer "shows that didn't make the schedule during the regular season" were all I really seemed to miss out on. I could still get in a few channels here and there, and I had my reading to keep me occupied. I was good.

Until about last week, when I'd finally had enough. I'd had enough of not getting in channels that I liked just because they were pleasant background noise to my reading or napping (PBS's block of home-improvement shows are far less glittering, but they get the job done). I'd had enough of not getting to watch ESPN for at least a fix of "Sports Center" because it was one of the channels that went in and out. But mostly, I was tired of being stuck with the History Channel as the one that came in the best (of the ones that came in), and because the last time it had anything "historical" on it, Clinton was in the White House.

If you spend enough time watching the History Channel (and God knows I have, perhaps way too much), you begin to think that every workplace has "hijinks" and "kooky characters" who exist solely as a conduit through which the audience can enjoy themselves (though not because they feel better about themselves in comparison, which explains the sadomasochistic appeal of "Toddlers and Tiaras" and the entire block of MTV programming). When you know that "Couting Cars" is the auto expert guy from "Pawn Stars," it's only a matter of time before the go-to gun expert at the shop gets his own show.

God help us all.

Anyway, I'd like to go further, but I only have so long on the computer I'm on, so I gotta wrap it up. No TV: live-able, but barely once the fall season begins. Read more. Avoid TLC. That is all.

Mitt Happens

No, I did not catch the premier of Clint Eastwood's new one-man show, "Angry Old Clint Eastwood Yells at a Chair." I have better things to do with my time, such as reading The Hobbit and wondering why my left earlobe swelled up to the size of a Goodyear tire last week (it's shrinking now, thankfully, and I'll spare you the details because I understand if you're about to eat lunch or something). But I can appreciate why Republicans liked that better than they did their own freakin' candidate.

Watching the GOP try to convince themselves to love Mitt is about as funny as it was on my side, back in '04, when our pretty-boy rich-guy candidate made even wearing a Red Sox cap look awkward and unnatural. John Kerry has a smidgen more charisma than Mitt, however, and it helped that his wife was batshit crazy. Ole Mitt just can't win in the personality sweepstakes.

That being said, the guy could win. White people don't respond well to a black man in the White House (yeah, I said it!), and to be fair, Obama hasn't exactly done what he said he'd do (though the GOP kinda forgets that they're the reason why). I can see Mitt winning in November...and I'm okay with that.

Doom-and-gloom predictions are fine when you're young, or when you're convinced the other guy is Nixonian in his lust for power (Richard Nixon is the most fascinating president to me because he's clearly the most evil. Granted, all the facts about Rutherford B. Hayes aren't in yet, but I doubt anyone past or present will ever top Tricky Dick in the Asshole Presidents Hall of Fame). But I just don't see that this time around. Mitt is like Dubya minus the accent; he's about as comfortable with real, living and breathing people as a serial killer is with a woman who isn't his mother or a prostitute. The dude just doesn't have anything to him that merits being concerned, because his political philosophy is "whatever you say, dear."

Mark Hamill earned my fandom yet again (after all, he did send up himself in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) when he compared Mitt to "the Thing," an alien that can imitate humans without itself being human. I agree with that comparison whole-heartedly, minus the whole "destroying mankind" bit (though I would imagine Mitt would be uncomfortable around Kurt Russell if Kurt's brandishing a Petri dish and a flamethrower).

I can't honestly say that a Romney presidency would be a bad thing, on the whole; as much as I don't want it to come to pass, I wouldn't leave the country if it did. In my lifetime, Dubya is the only president who ever came close to being a dickhead of Nixon's caliber, and he only got that far because, with Dick Cheney next in line (and probably in charge), no one was gonna take a shot at him. It's important to study history because then you realize that we've had some mediocre presidents. Here, I'll name them:

Franklin Pierce
James Buchanan
John Tyler
Rutherford B. Hayes
Martin Van Buren
Calvin Coolidge
Herbert Hoover
William McKinley

So, if Romney gets in, I'm betting he gets on the Mediocre list (Nixon and Harding are on the "criminally bad" list, Reagan makes it as "actor-in-charge bad," and Dubya is in a category all of his own). That's my hope, anyway. With a douche like Paul Ryan in the co-pilot seat, however, it could end up being a lot worse.

If you'll excuse me, tickets for Eastwood's new show are going at a pretty penny. Gotta place my bid now.

A Confederacy of Dunces Couldn't Keep Me Away

New Orleans is long past my rear-view, the Superdome is majestically behind me (sweet Jesus, my entire hometown's downtown could fit in there), and I'm possibly on the contestant list for eighteen months (still unsure, if I never hear from them I guess I know for sure).

Boy, is my brain tired...

The "Jeopardy" try-out, I'm not at liberty to divulge the questions (excuse me, answers) but I feel pretty good about how I did. At least, I think I did good. Driving out of NO later that afternoon (following a trip to a riverfront mall where I spent way too much on an Eli Manning Giants shirt, but I don't regret it because I felt on top of the world), I could safely say that, win or lose (or draw) I was glad that I got the opportunity to go.

On the way back, we stopped on the Gulf Shore (at Gulfport this time) to take in the beach. Only thing is, I was still wearing my fancy Jeopardy clothes, so I couldn't really get in the waves or anything (well, I could have, but then I'd be hoping I dried out on the long drive back). There is a good photo of me that resulted, looking like I'm keeping the beaches clear of illegals while looking fashionable. Alabama wasn't any more interesting between Mobile and Montgomery, so I drove that stretch while my sister rested. Atlanta was banging at ten that night (we lost the hour that we'd gained back on the border between Alabama and Georgia), and the next thing I remember is waking up just as the familiar sights of my street went by. Needless to say, my sis and future bro-in-law crashed at the house that night, and we all got a fairly wore-out night's sleep.

So I'm back, and I'm glad I went. I would love, love, love to get on the show, but I got a pretty good trip through a part of the country I'd never seen (all of it, even the boring parts, was worth it). I've got a few souvenirs, some memories, a lot of cameraphone pics, and an experience that will be hard to top. But it will be harder to go back to "sad bastard Trevor," at least for a good long while. Because who the hell thought I'd get a chance to try out for Jeopardy? Anything is possible...even finding a real, non-tranny woman on Bourbon Street.

Okay, that might be impossible...

Bourbon Street Is Decadent and Depraved

Second day in New Orleans, first full day of sight-seeing (and only, as myself, my sis and her finance plan to abscond with the loot...I mean, leave town tomorrow after my Jeopardy try-out. Yeah, that's the ticket), and I know that technically we didn't do a whole lot of venturing beyond Canal Street and a side-jaunt down Bourbon Street, but we got to do more than enough.

The trip down was much better than any previous long-ass trip in a car during which I was a participant (I think it helped that we were all well past the age when farting in an enclosed space was a source of amusement, though that did not preclude any involuntary passing of gas). Georgia minus Atlanta was rural but pleasant (our path through ATL was nice because we didn't have to deal with traffic. My thinking is we won't be so lucky tomorrow). Alabama was notable for a couple of things: the fact that my future brother-in-law and I wore Clemson shirts in Auburn was not received kindly by the locals at a Firehouse Subs there (much harsh stares and possible brandishing of nooses could be inferred), and the stretch from Montgomery to Mobile (which I took over on after my sis expressed exhaustion at having driven so far, because she thinks I drive too slow for the interstate) was devoid of anything besides trees, more trees, grass, the occasional wild goat, and trees. Not even a fireworks warehouse billboard to liven up the scenery.

That particular stretch of Alabama answers my question "why do people take drugs?"

Mississippi was a revelation; as a kid who watched Mississippi Burning at a tender age, I've always been under the impression that you don't want to make a Mississippian angry (also, they still have the Rebel flag on their state flag). But the Gulf Coast, at least, was awesome; sandy beaches with gentle tides coming in, not at all like the Atlantic at Myrtle Beach (also, a significant lack of tacky tourist trappings at Biloxi, where we stopped). After that, it was on to Louisiana and New Orleans...where we happened upon Canal Street overrun by young college-age men in red dresses. Either it was some sort of charity/fraternity thing, or their drag queens have really quite trying.

Culture shock, thy name is New Orleans...

Today was a little better in that regard, NO is both urban enough to feel like a big city and Southern enough to be weird about it. I know we won't be doing much more while we're here (the Jeopardy thing is in the morning, and we all miss my niece something awful), but I want to come back, at my leisure, and see all the stuff that's here. It helps that none of us had an agenda (i.e., "I wanna see some big tourist trap!"), but I will be back sometime in the future. While wandering away from the excess of Bourbon Street (best way I could describe it: Clemson on a Thursday night, magnified by a large percent. The country boy in me is coming out, but really, apart from a trip to NYC and a passing familiarity with DC, ATL, and Greenville, my frame of reference was pretty small before now), I happened upon a little bookshop that had some long aisles I wanted to wander down, had I more time. Alas, I bought a book by a guy about New Orleans jazz because I figured that's what you do in New Orleans (plus, I already own and cherish a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces). This city is amazing, and while we did a lot, we just scratched the surface.

Anyway, long day ahead first of Jeopardy, then driving home (not sure if I drew the short straw on that yet, though it's the least I could do). Tom-Tom should be programmed to take us through a more-wild-goat-infested part of Alabama on the way back (or steer us to the nearest Jareds Galleria of Jewellry), and I pray for patience while trying to navigate through ATL, whether as driver or passenger. But hell, this has been a kick-ass trip all around, and whatever happens with the show, I'm glad I got to take it.

Could've used some Skinimax on the hotel cable, though ;-)

“Rednecks”/”Birmingham,” Randy Newman, and Southern Identity

The thing about the South is, we know we’re idiots. Not that we ourselves are stupid, but that’s how we’re viewed by the rest of the country. No one ever says someone from Oregon is an inbred cracker, for instance. Midwesterners may be boring, but they never had a major network television show dedicated to glorifying bootleggers running corn across Iowa county lines, for instance. No, we Southerners have a lot to answer for, but we’re not the idiots that a lot of people think we are.

Sure, there was that whole slavery thing (really, we’re sorry about it. White people have had a long history of being too lazy to do things when they could just get someone from another group to do it, for less pay). And we dropped the ball on integration for about, oh, a hundred years. And we still embrace the big, dumb, and loud when it comes to politics (Dubya is one of us, like it or not). Randy Newman is one of us, too, a New Orleans boy by way of Los Angeles and back again. So on that basis alone, I give him a free pass on “Rednecks.”

If you haven’t heard it…first off, he uses the n-word. He’s writing from the point of view of a typical good old boy (in fact, that’s the name of the album the song comes from, though I got it from a best-of compilation), and I can see where it wouldn’t necessarily be high on a lot of people’s playlists because of that (I saw him on “Austin City Limits” refusing to do the song, because “why do you think I can’t sing it?”). In that sense, he’s echoing Mark Twain, who used the n-word with such stunning regularity that people still have issues with “Huck Finn.” I didn’t get the whole controversy until I actually read the book, and then I understood. Twain sets a record for using the n-word, surely, though I’m afraid he might still be lagging behind any association of white people in the South (or the North, for that matter) who like to dress up and scare non-white people. Larry the Cable Guy fans, for instance.

The South is defined via pop culture as backwoods, infested with toothless morons who live to drink moonshine and knock up their first cousins. And with any groundless rumor and unwarranted stereotype, this one has basis in fact. We are backwoods, and proud of it. We went to freaking war with the rest of the country with maybe one gunsmith in Selma and a couple of fellas in Waycross who could whittle rifles real good, of course. When “The Dukes of Hazzard” is the single most important television show set in your neck of the woods, and “Deliverance” was filmed just down the road, you tend to be self-conscious.

Of course, we’re not all idiots down here. I recently read a couple of books by Lewis Grizzard, a Georgian (but we won’t hold that against him) who was pretty funny and insightful, even if I suspect him of having political views that I wouldn’t necessarily agree with (side note: I get tired of people lazily using “liberal” as a pejorative. Come up with something more clever, such as “practitioner of fellatio on small woodland creatures,” for instance). As he points out, and as Newman does in “Rednecks,” racism isn’t just a Southern thing. Y’all Yankees got nothing to brag about, basically is what each is saying.

On the flip side of that coin, “Birmingham” is both a gentle poke at the Southern attitude (who in their right mind would call Birmingham the equal of Paris or London?) and a celebration of said attitude (well, it is the greatest city in Alabama, when your competition is Montgomery, Mobile, and maybe Muscle Shoals, where Stax Records was located or recorded or was somehow or another connected to Muscle Shoals, I’m blanking on which of those options is the correct one). Once again, Newman inhabits a character, a regular working guy (the kind that Mitt Romney knows well, because he fired them a lot), a guy who don’t want much out of life except to work at a steel mill and go home to his wife and his dog Dan (the meanest dog in Alabama, naturally). Newman, by the way, is Jewish, something that still seems alien to a lot of Southerners even though they’ve been around since the beginning. But like any good writer of fiction, he inhabits the roles of both the redneck of “Rednecks” (who, after the jaunty first verse about how stupid he is, proves himself to be smarter when he talks about the North’s “enlightened” policy of putting blacks into ghettos in major urban areas) and the common man of “Birmingham” (a guy who really doesn’t have to answer to anybody for anything), and he does so with that rollicking, easy-going vocal delivery that “Family Guy” parodied so well in their Y2K episode (you know the one, where he’s writing songs about Lois getting an apple from the tree, because he just sings about whatever’s going on around him).

God help me, I love to listen to “Rednecks,” even though I wouldn’t do so in mixed company (it’s easy to see where someone might not get the premise of the song and think that Newman is actually espousing the views he posits, or at least they just don’t like the use of the n-word in the song). “We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground” is a Southern-ism, and it’s appropriate for my hometown as much as it is for anywhere else. But as much as I take joy in that part of the song, I tip my hat to Newman when it comes to the second verse, because it would be easy to take pot-shots at the South without acknowledging that the North isn’t the land of opportunity that it was promised to be for freed slaves after the war. A dirty little secret about American history is that while many abolitionists were in it for the liberation of the slaves and wanted them to have every opportunity to make a good life for their families, some were secretly doubtful that the black man lacked the “mental capability” to live independent like the white man. Of course, this was a view that the slaveholders shared, because as long as they thought of the slaves as “children” it was easier to justify to themselves the conditions under which they “owned” them. Newman makes it clear that, yeah, us Southerners have a lot to be ashamed of with regards to slavery and segregation, but Northerners need to ask themselves why the urban landscapes of cities such as New York and Chicago suddenly became less desirable for white families to live in once blacks and other minorities started moving into the inner city. The distance between what we believe and what we do is something that this country needs to work on.

Must Be the Money

"Jeopardy" is a little over a week away (or is it two weeks...no, August 13, which is a Monday, so...wait, how do I carry the square root...I may be in more trouble than I think), and in all the time I've had to think about the ramifications that possibly appearing on the show could have (assuming I make it past the audition stage in New Orleans...in the middle of hurricane season. I am a master of timing), my own personal philosophy about wanting to be on the show has changed over the years.

When I first started trying out for the show (online testing), I was interested in acquiring a record total, something not quite in the Ken Jennings territory but close (in other words, I didn't want to have to work again). Now, as I actually stand on the precipice, I'm more inclined to believe that money doesn't buy happiness (though it can buy you peace of mind...hey, maybe I should write commercials).

Granted, I still want to do well, very well indeed, should I be picked to be on the show (and the waiting period could last long enough that maybe I'd actually have something approaching financial stability whenever I get on, but I wouldn't bet on it). But in life in general, after having seen up close (from a very non-likeliness of participation in the riches viewpoint) how money and wealth don't always mean your problems go away, I just want to make enough out of life to not owe anything when I'm gone (many, many centuries from now) and to take care of my family, should I happen to have one (working on it as we speak, though I've said that for years now). Most of all, I want to be able to avoid the pitfalls of believing that, if I just get this or that opportunity to make money, all my worries will be gone.

Just take a second to check out any of the news outlets devoted to celebrities, the ones who are famous for being famous (or Kim Kardashian); theirs is a whirlwind circle of seeking attention by being fame whores who get paid to be fame whores and who don't really contribute anything to society (unless you count reality shows as contributions to society, and I'm inclined to disbelieve that notion). Who wants to do that, really? All the money in the world, and the minute the cameras shut off it's like you're nothing. Until the eventual reunion show.

God help us all...

Anyway, looking forward to the trip there and back (I always wanted to see Mississippi, though preferably through the rearview mirror), and I'm hoping at the very least I have a hell of a (responsible) time in the Big Easy.

I Heard the News Today, Oh Boy

I don't want to talk about the Colorado "movie massacre" because I wish it didn't even happen, but it did. Some nut with something to prove (namely, how violence can solve low-self-esteem issues, I gather) took it upon himself to ruin the lives of innocent people who were just trying to see the new Batman movie. And now, once again, we're left trying to figure out "what this means about" modern American society.

The easy thing to do would be to blame society, what with our violent video games (though I'm guessing a majority of the people who play them don't want to see what it would really be like to go on a rampage, with real people taking the place of flesh-munching zombies or Russian super-spies), violent movies (though again, most people who see movies don't feel the urge to act out what they see onscreen once they get past the age of seven), or rap music (hey, because, well...it's violent, right?). Like I said, it's the easy thing to do.

Another easy thing to do would say that it's somehow the fault of gun makers, though (as it turns out) the gunman (whose name I will not dignify here, because that's all he really wants, the attention) purchased them legally. So banning guns isn't the answer (though maybe doing a better job of vetting the people who buy them wouldn't be such a bad idea, as we seem to agree in the wake of every mass-shooting).

It's not the fault of art that this guy went nuts, though yes we do have violent movies and violent video games and they are easy enough to identify and paint as the villains in this debacle (while absolving the folks who maybe should've seen this coming). I have watched well over two thousand decapitations, gunshot wounds, axe-wielding lunatics, cannibalistic space aliens, and Michael Bay explosion-porn epics to well qualify as potentiallu under the influence of such images if I so chose to enact something on this level, yet I never have and never will (and it's not just because I don't like guns that much; in theory, when you're a kid, they're cool, but when you actually shoot one and it feels like a sledgehammer to your shoulder blade, you kinda lose interest). I was brought up to have respect for human life, a basic decency that transcends whatever religious or cultural imperatives that might argue otherwise. Do I like to play video games where bullets take apart the skulls of my opponents? Yes. Do I want to see that happen in real life? Not a chance.

Art can trigger someone's deep-seated notions of depravity, this is true. But let's not issue blanket statements that it is the sole cause of last Friday morning's bloodbath. This was someone with an axe to grind, a call for help that grew into something much worse when he couldn't find another way of making himself heard. The dude needs to go away for a very, very, very long time, and not even sniff a chance at life outside prison walls. But we also need to do a better job of recognizing those around us who could see such beauty in chaos, not on a movie screen but in real life. That's when we stop this crap from happening, not by taking away violent entertainment.

Scientology, Penn State, and the Olympic Uniforms

First: Katie Holmes got out from the grasp of/divorced Tom Cruise in rapid time this past couple of weeks, with one of the stipulations being that she couldn't allegedly badmouth Scientology (I'll admit, I'm not up to date on my celebrity gossip). My question is, what the hell is she going to reveal that's so damn bad? Who the hell knows what Scientologists believe (I doubt they know)? Scientology was started by a fourth-rate sci-fi writer as a way to make money off gullible people (as are all organized religions, when you come right down to it). Also, he may have diddled with little boys, but there's nothing official on that. When John Travolta is your religion's main spokesman, you're in trouble.

But Scientology is apparently big stuff in Hollywood, and if I know anything it's this: celebrities are idiots. That tells me everything I need to know about Scientology's belief systems, and yes I'm saying all this as a member of the Illuminati (which controls Scientology, the world's banking systems, the careers of Jay-Z and Beyonce, and Dunkin' Donuts).

Second: A report that came out about the Penn State cover-up says Joe Paterno knew in 1998 what Jerry Sandusky was doing in the showers (i.e., "rough-housing") and thought more about protecting his college win record than the victims of Sandusky's devious behavior. My thinking is, burn Penn State to the ground. Short of that, take down the statue to Joe-Pa that stands outside the stadium. No one should be that big that they can cover up something like that because they're more worried about themselves than what harm is being visited upon young children. Yes, it's human nature to not want to believe the worst about someone that you're close to, that you consider almost a son. But once the facts were in Paterno's face, unblinking and not going away, he should have cut Sandusky loose to the DA and saved his reputation that way. Penn State will never really live this down, and they shouldn't. Shame on Paterno and all the men in charge who did nothing for so long.

Finally: The Olympic uniforms...is this really an issue? They look ridiculous (that I would have expected) and they're made in China (like everything else). Why is this a problem for Congress to investigate? Because it means avoiding the real issues, I guess (god help me I sound like a conservative blowhard, but I don't know what their take on this is. Maybe Sean Hannity can take time out of his busy neck-expanding exercises to register an opinion, but I think not).

Not to get off on a rant here, but...:-p

The Songbook Strikes Back: "Under Pressure," David Bowie and Queen

(Note: This is a note. Also, this is the first of maybe four or five essays I wrote before my computer's untimely or timely end. I will publish them sparingly, and then return to poop jokes and worries about all those erectile dysfunction emails I get. How did they know?)

Sometimes you listen to songs on your iPod that no one else has ever heard of (or at least no one in your immediate social circle; maybe the people in far-off corners of the indie-alternative music world have heard the same song you’re listening to, but they’re too cool to admit it). But sometimes, for every Neutral Milk Hotel and Belle and Sebastian song that you claim as your own, your very own…you listen to an anthem beloved by millions. The kind of song that gets used in commercials, say, or blasted at stadiums when a team scores a touchdown or avoids getting embarrassed. Such songs are clichés, overplayed and devoid of any personal import you can bring to them as a fan, right?

“Under Pressure” is one of those songs that I’m sure anyone reading this has heard, and not just heard but over-heard (as in “heard over and over and over and over ad nauseum”). It’s so familiar because it’s got a distinctive bass line (just ask Vanilla Ice how distinctive it is sometime), it’s got two of the all-time greatest ambiguous-sexuality singers in duet form (well, there was nothing ambiguous about Freddie Mercury, even before the Village People-style moustache, but I think it’s safe to say that David Bowie was bisexual because it was trendy to be so in the early Seventies if you were in rock music), and it’s an advertiser’s dream: plenty of bombast and quotable lines that can be isolated for identification with your product. Even if, somehow, you’re a space alien just arrived on this planet from millions of galaxies to the west of Tucson, you’ve heard this song.

It would be easy to hate this song, really easy, and yet…

I think something that my fellow self-styled music “experts” and “critics” tend to ignore when they get “serious” about music is the fact that it’s supposed to be fun to listen to. Chuck Klosterman gets it (why else would he devote an entire book to heavy metal, the most maligned form of rock music outside of, say, dance music?), but try getting Greil Marcus to wax poetic about anything the Black-Eyed Peas have done and you’re barking up the wrong tree. Music doesn’t have to have a “message,” it can be big and dumb and loud and stupid and fun and about Fridays or telephone numbers or girls dating some guy named Jesse. Because a lot of the time, the songs that supposedly have a “message” just don’t work. When was the last time you voluntarily listened to “We Are the World?” Exactly.

In the Eighties, rock music suddenly became About Something. It didn’t matter if it was aid to starving Africans or AIDS awareness, so long as it was About Something. Not that music wasn’t About Something before; the Vietnam War did a toll on the young men able to avoid service in the armed forces but physically incapable of not forming a band during the peak period of 1966 to 1971. Message songs about the war (most against but some, like the bizarre “Ballad of the Green Berets,” pro-war) were serious (except when they were funny, like “Fixin’ To Die Rag” by Country Joe and the Fish), and that’s why when you hear them today, they seem silly and outdated. Sometimes when art tackles a serious subject head-on, it ends up looking ridiculous in retrospect.

So is “Under Pressure” a serious message song? If it is, the subject it’s addressing seems to be…I don’t know, be kind to people? It was the Eighties, and the bizarre confluence of Reagan-era “optimism” and conservative “get it your own damn self” made for a Up-With-People approach to social problems, like “we’d sure cure that pesky gay disease if we just made a song about how important it is to love Jesus, and turn it into a Broadway show.” Live Aid, noble as it was, was less about the cause than the chance for celebs to look like they Gave a Damn, that it was all About Something. You could say the current bumper crop of reality-TV shows, for which shame is not an emotion you could feel regarding your status as a font of ridicule by the public at large, got its start when Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie said “hey, people are dying in Africa. Wouldn’t it look good if we wrote a song and got Bob Dylan, Springsteen, *and* Dan Aykroyd to sing on this?” I remember a P.J. O’Rourke essay about the “We Are the World” video and how satisfied the people involved were with themselves, that they were showing that they cared. You could transpose that to any second of any broadcast of any episode of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and the words would still apply.

So after all that, do I like the song? Yes, of course: it’s awesome. Never mind the odd and frankly hard-to-decipher “message” of the song (I’m still leaning towards “random acts of kindness” or “pay attention to depressed people, they need love too”), the song itself actually seems to be About Something, but that’s more about what you bring to it (or, in keeping with the theme, What You Bring To It). Yes, it’s over-used by commercials (the one where the Muppets sang it was pretty funny, but still). Yes, it’s a relic of a time when superstar collaborations were a rarity, not a weekly occurrence (and when the word “superstar” actually meant something, Nicki Minaj. It meant something that you will never, ever qualify as). But it moves me, and I can’t say that about “Eve of Destruction” or “Do They Know It’s Christmas” or whatever the title was of that dumbass British Christmas-themed song. I like it, I guess, and I hope you don’t mind but I don’t give a damn if you do (now see, *that’s* Eighties).

America, Heck Yeah!

This past week, the nation celebrated the birthday of our founding, the Fourth of July. I celebrated it by riding around a few hours, doing something close to nothing because it was as hot as an oven...and everything was closed. Except the mall: the mall never closes.

Anyway, after all that, you'd think I'd be content to settle in for a quiet night of just reading (because both the lack of original programming and the ability to get in a majority of the channels has limited my TV viewing options since about at least late May. Thanks again, thunderstorm). You'd be wrong.

My uncle got a pool put in a while back, and I'd been meaning to get my toes wet in it for a while. But various things kept coming up, such as my lack of swimming trunks and ability to swim (lack thereof). But on Wednesday, in the midst of "maybe the Mayans were right" hot weather, I managed to scrounge up some trunks that might belong to my n'er-do-well younger brother and I set out for the pool.

I spent about an hour in the water, just chilling. When I got out, I was sure I'd have some additions to my farmer's tan, like maybe a little blistering but nothing too shabby. Nature was cruel to me: not that I got too pink, but that I didn't get pink at all. I still look like I'm wearing a tan, flesh-colored hairy shirt.

Gosh darn it.

Anyway, I had a genuinely good time Wednesday, and I even got a little into the patriotic spirit (because, as you know, I voted for Obama, and anyone who does that is a Godless commie liberal gay-loving French-food-eating tutu-wearing cut-the-military-budget pansy). America may not be the best country in the world, but we're not the worst. That honor belongs to Andorra.

Go look it up...

Stupid Kids, With Your Donny Osmond records and "Dukes of Hazzard" Lunchboxes!

You know how the age of email began, and everybody was like "wow, some guy in Nigeria really needs my help money-wise, and it can benefit me in the long run too!" Then suddenly you realized that every email you got from someone who wasn't someone you already knew was basically a scam?

It is into this era of distrust that the email from "Jeopardy!," the world's longest-running quiz show/Alex Trebek appreciation society, arrived in my inbox Monday.

At first I thought "this is bullshit," because these things don't happen to me. Mine is a life lived with few moments of good luck and many of bad luck (see previous entry about computer dying if you don't believe me). Yes, this was the fourth or fifth time I'd taken the test, but my expectations were low because, when you do something over and over again, you expose yourself to the law of diminishing returns.

But I'm happy to report that (so far) this seems legit (see, even now I can't really believe it): On August 13, I will have to be in New Orleans to take a test and/or talk to folks about why I really could use the money from a good run on the show (not asking for Ken Jennings numbers, but something decent). Perhaps I could tell them the funny story of when I got stuck in my own desk in sixth grade (no, really, that happened).

This is uncharted territory for the Trevster, and I now have to figure out how to share this news with my family without the overwhelming concern being "how the hell are you getting to New Orleans?"

Drive, I guess.

Anyway, Blogger now shows how many page views their clients get, and this has in no small way stroked my ego to see how often this page is viewed (though whether it's actually read is another matter). I would like to thank those people who view it, even if they're only here because they thought I had naked pics of Betty White.

I'm working on it.

Typewriters Don't Crash

Today we gather in memoriam for...or is it "memorium?" I am not the world's greatest speller...anyway, we pause to remember a valued friend, a keeper of secrets, a sharer of things not of this world and yet of it, a thing that helped us get through college and wouldn't question why I am using the royal "we" at this moment because we just happen to feel it is appropriate.

Godspeed you, laptop computer (2005-2012).

Age was the most likely culprit, along with my woeful ignorance of computer matters and my insistance that if you just shake it, it will work out alright (I believe negligent parents use the latter of those two as a defense). Perhaps the hard drive can be saved, perhaps not. All I know is, since a ill-fated trip to the library to update my iTunes library (and update I did, apparently deleting all but 120 songs off what was once a close-to-2000-songs library), and my less-than-copecetic response to said deletions, I am now the possessor of a useless slab of black computer marble. Unlike the apes in 2001, I don't get any smarter just by touching it. But no one messes with my water source now that I can use tools, thankfully.

Mine is not a loss to be mourned much except by me, and even I'm fine with it, in the end. I didn't have the Next Great American Novel stored away on the hard-drive, just a bunch of random essays that I could easily re-create given time and a willing computer partner. Indeed, if I were in the midst of school work this would be a far greater loss. As for the iTunes, while I've sold off a good chunk of the "hard drive" stuff (i.e., I got a lot of CDs and just burned the songs to iTunes, which I'm sure infuriated the ghost of Steve Jobs), most of the songs I really loved are either on the original disc still in my collection or on one of the numerous mix CDs I've made over the years. Plus, if and when I get a new laptop, I can simply start burning the CDs I have back into iTunes (hint: I've had to do this before, when an unforseen error deleted my library a few months back and I sat through the process to do so yet again so that I could enjoy Al Green and Bon Iver whenever I felt like it). Music is all around, of course, and while I am putting my iPod on hold until I can afford a non-computer-jack iPod charger (they're cheap, but so am I), I can enjoy the radio.

Christ, the radio...well, I'll pop in CDs in my car for the ride home.

Anyway, I will miss my laptop, if indeed it's a dead parrot. The jury's not out yet, but odds are this is the perfect time to be looking at new technology and making sure I can't kill it just by touching it. I'm a little like Lenny from Of Mice and Men when it comes to technology; I didn't mean to, George, honest, I was just petting it and it bit me and...Anywho, Shakespeare wrote with a pen, Vonnegut and Salinger had typewriters, and one day we'll simply write with our minds, letting our fingers rest. It's going to be okay.

As for the iTunes project I was doing here, don't fret: I did plenty of essays before the crash that are on a thumb-drive, so I can still do that for a time. And I will one day have another computer, but for the time being I can still get my internet on at the various libraries where they know me by name ("hey, asshole, you still owe twenty cents for that copy of The Erotic Adventures of Benjamin Franklin you checked out and never returned").

So adios, large unwieldy slab of concrete-heavy laptop glory, you will be missed. Not by my back, but you will be missed.

"Riot Van," Arctic Monkeys

It was the Virginia Tech game at Clemson, the year was…2007? 2008? The memory gets a little hazy here, and here’s why: I was coming off an epic drunk when the game wound down.

What, me drink? Shocker! Yes, kids, I drink, or have drunk, alcoholic beverages, sometimes on a regular basis, sometimes once or twice a year. Lately, no alcohol has passed these lips. But anyway, this was on a day during which much drinking was done by myself and my buddy Will.

Come to think of it, the actual memory might be of the Boston College game in ’07…yes, Boston College. Because it was after this game (a loss for the home team) that I decided to cheer up my fellow Tiger faithful with a speech.

Specifically, the “friends, Romans, and countrymen” speech from “Julius Caesar.” That’s right, I dropped some Shakespeare on everyone’s asses.

We were streaming out of the stadium after the kicker failed to get the ball through the up-rights. My exact memory of that moment is “yes…yes…fuck!” To say that everyone was depressed would be an exaggeration. I had been drinking before the game, of course. Like I said, Uncle Trevor has known the demon rum (especially when mixed with Coke). I had completed a course devoted entirely to Shakespeare, the guy who basically wrote every kind of play (unless he didn’t…yeah, that’s one conspiracy theory I could never buy into. It’s basically “this country rube couldn’t possibly write that well.” As a country rube, I resent that kind of thinking). So it was fresh in my memory.

I mounted a tree bank that put me slightly above my audience, and I started to recite the speech. But I ad-libbed, of course, tying the recent loss into the speech Mark Anthony gave over Caesar’s body (the one where he’s saying “let’s not mourn Caesar” while basically whipping up the crowd to mourn Caesar and move against the conspirators). I wish someone was recording it (my buddy Will was too busy laughing and egging me on), because if I’m remembered at all amongst my peers from our time at Clemson, that would be high on my list (along with the time I yelled out a derogatory comment about Chuck Norris’s height within hearing distance of Walker, Texas Ranger himself).

But you can’t pick what other people remember you for. Ask Steve Bartman, or Bill Buckner, or the Mayans. Ask the captain of the Titanic, ask the cast of “Saved by the Bell.” History will remember you for what it wants to remember you for. When you get drunk, you do stupid things (such as forget to put on your panties while clubbing…ask Britney Spears). Was my speech that night brilliant, or stupid? The fact that I can’t remember much of it should tell you where I think it falls, but hell, I could be wrong. Youthful indiscretions when you’re a politician come back to bite you in the ass. But I’m not stupid enough (or drunk enough) to ever run for office. So if this ever comes up as a mark against me, well, I brought it up. I’m owning it, for what it’s worth.

Advertisements for Myself

Hi, if you're reading this blog you're one of two things:

1.) a friend or "friend" of mine on Facebook who either knows me in real life (I apologize) or "knows" me "online" (again, I apologize), and you've been led here by the inevitable link I post to this on my Facebook page. For that, I thank you, and promise never to write about that one time you helped me bury Willie Joe McCallister behind the old Winn-Dixie in West Union. I know nothing, I see nothing...

2.) someone who has stumbled across this blog inadvertantly, perhaps because you were Googling "Trevor Seigler" for some reason and this came up, or you just like randomly reading blogs online.

If you're of either group, and you have a publication either internet-based or hard-copy-based (he-heh, "hard copy"), please do allow me to ask you if you would like very much to have the sort of wit, panache, and gift with Word Processing errors that you see here added to your endeavor, with the promise of money changing hands (though not necessary).

I've been free-lance writing (or making it sound like I do that, even when I refrain from writing anything for a while) for about a decade. A lot of the contacts I established are now out of the business, for various reasons not related to my having written for them (I think). I started out very aggressive, in a "look at how clever I am!" mode, when I used to email editors countless submissions (most of which literally, not figuratively, came out of my ass. Literally). I am well past that now, but I do feel more restrained in asking editors to read my stuff (sort of a shuffling my feet, "aw-shucks, you don't really have to if you don't wanna" style that I'm sure grabs the editor's attention but which I seem dead-set against knocking myself out of). It's not that I don't lack the ability to advertise myself as a writer (hello? Blog?), but I feel a little self-conscious about it.

Fact is, I would like to do some professional-grade writing for somewhere, and I've sent numerous emails to various sites begging, pleading, and offering things I'm not comfortable mentioning online for the chance to write for these publications. If you see anything about Siberia sliding into the sea, that wasn't me. Repeat, that wasn't me. Any and all advice about how to advertise my writing skills without coming off like a complete asshole (AKA Tucker Max) is appreciated. No spammers, please...okay, maybe one or two, but keep it to a minimum. I'm already up to my eyeballs trying to help the son of the deposed king of Nigeria.

Just a Crazy Couple of Kids: Anyone Else But You, Michael Cera and Ellen Page

Good soundtracks have to do more than collect the songs that appear in a movie; they have to flow well, from track to track, and never leave you wondering what the filmmaker was thinking when he stuck a particular song in the mix. Some songs that work in the movie don’t work outside of that context; think of all the smarmy, lightweight love songs that litter the soundtracks of romantic comedies, and how they seemed perfect for the last-minute epiphany that your female best friend was the love of your life all along, but you just didn’t see it because of her darn glasses or lack of perky breasts. Don’t you hate when that happens?

Soundtracks are analogous to mix tapes (yes, I know they’re on CD now, but I like the term “mix tape”) in that usually they collect a variety of artists who, if they’re not commissioned to write a song specifically for the film, will accede to the inclusion of a track or two. Where soundtracks differ is that, with a mix tape, you don’t have to pay the royalties for each song (and of course you don’t sell your mix tape, because that would be wrong, he said nervously looking over his shoulder). Sometimes the filmmakers go for the obvious, name-brand single or song that made the band or suggests them to an audience whenever they hear it (when you think of Journey, you think of “Don’t Stop Believing,” thus its way-too-often use in film and TV over the last decade). But sometimes a soundtrack has the opportunity to give you a look either at an artist’s deeper cuts, or discover a “new” artist entirely (in the sense that “if I haven’t heard of them, they’re new to me!”).

The Moldy Peaches (or is it just “Moldy Peaches?” I’m not sure) are all over the “Juno” soundtrack, which easily became my favorite CD from 2007 (sharing the honor with Modest Mouse’s “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank”) in the form of Kimya Dawson, who went on to have a brief run as America’s Favorite Indie-Rock Kookie Songwriter before receding from the stage (I haven’t heard of her since, so if her career is thriving in some other part of the country my apologies for implying that it’s not). And the song that closed out the film (and the soundtrack) was an unexpected pleasure, Michael Cera and Ellen Page’s acoustic take on “Anyone Else But You,” which appears on the soundtrack earlier in the original Moldy Peaches version. Cera and Page acquit themselves nicely on the song, which isn’t demanding vocally but merely calls for interplay between a male and female singer talking about not wanting anyone else but each other. Simple, basic, to the point, and it’s a great song. I’ve probably listened to it more than I have the original version, which is also good. When you return to a song, even after time has passed and the newness of it wears off, you know you’ve got a good one here.

I’d be lying if I said I never thought of including this on a mix tape I might make for any particular female I might have found myself romantically interested in over the years since I first heard the song. But I figure it’d go down about as well as the time I stuck “Let’s Get It On” at the end of a CD for a girl as a joke (more about that later, if I feel up to it, when I eventually tackle the greatest Marvin Gaye song of all time). But there have been a few girls about whom I could say I felt this way, and while over time the feelings might have faded I tend to look back with fond nostalgia over the times we had (whether they were all in my own mind or something mutual). I guess the partners can change but the sentiment remains the same: whoever I might figuratively be playing the song for is indeed, at that moment, the person I’d prefer over all other women.

When I make a mix tape (okay, mix CD; even I realize it’s anachronistic and inaccurate to describe it as otherwise) for another person, I have to take into consideration what it is that I’m trying to say. If the songs come on too strong, I might scare off the girl I’m trying in my clumsy way to woo or just make feel better. If not enough songs mention the fact that I’m kinda in love with the girl I’m giving the CD to, I might as well put “Just a Friend” on repeat and be done with it. “Anyone Else But You” is pretty blatant without being “I need you, I love you, I can’t live without you”, especially if you’ve just met the girl (no I never made a mix CD for a girl I just met, though the thought did cross my mind on more than one occasion. Yes, I’m considering professional help). It’s what I think is a nice way to say “you rock, and because you rock I want very much to rock with you, or to help you rock it out…aw, now I’m sweating again, and you’re looking at me with that ‘what the hell is wrong with this guy?’ look in your eyes again.”

No, that’s never happened to me…moving on.

Michael Cera seems to be the patron saint of my soundtrack collection, as he adorns the copy of three of them (“Juno,” “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” and “Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World,” which I just picked up after wanting to find it for over a year now). I’m quite an awkward lad myself, so I identify with the nervous, socially incompetent way in which his characters deal with the world (he’s become his own character type, the “Michael Cera part” which requires an actor to respond to life’s challenges with clumsiness). Ellen Page is kind of my dream girl, at least as the snarky teenager she usually plays in films (she’s probably preppy and non-self-aware in real life). And they introduced me to one of my new favorite songs at the end of a really good movie about teenage pregnancy, before it became the impetus of countless MTV reality shows (teenage pregnancy, not the song). If I were to put it on a mix CD for a girl and it creeps her out, that’s her problem. It’s a good song.

But I probably wouldn’t put it on the mix CD…