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…

Nobody Put the Joy in Joy Division: “Love Will Tear Us Apart”

I have this recurring fantasy (relax; it’s PG-rated) in which the girl I’m currently in love with has some sort of accident (non-fatal, though I don’t know that in my fantasy until I get to the hospital where she’s being treated), and I rush to the hospital and get to her room. She (whoever it is; the girl changes, but the fantasy stays the same) is happy to see me, or she’s asleep and won’t wake up for hours (it depends). So if she’s sleeping, I pull up a chair and camp out in her room, staying by her side until she wakes so that she knows…what? One of the things that the fantasy seems to confirm for me is that I tend to expect the worst, especially when it comes to interpersonal relationships. If she has to have a near-fatal accident for me to show that I care, why would she put up with that?

Not to get too personal than I need to be, but I’m at a loss to think of “happy couples” in my immediate social circle, especially in terms of family members. I know of a few relationships that I would consider healthy, non-needy on one or another partner’s part, and in general strong enough to take what the world throws at them. Everybody else lives in resentment and plotting to do away with one another. I exaggerate, but it would be safe to say that, when I’ve tried to have a relationship in the past, I’ve had to rely more on pop-culture than real-life experience to make it happen. And the fact that I’ve never really had a relationship with a woman (close, but no cigar) seems to confirm the inherent fallacy in trusting John Cusack to teach me anything I could use in my own life.

If you take a minute to look at some of the more celebrated couples in pop-culture or literary history, you’ll see what I mean. Romeo and Juliet killed each other; Mr. Rochester got Jane Eyre but not before losing his sight and one or more of his limbs; Catherine and Heathcliff had to die in order to be together; Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck couldn’t make it work. For a romantic story to be successful, it seems, it has to end right at the moment when a relationship begins. The music swells, the end credits roll, and we leave the theater glad that the couple ended up together (though we probably knew they would anyway). When they move in together and have their first fight over chores or the naming of their children, we’re long gone.

Illusions and fantasies; no matter I find myself unable to “make it happen” with a girl, I’m basing it all on stuff that never actually happened. I think that’s the real message of “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” the Joy Division song that always comes up as “typical Joy Division” (though it’s actually an atypical JD song, in my mind; “Transmission” might be more representative, or “Digital.” Basically, if it’s a one-word title, you can’t go wrong when it comes to Ian Curtis and the boys). Granted, the song references a situation that Curtis, in his early twenties, found himself in: a marriage that wasn’t working because the couple had married young (though Ian’s fooling around with a Belgian female journalist didn’t help), and the dying embers of the relationship were leaving a sour taste in his mouth. But as the man says, you bring your own meaning to anything you read, and once the work of art leaves the hands of the creator it becomes all things to all people. Hell, “Born in the USA” was co-opted by Reagan despite its obvious rejection of the very gung-ho patriotism he and his ilk professed. When I hear the song, I hear Ian Curtis, but I also hear all the times I’ve come up short, or the girl I’ve professed love for didn’t quite measure up or deserve my efforts (lest you think I’m full of myself, I usually come to the conclusion that, as Jimmy Buffett says, it’s my own damn fault. But sometimes I fall for the glamorous exterior before getting a chance to see the xenomorphic man-eater beneath the surface).

Love doesn’t have to be stressful or doomed, of course, but my experience has been of the “nerdy sidekick who gets an axe to the head via the serial killer in the woods” type. I’m a cynic because I’ve had my heart broken one time too many, but I’m a sentimentalist at heart. I’ve used mix CDs to say things I couldn’t say in person, and I’ve realized too late that I should’ve just said what I needed to say (how the hell I worked John Mayer, Jimmy Buffett, Ronald Reagan, and Bruce Springsteen into a post about a Joy Division song is beyond me, but it just happened). Such is life.

Ian Curtis’ widow Deborah wrote a memoir of her time with the Joy Division front man, which was turned into the movie “Control.” She says that Ian in essence never grew and never wanted to, saying that he wanted to die before he was twenty-five (when he killed himself, he was a couple of months shy of twenty-four). He bought into the romantic myth of living fast, dying young, and leaving a good-looking corpse (though his idol, David Bowie, only did the living fast part, and is an esteemed rock icon past the age of sixty). Real life, with an early marriage and epilepsy, intruded on that, and he couldn’t handle the life of the rock star while also working nine-to-five and leaving a wife and daughter behind when he went on the road. I think it’s not quite as cut-and-dry as that, whether you call that “cut-and-dry” or not. But if he couldn’t handle grown-up life with all its complications and compromises, I can’t say I blame him. It’s scary being grown-up, even if you don’t have the added pressure of a mortgage, a wife, and a young daughter as well as a thriving career as the lead singer of the most important post-punk band ever.

Maybe we need the fantasies to get us through, then, when the real-life alternative is either so bleak or so dull that we wonder why we bothered. The movies almost always end before a relationship really begins (or after it’s over, like “(500) Days of Summer,” which then went back to what went wrong). Granted, it can be crushing when the person we end up with doesn’t live up to the ideal. But as one of the characters in that movie says, why wait for a fantasy girl when there might be someone in real life who’s better, because she’s real?

Sweetest Thing, U2

When a band tries simply to render an artistic vision and fame is a side-benefit that they didn’t see coming and have an ambiguous relationship at best with, we applaud them. When they start out telling people “we’re gonna be the biggest band in the world” and then, well, become the biggest band in the world, doing entire concerts from inside a giant lemon, we call them U2 and we say they’re wankers. At least we do if we’re online.

Once upon a time, I became a regular visitor to the website New Order Online, and by “regular” I mean “I spent hours there arguing the merits of various late-twentieth-century popular music artists such as a certain Irish quartet who you may have heard of. In fact, if you’ve never heard of New Order, you probably don’t want to visit that particular website; we would’ve reamed you for your lack of knowledge. New Order, in brief Cliff’s Notes version, once was a post-punk outfit named Joy Division, until Ian Curtis (the lead singer) killed himself and his bandmates had to decide whether or not to carry on. In one of history’s nice little coincidences, AC/DC were going through the same period of grief versus practical concerns that same year, 1980. They got Brian Johnson, who sounded a lot like Bon Scott, and went on to be even bigger. Joy Division changed to New Order, elected guitarist Bernard Sumner to front-man position, and went electronic. And they were great; trust me, a blind download of “Substance” (their best-of circa 1987) would be worth your money. But they never got to be as big as they should have.

Or as big as U2 became…

You’ve heard of U2; from the beginning, they made quite a racket, and they’re still at it. I don’t even have to pretend to offer a history lesson or highlight any of their songs, because you’ve heard them. In fact, they’re so omnipresent that I think this is part of why people absolutely hate them. It’s far more fashionable (and frankly more fun) to mock Bono’s pretensions at being a world statesman (though it turns out he’s pretty good at it) or consider the band as a whole as merely imitators and not innovators, benefiting from America’s fascination with anything that has a foreign accent, seems exotic without being threatening, and rocks in an arena-rock, balls-to-the-wall way.

And I was right there at the barricades, bagging on Bono and the boys even as…well, even as I had to admit that I liked their music. Most of these essays are about music that was big during my youth, and I think that’s the way a lot of people’s iPod songlists are: as much as you want to think you’re hip and with it, the songs you listen to the most are the ones you grew up with or associate with different times in your life (thus the autobiographical nature of many of these essays). U2 might be the Train of the Eighties, except for the fact that they did great, great songs. My cousin Brandon is a big U2 fan, with zero trace of irony in his fandom.

But being a fan doesn’t mean you can’t hold the band’s feet to the fire when they do something you can’t get behind. I’m sure if you asked him, he could name a few times when U2 let him down, or released something that wasn’t up to their previous standards. But something that I’ve noticed with even the songs that I didn’t care for first time around: eventually they grow on you. For every fist-pumping “Bad” that snares you in from the first lyrics or drum break, there’s a “Sweetest Thing” that seems nice enough but nothing to write home about, until it worms its way into your cerebral complex and makes its case.

For all the bombast that they’re known for, U2 can be surprisingly quiet when they want to be. Even “One” is more restrained, I think, than the usual crowd-pleaser. And “Sweetest Thing” is that rarest of U2 songs past a certain point in their recording history: it’s just a love song, albeit with an edge (get it? “Edge!”) of melancholy. Once upon a time, U2 sang simple songs about simple emotions in a complicated way. Oh, and Bono is one of the best singers in rock history. Yes, he really is, and “Sweetest Thing” is a good reminder of that. I think so, anyway.

Picking on a popular artist is fun, no doubt, and I enjoy bagging on so many bands and artists that I can’t really say I’d ever really like even in an ironic way. But I like U2, I don’t love them but I like them, and I like some if not all of their music. I may envy them their money, fame, ability to help charity, lack of a day job, and so on. But I like them, enough to mock them on occasion. But you know I don’t really mean it.

“Do You Want to Know a Secret?” Well, Do You?

Love is pretty messed-up when you’re in middle school; for one thing, you can’t drive, so you have to be chaperoned if you’re lucky enough to get a date. If you have zits and glasses with lenses the thickness of bullet-proof glass, forget it; you won’t have to worry much about whether anyone can chaperone you.

When you get to high school, it’s supposed to be better, but it isn’t; after a couple of years of feeling like the world’s biggest pizza-face, your confidence is at an all-time low and you don’t feel much like even trying, even when you’re a senior, you’re on the school newspaper with a cute freshman cheerleader, and you’re pretty sure she likes you. Well, maybe.

Becky was that cheerleader, and she was cute. Her middle name was “Mildred,” which I still remember after all these years because it seemed like a ridiculously old name for someone so young to have, even if it was her middle name. Ours was not a great love story, by any stretch of the imagination (I doubt she’d remember me today, I looked her up on Facebook once because I was feeling nostalgic for high school romances that never were and what I saw seems to confirm my belief that she failed to carry a torch for me after I went to college and then came back to work at a grocery store to pay off some loans I may have reneged on regarding my supposed education), but I’d like to think maybe I contributed to her overall growth as a person. Is that too much to ask? Yes, yes it is.

The prom came around towards the end of senior year, and I did what any right-thinking male would do; I had a mutual friend ask Becky if she wanted to go with me. Girls like that when guys can’t approach them and have to use a friend, right? She was already going with someone (because male seniors like to scan the freshman talent pool before they officially leave high school, though they’ll be back for all the football games now that they can smoke without the principal or other authority figures giving them hell about it), so I went stag. I was also working through a lingering crush on Brooke, a girl I’d met who shared my obsession with the Beatles at a time when Nirvana-wannabes and the Smashing Pumpkins were ruling the roost. So I got to watch the two girls I sorta liked dancing with other guys all night, in my rented tux that cost more than I’ve probably ever made on any subsequent paychecks in my working life.

The Beatles were supposed to guide me in the ways of love, but as I discovered from reading about them, they were pretty bad at it. Apart from the random groupies over the years, John married Yoko (which I took at the time as a sign of mental instability on his part), Ringo married a Bond girl (not too shabby, even though it’s 007’s sloppy seconds), George lost his wife to Eric Clapton (I prefer his work with the Yardbirds to his AOR Eighties songs), and Paul managed to have happiness with Linda before she died and he found himself without a leg to stand on in divorce court with Heather Mills (low blow, I know, but I’m a gutter-dwelling comedian). “Do You Want to Know a Secret” is from the period when they were naïve, just as I was, and while it’s not the most amazing Beatles song or George vocal, it’s appropriate. High school is ridiculous, in retrospect, and my avoidance of Becky probably cost me at best a couple months of fun, before I went off to college. That’s *if* she liked me then…and I can’t say for sure about that.

I did have her phone number when I came back from college, and one night on a dare I called it from the pay phone outside the grocery store I worked at (this was a time when you still had pay phones; believe me, I know how this ages me but I have to deal with it). When a guy picked up (and started asking “hello?” repeatedly when I just stood there, unable to think of a viable reason to call), I knew it was over. I wasn’t sad, actually, or at least I don’t remember being so. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I didn’t know anything about love then, I think. I know more about it now, and I can say with certainty that I did not love Becky…at least, I don’t *think* I loved her.

Who the hell knows?

“Fall In Love With Me,” Iggy Pop

“The Adventures of Pete and Pete” is a show that I treasure having had the chance to see when it first aired on Nickelodeon, back before it became simple a nostalgic touchstone for thousands of former kids (and in my case, at the time that it was on, former pre-teens) to join Facebook groups about. There was something deliciously off about the show, as it defied the “Saved By the Bell” model of “preppy kids with whom I have nothing in common” by featuring kids whose lives were absurd, even bizarre. It prepared me for the adult world, in a way, by showing that grown-ups didn’t have it any better figured out than us kids. It was the anti-“Wonder Years,” though I liked that show too. I watched a lot of TV as a kid, is what I’m saying.

Iggy Pop, the once and future king of Detroit’s seedier rock and roll scene, became a regular character on the show, playing the father of Young Pete’s best female friend (when I see Michelle Trachtenburg today, all sexy and hot, I feel like a dirty old man because I remember when she was a young’un. It’s the same thing with the Olsen twins, though they made these easier for former “Full House” viewers by going on the “no food shall pass between these lips” diet). At the time, I had no idea who Iggy was, nor was I aware of the truly subversive notion that having him on a kid’s show was. This was back when Nickelodeon didn’t try to out-Disney Disney, by having their headliners record horrible records as well as do horrible shows with canned laughter accompanying sub-Three Stooges physical comedy (funny how I went with a Three Stooges reference there, given that Iggy’s band was the Stooges).

Iggy Pop, as I later learned, was the doped-up, strung-out lead singer of America’s best rock band that no one had ever heard of, the Stooges. I bought their first album, simply called “The Stooges,” and while I eventually sold it I did wear the hell out of it at times, because it was great. “Raw Power” I didn’t respond to quite as much (the touches of glam rock might have something to do with it; there was one rock genre that I could never truly embrace, either because I’m a latent homophobe or the music was on the whole iffy. I prefer to think the latter, as my appreciation of the Smiths and their ambiguous singer Morrissey gives me the right to say I’m not homophobic. Granted, that’s like saying I can’t be racist because I have black friends). But it was his 1977 solo record “Lust for Life,” with the title track and “The Passenger” and “Success” and “Fall In Love With Me,” that I really liked. I enjoyed the Road Warrior-esque “Passenger” because at the time I wasn’t driving myself, I relied on rides from friends, and the extent to which we were still friends depended on how often they were willing to cart my lazy ass around with them.

“Fall In Love With Me,” coming as it does from the admittedly creepy Iggy (just look at the album cover and tell me you don’t get the “windowless van full of puppies” vibe), is a tender love song, albeit one couched in drug addiction in the druggiest of all European cities, West Berlin. Having some German ancestry led me to develop a lifelong interest in the country that gave the world Haydn, Hitler, and Hasselhoff. Part of it was trying to figure out why such an evil as the Holocaust came to pass, and how the German people dealt with that legacy of being the world’s worst mass murderers (hint: they embraced David Hasselhoff as their cultural icon. I think that indicates just how well they dealt with being Holocaust perpetrators). Being history’s bad guys can lead you to do nutty things, such as make Fassbinder films or ingest massive quantities of heroin, both of which Berlin was known for in the Seventies when Iggy and David Bowie (champion of the then-underappreciated Stooges and Velvet Underground) went there to record Pop’s first two solo records, “The Idiot” and “Lust.” The record as a whole reads almost like a great high followed by the lowest of lows, with some great guitar riffs thrown in. “Fall In Love” caps off the record, which began in the hedonistic rush of the title track (used to great effect to start off the greatest film about Scottish heroin junkies ever made, “Trainspotting”). It’s sinister and a little sexy, and it would be the perfect song of choice to play for your girlfriend if she were into bondage and leather.

Having said that, I’m not sure that I’d want a girl I date to be into that stuff. I didn’t like the idea of getting spanked as a child when it was my grandma; why would I get off on it now because it’s being done by a woman who might be paid to do so? Oh, the psycho-sexual hang-ups of a former English major don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but still…I think about these things.

Iggy Pop and the Stooges reformed, and it was perhaps predictable that they recorded a new album, one which I’ve actively avoided (because it’s the rare creature that is a satisfying reunion album from a band that broke up when all their members were still in their twenties). But as always, I can stick with the classics. I found a best-of CD for the alt-country group Uncle Tupelo (literally the forefathers for Wilco, as Jeff Tweedy was in both bands) on which they cover “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” It’s a disarmingly clever cover, at least until the last furious onslaught of guitars at the end (I kinda enjoyed the almost bluegrass reading Tweedy and the boys gave the song). If there’s ever a “Pete and Pete” movie, I feel some hope that Iggy will be asked to revisit his part, and he’ll do a good job of it. But without the heroin, without the saloon in West Berlin, without the table made of wood, it’s just not the same, is it?