For a Friend

There are times when I question the path that my life has taken, things that I could've done over and better if I'd known where they would lead, things that I wish I could have the opportunity to rectify. But for the most part, I know that were I able to enlist Doc Brown in helping me to make such things come to pass, I'd regret it; who I am now is often times the result of how I've dealt with the bad things that happen (as well as the good things, too). I had reason to think about this last week, because without one particular experience in my past I wouldn't be able to understand what a friend of mine is going through right now.

Without getting into specifics, she was let go from her job last week, and she's currently trying to find employment somewhere else. I know all too well what a hell that can be.

Two and a half years ago, I had a job that I loved. I was good at it, my co-workers liked me, I made decent salary, and what's more I could help people (yeah, sure it was just helping them find a book that they might be looking for, but it felt good at the end of the day to have a job that actually required me to use all the information I'd stored away in my head after a lifetime of reading and paying attention to culture). Then I got fired, and it was devestating. In the immediate aftermath, I went to a really dark place mentally, not a "guns blazing revenge fantasy" place but a "why fucking bother getting out of bed" place. It took me over a month to find a job that would take me, and then only because a friend of mine worked there and let me know about an opening. It took even longer for me to feel like I could do anything worthwhile.

In a way, though, getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it forced me to start the long, unattractive process of growing up. I'm still not there yet, but I am getting to the point where I appreciate how difficult things can be without a good support system. Those co-workers who liked me at my old job? We're still close (they made a point of inviting me to a birthday party not too long after my firing, and while I wasn't my usual barrel of laughs they did help me feel better about things). As dark as things got, once I knew my sister was pregnant with what would become my beautiful niece, I knew I had to stick it out. And now, when my friend needs support and understanding, I hope I can provide both. I know for sure that I'll try.

So let me tell you about her, in case anyone reading this is a prospective employer in the greater Greenville metro area: she's an expert customer-service representative, with experience in retail. She told me once that she wanted to be a librarian, so anything like that (libraries, bookstores, etc.) is where she would kick ass and take names. She knows how to navigate the delicate waterways of interpersonal workplace relationships (i.e., she gets along with everyone, even the people that piss her off). You'd be a fool not to hire her.

In the intitial moments after she let me know about her unemployment, I felt helpless to aid her, and while I've done job searches online and practially harassed friends of mine in G-Vegas about jobs that might be available, I don't think I've done enough to help her out. Maybe it's the whole "Hero on a White Horse riding to rescue" thing, but I want to do more. So far, though, this is the best I can manage.

So I hope that, in some small way, me doing this will help her out, either in actually getting a job or in making her feel better until she does get one. I'm good at cracking stupid jokes to take her mind off the sad stuff, I think, so I'll keep that up as well. And for anybody else out there going through something, be it work-related or not, allow me to offer this platitude: don't give up, things will get better.

You Just Got Te'o-ed, Bro!

Hmm, there's so much to talk about this week...President Obama's re-inaugeration (this time, it's personal)...the whole gun-control or non-control debate (I'm pro-not letting crazy people have deadly assault rifles myself)...Lance Armstrong talking to Oprah Winfrey about what an asshole he is (sorry, I meant "steroid-taking cheating asshole"). But the story that seems to be sweeping the nation is one that's entirely made up.

In case you've been living under a rock (or are more concerned about things that directly concern you, fools), Manti Te'o was exposed this week as either the stupidest man on the planet or a partner in one of the most bizarre hoaxes ever to be perpetuated (because we live in an age of absolutes, it can't just be "dude was an idiot" or "dude might have been in on it." It has to be one or the other extreme, truth be damned). He had been in a "relationship" with a "girl" he "knew online" and "had never met" because, as it turns out, she's about as realistic as the Tooth Fairy, Bigfoot, and the Yeti (the Chupacabra, however, is totally real. When will science acknowledge it?).

It's a funny story in that it's both reflective of the online culture we live in ("anyone you meet online might not be who they say they are" being the standard trope of the media this past week) and that it highlights the media's own peculiar inability to see through bullshit artists, be they political hacks or (allegedly) lovestruck college football stars who may or may not have used the idea of a fake girlfriend's death to build up their Heisman chances. Deadspin was the source I turned to for the particulars (after spending a day joking about it with my friends) and I have to say, if they are to be believed, Te'o was an innocent victim like Nixon was a pawn in the Watergate instigator's nefarious scheme. So, subsequently, I've had a field day with fake girlfriend jokes, because whatever the truth is the whole thing sounds like a movie (like the movie "Catfish," for example, which I've never seen but have been assured by my fake internet girlfriend is a real thing).

It's a bizarre time to be alive, to be sure; the internet promises the idea that the person you could be talking to is Tom Hanks or Meg Ryan, when the reality is that it's a serial killer or a cop (who says references to You've Got Mail are dated?). I am old enough to remember when it really didn't seem like that much of a stretch to assume that someone was who they said they are, but nowadays you have to be skeptical to preserve your sanity. People go online to define themselves, and sometimes they forge an identity that has nothing to do with who they really are (like, say the ringleader of the Te'o scheme, who is a dude who is very much alive). It can be a liberating thing to go online and actually find yourself, with a community of "friends" who very much are who they say they are, and who open doors to your psyche that you didn't know were there. But if they keep dodging actual meetings...you might best be careful about actually wanting to meet.

Now if you'll excuse me, I just started talking to this girl online, she's eager to meet me and gain access to my bank account, but she assures me she just wants to use a little of my cash to help bring her deposed father over here from Nigeria. It's on the up and up...

Wound Your Idols

Well, the cat is out of the bag: Lance Armstrong, an American hero for riding a bike and fighting cancer, a genuine survival story...used performance-enhancing drugs (usually we call them "steroids," but there's a whole mess of things that fall under the PED banner nowadays). The news is shocking...if you have suffered repeated blows to the head and are living under the delusion that anyone is what they seem.

Hero worship comes naturally in sports, and when I was younger I idolized guys (mostly baseball players) who seemed like amazing athletes. And they were, until it was revealed that they boozed around, cheated on their wives, treated fans like crap, and hung around Billy Martin too much. But it wasn't just Mickey Mantle (whose life story is Greek tragedy personified) that started me thinking I need to wean myself off the hero drug; it was me.

Looking at someone else to be better than you just because they can hit a ball out of the park is pretty messed up, when you're honest about it. And thinking that someone of Barry Bonds' talent (yes, the jackass is talented, before steroids came into the conversation) is worse than you because they cheated to get where they are is not much better. I've gone through all the stages on steroids, from genuine shock to a numbed, almost default cynicism that of course, everyone is juicing. Athletics is based not on a level playing field, but on the idea of winning. Ricky Bobby isn't ridiculous in the sports world; he's a prophet. And using any advantage that you can to win, well, that's just part of the sport. Sorry if you thought good grades, praying to God, and drinking your milk were the only things you needed to do to hit the longball.

Idolization of anyone is human nature (why do you think the Greeks and Romans had so many gods, or why all three major modern-day religions have one Supreme Being who's Superman times ten?), and we're never gonna rid ourselves of the desire to have someone represent our ideals. Lance Armstrong did do good; there are probably a lot of people around today who wouldn't be here if he hadn't created more awareness of what cancer does to people. But he's human, just like the Mick or anyone else we put on a pedastal just so that they can be knocked down. Maybe that's why reality shows are huge now; no one wants to be Honey Boo Boo, they just want to laugh at her and feel better about themselves.

The point is, I feel the same conflict about this latest PED dope as any sports fan would: on the one hand, I don't begrudge him the idea of cheating, because to be honest it probably would occur to me as well (though I'd hope I could resist the temptation), but I also think he deserves some degree of shaming, because he led people on with what amounted to a lie about his ability. Steroids probably don't make you better at hitting a ball or riding a bike, but they do make you endure those grueling physical activities better. They wouldn't be taken by everybody and their mother if they didn't work. But it's not kosher.

One thing is certain, though: it's real easy to jump on the moral high ground after the fact. For every revelation about a sports star's steroid use, the same nattering nabobs that glorify said star when there's no indication that he is a doper jumps on that star with "shock and horror." Please, you guys knew all along, you just didn't write about it because you'd lose the access, you'd lose the ability to ride that gravy train ("My Week with Lance!"), and the ability to pad out your own resume as a hagiographic toady. Major League Baseball knew from the beginning that steroids were being used, but homers equalled butts in the seats. If cocaine made ballplayers seem stronger and better able to hit home runs or score touchdowns, you'd see piles of the stuff given out at "Fan Night."

Let's just admit that we don't know these people any better than we do, and try and keep that in mind the next time we're sold on "the Next Big Thing" in sports or any field of entertainment. Because odds are, we're being sold a bill of goods that doesn't deliver.

Belle and Sebastian, "The Boy With the Arab Strap"

It should come as no surprise at this point for me to acknowledge that I might be a little OCD about things, obsessive about elements of pop culture or sports or what have you that, while not being unique to me (because we all want to feel some connection to our fellow man, at least enough to get references on "I Love the Eighties"), are alarming to me at the same time that they're comforting. What is this restless curiousity that dwells within me, to seek out obscure films, books, albums and the like, and does it lead away from the elusive happiness I might seek in these sacred objects? Am I spending so much time in antique stores because I'm looking for books, or am I looking for books because I spend so much time in antique stores? (By the way, "American Pickers" was my gateway drug on reconnecting with my desire to find secondhand books in places that are crammed full with otherwise useless junk).

Yesterday, I went to "Yesterdaze," a record store that is both new and familiar to me. It's new in its location, back in Seneca after a brief layover in downtown Clemson, after which that location's closing it became lost to me, but it's old in that I've been going to it, or places like it, for close to fifteen years. Long after my interest in popular rock music began to stray from the easy-access confines of the Walmart CD shelves (in a fit of youthful indulgence, I even went so far for a time to shun the very idea of buying music at Walmart, though in my defense they edited the naughty words out of rap albums and thus violated the First Amendment), I began to haunt the record stores that stocked all kinds of CDs that you couldn't find elsewhere. And there were quite a few, most of them fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants joints that catered to myself and fellow cast members from the movie High Fidelity (the film having given voice to the voiceless minority in our culture who obsessed over, as John Cusack put it "original, not re-release Zappa albums and rare Smiths singles"). One of the ones that sprang up around this time was Yesterdaze, which is exactly what you'd expect by its "playful" misspelling of the word.

Run by a nice enough guy who looked (and still looks, judging from seeing him yesterday) like he'd done one too many acid trips at Dead concerts back in the day, the store sold that rare and precious totemic object that all music junkies should at some point yearn to collect: old records on vinyl. It didn't matter if the pressings were original or re-issues, not to me anyway; I managed to get some nice Joy Division and Beatles LPs that would eventually look good on my wall or "man-cave," though when I'd get said dwelling was (and remains) hard to say. Plus he had bootlegs of current and past acts that I loved, though (and this is where the falling-out with Yesterdaze and other second-hand record stores began) bootlegs are often bootlegs for a reason: they weren't good enough to be released officially (though on rare occasions, it did turn out to be worth the purchase price). I lost contact with the store after one too many bootlegs that sounded bad on my stereo at home (hey, they sounded great at the shop, right?), and at what point Yesterdaze left the Clemson area I couldn't say.

Last June, after my computer died, it was hard for me to justify buying any new CDs, because the impetus for so much of my record collection over the previous four years (adding them to my iPod) was no longer there. No computer? Can't add the album to my iPod, so I can't just sit around listening to them at home (for I no longer have a home stereo to blast them on). But gradually I began purchasing CDs again, at intervals, at discount prices, and I became, once again, a lurker.

You know those people (guys, mostly) who go into a record store, or a book store, or (well, there aren't any Blockbusters anymore, but you'd see them in there too), and spend an hour or hours just looking through the collections, trying to find something, anything, to justify their coming in. Or maybe it's more about the looking than the finding, the journey being more important than the Journey Greatest Hits you end up with (just kidding, no self-respecting lurker would buy a Journey CD. They're much too mainstream for most lurkers). Anyway, my youthful passion for all things obscure had mellowed over the years, and now I could find equal satisfaction with a Simon and Garfunkel CD as I might once have over a rare Sex Pistols live show on CD (just for the record, live CDs are a gambler's proposition. It depends on the artist more than the recording equipment. Johnny Cash is great live; I'm guessing Nicki Minaj is not). I could still get excited over a new, under-the-radar act (I guess the Decemberists are no longer "under the radar," but I did get some joy out of "discovering" them last year), but there was nothing wrong with letting Phil Collins into my life again after a tumultuous over-saturation of his solo work and Genesis in the Eighties.

Yesterdaze, in short, would not appeal to me now, with its bootlegs of punk acts that never were and records of rock dinosaurs that, while worth listening to, weren't worth buying if I wasn't going to listen to the record or display it on my wall. But I went in anyway, just for old times sake. The smell (or stench) of incense was the first thing I noticed, as well as the predictable "young hipsters combing the racks of vinyl" (though surprisingly, these were females doing the hipster-ing. When did women start to be obsessive about music? This was new). And there was a bookshelve or two with some faded bios of your expected rock gods (the Beatles, the Stones, Lou Reed, and Springsteen), nothing that I couldn't live without. I was beginning to think that this was a waste of time until I started looking at his CD racks and found something I'd been looking for.

Belle and Sebastian are one of my favorite bands, and the one album of theirs that I'd wanted but hadn't been able to get was The Boy With the Arab Strap. I did buy the title song on iTunes (one of the last ones before my comptuer holocaust of late June) and had considered buying the entire album at one point, but finances weren't permitting for such a hefty iTunes purchase. And sometimes, when looking at CD racks at other stores, I'd entertained the idea that it could be waiting, there amongst the "B"s, if I just kept looking. To find it here, where I least expected (and truthfully, didn't want to) find it, was astounding, one of the rare "destination trumps the journey" experiences of my life thus far. The proprietor didn't quite recognize me (he asked if I had worked at a grocery store I never did work at, I'm guessing I could have lied and said that I did, and then we'd strike up a conversation about music which I didn't want to have, because I didn't want to remember how often I'd come away from the store with something I'd thought I wanted only to have it turn out to be a waste of my time and money), and I'm a little ashamed that I came away from there without really acknowledging that, once upon a time, he had been an important conduit in my fandom of old-timey punk and New Wave rock stars. But I might have to go back to Yesterdaze at some point, because the B&S CD wasn't the only one I saw that I'd want to get, and the prices are reasonable (they're used CDs, so you can't charge too much for them). Maybe then I'll let him know that I used to come in, that I was the arrogant kid who only wanted Joy Division bootlegs, and that I was that same kid who didn't realize that stores like his were a haven, a place to educate myself about much more than some moody Mancunian bastards with a death wish and a drum machine. Music has been and will probably my overwhelming obsession pop-culture-wise, because it has that hold on me. As long as I come away with something that enhances my life, it can't really be a waste of money, can it?

Once More Over the Fiscal Cliff...

It feels weird to say 2013, it still doesn't feel like that just yet. Damn Mayans, why couldn't you have been right?

Anyway, New Year's is the time to make resolutions (i.e., "promises that you won't keep"). In that spirit, and with that in mind, here are some of my New Year's resolutions:

1.) Watch more reality TV, especially Mob Wives of LA Love & Basketball Wives of Real Atlanta

2.) Read less books, especially ones related to sports.

3.) Shave my head (because I have a mental picture of what I'd look like and I gotta say, dynamite!)

4.) Quit indulging my niece in her endless quest to look at the baby in the mirror (we keep seeing it, it always is there).

5.) Join the French Foreign Legion.

6.) See if I have any years of eligibility left and try out for any local college's punting position.

7.) See the collected works of Michael Bay.

8.) Vote Republican, for once.

9.) Quit being a smartass (people get it, I think I'm funny. Move on).

10.) Finally start that meth lab I've been dreaming of.

11.) Quit making pointless lists just for laughs.

12.) Write my own self-help book (Troy McClure already took my title: Get Confidence, Stupid!).

13.) Bathe less.

14.) Smoke more.

15.) Pull for the Patriots, Crimson Tide, Yankees, Heat, and whoever is the most hated team in hockey or women's volleyball.