"I don't know what it is, but you gotta do it."

Ten and a half years ago, I graduated naturopathic school. Great job, congratulations, here's your diploma, now get back to work and study your ass off for boards. Five weeks later, I had successfully filled in approximately 900 little circles on papers that would determine whether or not I would be eligible to get a license to practice or not. A few weeks after that, I found out that, yes, I had passed my board exams. Thrilled, to say the least.

But now what? You have your diploma, you now have your license, you have the title...what are you gonna do with it? And suddenly I became fearful for the future. I could complete medical school...but what of it? My bluff was called, and I blinked. Big time.

As it happened, Mr. Man and I had moved from Puddletown to the Chicago area after I completed my board exams. I'd unwittingly landed in the backyard of a chiropractic school that offered an accelerated program for health care pros like myself. It looked interesting. I visited the school on one of their "be a student for a day" programs. The day of the program was gray, rainy, cold, and dismal. The closer I got to the school, the drearier it seemed to get...used car lots, potholed roads, and nothing inviting. The entire day felt wrong. I felt magnetically repelled from the school, as if some huge force were trying to push me away. I came home and told Mr. Man that I couldn't see myself making that drive and going to school there at all.

But apparently I couldn't see myself using my degree right off, either. Despite what so much of my body, mind, and psyche was telling me (and there was no mistaking how wrong I felt about it), I decided to avoid the future, and retreated back into school.

And ten years ago today, on the first day of school, began the worst and most painful year of my life. I drove to school, singing a song that echoed my uncertainty but hope that this was perhaps the best path forward. Then I felt that hope collapse like the industrial dissonance and clamor at the end of the song, just as I pulled into the school parking lot for this first day of school. 2004 was a year that drove me to drink (but only on weekends), that contributed to some major adrenal fatigue (that I overcame years later, though not without effort), and that I would gladly erase from my life if given the option. I learned how cruel some instructors and fellow students can be. I learned how awful it feels to be devoting all your time and energy to a program you don't really believe in, yet one that will be significantly determining your identity, income, reputation, and mindset for the rest of your life. I learned how painful it can be to push forward when it seems that everyone has you in their crosshairs, to eliminate, to ridicule, or to shun. I learned the constant static that you feel when you had a vision for your life, but you chose a path that runs counter to it in many ways. And ever since, I've been trying to push the negative aspects of 2004 out of my brain and take what good I could from it. I've been mostly successful at winnowing the bad from the good, and I am definitely excellent at what I do, but my expertise came at a tremendous psychic and physical cost.

And 2005 wasn't much better.

 



 

 

So here's to having no year worse than 2004, and having every year being exponentially better and more fulfilling somehow. Because I've put in my time in hell...and it's time to turn my back on it. (Despite the fact that, yes, I did just commemorate it very unsubtly.)

So what is it?

Is it "in vino veritas," or is it that alcohol overly amplifies emotions? Because at this moment, I'm leaning toward the latter. And believe me, at this late hour on the first day of 2014, it ain't purty. Fights between me and Mr. Man never are. Then again, we don't really fight. A few bon mots, some insinuations, some passive-aggressive acquiescence, and some stomping off to another bar while the other stays behind. (I'll leave you to guess who stays behind, in a very passive-aggressive manner.) God, but relationships are agonizing.

Oh yeah. And happy 2014. Don't send me any pity. I'm over it.

"And we liked it! We LOVED IT!"

A FB friend I met in Provincetown this summer just griped about how, for the millionth time, he and his husband were accused of being twins, let alone brothers. And it was all I could do to bite my tongue and not say something snarky in reply.

Gay men are narcissists. And I mean that in more than the obvious way. For many guys, it comes through in who they are attracted to. These guys both have a heavyset, almost fireplug build, with narrow eyes and dark, short hair. They both wear the same type of eyeglasses - narrow and rectangular. They both are slightly above average height. Other facial characteristics are similar, including a slightly forced smile. IMO, both are quite handsome. It's not a leap to suggest they are both attracted to themselves. (From what I know of them, they are not emotionally narcissistic.) But it is a potentially friendship-killing leap. So I keep my mouth shut. Oh well.

I'm seriously considering starting a FB profile so I can masquerade as a grumpy old man who just can't keep his mouth shut about stupid shit he sees on the world wide webiverse and the world around him. Just to have an outlet for my opinion...until FB shuts it down for some reason or other. I'm not quite ready to be such an asshat from my own profile. Give me a few years and a few more gray hairs.

The Music of 1989

A glimpse into the music-obsessed world of mine. I, riddled with ADHD (not diagnosed, not really ADHD...just sayin') read music reviews obsessively. Like tiny packets of dopamine to my system, these wastes of time and energy are. But I just can't stay away.

Since 1989 was far and away the most pivotal year of my young life (best and nearly worst, for a variety of reasons), I decided to look at the top 100 pop songs of that year. Yeesh...what a wasteland. Put thusly: if Milli Vanilli 1) has a firm hold on this list, and 2) I actually find MV's contributions among the better songs in this list, you know something is wrong. No wonder I soon found my way out of the mainstream.

So here's a fun little exercise: commentary on various of the top 100 alternative albums (back when the term actually meant something, you spoiled little upstarts!) in 1989, as proposed by the biased-but-still-awesome blog Slicing Up Eyeballs.

The Cure - Disintegration: Meh...didn't grab me so much, but you can't deny it's an awesome album. Maybe I'm not as goth as I'd like to pretend. I did get it years later, figuring it'd be a great breakup album to have as my relationship with Mr. Man was seriously on the skids. Fortunately, we stayed together, and I got to keep Disintegration. Huzzah all around.

Pixies - Doolittle: Discovered this a few years after the fact. And again, for some reason, the album as a whole didn't grab me, but individual songs stuck in my cerebral sulci, and to this day, they're on reliable rotation. Nirvana, and by extension virtually all of 1990s rock would've been DOA without this one. "La La Love You" has to be one of the coolest surf-punk songs ever committed to tape. (Bonus: "Debaser" inspired the referenced blog's title.)

Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine: Good GOD, but this informed my high school experience. M. Reznor fuckin' FELT my pain, man! And the music felt so edgy and skittish. It was my entry point into industrial, for which I am forever grateful.

The Stone Roses: How the fuck did I miss this one? Only got it last year, and my conclusion: damn, I missed out on a whole lot of something back in the day. I'd have worn this one the fuck OUT. As it is, it's consigned to an occasional song on my "top rated" list. It deserves better. Mea culpa. (When I got a drum set around 15, a friend offered to teach me some tricks. Quote: "I'll have you playing the Stone Roses in no time." Would've been nice. Instead, I was stuck playing R.E.M., which wasn't exactly drummer heaven.)

Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique: I'm seeing a miserable trend here. I'm consistently decades late to the party. But hella fun, right? "Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun" is pretty frightening, though...belongs in some warped Tarantino vehicle.

B-52's - Cosmic Thing: Phoenician rebirth, y'all. Fun, for the most part, aside from a few throwaways. I blast "Dry County" during the first real scorcher of the summer, and it feels like home. I've also sung "Love Shack" at the weddings for my brother and my sister. *hangs head in embarrassment*

The Replacements - Don't Tell a Soul: Uh, no. I meant to order "Pleased to Meet Me," but I got this drearfest instead. (This was back in the day of music clubs, kids, where you could actually buy EIGHT CDs for the price of one!) Professional, so it sounds good, but the Replacements should be anything but professional. Keepers: "I'll Be You," "Achin' to Be."

Bob Mould - Workbook: Yet another "just got this last year." I suck. Anyhow...the production here is clean and bright as a sanitized chrome kitchen. Some awfully beautiful songs here, too. And a bit of noodling that sounds...well, cool mountain stream comes to mind ("Sunspots"). Wait...all this from one of the big names in corrosive and angst-ridden punk? Yes. A major left turn from the noise that was Hüsker Dü, but a really awesome left turn.

10,000 Maniacs - Blind Man's Zoo: My entry point into this band. (Bragging rights: met them backstage at the Tonight Show during my 15 minutes of fame in 1989.) Loved 'em at the time, but this one is now about my least favorite of their albums; I can't remember when I last gave this one a spin. Someone once said that it's easy to listen to 10,000 Maniacs while you're doing household chores. I'd concur. Not exactly the most ringing endorsement.

Indigo Girls: This one hit me but HARD. While enjoying a beautiful mountain summer, I stumbled upon this album, courtesy of my sister, and "Closer to Fine" became one of my anthems that summer (I think it must have been 1990). Clean, green, sweet harmonies and simple guitar melodies throughout ensured this would be one of my favorite albums throughout high school. Heck, I even performed "Closer to Fine" with a friend during our spring concert my senior year.

Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits

Some albums you just don't need to own, because...well, everyone out there seems to own it, and you can just listen to their copy. At least, that was how the logic went circa 1990, when CDs and tapes were all the rage. In this case, my sister, who left a fair bit of her music collection behind when she went to college, was my unknowing benefactor whenever I snuck to her room and borrowed her copy of Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits.

My music collection back in 1990 left a fair bit of testosterone to be desired, and this album certainly didn't contribute to the cause. What it did do, though, was to allow me to work on my voice on some of the most poignant and beautiful songs from the 1960s. Anoretic ol' me couldn't rumble down low quite yet, and for some reason, I idealized a high tenor, so I did what I could to nurture said tenor. (It certainly came in handy a year later when I began my choral career.) And I tried to ape Simon and Garfunkel's straight, unobtrusive, simply declarative singing. Any high notes sounded effortless, and that was my goal...regardless of how much my neck muscles and jugular veins would pop out, I would make those high Fs perfect, and not in falsetto, either!

I still point to Art Garfunkel's "For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her" as a crystalline example of how tender and touching singing can be. (I don't care that Paul Simon wrote the song...Art owns that damned thing.) The imagery is beautiful, and virtually every phrase is an impressionistic reverie ("I heard cathedral bells/Tripping down the alleyways"; "What a dream I had, dressed in organdy, clothed in crinoline of smoky burgundy"; "We walked on frosted fields of juniper and lamplight"). Say what you will about Simon's precious poesy elsewhere...here, he gets it perfect. The delicate and pointillistic accompaniment is gorgeous and perfectly suits the mood.

I also jibed with "I Am A Rock," Simon's declaration of emotional independence from all around him. Friends and lovers be damned, he was going it alone...and as an alienated teenager who found little of emotional sustenance to be had around me, so would I. Again, his fascination with poetry came to the forefront, where he intentionally contradicted John Donne's famous poem "No Man Is An Island."

Such was my resonance with this album and its melancholy that by mid-high school, I could sing anything on it, with memorized lyrics and the correct key, at a moment's notice. But as I grew older, so did this album, and we began to part ways during the latter years of high school. By mid-college, I had little use of it. The only reason I returned to it now was based on the 50th anniversary of JFK's death. I had mistakenly thought that "Mrs. Robinson" was the #1 song at the time of his death (actually, it was some song about a flying nun or something), when actually it was around RFK's death. Either way, I had remembered reading about how the lyrics seemed to echo America's sentiment at the time. ("Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.") So I decided to revisit the album...and on the recommendation of many others, ended up getting its more expansive and sonically-updated relative, The Best of Simon and Garfunkel. It's nice to have more songs here, particularly from Bookends, an album I never had. But much like people sometimes complained about the sterility of CD sound vs. the warmth of vinyl, I feel like something has been lost in the upgrade somehow, and I miss the familiarity of the original audio. Oh well. It still is good to have these guys back again.

"What's that I smell?" "Burning nun, darling. Cheers."

Random comments about last night:

• When a new gayby (young, either newly-out or new to the scene gay man) says he has not seen The Sound of Music after 21 years on this plane, what do you do? Of course. You devirginize him. With said movie. And lots of friends. And lots of drinks and nibbly things.
• Don't be too bummed if he decides he really won't go out of his way to see the movie again, despite allowing as how he liked it.
• The St. Germain gin and tonic is utterly delightful. I wish I had begun drinking it about six months ago. It makes the perfect summer drink. (Don't belabor it. One gin and tonic, a half shot of St. Germain.)
• Forgive me, for I have sinned. Of all the gawdawful, socially, politically, environmentally, and hygienically repugnant things I could have done last night, this takes the cake: ordering Papa John's.
• Superman: Man of Steel - (Spoilers, natch.) Not a bad movie. I appreciated the story behind why General Zod was so hell-bent on taking over Earth. Not that it particularly made me like him, but it certainly made me understand his impulses better; I could almost sympathize with him. (Compare it with Superman II, where Zod just plain wanted to rule the planet and subject its peons to cruel dictatorship because...well, you know...just because.) But GOD...how many buildings did those two lovers need to throw each other into? And in the end, all it took was a good old-fashioned neck-wrench to send Zod hurtling into the void? What a disappointment.
• Combine the gin and tonics, the pizza, and the hyperkinesis of MOS, and you have yourself one soon-to-be-sick puppy on your hands. Cold sweat, that sudden sense of impending doom if you don't do something NOW...you know the feeling. And so:
• Enter my favorite herb of all time: gentian. Insanely bitter - and insanely awesome. I keep a tincture of it on hand at all times. It has often made the difference between puking my guts out and feeling miserable for hours afterward and feeling clean, cool, and calm. Three squirts of this in a cup of water, sipped over a few minutes, and here was the progression. Five minutes after starting: something is happening. Ten minutes after that: I'm definitely on the mend. Not sweating, stomach is moving, and this noxious brick in my stomach feels like it's dissolving. Within a half hour: completely out of the woods. Not just that, but I feel like I could SOAR, I'm feeling so great. I normally don't have quite that dramatic a response to gentian, but I was in a world of hurt last night.
• Want an aural approximation of this progression? Listen. Start at about 7:30 (just before feeling sick), and go until the vocals kick in at about 13:40. Thank God for prime Floyd.

Alice Hanson

I went to a Lutheran college in small town Minnesota renowned, quite honestly, the world over for its music department. The choirs, orchestra, and band all were miles beyond the typical college ensembles, and were compared favorably with the likes of other world-famous ensembles. But behind the groups was the faculty. While being peerless in excellence, the demeanor of the instructors ranged from friendly to aloof, modest to egotistical. But the most notorious instructor was the one whose name was spoken with not a little fear: Dr. Alice Hanson.

Dr. Hanson taught what was universally known - not just in the music department, but schoolwide - as the toughest two courses at college: the two classes in music history required for music majors. Organic chemistry? Pshaw! Advanced statistics? A cake walk. Her classes all started at 8:00 am. Her door shut at 8:01. And students who showed up late were locked out and received an absence. Her lectures were legendary. She would be discussing Schubert lieder, then in a split second, point at you or one of your unwitting classmates and ask you a question about them. Woe unto you if you didn't know the answer or weren't paying attention, since participation every class by every student was mandatory and a significant part of the grade. She'd go down the line, knocking down student by student until someone gave her an acceptable answer. If corporal punishment were legal in college, I'm sure there would have been more than a few knuckle-rappings for not knowing the answer. I never heard about the rigors of writing papers for Dr. Hanson, but I think this post by a respectful former student rings true. No one who crossed her forgot her, and everyone who took her classes emerged a better person for it.

As you've guessed, I wasn't a music major, although I took as many classes as I could without declaring an official major, so I never met Dr. Hanson. I'm certain that I walked by her more than once in the halls of the music department, small as it was, but I never really recognized her, which added to her mystique. And once I left college, any mention of her disappeared...until this past week. She left behind the kind of legacy that I aspire to: that of a hard-ass who was frequently harsh and unyielding but always in the service of improving those around her. People may not have liked her, but they unanimously held the highest of respect for her. To be blunt, perhaps as she would have liked it, bitch got shit done. And she taught others how to get shit done in her own way, too.

I'm imagining one of two scenarios right now. Either St. Peter is wondering if Dr. Hanson really belongs up there, or Satan is afraid of being upstaged. I'm thinking more the former, but wherever she ends up, there's gonna be a lot of chain-rattling going on.

And again...damn. I never met the woman. I never took a class of hers. But I heard stories upon stories about her the entire time I was in college. And years later, upon hearing about her death, I'm spending part of my afternoon writing a whole post about her. That, my friends, is one awesome legacy.

Get shit done.

I woke up this morning to a FB post wherein someone referred to an article and erroneously concluded that because he didn't contribute to society, that was the reason he was single. (By the by, he's a government employee, providing an extremely valuable service.) The article's title piqued my interest (Six Harsh Truths That Will Make You A Better Person), but I was ready to discount it as just another random, unnecessary posting by Cracked, and a waste of my time. Still, I read on.

And damn...for a website that puts out some occasionally snarky and annoying and sometimes funny shit, this was one whopper of an article. I mean, wasn't this once a magazine that sold itself as a second-rate Mad Magazine? From such lowly dregs apparently come gems like this years later.

Here's the gist of this article: You know who gets shit done? People who get shit done. It's all nice and good if you're nice, or if you're talented, or if you're one of the beautiful people, or if you're charismatic, or if you have money, but at the end of the day, that's not what people are interested in. They want to know if you can get shit done. And if you can, awesome.

This was pretty much written from a business perspective, as far as I can tell. You could extrapolate it to many other areas in life, too. But I've learned this a number of times, the hard way, and it has stuck with me ever since.

Years ago, while working as a server at Good Earth in upper-crust Edina, MN, I occasionally interacted with another, more experienced server, who was basically a bitch. Could not stand her. Condescending, mean, brusque, and just not someone I cared to associate with. Also: a stickler for rules. She came in one morning for her shift, and she was scheduled to take over part of my section for lunch. A couple sat down in said part of my section not 45 seconds before her shift started, and despite my being slammed, she refused to help me out and take this couple. So I gritted my teeth and proceeded to do the best I could, all while beginning to nurse one poisonous grudge.
But I soon realized that despite her attitude, she always worked the busiest sections toward the front of the restaurant, never broke a sweat, and regularly pulled in two to three times the tips I did. My take-home: Diners didn't care that she was snippy. They cared that she was efficient and got shit done...and tipped her accordingly. I was much nicer, but somewhat bumbling - and never left the back of the restaurant. Nice is nice, but it won't pay the rent.

Fast forward to chiropractic school. In the mock patient visits, I was always told I had great patient rapport. But I sometimes forgot things here and there: not completing a full neurological exam, forgetting key or confirmatory orthopedic tests, not ordering the correct lab tests...the things that students often miss as they're learning and drinking out of a fire hydrant. But while I was working on those things, it was the students who had lesser bedside manner and didn't care much for niceties who did the right things and got the higher scores.

Years later, I'm still learning this lesson. People always compliment me on how nice I am, or how modest or unassuming I am, whether I'm in a professional setting or simply among friends. But again, that doesn't pay the rent. Being efficient and effective at your job does. And sometimes I fantasize about how great it would be to be an utter bitch who could really give a shit about anything other than getting shit done...and damn people's feelings in the process.

So I responded to this guy. Told him how much I thought the article was dead on. And he countered with a "woe is me...so according to this article, I should kill myself?" I slammed my head against the wall so hard I about gave the wall an aneurysm. And perhaps this isn't a perspective that will work for him. (Apparently, self-destructive hyperbole does work for him, though.) Nor did it for a friend of his, who maintained that love and caring and friendship was enough to make this world go round. Oh well. You can't reach everyone.

I guess I've become immune to the idea that love and flowers and rainbows and glitter is all you need. I mean, I've promised Mr. Man a very belated birthday cake. It was two days ago, and he began last night to gripe about how it hadn't materialized. The fact that I love him doesn't change anything for his expectations. I gotta get this damned cake made. And I'm not gonna enjoy making it...and I may even bitch about it. But he'll have his cake, as promised, and that will mean more to him than a platitude of "I love yous." At the very least, it'll be physical evidence to support my sentiments.

Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley

Leonard Cohen penned this old chestnut back in the '80s, and indulged his nascent love for synthesizers while recording it. The results were moving but still jarring, particularly for people who had always known Cohen as a folkie, and this rendition sounds hopelessly dated now. But, y'know...if Dylan can go electric successfully, why can't Cohen? (Listen to I'm Your Man for what can happen when he gets synthesizers fully right.)

Since that time, gobs of singers have recognized what a stunning piece of work "Hallelujah" is, and have tried their hand at it. Rufus Wainwright and k.d. lang are among the fellow Canadians who have successfully turned it out. I actually heard a country singer attempt it yesterday on our office Muzak, with abysmal results. But honestly, no one - NO ONE - has even come close to Jeff Buckley's crystalline, heartbreaking rendition.

Buckley's voice is a nearly otherworldly instrument...some have even said that his voice sometimes does what no human voice should be able to do. He can sound angelic, soaring above the world like the most pristine of boy's choir voices, then scream like a banshee hellbent on destruction for what feels like minutes on end. Buckley is also not afraid to sound like an possessed fool in the service of a wild old blues song.

But he understands the quiet, serious reverence "Hallelujah" can take, and with spare spidery guitar behind him, he begins nearly in a whisper, commanding attention and wringing out every last bit of emotion from the song as beautifully as possible. The way he adds the slightest of melismas to the chorus is chill-inducing, and damns the likes of Christina Aguilera to musical hell. On the entrance to the bridge, he sings the last "hallelujah" as if he's pushing a paper boat with the slightest of nudges out onto a vast lake, with nothing but that solitary guitar and its sad but sure direction between vast spaces of silence.

And then that ending...oh, my God, that ending. Buckley intones the chorus over and over again, growing ever quieter all the time, drawing you in once again. Then suddenly HALLELUJAH...his voice unexpectedly pierces the cathedralesque quietude like a jagged dagger, and hearts are shattered, tears erupt by the riverful, and worlds fall into despair. But as if to heal the pain, he gently sings hallelujah two last times...once that seems to flow for eternity, offering ethereal balm for all the world's suffering, then again to affirm that perfect healing. And although tears may not dry up, and sadness may continue, the last hallelujah closes the song as completely and gracefully as a pastor closing a Bible.

As far as moving, heartwrenching music goes, Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah" is right up there with Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings and Henryk Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. It's a perfect confluence of one of the century's most brilliant lyricists and songwriters, and a young man with a staggeringly talented voice. Take ten uninterrupted minutes out of your life and listen to it.

 

"There are three things I have learned never to discuss with other people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin."

The newest religion has nothing to do with some supernatural, omnipotent and omniscient being. No God, no Tao, no Jesus, no Buddha, no Allah, no Mohammed, no Krishna, nothing. The newest religion is based on the worship of technology. To be more specific, it's the worship of computers and cell phones. And I find it utterly repugnant.

I'm SO lucky that I get to witness, firsthand, the evangelical furor with which guys* support their favorite company/platform/what-have-you. With equal passion, they decry the other side. We can bring it down to the polarity of Apple vs. Windows/Android. This largely occurs because I get to live with a guy who is a self-avowed tech geek, and who is firmly on the Windows/Android side of the divide. He says he can understand (begrudgingly) the appeal of Apple, but let's not fool anyone...he looks at those who love Apple products with utter disdain. And he has ample opportunity to express said disdain and get into conversations and arguments with believers on the other (read: evil) side of the schism.

When talking to people about this schism, I hear things like "Oh, he's drunk the Kool-Aid," "iPhone = Apple = the devil," "People who follow Apple...it's like they're in a cult," and the like. And I'm seriouslythisclose to expunge these people from my FB feed. True believers of all stripes, get thee behind me and begone!

*For whatever reason, I have yet to hear a single woman engage in this annoying conversation. Very wise.