beautiful, funny, sad & true

This week is Banned Books Week, according to the American Library Association, and here’s a list of some of the most popular ones.  I’ve read about half of the books on the list, and among them are some of my favorites, including Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Lord of the Rings, and A Clockwork Orange.

Of particular interest (to me, anyway) was the inclusion of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, thanks in part to my beloved alma mater, the Yakima School District:

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

Excerpts banned in Butler, PA (1975); removed from the high school English reading list in St. Francis, WI (1975). Retained in the Yakima, WA schools (1994) after a five-month dispute over what advanced high school students should read in the classroom. Two parents raised concerns about profanity and images of violence and sexuality in the book and requested that it be removed from the reading list.

Thanks, Yakima.  That must be why we had to suffer through forgettably crappy books like Silas Marner and Billy Budd instead of ‘real’ books that people read everywhere else.  When my English teacher (God rest her soul, assuming that she’s dead) assigned us Silas Marner, she said, “You’re not going to like this book, but that’s what we’re going to read.”

I was the quietest, shyest (shiest?) person in human history back then, but I raised my hand, and she motioned for me to speak.

“I love to read, and there are a lot of books out there.  Isn’t there something else with a similar message that maybe we would enjoy?”

“I’m sure there is, but we’re going to read this.”

That happened in my sophomore year of high school, and that’s the point at which I officially gave up.  Coincidentally enough, I got my first electric guitar not long after that.  I thank GreatSpirit every day that I already loved to read, because the vast majority of the people I knew in Yakima actually hated reading due to the so-called learning environment we had in our schools.  I, on the other hand, had my life saved by books, and it breaks my heart to know that people all over the country are trying at this very moment to deprive kids of that experience.

That being said, I have to go on record and say that a ban is sometimes the best thing that could possibly happen to a creative work, because it creates a controversy, and then people will buy the work just to see what all the fuss is about.  I worked in a record store at the time 2 Live Crew’s Nasty As They Wanna Be came out, and our dusty copies sat on the shelf for months until it got banned, and then we couldn’t order copies fast enough to fulfill the overwhelming demand for it.  Those guys are multi-millionaires by now, but I’m positive that they’d be just another group of obscure hip hop also-ran’s without the ban.

I think Oscar Wilde was correct with his famous line from The Picture of Dorian Gray, “There is only thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is NOT being talked about.”

Suffice it to say that when I write a book, I give you permission to ban it.  In fact, I encourage you to ban it.  I want it to cause so much controversy that I have to go into hiding for years, like Salman Rushdie and J. D. Salinger did.

And now, I have some reading to do.  The first book on my list is Invisible Man.

OneYearAgo

Saturday I got up early to drive to tiny little Welches, Oregon to see my friend Andrea play and to hang out with my recording friend Jim.  (He and I produced Andrea’s CD.)  Since she’s living in Europe now, we’ll take any chances we can get to hang out with her.  Jim and I talked over breakfast, and she arrived while we were finishing up.  Huge hugs all around.

She played her set and sounded awesome.  There were a few songs that were new to me.  One in particular (which I don’t remember the name of, but I do remember that it was in E minor!) was especially stellar.  At the end of her set, I stood up and clapped, and then motioned with my arms for everyone else to stand up and join me, and we all gave her a nice, big ovation.  It was a great way to welcome her home and send her off again, all at the same time.

Tonight she and I got together for dinner at Queen of Sheba, one of the better Ethiopian restaurants in town.  Portland is known for, among other things, being a very ‘white’ town (to put it kindly), but for some reason we have a plethora of Ethiopian restaurants here.  In fact, another new one just opened up recently, and it’s not even very far from where I live.  Must. . .investigate. . .

After we were done with dinner, she asked if we could drive down to EliteHippieCollege.  She had just finished reading a book called ‘Blue Like Jazz’, the author of which had gone to that college, and had written movingly about a park with a little bridge.  She wanted to find it.  I said, “Let’s go.”

We drove all over and found nothing until we went around to the back side of the campus, and sure enough, we came to a large, forested area, replete with two bridges.  We parked the car and walked across one of them, and found a slightly overgrown path to walk down along the pond at the bottom of the ravine.  We ended up here:

The picture quality isn’t the greatest because it was starting to get dark, which meant that my poor little camera was trying to compensate, and it was hard for me to hold it still while the shutter was open.  (Have I mentioned how much I want a better camera?  And a tripod?)  But the place was beautiful, the conversation was great, and the mosquitoes weren’t too bloodthirsty.

It really started to get dark quickly, so we headed back up the forested path.  We stopped under the bridge to take more pictures, and here’s the best one:

It was just. . .an excellent evening.  I don’t want to trivialize it any further by reducing it to mere language.

OneYearAgo

Late last night, one of my friends sent me an e-mail containing a link to a WebSiteLikeTV video of pictures that were taken at my high school reunion, which happened about a month ago.  Naturally, I gave it a miss, because it’s a well-established fact by now that I hated both high school and the town I grew up in. I have no nostalgia for that time of my life at all.  I think if I could have it surgically excised from my head, I’d sign up for that procedure before you could finish saying, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.’

Based on the pictures from the event, it looks as if about thirty people attended the reunion, out of a graduating class of around four hundred.  Normally for something like this, I would post a link to the video so that you could experience it too, but believe me when I tell you that in this case I’m doing you a favor by not including it.  I recognized about five people, and only one or maybe two would have been nice to chat with for a while. 

Everyone went bar hopping on both Friday and Saturday night, and then had a picnic in the park on Sunday, which involved all their kids and families, and sounded pretty awful.  Most, it seems, married others from the class and stayed in town.  If that had been my fate, I have no doubt that I would not be alive today.  I feel very fortunate to have escaped Yakima’s event horizon.

[shudder]

Moving on.

In other news, I got a call from my friend Jim, whose studio I’ve been planning to use for both new recording projects starting this month, to tell me that the golf course outside his place is being completely torn up, redesigned, and then rebuilt.  Construction started Monday and will last until spring.  The crews, with their huge earth movers, will be working approximately ten hours per day, six days a week.  This leaves only Sundays for recording purposes.  This is not the end of the world, or the end of either project, but it sure puts a cramp on our collective style.

Work has been extremely stressful this week.  Thank gawd for the play-reading group tonight, a gig with IrishBand tomorrow night, and a gig down in Salem with Breanna ‘n’ Justin on Friday night.   And remember Andrea, who moved to Switzerland right after we finished her CD?  She’s in town this week and next, so I’m going to go see her play a show on Saturday, and hopefully make some time to get some Ethiopian food while she’s here.

Our apartment building is getting a new heating system this week.  The good news is that the people whose apartments are freezing in the winter will no longer have to freeze, the people whose apartments are boiling will no longer have to boil, and the fuel tank which runs out of fuel on the coldest nights of the year will no longer have to be filled.  The bad news is that we’ll each have to pay for our own heat, which we haven’t had to do thus far.  I know; I know.  I shouldn’t complain about that, because we have such a good thing going here.  But it will be a tremendous improvement over the antiquated boiler and heating system.  I’ll miss the central fan, though.  I sure hope they keep that around for the summers.

Hmm.  How to end this entry. . .

Well, here you go. Since we were talking about YouTube (no, I’m not going to include the reunion), here’s a funny video about an Australian oil tanker crash.

Yesterday was my mom’s birthday, and I called her last night.  We talked for a while, and one of the things she mentioned is that she occasionally checks in on my blog to ‘see how things are going.’  My mom reads my blog, and she’s apparently been doing it for some time now.

Great.

With all those posts I’ve written about Satan and feces and third grade memories, not to mention all the copious amounts of premarital sex weird dreams and my judicious but regular smattering of naughty words, she probably thinks that her real baby son must have somehow been swapped in the hospital for this devil’s spawn.

But the most egregious thing of all (for her, anyway) has to be my non-stop trash-talking about Yakima, which is decidedly well-deserved, but she can’t stomach it.  I have a kinda funny story about that, actually, which involves my niece’s favorite TV show, which we all couldn’t help but watch with her while we were at the beach a few weeks ago.

It’s a national show, which you probably haven’t seen, let alone enjoyed, if you’re over the age of ten.  It’s about PrecociousTeenageGirl, and it’s set in Seattle, where Niece lives.  The grandparents on the show even live in Yakima, where one set of Niece’s grandparents live.  The hijinks ensued in one episode when it looked as if PTG was going to be sent to live with her grandparents.  She didn’t want to go, and she kept making all these lame jokes about Yakima and how bad it is (“oh, the sweet smell of Yakima”, et cetera).  I kept waiting for them to actually take her there, and have some scenes set in the town, which I’m sure they would have filmed in Salinas, California instead, anyway.  It has the exact same feel and look as Yakima, except for the fact that Salinas has the brilliant John Steinbeck rooting for it.  Raymond Carver and I are Yakima’s vox populi spokespeople, and we have nothing good to say about the place.

But that’s neither here nor there.

I found that episode surreal and hilarious.  No wonder it’s Niece’s favorite show; the writers practically frickin’ wrote it for her, and set it in the two places she knows best in the world.  I couldn’t stop cracking up at the irony of the situation, so between my incredulous laughter and the show’s cloying laugh track in response to every generic joke, my mom got angry and had to go upstairs to get away from it all.

I couldn’t tear myself away from the stupid show, and I actually watched the thing in its entirety. You’ll be glad to know that PTG did not, in fact, get sent to live in Yakima, because GenXGuardian (her older brother?) came through in the end to prove that despite his slacker appearance, he really was quite the responsible young gentleman when it came to raising her.  Awww.  Wipe my tears and cue the organist.

I suppose I don’t have a real reason to feel weird about my mom reading all this.  She knows (pretty much) what I’m like, this is all real stuff, and I feel like it’s a good representation of me, slightly-glossed-over warts and all.

But it still does feel weird.  I’m sure you understand.

I feel like I’m wasting my life.

No, I don’t mean that in a melancholy way; I’m not feeling bummed out.  In fact, it’s quite the opposite.  I’ve actually been feeling energized and inspired lately; inspired to change my life again.  I feel that I keep coming up against the same proverbial ceiling that I always come up against eventually, being the ‘side’ person in musical situations.  I need to be either the main writer or one of the main writers in a group.  I need to take more chances.  I need to step up my metaphorical game.  I need to have confidence in the marketability of my skills.  My skills get results, you know?  Someone’s making money off of them, and it ain’t me, and that’s unacceptable.

I need to talk to other people who are out there doing it as freelancers, as professionals, not the nay-sayers, or cautious people who are slaves to security.  Working a dead-end job that sucks up my valuable time is getting really old.  I’m watching my life get frittered away, and I’m the only one who can change that, shake it up, and set things right.  I’ve done it before, and I can do it again.

Luckily, I do have a few friends and acquaintances who are making it work, so I have people I can go to and discuss all of this.  Talking to the right people is crucial right now; talking to the wrong people can be poisonous.

Right now I have some things I need to do, and some business to attend to.  In a good way.