I’ve always been fairly news-addicted, putting a few decades or so under my belt of reading about politics.

I was young, but by high school a reformed Abbie Hoffman was up from the underground after saving, or something, the Saint Lawrence River and doing talk shows. I knew from political protest and disruption for the sake of sticking it to the man.

I preferred Ken Kesey and the Pranksters. The Merry Pranksters, they new theater. They might be jamming up the status quo, but they seemed contagiously fun. I could imagine being on the bus and just trying to find my place at the party.

Abbie Hoffman just seemed like a self-important douche. The kind of guy that got punched by Pete Townshend at Woodstock. Disruptive and self righteous. An annoying combo for sure, whether you agree with the political slant.

Now, we’re in a new age. Everyone and everything can be a disrupter on the world-wide webs. Scream out your protest and maybe you’ll go viral.

Apart from all of that and admitting that the Code Pinks of the world are more irritating than effective, what I can’t figure out is when did the out and out crazy ass making shit up without satirical intent happen?

Could Sarah Palin really believe/em> that there are “death panels” in one version of a health reform bill? How the fuck do folks like Betsy McCaughey get play on legit op ed pages, columns and radio and the TV? How is that shit even possible?

One of the conditions of my great move west was that I do it unencumbered by the vast stores of shit I had accumulated in my 20 plus years in Cambridge.

I had not one but two yard sales in preparation, and I gave countless treasures to charities. (And, to some neighbors who decided to pick apart and rip up and throw around all manner of bags and boxes I had left in my side yard for the Boys and Girls Clubs before they could show up. I’m pretty sure the most flagrant destroyer was the chick who flat out fought with me over some gewgaw or another and the usurious 75 cents I was charging. She looked me right in the eye and told me my life’s accumulations were garbage.)

Anywho, among the items lost in the westward expansion were a lifetime’s worth of vinyl. Actually, I think it was a couple of lifetimes, because there were my records, begun with my very first ever long-playing vinyl record the Beatles “Rock and Roll Music,” and a couple of giant crates an old roommate left behind before he eventually moved out of this country.

A huge metric ton of the records were bought by some heavy-metal-haired dude who was visiting friends in the apartment next door. He also got my shitty, but fun enough to tool around with, bright blue electric guitar and my actually pretty good Fender amp.

It was a fair enough trade to not have to move all of that weight, which actually had been moved in milk crates and wooden boxes through at least five geographical locations, if you count not just cities but apartments. By then I think I was onto my second iPod anyway, and I never ever was the kind of audiophile who needed my chair inside the perfect acoustic V or gave that much of a shit about the hisses and pops of dust and scratches. I bid adieu to my old Beatles records, Janis and “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” which was a must own circa 1978, and much, much more.

Now, the move to California is four years in and growing. We’ve been in two apartments and now a house. Thanks to a 30-year mortgage and an easy stroll to the ocean, that last move seems like it may be a long-term keeper. (As a side note, I flipped through the report on sea levels and their rise from climate change, if all goes poorly, as I’m sure it will, within our mortgage we’ll be inching closer to ocean-front property.)

Here’s the ironic twist, because you knew there had to be an ironic twist.

As we have settled into our little suburban home, the kind of home where you run into the neighbors at the grocery store, which we just did, the kind of suburban home where a stroll down the street with wet hair gets you questions about how the water was today and the waves, the retro home in the retro-feeling town where kids lean their bikes up next to the ice cream shop without locking them, as we settle into that home, M. has embraced Americana and home owning like nobody’s business. This weekend, this episode, that means he came home with a stereo turntable.

Now, it ain’t your grandpa’s hifi. Nope, it’s USB and comes with software to record your vinyl to your computer’s hard drive.

But, M., he envisions something a bit more akin to his lying in a distant bedroom in the 1970s listening to the crackle of vinyl rock and roll and imagining a life in the U.S. of A. He wants a record-player set up in our British Empire inspired dark wood and breezy curtains plantation meets Pier 1 Imports living room. He wants to hear Deep Purple all over again like the first time.

Where my first vinyl collection came about from that being the only thing there was, this one will be more kitschy. M., no doubt, will be piling up the classics from the British and American stars from way back when. I think Frampton will be coming alive fairly soon in our living room. Me, I have to think about it. Do I need to by Cheap Thrills on vinyl again, or should I start hunting for 78s and one-off recordings with dust and questionable worth?

Technorati Tags: 1970s, 1980s, America, beach, records, vinyl, music, youth

Here’s what’s occupying a few brain cells this should-already-be-sleeping night.

Meryl Streep was just on the Colbert Report. She’s playing one of my heros, Julia Child, in a new movie. Once many, many, many, long, long, long years ago, I used to watch Julia and take notes. I fantasized about a well-appointed kitchen and endless hours to let my bread rise and my own fresh patch of herbs to grow.

I now have that kitchen, and most of the time it hosts take-out rice and noodles from various eastern lands. As someone here, surprised that my zucchini bread was respectable enough, pointed out to me — Spending hours to cook in New England weather, sure why not, what else are you going to do? But, here? Here where mild and temperate are a presumed way of life, who the fuck has time for yeast to breed? Why cook when you can buy and then have plenty of sunlight left over to do something else?

I also have the dead basil haunting my every step in the backyard to taunt my desire for a Provence-enspired garden worthy of Julia. I am simply not worthy. Only my rosemary seems to be surviving the concentration camp-like nursery that is life under my green thumb.

But, none of that is why I mentioned Meryl. Meryl, she reminded me of my roots. My non-French Chef roots.

She brought up Peg Bracken and the I Hate to Cook Cookbook. Apparently, my mom, Pat, and Meryl’s mom shopped at the same bookstore and believed in the same notion of 20 minutes to the table after a long day at work. So, we have the same nutritional base, but somehow her vitamins and minerals, no doubt freeze-dried or flash-frozen, crystallized and grew into talent. Mine, they took another path.

Meanwhile, back in the news, despite the obsessive attention to her Puerto Rican roots and the inherent fear of such a woman playing in the major leagues alongside the white, male power base, Sonia Sotomayor did it. The world didn’t end. Justice didn’t stop. White men aren’t being sent to camps in Manzanar.

Congratulations, to a wise Latina, and I mean that in a non-condescending or suspiciously close to racist manner.

Better yet, she did it by a wider margin than Justices Alito or Thomas. By the way, how come if the left is supposedly destroying the country and always has been un-American, how come the presumably liberal judges get wider vote margins, reeling in some folks from the opposition party? We can’t be that horrible over hear behind the socialist left curtain, yeah?

Meanwhile, back in the shitty, sad news, one crazy guy killed himself and shittily brought some others with him, because he couldn’t get a date? Fuck you, madman Sodini. Your failed life was on your shoulders, but now women, gym-goers and bloggers, and most of all the women you killed and their families are now dealing in the wake of your selfishness. Asshole.

And, Lynette Squeaky Fromme is getting out of the pen. The only thing good that ever came from her pathetic life and worship of Charlie Manson is Stephen Sondheim’s duet with Hinckley in Assassins.

Finally, the celebrity deaths just keep piling up this year. Budd Schulberg left the world after a good, long run at 95. “You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charlie.”

On the flip side of memorable dialogue, everyone alive and watching youth-targeted movies in the ’80s lost the man responsible for “Farmer Ted” and a resurgence of Danke Schoen. John Hughes was so much a part of more than just pop culture in that decade, kind of uber-pop culture, I remember not just the movies themselves but stories around them.

The first thing I thought of when I heard the news was actually about Pat. In those dark and distant days, technology wasn’t what it is today. “They” had just come out with a magical bit of consumer-level, household electronics that let the moving picture shows be recorded of of the TV. The TV. The VCR it changed our collective relationship with the TV.

Pat had gotten a VCR and, I think, somewhere in the mix of my heading off to college, she got cable television. Once upon a time, television waves floated through the air and got caught by a large antenna placed up on the roof. And, then there was a chunk of co-ax bringing in MTV and the Home Shopping Network.

Anyway, back then, Pat would prepare for my various returns home from school in a modern, electronics rich welcome. I wasn’t prodigal or a son, and I didn’t get a fatted calf. But, I got videos of 16 Candles and Pretty in Pink and the like. She’d store up recordings and present them to me. I don’t think she watched them, just recorded them for me.

Thanks for the memories, Mr. Hughes. “Screws fall out all the time. The world is an imperfect place.’

Technorati Tags: 1980s, Julia Child, Squeaky Fromme, America, John Hughes, Movies, Sonia Sotomayor, food, cooking, gardening, herbs, life, Budd Schulberg, Pat, Supreme Court, video

In the ultimate irony that proves I actuall dig my life, my friends, my soulmates, my brothers from another mother, they come up with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUIucrPx-NAhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUIucrPx-NA

Pretty much, it’s all about the tanning room for me. But, here I am, actually, having planned a hotel-based offsite. Spa and fruit platter in my suite. I ain’t know Ramada Boy, but I’ve been to hotels.

Now, for me, if I don’t bludgeon anyone in a “redrum” hallway, life is fucking good.

As the song goes, “everybody’s working for the weekend.” I never wanted to be the person that song suggests. I wanted to be the person who lived the weekend 7 days a week. Yet, here I am, and I never even particularly liked Loverboy.

Work has just sucked whatever teeny weeny little miniature bit of soul I might have ever had. Just too much and never ending. (Of course, there’s more than that, but, ya, the web, public, yada, yada, need a job, blah.) Suffice it to say, I don’t feel like I can keep up, and every nerve just feels rubbed raw.

In the middle, though, there was a jet-setting trip to Cape Code for practically just hours not days. It was worth it to see two really great people start a new adventure. It was worth it to see old friends from along the way. It was worth it to dive back into the Atlantic Ocean and recapture that feeling from so many Julys of my past.

In the old friends vein, I kind of had one positive epiphany. I like performing stand up, but I don’t love it with the brutal love that makes you go out night after night after night, like many folks do. Even when I was someone out night after night after night myself, it wasn’t for a pure love of standup. It was complicated. My passion was there, but it wasn’t single-minded. I kind of envy those people I know with that single-minded focus.

I’m more diffuse in my focusing ability. Soft lighting with vaseline gel on the filter spreading the beam. No laser pointed, narrow spot am I. I suspect the equation of my success, or lack thereof, is directly in proportion to the diffusion of that focus, to the reality that I don’t share that single-mindedness.

That’s not my epiphany, though. My epiphany is that had I never tried, had I never worked to release a little bit of that inner voice that had previously only sounded in my head not out a microphone, I would never have met some people I now call friends. Our paths would never have crossed. Ever. Or, given Boston’s and Cambridge’s diminutive size, our paths may well have crossed, but we never would have bumped into each other.

If for no other reason, if I never achieve any success personal or professional in writing or in performance, I have that to show, and it was worth it to get on stage.

I wonder if it was that same progression that has me sitting waiting for a man nicer than any I had previously dated. I might never had my own lemon tree had I not ventured out to the adventure of getting on stage. On the down side, I might never have grown the saddest tomato plant ever either. My fantasy of quitting my job and living organically from our backyard is shattered at the sight of this dime-sized crop.

Yes, literally dime-sized. Harvesting my vast crop isn’t on this weekend’s agenda.

I like my friends, and I like my weekends. But, for fuck’s sake, why was I not born rich enough to have the adventures all week long? Why wasn’t I born rich enough to never, ever, ever experience the gritted teeth and swallowed pride of not yelling out “Take this job and shove it, I ain’t working here no more.”

Tomorrow, we shall kayak. At least M. made reservations to take a lesson and rent. Back in Boston, I may have tried to drown my sorrows metaphorically after a bad month’s work. On this coast, it will be a more buoyant sorrow drowning, with all of the Pacific to help me out.

Technorati Tags: beach, beer, California, comedy, Dot_Dwyer, friends, gardening, work, writing

Tonight’s adventure was trying to catch up on a spreadsheet that I kept getting interrupted while trying to understand while chained to my cubicle walls. Meanwhile, M. got a night call from his manager with some out of office strategizing.

Is it any surprise that all I want to do is go to the beach near our house. Sadly, it’s the house we must pay for every month with our meager, or at least not nearly enough zeroes on the checks, earnings. If I can’t have a life of leisure, I’ll grab the leisure I can get.

It would all be so much less painful if I were filthy, fucking rich. The kind of money in which scandals and embarrassments abound and countless generations of stupid and degenerate. I want that kind of dough. I want to douche with Chateau Neuf du Pape. OK, maybe I’d just drink that.

Right now, my vacation from this level of workaday horror is more Ripple and less Biarritz. Shit.

Technorati Tags: money, life, work

Nothing I hate more than having so much work that I don’t have time to think. Pretty much it’s been a thought-less week so far.

I did, however, manage to stay out far too late after our softball team scored a perfect season record — not one win. The upside is we had the best (i.e. only) barbecue running before the came. Carne asada hot off the grill and a cold beer is a pretty good trade off to losing.

(The best thing about this picture is the complete absence of anyone one on the field near me. Apparently, no one feared my Jacoby Ellsbury-like “need for speed.”

After getting pulled over going 45 in a 25-30 zone, and happily avoiding a ticket, I have wimped out on the post-game draining of beer cans. However, with that scare in my head as I cruise through suburbia to the highway home, I feel illicit and dangerous. This rebel sense is heightened knowing that M. is waiting up for me at home.

It’s a very retro feel to glide back home and know a groggy person will be wondering where you’ve been. Pat was quite a bit more suspicious and judgmental on those late nights, and some of those nights went mighty late and she should have been suspicious. On the other hand, M. has a phone, and cellular technology was barely invented or in use in my youth. Right around midnight he called to ascertain that I was just winding my way through the winding roads that lead to home and told me he was headed to bed.

In completely unrelated news, I got to experience a little social alchemy at the workplace today. I had to take some newfangled, online assessment doohicky about my labor style. ‘Cuz who don’t want to labor in style? I’d say which tool and all, but, you know, I like that workplace firewall between the sane, sitting on the couch me and the check-earning, good, little worker bee or ant. No reason to let the man know I was talking up his toil-measuring tools.

The noteworthy part, though, is really about me. Pretty much the evaluation in some mysterious psycho-social way nailed some stuff based only on my picking the word pairs I liked. Click, click, click, you’re creative and shit like that there. For a minute, you believe in magic and have faith in the salt mines and the man.

M. kind of sank that mystical, magical feeling. His thoughts, with which I tend to agree, is work-style evaluations pretty much work, because none of us are really special unique snowflakes. We’re probably more like daisies in a field. With a bent petal or left-facing leaf or chubby stem, we’re different from the next daisy over in the pasture. Sure. But, in the final analysis a daisy is nonetheless just like all of the other white-petaled, yellow-middled throngs.

So, as we plod through the workaday world, assuming there’s some faith in actually get some minimal shit done, how many different ways can you really play it?

I’m the freak with the messy desk but preternatural organizational skills for other people. Someone else is the diligent and smart and careful colleague who keeps the ship afloat calmly and thoughtfully. Theme and variation. Same shit, different way to wank.

We’re meant to discuss it all at our offsite (the one for which I have the grave misfortune to be making all of the arrangements and rocking the planning) in some kind of uplifting group dynamics session.

The Buddhist lesson hidden in that little joyous exercise, i.e. “Buddha is a shit stick,” will come to its full joy when I get to listen to the folks literally in their first jobs (or first tough, “real” jobs) wax on about their work styles. But, that’s not the kicker, the moment of transcendence. Nope, that will come when simultaneous to listening, I’ll have to be sure lunch is ready and set up, the water glasses are full and any number of shitty little details that are the essence of meeting planning are handled.

I’m surprised my self-assessment didn’t throw me a line in tortured fortune-cookie philosophy. “You were born to serve others.” Maybe with some tips thrown in for better managing my suicide attempt, either life or career-wise.

Technorati Tags: Bay_Area, beach, friends, photos, suburbs, softball, work

Somewhere along the way of walking around our neighborhood I recorded a few seconds of the virtual war zone. Crank it up and feel the glory of the U.S. of A. when the “nanny state” isn’t peeing on your personal parade.

7_4_09-jul-4-9_36-pm

I think a Friday start to a long weekend is better than a Monday. I didn’t do much, but nonetheless I have a feeling of accomplishment. Maybe it was the walks back and forth to the beach three times or the stop at the surf shop that’s closest to our house or the rack of ribs I ended up baking/roasting when we realized our propane supply was gone.

There’s something about our newly adopted town that always makes me feel like we’ve traveled to another dimension. We are literally a 15 minute ride from SF (in fact dinner on Friday was burritos in the Mission), but it feels like sitcom, beach-town suburbia every damn day. Kids play in the streets and ditch their bikes on manicured front lawns like it’s 1952 and crime hasn’t been invented yet.

In the time warp town, it makes perfect fucking sense that fireworks would be legal. The neighbors assured us that despite the $1,000 fine for illegal fireworks and the very visible police presence, illegals would be shot off in abundance. And, hells ya, they were right.

I missed grabbing pictures but at one point there was a municipal-worthy splash of chrysanthemums lighting up the generally, although not so much in this photo, photogenic San Pedro Point.

When we got back to our house after strolling the battlefield-looking sight/site of our local beach, back behind our very own home were amazing, just about as good as professional light show bursts of color.

The thick smoke and essence of gunpowder was crazy on the beach.

I felt so bad for the one poor schmoe who seemed to be the only one in custody inside the police’s makeshift, chain-link holding tank, so I didn’t take his picture. A nervous-looking cluster from multi-generations peered at him through the fence. Tough ending for a family outing.

We had some fun lighting off our own. But I suspect we’re both just a tad bit on the cautious side to be pyromaniacs.

All sorts of pictures, some OK, maybe good, mostly bad and worse, can be found here: http://dee-rob.com/zenphoto/July%204%20by%20the%20sea/.

Technorati Tags: America, beach, California, fireworks, July 4, Pacific_Ocean, Pacifica, photos