Mark

What a different week from last week and the last what seem eight trillion or so. Started a new job and it’s been good so far. I’ve been there all week, and it’s been interesting, hard, easy, strange, and everything else in between. It’s a small place and it’s basically physical labor. The last two days I spent on my feet the whole time. It’s been an odd adjustment going from sitting around doing nothing to doing actual work, but I enjoy the challenge. Even though I got laid off a while back and then spend most days just sitting at a computer at home, or out and about with the laptop, the last few years of my job were spent pretty much doing nothing as well. In fact, I am starting a new blog kind of about this very thing. My time doing nothing at my last job, getting laid off and then the long ass time between then and now and some of the stuff that happened in between. I hope to make that one humorous for the most part since this place has gotten kind of out of hand.

A few thoughts since I started. I post too much shit on Facebook all the time, which I don’t really care or think about that much. I sometimes put some “personal” normal stuff up there when I am not joking around. I try not to complain or put anything passive aggressive up, but maybe every 29th post may be something like that, whatever. Other times, I’ll put something personal like I quit smoking for however many days. I put something up when I started work this week and then a couple of subsequent posts referring to work and a few people asked where I was working. I think I decided since this job is mainly to earn money I don’t really need to tell people about it, it’s nothing exciting, it’s warehouse work and it is supposed to turn into a more important warehouse position, but I certainly don’t want to be defined by the job. I always am bored to death when people want to talk about work. In Los Angeles, every person you meet asks you what you do for a living, which basically means they want to see how you might be able to help them out, or what they can sell you. Anyway, I’d rather talk about other shit “I’m up to” unless of course I start making lots of money doing interesting things.

The people I work with all seem pretty okay, it’s a warehouse environment, and there are only about five or six people in there at a time so it’s pretty quiet aside from the music which may or may not become a problem at some point. The first day was mostly your basic rock and roll station on FM for most of the day and eventually that got turned into modern hip hop complete with vocoder songs, etc. I honestly can’t stand this shit at all. I’m pretty open minded about most music, but I can’t really handle that stuff at all. There is quite a bit of ball busting going on in there, the crew is three young men in their early 20’s I guess who are typical teenagers (I guess), talking about Call of Duty (I shouldn’t have mentioned I play) and smoking Newports on break, and liking that horrible music, a seemingly bitter guy in his late 30’s who is helping out there until they move him into another position, the boss who is cool, and then a guy in his 30’s (I think) who is also really cool, likes good music and seems to get annoyed to all hell with the younger guys and their antics. I’ve tried to keep to myself for the most part until I figure out what my role is there. I haven’t really gotten that friendly with anyone aside from small talk. Oh yeah, and a young man working part time that started the day after I did, after some talking he goes to the Jesus college I talk about on here sometimes and his girlfriend works at the coffee shop I go in daily. Small world. He’s a nice guy and I can’t imagine what is going through his head listening to some of the conversations going on in there.

As shitty as I’ve felt the last few months, I don’t feel that much different really. I guess my mind is elsewhere all day, but on the other hand, interacting with people all day is making me almost not want to do anything at the end of the day. I may just be feeling tired right now though. I feel generally better off though. I enjoy the physical labor more than sitting there at a desk, and as soon as I get a little money together I am going to join a gym and start working out again since I am so disgustingly out of shape now. I am clean of everything at this point, but look and feel horrible and fifty-eight years old. I almost don’t even want to go out right now because of it. I feel a little disconnected from everyone and everything as well. For a while I thought I wanted to do music again for an outlet but now I don’t even think I want to. I guess the way I know this is, when the band played their last show last August I never took the guitar out of the case after that show. Playing that show in October with that other band I used to be in was fun, but I haven’t even thought of picking it up again. Usually if I even think about playing the guitar it’s because I hear a song and think “ooh, I’d like to learn that” and then realize I could just listen to the song and have a better time. I think I’ve managed to tell twenty six different people I want to start a band with them yet have no desire to really. Perhaps in thirty minutes I’ll feel different about this.

Looks like shit is still the same I guess.

Say it to my Face!

When I was 13 years old or however old you are when you get to seventh grade I started school in my new town of Swampscott, Massachusetts. I was fat, had gross long greasy hair, bad acne and wore concert t-shirts all the time. Ozzy, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, etc. Concert shirts back then were often “baseball style” with those long sleeves. I was also painfully shy and as I am now, socially awkward. Granted if I know the people I am with I am whatever the polar opposite of socially awkward is.

There were a group of 8th graders I could tell were just trouble makers. One particular guy, his name escapes me now...his face though, he looked like a rat. Tiny little eyes, this rat nose and just this demeanor that was sneaky and shifty. Him and his group of friends were like those kids on the Simpsons, when you saw them coming down the hall you knew they were going to do something to you. So one particular day I was walking down the hall in an area where nobody happened to be at the moment and there was the Rat boy and his crew. This particular day I was wearing one of those long sleeved concert shirts and him and his crew grabbed me and proceeded to tie my sleeves to the two doors to the theater which swung out. I was stuck there for a few minutes until someone, probably a janitor came to my rescue.

Fast forward to couple of years after high school and I was a much bigger person, was lifting weights quite a bit and was considered “mean looking”. I was working at this small supermarket in this disgusting city called Lynn, Massachusetts. This girl started working there, and while she was a nice enough person, she may have been one of the ugliest girls I’ve ever seen in my life. She literally had a dark mustache and really hairy arms which led me to believe that whatever was happening “in other areas” was probably just as horrible of a situation. At one point she mentioned her husband would be coming in to meet her for lunch. So lunch rolls around and I am in the little lunch area and she comes in to introduce me to her husband and low and behold it is Rat boy!

So now I am much bigger and scarier than him, and he is married to the ugliest woman I have ever seen in my life. He shook my hand and we both kind of did that whole “oh hey yeah we went to school together” thing and subsequent visits to work he was always extra friendly to me.

Nowadays, this thing in the news has been “bullying” like it’s some new thing sweeping the nation. I guess with the onset of social networking bullying is worse than it already was. I don’t think it is, I think it’s less than it was. Aside from that incident tying me to the doors, when I was much younger kids were even meaner and nastier. You’d get pushed over, hit, shit thrown at you, etc. Nowadays kids get called fat on the internet and they are killing themselves. I think the bigger problem is, parents are raising their kids to be pussies. In the summer parents are shaving the heads of their young men and sending these little shaved pussies (not the good kind) out into the world to get taunted and made fun of.

My dad never did that “let me show you how to fight” thing or anything, because violence is never the answer ever, but I was at least taught that name calling is...fun. Unless you are extremely thin skinned, “sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never hurt you” If you spend any time on the internet, social networking, message boards, etc quite a bit of name calling goes on. It’s kind of what happens on the internet on the regular. Besides, why are young kids on the internet anyway, they should be reading books, outside playing and getting into trouble, etc Leave the name calling and time wasting to us adults.

Explodes in My Head Like Bright Red Fireworks

Comes on every few hours
It has been there for a couple of years now
Making me feel three feet away from my self,
like my shadow is me and I’m just a host waiting to expire.

After a trillion mixed tapes and movies I never wanted to see anyway
After a trillion lies dumped into my head, not even remotely processed
After a trillion drives through the woods and drives to the ocean and drives to my house...their houses
After a trillion haircuts and bad cologne
After a trillion times saying things I most likely never meant
Here I am with horrible lyrics from the 80’s in my head by homosexual men
I end up having to write my own
“oh baby please don’t hurt my soul again”
“oh mama you are so pretty the sky has nothing on your eyes”
“hey sweetheart let your hair down so we can hit the road”
etc

Every few days it happens
I turn into this guy I knew once
Dark blue button down sweater
Head full of ideas of what i thought was best for me
Man I would pay fifteen million dollars for a crystal ball
Go back in time and hand it to myself

After a trillion conversations I should have never had
After a trillion different hairdos and shoes I lied about liking
After a trillion different levels of anger I hit every day
After a trillion different times walking through the snow, the sun, the rain and up hills
After a trillion hours and hours of trying to convince myself I’ve ever made a good decision in my life
I end up with the remnants of the same soul as these gross Los Angeles losers I see
Black sunken in eyes
Still looking for some sort of piece of recognition
Still holding on to that dream, forgetting everyone is selfish
Nobody ever wants to hear you until you start to suffer or feel and look like shit
I see these fucks here every ten minutes out here and then realize how much more I am

Every few months I feel like this
I feel like I need to have some sort of other part of me
I forget how intense everything has been when I see it with my own eyes
They can live vicariously through me, I never learned to share
I certainly don’t feel like it now, fuck them all and the minivans they rode in on

After a trillion phone calls from 1985 through 2009
After a trillion times I can physically feel my head working overtime
After a trillion times wanting to believe everything I see and hear
After a trillion different explanations why I feel like I do from a trillion different non-doctors
After a trillion times I looked into eyes I can’t remember the color of
I arrive here, with the most horrible thoughts a person can have in their head, stuck there
I arrive here with a broken heart, an empty skull and the best TV money can buy
I arrive here with a tan and whatever excuse I can think of for being the biggest pussy in the world

To Catch a Thief

I wrote this a long time ago, updated it where it needed to be updated. I always wonder if this dude is still out there.

So there I am, stoned. How many stories can I tell that start like that? Every one that’s how many. So there I am stoned, approaching the Charlie Parker section when out of the corner of my eye I see him. “Shit” I say to myself, there’s no way that guy will recognize me at this point, it was….over 15 years ago now. “Fuck, he’s listening to jazz now?” Perhaps he always was though. I would assume that he would only listen to Led Zeppelin and Ozzy if he was doing what he was doing when I first encountered him. Looks like he gained a little weight. Has the glasses on, looks sort of like a computer programmer, or maybe someone who works at Radio Shack ( let me just say that Radio Shack is the worst thing in the history of things that have existed in the world. You go in there and first of all, they don’t have anything good whatsoever. There is not one good thing. And if you say they are different now like Sears, because they carry all these top name products now, I’ll tell you to shove a box of 9 volt [my favorite member of the battery family] batteries up your ass, as Radio Shack is not good now. I don’t care who they have doing their television ads now, I don’t care if the logo is hip now. I don’t care if when you think of Radio Shack you think of Radiohead. It’s 2 things that stink Radio’s and Shack’s. When I think of the radio I think of noisy static and shittier music. When I think of a shack, I think of an old run down fucking shack, not somewhere I want to buy stereo equipment. Anyone who buys anything from Radio Shack other than a fucking LED light or something is an asshole, and should not be allowed to listen to music or use anything electronic. You go in there to buy something, and first off they ask you for all this shit…name, address, phone number, social security number, the last time you listened to Vampire Weekend{this obviously is probably more often than not answered “yes” in the Radio Shack environment if you catch my drift}, mothers maiden name, all to buy a fucking fuse for 29 cents. Fuck that, I’ll take my business elsewhere.) or some geek like that. So I quickly make my way out of the jazz section, as the guy is there, and secondly, there’s nothing there I need right now anyway. I guess I should back up a little.

So years ago when I had a skateboard and my prom would be a couple years later where we would hear all sorts of 80’s songs because it was the 80’s, not because it was an “80’s themed prom” (I tell you, being in junior high, and high school in the 80’s was not fun. It wasn’t like those John Hughes movies. It wasn’t like Saved By the Bell, it sucked. The clothes people wore were so god-awful it wasn’t even funny. Ronald Reagan was in office, there were no punk rockers around where I lived, the pot wasn’t what it is today, if you hooked up with a girl you spent half the time trying to figure out if something was a strap or a ribbon or a belt or whatever, and then of course you were fifteen so when you did finally get the baggy outfit off you had no idea what to even do with the “stuff” So when you start thinking that you want to go back to the 80’s because it seemed cool, think again, as it really wasn’t that great of a time for anyone. Let’s let it rest.). I looked like a dork, I was a teenage punk rock kid with a skateboard, how original.

My friend Peter and I used to hang out at this shopping mall literally every day of our lives. It was a small shopping mall with maybe a dozen stores, anchored by a big pharmacy (pharmacies are out of fucking control nowadays, people don’t think about it, but you go into a pharmacy and the days of just getting a prescription and a card for your sister are long fucking gone now you can get anything you want in there…at any time of the day. They have 24 hour pharmacies here, perfect for a guy like myself who sometimes will wake up in the middle of the night and go out to the car to take a ride and cool myself down. Sometimes I need a bag of licorice in the middle of the night, and sometimes I need to buy a box of blank DVD’s, or maybe I am coming back from a keg party on a golf course at like 4 million o’clock in the morning and I need a copy of the new Michael Crichton novel [paperback edition], either way, it’s now all there. Pharmacies do not get the much deserved respect they have built over the past few years now), and a department store. The details of this are sketchy at this point, but from what I remember Peter may have said some bad words about some girl. For a week or so after that we kept seeing these two sort of scary looking guys in the mall. We thought they were after us for saying what we did. So one night, I’m sitting in the mall leaning against this wall with my skateboard, I have a clear view of one of the entrances (I can still picture the big brick pillars outside at each entrance), so anyone pulling up in a car, you can see. This would be where you waited in the winter for your mother to pick you up after a long day of mall shopping, if you weren’t a nerd like me who just hung out there. So I’m sitting there, presumably waiting for my friend to get out of work when I see this motorcycle pull up, okay, well a “chopper”. I notice it’s our two friends who we thought were going to kick our ass, they look a little different though. The taller, blonde one is wearing mirrored sunglasses, and a bandana on his head, and overalls; he gets off the chopper and enters the mall. The shorter dark haired one stays on the chopper and is looking in at me. I’m thinking he’s going to come in and kick my ass. I hadn’t had much experience with getting my ass kicked at this point (although, a few years before or so, I was down at the movie theatre and there was this nerdy “new kid” eating a sandwich, for some reason I decided I wanted to eat the sandwich, so I took it away from him. Me and my long hair, and my Ozzy Diary of a Madman tour shirt [which was the first concert my mother let my brother and I go to without parental guidance, and I was right after all these years with the date thanks to the new reissue of this classic record which shows a flyer which indicates Ozzy would be in the New York are on April 4th, 5th of 1982. I always remembered the show being April 2nd, 1982. Which now that I think of it, me buying the reissue of Diary of a Madman back in 2002 was the 20th anniversary of that gig. Shit. Fuck. I wish I knew, I would have celebrated by going to the Boston Garden that night, or rather where the Garden was. UFO opened for Ozzy at that show, without Michael Schenker, who had already started making waves with his solo career, we also missed Randy Rhoads who was killed right before the gig, instead we got that guy Brad Gillis who ended up on the underrated Speak of the Devil live record, and eventually to Night Ranger] took the poor kids dinner away from him. Big mistake, it turned out the kid was the younger brother of “that black belt crazy kid Bill Ward {we’ll call him Bill Ward for the sake of anonymity}” So now the rumors were that Bill Ward wanted to fight me. I couldn’t fight him however; I was a long-haired freak who couldn’t hurt a fly. I avoided Bill Ward for weeks when finally he caught up with me. He was definitely the Mike Tyson of the town, not really a big guy, just crazy, and could fight and knew karate and loved ninjas and shit. So one day, I’m leaving school, about to cut through some backyards when he runs up. Mind you, he’s running, not walking. “Let’s go man, why’d you fuck with my brother??!?” “I didn’t know it was your brother” “Well, you have to fight me” “Bill Ward, I’m not gonna fight you” He then says “Then I have to hit you”, and he punches me in the face and says “Don’t fuck with my brother”.), so I was getting more or less ready to run away from the crazy biker guys who wanted to kick my ass for having a skateboard and gallivanting around with the kid that said that shit about his sister. (Un)Fortunately, it wasn’t that at all, as while I was standing there with my skateboard and punk rockness I heard this door being flung open loudly and a woman yelling. The tall blonde mirrored sunglasses and bandana guy was running out with a box in his hand, coming from the jewelry store. He hopped on to the motorcycle, or chopper rather, and they drove off into the sunset. The police came down and I gave them a report.

A month later, I get on a bus and look in the back, and there’s mister tall blonde guy with the bandana and mirrored sunglasses, this time he’s wearing a baseball hat though. I avoided eye contact with him and hid my face for the bus ride.
So now, years later I see the guy at the record shop looking through the jazz and blues CD’s, before I disappeared from his sight I wanted to see what he was buying. BB King – Live at Cook County Jail. Ha (?)

Okay I'll go back to writing about how miserable I am and that kind of thing later on. This was fun for a minute.