Life and Times

Here's the latest:

1. The Nervous will be recording a 7" record / digital EP thing at some point in the nearish future, hopefully around the end of June.  I'm very excited about this; it's been about 10 years since I did any recording, and I'm stoked to send the MP3 of our song Publish or Perish to all of my grad school homies.
2. Remember that whole "brutal insomnia since I was about 13 thing"?  Latex mattress = sleeping like a rock.  IMHO, the expensive bed has already paid for itself.
3. (Not that you asked, but...) week 3 of potty training.  Plan C very much gets it at this point, but we still have to run interference sometimes to prevent accidents.  She's graduating to undies this coming week.  Now if the poor kid's digestive tract would just produce poops that weren't the size and consistency of car batteries, she'd be in good shape...
4. Gorgeous rainy how-it's-supposed-to-be spring weather in the last week has done much to revive my spirits.  We had our first rainy-day BBQ on Friday, which was great fun but did involve too much mud getting tracked into the house.  I'm thinking about making people hose themselves off from the waist down before they are admitted in the future.
5. Three weeks of classes to go, then finals, then summertime!  Hot damn!

Middle-Aged Moshpit; Portlandia Morning

Part I:

Last night, homies Ransom, P and I ventured far into the night to see NoMeansNo at the Hawthorne Theater.  I've been a huge fan of NMN since I was 14 and I got their seminal "Why Do They Call Me Mr. Happy?" on vinyl; I spent years trying to play bass like their stalwart leader Rob Wright, which is sort of like trying to play trumpet like Miles Davis.  Despite the heat and humidity in the stanky venue wreaking havoc with their equipment, the band itself was top-notch, delivering about 1.5 hours of blistering, dirgy (i.e. "like a dirge", not a misspelling of "dirty") punk.  Two notes on the show:

1. Those guys have looked old since I first heard them.  They looked old on the album photo of their first album, put out in the early 80s.  They looked old the three times I saw them in the 1990s.  They still look old now, in 2013, but not really any older than they ever did.  It was WEIRD, you guys!
2. More to the point, the show was 21 and over, and I expected it to just be a lot of old rockers like myself rocking.  That was indeed the case.  What I did not expect, however, was the presence of a full-on geriatric moshpit the whole time!  Big, sweaty dudes who happened to be in their 40s slamming into each other!  Minivan-age fellows crowd-surfing!  It was grampa punk at its purest!

Part II:

After getting home really late and getting a few hours of sleep, it was up for the big day-before-Plan C's 3rd birthday outing B and I had been planning.  We did the following things:

1. Bought a bed frame from West Elm (high-end mall-pop blaring on the speakers included) to go with our new fancy latex mattress we bought last week.
2. Got fancy donuts from the new fancy donuts joint Blue Star Donuts a few blocks away (I got a maple bacon one.)
3. Did photobooth pictures in the lobby of the trendy-ass fancy Ace Hotel a few blocks away.
4. Went to Powell's (which is just great, as always, not really "fancy", where I bought two more dragon-slaying paperbacks (a few blocks away.)

It was, in short, the most Portland yuppie/hipster morning conceivable.  We regret nothing. 

Dust Settling...Now What?

This has been a tough (school) year for me, but only as tough as one would expect: I am a first-year full-time instructor at a community college, and that entails a whole lot of work in preparing and teaching four classes per term.  I had to create two completely new-to-me courses from the ground up, including lectures, powerpoints, readings, and assignments.  I had to try to figure out how to pace myself delivering up to three 1 hour, 50 minute lectures a day (still working on the pacing thing.)  I'm also very carefully testing the waters of the inevitable office politics, although I'm incredibly lucky in that my colleagues are all great, smart, sympathetic people and there's no question I have less political bullshit to put up with than 90%+ of other teachers out there.

The thing is, though, I appear to be over the hump with the insanity; I have all four of my courses in reasonably good shape and I'm more-or-less on top of the material.  So...now what.  The weird and (possibly) interesting thing about teaching a specific set of classes is that you can fine-tune and modify as much as you want, but the time per lecture is always the same.  What I mean is that modification for the sake of modification would be pointless, and there is a high baby-out-with-bathwater chance if you were to just ditch a lecture topic in favor of a new one.  Likewise, since the students are new each term, novelty for the instructor ("Hey!  I am lecturing about Spain more than I used to!") just means a different narrative for the students, and one that isn't necessarily "better" than the old one.

Point is: I am still figuring this shit out.  Word.

Rain

Let me explain myself here:

Everyone who knows me even casually (e.g. the shuttle driver to campus, angry hobos I avoid, the friendly chap who built our fence, porch, and kitchen) knows that I love the rain.  My friends get annoyed with my references to it, and OMFG...poor B.  I've gone off about how it hasn't rained enough lately so many times in her presence that when I start in, she delivers a seriously-shut-up glare that could make Rush Limbaugh turn off his microphone.* 

I am feeling kind of nostalgic and emotional-in-a-good-way and it's raining right now and I want to say why I love it so much.  It's because rain for me is equivalent to life itself.  There's the obvious part - it makes everything grow, it provides for our species to keep on being a species for the time being, and so on.  There's also my subjective position and, I serpose, philosophical position, that I love Oregon because it's green here, because the rivers are huge, because most of the year you're stomping around in a sweater and a jacket (which makes everyone look cooler than they would in California crap), and ultimately because Oregon seethes with something like good "energy" in the hippie sense.  This place is defined by the rain, and I get worked-up when it doesn't rain enough because (A.) it makes me think about mortality**, and (B.) I fear more than anything Oregon losing its identity, losing its core.  There's no evidence that that's going to happen, it's just that this place is so precious to me that the idea of a de-Oregonized Oregon terrifies me.

So keep raining, sky.  Despite what everyone else says.

* This is a good idea, and I will start trying to come up with a way that B can deliver this glare to that particular pile of reheated shit.
** Honestly...lack of rain makes me think about being dead.  Welcome to my psyche.

Punk Rock and Skinny Jeans

• Things with the band are going well...we suck less and less with every practice, I'm back on a churning-out-new-tunes kick, and we've got a show coming up in April that we're looking forward to.  
• That noted, it's kind of lame to think that Portland's punk scene itself is not what it used to be; I assumed that punk was the subculture zombie that would never die, but it appears to be a little battered in the P-Town area (this information was brought to me by my homie C, who actually knows what's happening in the music scene, unlike me.)  
• That said, I don't really care.  The whole point of The Nervous was three spectacularly smooth operators who were spectacularly out of give-a-shits about "succeeding" in any way beyond getting to play some shows and recording something, eventually.
• It turns out my whole life, I was wearing the wrong kind of pants.  Now that I know I look good in skinny pants, I buy them.  Today was, it turns out, Urban Outfitter's last day of the big early-spring pants sale, and I scored some appropriate legwear for both the classroom and the urban rock n' roll venue.

Complaining About Anthony Bourdain

B got me the last season of No Reservations on DVD for my birthday.  Last night, as a post-dinner-with-friends winding-down, we watched the Ozarks episode, which consists largely of Tony tooling around in the backwoods of Missouri with different gaggles of rednecks, killing (or at least trying to kill) animals.  As usual, his own humor and gravitas are such that the hillbillies he's hanging out with, whether in the duck blind or the tavern with the arm-wrestling tournament, seem to warm up to him pretty quickly, and he goes to great pains to relate to them, to join them, and not to stick his nose in the air just because he happens to be visiting a fly-over state.

The episode is highly reminiscent of one he did several seasons ago where he zipped across the southwest, ending up at Ted Dickhead Nugent's survivalist mansion/compound, where Tony cheerfully joined Uncle Ted in shooting machine guns and listening to foaming-at-the-mouth libertarianism given free reign.

I like Tony Bourdain, I like his show a lot, but I hate these episodes.  It strikes me that he suffers from a bizarre kind of liberal guilt in which he feels guilty for BEING liberal; it's not so much that he questions his own politics, but instead that he feels ethically obligated to demonstrate with great force that his open-mindedness extends to people on the other side of the aisle.  He also makes a big show of his dislike for mealy-mouthed political correctness; his whole San Francisco episode consisted of him trying to find something he hated, gloomily concluding that San Francisco is really cool and fun, much to his own irritation.

I have two problems with this:

1. The other side doesn't launch liberal-outreach programs.  Ann Coulter does not visit Berkeley or Austin or Portland and ask around to try to understand us better; she instead compares us to satanic Stalinists and hopes that we get what we got comin'.  I do not think Bourdain does "his" side any service by putting on a one-man dog and pony show to conspicuously reach out to them.
2. Liberalism has always needed more balls.  Obama in his second term, whatever else can be said about him, is at least coming out swinging.  He wasted so much time and political capital in his first term being a good liberal conciliator, and it's nice to see that he's finally acknowledged that Republicans are not reasonable people capable of compromise.  For his part, Bourdain has plenty of balls, and I hate to see him wasting his ballsiness trying to hate on liberal stereotypes (another tired vegetarian joke, anyone?) rather than sticking it to the idiots who, like Nugent, think every man is an island, and that island should be surrounded by guard towers and stocked with wild game to kill.

Razor Wire

I was having a good, solid man-to-man existential hashing-of-it-out with my homie T a couple of months ago (it goes without saying this was over beers), discussing elements of his life he finds dissatisfying, and when we switched over to me, I rapidly concluded that what I want out of life is to have the things I already have, just protected by an elite cadre of highly-trained security personnel, razor wire, and some kind of robot that can anticipate and neutralize threats before they happen.  Every time we plant a new thing in the back yard (dogwood tree!), every time Plan C gets a little older and funnier (changing up lyrics!), every time nothing disastrous happens at work (no dickhead students this term!  Solid enrollments for next term!), my natural inclination to cringe as I wait for the proverbial other shoe to drop kicks in, big time.

[Note: that paragraph consists of two sentences, but they are not run-ons.]

Thus, my intention lately is to just assume that the things I have, against all odds, will still be here in the foreseeable future.  I am still working on the threat-neutralization robot (I call it "playing video games"), but I'm trying to stay calmer in the meantime.

Unrelated: yesterday I dug up the clothes line anchor in our back yard.  I do not use the term "anchor" lightly.  This bastard is the same size and shape as an actual ship's anchor: about 8 feet of steel piping embedded in a two-foot cylinder of solid concrete, which was buried three feet down.  It weighs about 200 pounds (guesstimate.)  It took me over an hour of cursing and digging to get at it, then a lot of leverage was involved in getting it out of the ground.  We're not sure how we're actually going to get rid of it, but we'll figure something out...

Chicken Cookies

I am on record as hating lessons, e.g., you go over to smell a pretty flower whilst hearing a pleasant buzzing noise, then hornets sting you in the neck and you die.  While dead, you think "ok, ok....I get it.  Don't mess with buzzing noises near flowers."  The lesson is overkill; you already got it.

CASE.  IN.  POINT:  We roasted some chickens for B's family, gathered and visiting, and the disposable pan had a leak.  Chicken fat ensued all over the bottom of our oven.  We had had some whiskey, so it didn't occur to us that cookies in this oven might be a bad idea right now.  I tried to put in the cookie pan, a plume of deadly smoke ensued, and I retreated.  In the meantime, however, two cookies had fallen off and proceeded to kind of leak through to the bottom of the oven.  Please reference the above picture to see the results: pure chicken-fat cooked cookies.

We did not eat them.

The next day involved a whole lot of me scrubbing before I ran the oven self-clean cycle, which immolated the remaining nastiness and replaced it with a fine layer of ash.