Too Old for Best Of Lists

In blogs past, I've hoisted upon my readers "best of" lists for all the records I bought that came out during the passing year.  This year, I've purchased somewhere around 60 albums, only three of which came out in 2008 as original releases (that is, they're not re-issues; bought plenty of those!).  

This is an indicator that I'm simply getting old, and that I'm not cut out to count myself among the hordes of 30-something music bloggers who giddily and in most cases precariously sound the trumpets for the next Clash or the new Lou Reed or whatever.  I would never be so bold to make such statements, especially since I count the Velvet Underground and The Clash as inimitable, towering fixtures in the rock 'n roll canon that can never be touched.  

Do I sound like your dad yet?

All the shows I've attended this year except for two have been to see bands who have regrouped or have been around for at least ten years.  What are the kids listening to these days?  Definitely not Camper Van Beethoven or Will Oldham or Gang of Four.

However, I do want to praise a relatively new practice in record buying that is actually consumer friendly(!).  Over the past year and a half or so, record companies that produce vinyl have given those of us with our beloved turntables reasons to invest in mp3 players as well.  In the past, I've had to grapple with the option of either buying the vinyl or the CD.  I buy the vinyl because I have a decent stereo system that I take very good care of and in exchange, it continues to play kick ass music with the warmth and spaciousness that you can't get with a CD.  But, of course, you can't play a record in the car or on a walk around town.  

That's a big conundrum for someone who spends as much money on music as I do.  But 2008 has been a year with increasing access to both formats for the price of one.  Often, if you buy a new vinyl release, you get a download card so that you can have it in mp3 format as well.  

That's love.  That says, "Thanks for holding the vinyl torch high.  We take a hit because it's expensive to make, but we dig it too and we like that you're spinning our wax at home.  Here's a little something for buying our LP.  Now you can listen to our tunes on your fucking ipod or whatever.  Traitor.  I mean, half-traitor.  Gah!"  

Fact or fiction?: the first band to have a download code with their LP release was Against Me!'s "New Wave."  There's a bit of pop music trivia.  I'd put it on the wikipedia page, but I don't know if it's true.

Anyway, I wholly endorse this practice and I hope to see more of it in 2009 and beyond.  I'll be 40 in less than ten years.  That's horrifying.  

P.S.  Check out Hayes Carll's "Trouble in Mind", Deer Tick's "War Elephant", Vampire Weekend's "Vampire Weekend" and The Courteeners' "St. Jude" for 2008.  That's all I got.  Really.

  

Murder City Devils Regrouping

I'm not sure what constitutes a "reunion" tour, but the Murder City Devils have regrouped for a string of West Coast dates after only being broken up for about six years.  For those of you who aren't familiar with MCD, they were a stand out rock 'n roll group from the 90's and the first couple years of the 00's that played really well crafted songs about broken hearts, truckers, cowboys and painful devotions to hard drinking, mostly backed by a creepy organ that gives them a very effective, unmistakable sound.  If Bela Lugosi were to get into a bar fight, this is likely to be the band up on stage.  

The most recognizable member, I guess, is frontman Spencer Moody.  He looks kind of like some tech support guy or maybe that kid you pantsed in grade school after pwning him in tetherball.  But he's a pure showman with a voice that sounds like broken glass under a dusty boot, and he sings like a man who's just had a terrifying revelation.  I like MCD a lot, but at the moment, they're making me feel pretty old with their "reunion" tour.

I hereby declare a new rule: no "reunions" can occur unless the band has been broken up for a minimum of ten years.  Going to a "reunion" show of a band that I was gaga about the first time around makes me feel like I should be scrambling for a sitter and digging deep into the back of my closet for the clothes of my youth, long since traded in for fleece, khaki pants and Tevas that I insist on wearing with socks.  

Anyway, I'll be at the Great American Music Halll show for the 4:00 matinee on February 15 if any of my peeps want to get tickets and join me.  I'd go to the evening show but it's sold out and besides, if these folks still drink like they used to, they're liable to not even make it onstage for the second set.  

Oh, and the tour coincides with the a reissue of the band's entire catalog on scrumptious Sub Pop vinyl.  Word.

Yelp East Bay Review of the Day

So I woke up this morning to find my inbox filled with "new compliments" from fellow yelpers. I couldn't understand why until I visited the site. To my surprise, my review of Berkeley Bowl has won the auspicious "Review of the Day" award for the East Bay.

I really like Yelp. I find Yelp to be a valuable asset, and is in large part a reason I think the Internet can be used for good. I'm all for a site that promotes "amateur journalism" or media egalitarianism or whatever you want to call it. The truth is that I've found some paid columnists who write on food in the Bay Area to be full of shit, while I've found some Yelp reviews to be honest, balanced and accurate, touching on things that major media publications either can't or won't touch on. Yelp has provided some make or break information when I'm considering patronizing a business, or not. When three Yelpers who don't seem to know each other all give accounts of how they found a dirty sock in their split pea soup or whatever, I'm probably going to pass on it.

My own reviews on yelp aren't without some amount of flippancy (see my review of Hot Topic), but that's how I roll. Some peeps give me props, some peeps give me grief.

Beer I Like (Entry the 1st)

Here's another entry whereby I thrust upon you good people some of the highest achievements of mankind (if you missed the one on Leonard Nimoy's LP, do yourself and all your friends a favor by buying ten copies of it and giving nine of them away).

Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I drink quite a bit of beer.  I don't drink it to get drunk, but I confess that's a "happy accident" if I'm in no mood to be reasonable and deal with the travails or even minor setbacks of life in a sober mindset.  Here's the part where I quote some genius of times past who all but credited beer for enabling them to trail blaze some new mode of human thought or invent something really functional that changed the world without fucking up the environment, but I'll spare you all the intellectual gymnastics because it's overkill when talking about something as awesome as beer.  Beer doesn't need it.  Beer--at least good beer--is a thing of variable complexity but the reason for its value couldn't be more simple: it tastes good and in the best cases, makes you feel good.  

So here's the first of what I hope will be many entries of beer I like.  And the winner is....

I was only recently turned on to Shiner Bock.  I went down to visit a friend in Austin, Texas where Shiner beers are kind of everywhere the way Sierra Nevada is here in California.  Only the company has been around much longer and though they don't seem to have major distribution, they seem to be popular in other states besides Texas.

According to the bottle, bock was brewed in Germany "to celebrate the arrival of spring," but I seem to remember reading that it was also brewed during winter solstice and Christmas.  I can see the reason for the seasonal versatility.  Though I haven't tasted a whole lot of bocks, Shiner's just as good on the cold nights here in the Bay Area as it was on the scorching days and nights in Texas over the summer.  

So here's the rundown:

The carbonation is pretty moderate and it has a really dry feel to it, making it kind of crisp.  If complexity is your thing, Shiner will probably bore you.  It's about a medium dark beer with a medium body, which is probably why it's so good on a cold night, but hints of caramel give it a sweetness that's damn good during the summer.  This is balanced out with some a delicious roasted malt flavor and a pretty sharp aftertaste. 

The biggest problem I've found with Shiner Bock is that though it doesn't contain a ton of alcohol (4.40% abv), it's so easily drinkable that a hangover is the next logical step, so watch it.  

It's not the best stuff in the world.  I like Shiner Bock a lot because of its quality for the price (around $6-$7) and because it doesn't give me that "beer coma" if I have one after work but before dinner.

Get some.

The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy

Here are the two sides of the "Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy" sleeve:
















Side one of the LP is written from the perspective of Spock, while side 2 is straight up 60's folk-pop with a couple standards popular at that time.

I have to admit that I've seen maybe a total of two episodes of Star Trek and probably just as many of the films, so I'm no trekkie. But I am occasionally drawn to some good, old fashion American camp and the fact is that a couple songs I've heard off of the album are pretty catchy even when unintentionally hilarious.

The track, "Highly Illogical" opens the album and can be heard on Leonard Nimoy's myspace page for anyone curious. It's basically a song written from the perspective of Spock, who is incredulous but calm as he outlines a number of observed contradictions in human behavior.

Need...

In Memoriam James Crumley

One of my favorite writers of hard boiled fiction--hell, one of my favorite writers in general--died almost two months ago and I've just learned about it now. It seems that James Crumley has passed away rather quietly, a direct contrast to the years of hard drinking, hard living and turbulence that preceded his death.

Crumley's novel, The Last Good Kiss, totally upended my naive, unfounded prejudice towards genre fiction and kick started a fascination with the sordidness, the betrayal and disillusionment coupled with an extraordinary command of language and sense of plot structure--in short, with all the best things that characterize kick ass Crime Fiction. His body of work will continue to occupy the highest precincts of the genre, and his novels had such an impact on me personally that I'm almost envious of the perhaps unsuspecting readers who continue to pick up his books for the first time.

Crumley's work is popularly characterized as a a Chandler-meets-Hunter S. Thompson, and I guess that's fair. He certainly shared HST's sardonic worldview in the Vietnam and post-Vietnam eras, and traces of it are present up through the next three decades. His characters often masked the painful pasts of their lives with mistrust and sardonicism, but the memories of personal hell almost always manifest themselves somehow. Chandler's marvelously erratic characters are always humming away somewhere underneath, but unlike both Chandler and HST, Crumley himself managed to possess both unprecedented talent while being criminally overlooked by major book reviewers and critics. He has no bestsellers. He isn't celebrated much outside the peripheries of the genre in which he wrote, but I hope that someday he will be. Almost all of his books are in print here in the U.S, but as is the case of other outstanding American writers of Detective/Crime Fiction like Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald and Charles Willeford, Crumley has gained greater respect in France and the UK than he has in his own country.

Speaking even as someone who's read everything the man's ever published, it's no surprise that I've only learned of his passing now. He has no biographer, and I've come across only one printed interview in a very hard to find collection of short stories. Very little exists online except for a handful of book reviews and a couple of fan websites that haven't been updated in years.

Ever since becoming a fan of his work, I've entertained the notion of spending a week or so in Missoula, Montana hanging out at Charlie B's--a bar Crumley was known to have frequented--with the hope that he'd walk in for a drink. I'm sorry I never made the trip (Missoula is beautiful country anyway), but his books will be on my shelf until my time comes, and I have no doubt that I'll find new reasons to enjoy them for years to come.

RIP James Crumley

More on Oakland/Prop 8

I was looking for videos on youtube to supplement the very serious, thoughtful blog I posted earlier today.   Nothing up yet, but I did find a video posted by a guy a couple weeks ago who went down to MacArthur and Lakeshore to ask questions of protestors from both sides.  I had a lot of faith that Prop 8 would fail, and though it was disappointing when it passed, I took comfort in the hope that I will live to someday see an end to this ridiculous bigotry.  This is a major setback, but I'm confident that 8 will be defeated in years to come.  

However, after talking with a few friends who share my beliefs on the issue, and then reading smug, hyer-moralistic commentaries which indicate that it wasn't intolerance and discrimination that was responsible for 8's passing, but God's will, I'm finding myself pretty angry.  More serious and thoughtful commentary that isn't the least bit snarky below the video:

- First thing's first, and this has to be said: Jesus Christ!  I didn't know Jabba the Hut's sister lived in Oakland (see 1:40-2:20).  The guy asks her what her "position" on 8 is, and the answer is definitely "sitting down,"  preferably with a small trash can filled with buffalo wings, two buckets of Halloween candy, eight orders of bread sticks and a jar of mayonnaise.  What car does she ride in?  On a side note, I hope she's not in a wheelchair.  If she is, I'm pretty sure I'm going to hell.

- It's hard to tell, but a couple of the pro-8 people in this video appear to be Mexican-American.  I may be wrong, but riding on that, hispanics as a group have a history of mostly voting Republican and being pretty conservative when it comes to politics that conflict with  the views of the Roman Catholic Church (results show that 53% of the Hispanic vote was for 8).  At the risk of making an already volatile situation worse, if I were the guy holding the camera, I might ask these people how they stand on proposed legislation against amnesty for illegal immigrants already here, the vast majority of which are from Mexico (everyone remember Prop 187?).  

I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to belittle the struggles of people who come here illegally because they have no alternative.  I'm aware that the right to health care carries a lot more weight than the right to marry.  I want to be clear on that, but I think it's a relevant question simply because it has to do with two wedge issues concerning two separate groups that are historically discriminated against in this country.  No, opposition to granting illegals an easy path to citizenship doesn't have anything to do with core values.  The arguments from both sides have to do with economics in the best cases and race in some of the other ones.  But I wonder where these core values that dictate who can and can't get married come from.

The answer should be obvious, but let's see what these pro-8 people have to say:

"It's all about family with us."

"The state of California has always been a man and woman state"

"(It doesn't) just (affect us) directly, but for the future of the kids.  It's important."

"A man and a man and a woman and a woman is not okay.  It's not good."

"God ordained marriage between a man and a woman."

"If gay men are approved, no more children in California."

Just a geyser of eloquence, huh?  I really feel bad for the one anti-8 guy who's making an attempt at dialogue with these people (5:12-6:58), but I think their "arguments" make it a lost cause.  It's a sad state of affairs when we have to try and elicit real answers from tired old slogans or just sheer nonsense ("...no more children in California").  I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the "values" that these people espouse can be traced to a belief in God.  

I'm a man, so I'm naturally a polytheist (my spiritual realm consists of Me and My Penis), but as a general rule, God has a talent for really fucking up the machine that is U.S. politics, and we should try and avoid any talk of God when there's no place for it, specifically those things we like to call our individual rights as Americans.  This is coming from a straight man who will be a bachelor 'til the day I die, but I've always maintained that anyone who wants to make the mistake of getting married should be able to.  My father was a divorce attorney and peoples' lives (straight mens' particularly; sorry, but I have to say it because it's true) get fucking WRECKED by failed marriages.  That's my soapbox moment.

- To the woman who went out to protest in defiance of the epithets she heard when getting home from work (4:29), I salute you.  There's a word for what you have and it's called integrity.  I wish more people had it.

Anti-Prop 8 Protesters Target Oakland Mormon Temple

According to an SF Gate post a little more than a half hour ago, a few hundred folks have come out to the Oakland hills en masse to protest the church's role in providing the Yes on Prop 8 campaign with millions of dollars.  I have to confess that my applause for the protestors is silenced and overridden by a sense of wonder at the fact that the Oakland Mormon Temple is finally the site of something relevant.

See, I've always been curious about it.  When I was a wee child, I thought it was Disneyland, and my Mom was always quick to correct me.  The temple can be seen from just about any part of Oakland, and it's not a little curious that in a city that is predominantly black and non-Mormon, one of the most prominent, spurious presences day or night should be a massive, white, phallic Mormon church.  It's kind of like walking into a Synagogue and telling everyone your name is Adolph.  That might not be the best simile, but apparently good similes are taking Sundays off for awhile. I've come across two bad ones this morning and I'm not having much luck either.

But perhaps more ironic is the fact that the Mormon Church, which is widely known to have a few unconventional marriage practices of their own--polygamy and child marriages and the wearing of weird underwear--has spent millions of dollars on a campaign to keep the traditional definition of marriage in place.

In any case, I'm glad to see that the OMT is making headlines, perhaps nationally.  We have this beautiful, majestic piece of architecture that overlooks the city, but its occupants are really out of place.  The world needs to know that it's going to waste.  People might finally wake up and say, "What the fuck?  Remind me again why that's NOT a roller rink!"

"A roller rink, you say?  Why a roller rink?"  Need I remind you that roller rinks today are just as awesome as they were in 1978, but a lot more rare?  Where's your head at?

For those of you who don't know, Oakland has been a hot spot for the revival of what is probably the greatest sport of all time: roller derby.  

Why roller derby has never been made an olympic sport, I'll never know.  It's traditionally consisted of young women on rollerskates wearing short shorts trying to physically best one another by knocking their opponents over.  Plus, they have really kick ass names--Lemmy Chokeya, Jennacologist and Jane Hammer to take a few from the Oakland Outlaws roster.  I've searched and searched, and I'm convinced that life offers few things that are better than roller derby.  And before the sexist card is pulled, allow me to point a couple of things out: First, most of the leagues today are run by women and are not-for-profit.  The roller girls do it out of love.  

Secondly, a handful of leagues are co-ed .  That means men knock down women and women get to knock down men.  Put that in your hyper-sensitive feminist agenda pipe and smoke it.  Your gender politics are null and void, because that's equality in action!

It's my understanding that a major hurtle for the Bay Area Derby Girls organization has been finding a fixed place to compete.  I seem to remember reading some time back that they were competing at Dry Ice, but the maximum capacity wasn't big enough for the massive crowds coming out, and it was deemed a fire hazard by the Oakland FD.  

How awesome would it be if the inside of what is presently known as the Oakland Mormon Temple looked like this:

                       

I admit that the gay marriage issue is the more pressing one, but I think running the mormons and their institution of bigotry out of Oakland for a higher, more awesome purpose (complete with daytime matinees and beer on tap) should be next on the agenda.

A belated congratulations to the Oakland Outlaws, who pwned their way through the 2008 season and are this year's champions.

Mark Twain in Oakland

I've been spending some time in history rooms and museum archives trying to compile materials for a blog I want to start on the history of Country music in the Bay Area.  The academic in me has once again been awoken but this time I have to worry about copyright laws and all that burdensome kind of stuff.  

Anyway, while going through indexes in the Oakland History Room, I found this:

Turns out there was a guy in 19th Century Oakland who walked around with an arrow pointing at his head.

Well, his name was Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, or at least that's what the index claims.  I guess it looks like his profile, but how can we really know?  This kind of reminds me of that really dubious photo of Bigfoot that probably won a Pulitzer Prize or something.  I can't really offer any tenable counter to the claim that this is Mark Twain, so I have to kind of accept it.

I've always maintained that Huckleberry Finn is for boys what Jane Eyre is for girls: there are a lot of instances of fucked up human behavior that is beyond the abilities of cognition and self-reflection of young readers, but that's all overridden by the fascination with what we might get away with.  What 10 year old boy wouldn't want to spend his days fishing and, er, smoking and botching the rules proper grammar our that superiors hoisted upon us at every turn?

So that's Mark Twain at the Piedmont sulphur springs, hanging out with snooty white people.  Incidentally, snooty white people still live in the area.  It looks a lot different, and the sulphur springs have been replaced with spas that snooty white people flock to and patronize along with their ridiculous friends.  You too can be massaged and tanned and exfoliated and waxed and otherwise be completely stripped of any real, human sexual appeal that might have worked really well before you decided to make me want to kidnap you and sell you to a wax museum.

Anyway, Mark Twain famously said that the coldest winter he'd ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.  Along with Hell's Angels, Jack London, the Panthers and boozing sailors on shore leave Oakland is famous for a kick ass microclimate.  In other words, it's a fine town to get naked in.

"Clothes make the man.  Naked people have little or no influence upon society."  -Mark Twain

Heavenly God

If I die of a cardiac arrest this weekend, you'll know why.

I have designs to make this the perfect nosh food for my second favorite October event.

I may not be the prettiest corpse (I have a big ass zit on my forehead), but I'd die with a smile if I keeled over eating bourbon and sweet potato mash.

By the way, I want a wake. I'm not Catholic, but while I'm on the subject, I object to just "go to feed the roses" while some ghastly dirge plays and my loved ones weep. It's so depressing. I used to want to be cremated with my epitaph reading "Just Add Water", but I'm pretty sure it's been done and besides, with the way the food industry is going, it may not be so funny someday. Ben Franklin, writing his own epitaph at the tender age of 20, never faced such obstacles.

Then again, he passed on before he could imbibe the greatest beverage on Earth (great for the whole family!), so he certainly never ate bourbon-walnut-sweet potato mash (drool).

Like Sarah Palin, I were ill...

I've been reading about what a violation of basic intelligence Sarah Palin is capable of committing in front of a national audience. I've read all about it in publications partial to either side of the partisan fence. But in fairness, I thought I should giver Mrs. Palin a fair chance and judge for myself. Well, today I found this:



"Health care reform and reducing taxes and reigning and spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans."

So, among other things, we have to reduce taxes in order to reduce taxes. Everyone got that?

Nevermind the fact that she first answered the question by saying that she "were" ill along with Americans she has purportedly spoken with about the bailout plan. She then gave it her support for reasons I still haven't managed to decode from her answer. She then moves on to say (I think) that taxing us lowly citizens, effectively granting large scale corporations the same rights as individual people will stimulate job growth and also cut taxes. So raising taxes in an already sagging economy will create jobs and reduce taxes. Everyone got that?

I watched this one and a half times. Halfway through the second viewing, I closed the page and I actually took the nearest object, a spoon, and shoved it up my own ass. Because if I'm ever going to be in that much pain, I'm going to do it to myself.

Now, I'm aware that this is just one clip, and that she may not always be this bad. But on the other hand it's not spliced up, either. You heard the question and this is her answer, if you can even give her as much credit to say that she "answered" at all.

Has everyone seen the excruciating, horrifying Q&A with Miss South Carolina 2007? If so, you'll probably want to skip this next clip because I think if you watch it more than once, you'll actually forget how to read. But if you haven't seen it, and you want to see something that makes Sarah Palin look like JFK by comparison, enjoy:

Fourteen Year Olds Reading Kafka

I've been unusually social the past few weeks. I have two friends who live in my building, A and T, and September is kind of birthday month for some of my older friends (D, M and...Db[?]). I went to Austin to see a friend from college, and I hope to soon go to Seattle to visit a friend from I-don't-remember-where.

I'm finding that a lot of the same topics are coming up when I spend time with these different groups of people. I'm not deliberately keeping tallies. Maybe I should, because I regularly embarrass myself by continuing a conversation with T in Oakland that I actually had with D in Concord. Is everyone getting this?

It seems obvious that topics would find their way into conversations among people of the same age group, in this case late 20's and early 30's. But things like mortgage, the stock market, car payments and talk of starting families isn't something my friends and I regularly delve into, at least not willingly. We talk about the current political shortcomings of the U.S. because how can you not? But if you want to get everyone talking, bring up a traumatic high school experience.

It's deliciously ironic that talking about high school is an old faithful antidote to potentially awkward social atmospheres. It is both an ice breaker and something to fall back on when the night starts to wear on and you're almost out of liquor. I'm pretty sure that in years to come, deals between major corporations will be struck not on a golf course, but in a bar, with a good old session reminiscing about the woes and trappings of adolescence. Even the SWPL blog touched on it.

I often try and compound these conversations with questions about books assigned in high school classes. Which ones did you like? Which ones didn't you like? It interests me to know what texts made an impact on people at that age, when each day teeters among such heavy extremes and we unwittingly parade ourselves before some unseen committee.

To me it's very telling, perhaps because books played such an important part to my own development. For other people, and for me too, books are ancillary to experience. What you read in English class and what you did during your lunch period couldn't be more different. I have to concede, but if there's anything that could tenably be an exception to this, if one author could have told all our stories, whether we cared to admit it or not, it would have to be Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis."

"The Metamorphosis" probably vies with Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" for the dicstinction of "Weirdest High School Reading Assignment." Even people who have no interest in literature can quote you the first line of "Metamorphosis" ten, fifteen years later. At the risk of stating the obvious, Kafka provides no preamble, nothing to elucidate Gregor's horrific, inexplicable tranformation. "Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find that he had been transformed into a giant insect." I'm sure scholars of St. Paul or Aquinas could do a good job explainining the mystery and absurdity right out of The Metamorphosis, and thank heavens I didn't have one in my sophomore English class.

Holden Caulfield was, is and probably always will be the fictional character most lionized by American high school English students with so much as a passing interest in literature. His depth is remarkable, and in the massive cauldron of contradictions that make up his character, none of us have to look very far to find something of ourselves in him. Who isn't tired of "phonies?"

But the delightful, tragicomedic anecdotes about high school and the baleful forces that asserted themselves in so many ways--from acne pimples to nervous nausea--don't call up Holden Caulfield in my mind. Time after time, I'm reminded of Gregor.

I haven't read The Metamorphosis in years, but the interpretation of my first reading fifteen years ago (!) stubbornly keeps itself fixed somewhere in the peripheries whenever I revisit it, despite more mature, studied readings since. Like many teenagers, I questioned my own signficance, and what is more picayune or casually done away with than a beetle or cockroach?

Then there were the changes going on in my body. Not to sound melodramatic, but they sometimes bordered the harrowing, the grotesque. The horror that overcame Gregor upon discovering his transformation wasn't completely alien to me. I may as well have been a fucking beetle going to my locker in the morning, what with the stinkeying and nonverbal condescension that plagued me and lots of other people at one time or another.

I don't know where I'm going with this. Perhaps I feel like the scholars who put "The Metamorphosis" on the high school reading list didn't consider the multifarious implications that allowed for the deeply felt parallels I drew when I read it. Generally speaking, the story's credibility is derived from the exquisite evenness of its structure, its philisophical complexity, and the manifold erudite analyses that have procured a place for "The Metamorphosis" high up in the precincts of the western canon. I once read a paper on the political implications of Gregor's parents. Did Kafka foresee the rise of fascism?

Well, Gregor's parents were my parents. Gregor's parents were every authority figure. Gregor's parents were the order and discipline that these people bestow with so much importance. They represented the routines and distinctions in life that were as ostensibly reliable and unshakable as the walls that made up Benicia High School. But they were cold and monolithic, insensitive and deaf to all the bullshit that falls in between. Sudden, unforseeable changes are little more than hurdles that need quick doing away with. I'm not trying to debunk the merits of serious reading.

I'm just saying that Gregor kind of told my story.

The Homeless EMT

I'm a real hypocrite when it comes to the argument against calling homeless people "bums." Naturally, I understand that it completely overlooks the possibility of affliction. Let's say, for instance, you once had a good job but you also had a heroin addiction and a junky lifestyle which may or may not have exacerbated a case of paranoid schizophrenia, now in the late stages. On top of all this, your friends have given up on you and you have no family or loved ones to speak of or shout about at 4 in the morning three feet from my apartment window.

You're homeless. You may have had a decent job at some point, but with your mental disorder you don't even qualify for the lowest rungs of employment. In fact, they'd rather hire sane people who don't know so much as a smattering of English. I feel sorry for you, and I wish I could help you in some way. But I'm at a loss.

Let's say you're hard up for money or food or a drug fix, so you break into my car and take one of the few marignally stationary items left after living in Oakland for five years, replacing more windows than I care to count. In this case, the lid to my electricity jack.

You're a fucking bum. Mental disorders and relapses aside. No more sympathy. I'm like Mr. Alexander in A Clockwork Orange: I'm something of a philanthropist when lowly, misunderstood subjects of discrimination are a risk to other people. But fuck with me somehow, and I turn into a monster.

I'm a pushover, and I don't really feel this way all the time, but goddamnit, living in the city can really suck.

I can only count one instance where a homeless person/bum tried to prey on my sympathy. Or was it my naivete? There's sometimes a fine line between being sympathetic and being naive, but in this case, the guy must have just been banking on the hope that I was a complete dipshit.

I was living on 23rd Street and MLK near downtown Oakland. For those of you who have never been there, imagine a milieu from Robocop except without so many people. I was living in a warehouse with a lot of artist/punk rock type of folks. It was a terribly run down area, but rent was cheap and I had even less money then than I do now. Despite my poverty, which was obvious if paid any mind to the holes in my clothes, I frequently found myself accosted and asked for money.

One day, as I was driving to work, I was sitting at a stoplight on San Pablo and 27th St. It was summer and I had my window down. Before the light turned green, I looked to my left and saw that I was being approached by a guy who was obviously homeless. Yellow eyes, black, disheveled. But this guy stood out from other homeless people. This guy had a stethoscope.

It was clear that he was coming towards me, and the first thing that ran through my head when I saw the stethoscope was, "Jesus. What kind of horseshit story is this guy going to try and sell me?" I didn't have to wait long, because he got to my car in a big hurry.

" 'Ey man. We got us a situation." He tried to put an urgent trill in his voice, but he was a bad actor.
"Oh?" I was trying my best not to smile. The urgency in my voice was much more convincing. "What is it?"
"Our ambulence broke down. We got a guy down the street bleeding real bad. We gotta get him guy to the hospital."

I tried to maintain a look of alarm on my face while looking this dickhead over . What made the whole thing so great was that he didn't even have anything on that even resembled something an EMT would wear. He just had, you know, bum clothes. And a stethoscope.

"Oh no! Where is he?"

The homeless crackhead mugger guy wearing the stethoscope pointed down towards a long alleyway couched between a boarded up building and a recently closed liquor store. Now I was ready to laugh. How convenient.

I looked up and saw that my light had turned green. "Okay!", I cried. "I'll be right there!" Then I casually merged onto 580 and drove to work.

I didn't know whether I wanted to give the guy a couple bucks for the charade, or whether I wanted to punch him in the face for thinking I was such a dumbass to fall for some stinky homeless dude wearing a stethoscope trying to pass himself off as an EMT whose ambulance has broken down and, I guess, has no way of calling for back up.

I've always wondered what would happen if I would have pretended to fall for it just for kicks. I remember not having any money in my wallet, and after living on 23rd Street for as long as I did, there was nothing left in my car to take. I guess they could have taken my car, whoever "they" were. Did he have a bunch of other homeless guys wearing stethoscopes laying in wait until given the signal to descent on me all ninjitsu style?

Fucking bums.