XXI

Just as incessant drinking put a temporary end to all this, unemployment brings it back to life.

Over the last couple weeks our traveling gang of problem drinkers hit the first leg of our world tour. During the 16 hours we spent driving to and from New York City, we listened almost exclusively to mix cd's from 2003, an all-christmas music radio station, and the same two David Cross cd's about 10 times over. Obviously a fan of his from Arrested Development, I had never actually listened to his stand-up. Silly me. It was good. I think %8-10 of the conversation over the entire 4 days was just quoting him, and the record "Shut Up You Fucking Baby" has maybe the greatest description of binge drinking I've heard outside of my own head.


David Cross - "Shut Up You Fucking Baby!" Disc 1 (2002)
David Cross - "Shut Up You Fucking Baby!" Disc 2 (2002)

XX

"He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise."

-William Blake



Elvis Costello and the Attractions - "The Very Best Of..." (1994)

XIX

The rain from Hanna has just started. I hope we get crushed. The one time I was in a bad storm I was sitting on the beach in LBI, and as this big, black cloud rolled in, the wind picked up. I started walking back, but the wind got so strong it was almost impossible to move forwards. Shit started flying everywhere, and when i eventually made it home, i couldn't even get the door open. It ruled. C'moooon, storm.



Bob Dylan - "The Freewheelin Bob Dylan" (1963)

XVIII

Ever take a nap in the middle of the day and the very first thing you think, and consequently say out loud, is "WHY?"

Me either.



Marvin Gaye - "What's Going On" (1971)

XVII

I haven't done enough pool-hopping lately. It was a great way to pass the time when we were in high school and had no cars or anything to do. We'd just walk around from house to house, looking for the ones with pools, jump in and bolt. Eventually I guess that lost its luster, because it got to the point where we rang a doorbell and asked if we could swim in the pool, the answer obviously being no. Then we discovered that the town pool has a much better payoff with much less risk, sealing it as the ultimate aquatic trespass. I miss hiding when we thought we saw cop cars, or running into the woods barefoot when we definitely saw cop cars. I miss the absolute pain of sliding down a giant slide that isn't lubricated with running water. Those were the days. I'm much more mature now. I spend my time drinking until I can't see and passing out drunk on the beach in the middle of the afternoon. I'm a grown up.



Rilo Kiley - "More Adventurous" (1994)

XVI

I really have nothing to say at all, except time is a motherfucker and summer is a dickhead of a season.



Big Star - "Third/Sister Lovers" (1992)

XV

I got my first introduction to Sonic Youth through some interview with Kurt Cobain in which he said he dug them, which prompted me to download "Teenage Riot" via Napster. I liked it, so I downloaded more, all of which I pretty much hated. I didn't get all the noise. I didn't go back to them until probably last year, by which point I finally understood.

I'm currently living out of my car and it seems like every time I get in it Sonic Youth is playing, hence the boring, "who gives a fuck" story.



Sonic Youth - "Daydream Nation" (1988)

XIV

It's 4 am, I'm drinking, forgive me for any incoherence.

There was a regrettable period of my life where I was a mallrat. We'd take the bus there every Friday after school, and just walk around being obnoxious, which is really all I did for the first 20 years of my life anyway, just in different venues. Before we went, I would always go into our basement where my mom kept the money she held for the school store, and take 20 or 30 bucks. It still kind of amazes me to this day that she never caught on, because I was pretty liberal about how much I took. I used the money for three things: food, bus fare, and CD's. This was at the time where I was the only person I knew into punk, so I was on my own as far as discovering bands. A good way of doing this while staying within my limited budget was buying comps, the first of which I bought was Punk-O-Rama 4. There's a bunch of really good songs on it, and I still listen to it almost 10 years later. Among a bunch of others, it was my first introduction to Bad Religion, with their song Generator.
The same year I stumbled upon this gem, I went to Long Beach Island for a week with my dad and my two brothers. I met a bunch of surfer kids that lived on the street I was staying at who pointed me in the direction of a halfway decent record store. I can't remember what else I bought, but I picked up Generator, the album whose title track I was so fond of. I had only heard one song, but I was not disappointed. The music had a level of sincerity that I had not encountered prior and which still resonates with me now, drunk and bitter.
There was a kid we hung out with in my mallrat days who went to see Blink 182, and Bad Religion opened for them. He came back from the show and said that some band of old dudes played and everyone there hated and heckled them. I look back on him telling me that as the first moment that I started to hate the general population.



Bad Religion - "Generator" (1992)

XIII

The summer between my junior and senior year of high school I spent a lot of time walking around our small, 2 square mile town. Only two of our friends had licenses, so mostly we all just moved about on foot, meeting in parks and parking lots and doing stupid things you do as a stupid kid. I did this armed with my trusty walkman (wow) by my side, usually containing a mix cd I had made. Around this same time I started getting really into noisy/screamo bands like Orchid and You and I. I spent many days walking through the gully where the old trolley used to run in Glen Rock, listening to what I consider now to be mostly unlistenable music. There are a few records that I still throw on every once and awhile though, one being the Neil Perry/Kaospilot split. I had never heard of Kaospilot and bought the record because I was really into Neil Perry. However, that riff in "The Noise From the Bell Killed Me" ended up stealing the show. Unfortunately their follow-up LP proved disappointing. The last track on the Neil Perry side is my favorite of theirs.



Neil Perry/Kaospilot split

XII

RIP





Drive-By Truckers - A Blessing and a Curse"

XI

I walked into Mexicali Brewz late last night, and was immediately accosted by two really faded dudes as I tried to find even the slightest hole to get a beer. They kept telling me my fedora was awesome and then started yelling, "BOUNCING SOULS? BOUNCING SOULS?" I responded "Yeah man, How I Spent My Summer Vacation" is a great record, to which they reacted by yelling "Yea bro" over and over. A couple minutes later the long-hair was walking around and the bartender kicked him out, presumably for being an excited lil' boy. He walked out, dejected, only to come back a few minutes later. As he opened the door though, the bartender stood in wait, and began throwing coasters at him until he left. One of the better bouncings I've seen for sure.

Stay tuned for my new book, "Adventures of a Fancy Gentleman", dropping in the fall.



The Bouncing Souls - How I Spent My Summer Vacation

X

I'm in the middle of about a three week bender and I hope everyone is having as much as I am, though it would be nice to go to sleep before the sun wakes up.

I love horror movies. Can't get enough. I wouldn't even really say they scare me for the most part, but that's not even the reason I watch them. I watch because I'm obsessed with the different devices and methods that a filmmaker will use to get scares. A perfect example is the climax in Halloween, when Laurie Strode, played by that tranny Jamie Lee Curtis, kneels at the frame of the door which opens into the room where she's just killed her masked assailant, Michael Myers. Before she can catch her breath, he sits straight back up. If you try and tell me that isn't one of the scariest scenes in movie history, you're a dope.
Again though, it's not actually frightening, it's more of a "cool" scary. I have a smile on my face the whole time. I like scenes that make me yell "Fuck, that ruled." Unfortunately the american horror movie has become an endless string of bad remakes, in which they take movies from Japan and Korea and strip them of all beauty and artistic sense, the very things that make them scary, and replace it with cheap thrills, jump scenes, and happy endings.
I went to see "The Strangers" the other night, and all I can say is fuuuck, that ruled. The movie was exactly how it should have been. It's been getting terrible reviews, and the people I went with hated it, but I will not be swayed. If you saw "Funny Games", you'd probably recognize The Strangers as a less lyrical, worse acted version of that, and I mean that in the best way possible. I'm not gonna give it away, but the ending is perfect.

All the music in the movie is played through the turntable in the house, one of those aforementioned cool devices I hold so dear. The soundtrack has a couple great songs: Richard Bruckner's "Ariel Ramirez", the Woody Guthrie written, Billy Bragg and Wilco performed "At My Window Sad and Lonely", and "The Sprout and the Bean", from the Joanna Newsom album "The Milk-Eyed Mender".



Joanna Newsom - "The Milk-Eyed Mender" (2004)

IX

A few summers ago, my friend Ryan and I drove the 40 mins down to Westfield, where I had lived and worked for a little while before an epic crash in which I was fired for drinking at work, and then spent the next few months unemployed and a recluse, only leaving my room to go to the liquor store. We were going to visit my friend with whom I had worked and kept in contact with. I think we met her at some awful cafe where a lot of kids probably pumping Norma Jean through their ill-fitting, terrible sound quality earbuds hung out. A forgettable experience to say the least. Afterwards we grabbed a couple six packs with my fake ID which I still had at the time, and went up to a golf course to put em down. It was perfect drinking weather. I hadn't started smoking yet, but it was the kind of weather when cigarettes taste the best. That summer I had three albums in heavy rotation: the first two Hold Steady records and "Grace". The warm tone and almost distant sound fits in well with the summer. One of my favorite things about music is the way it just naturally becomes a soundtrack for certain times or activities, though I'm not sure if it's due to the sound or to the listener.



Jeff Buckley - "Grace" (1994)

VIII

I've been making a lot of mixtapes for myself lately because it's a good way to kill 15 minutes, and I have a hard time figuring out what I want to listen to in the car. Usually it's either O and A replays, or my iPod on shuffle. Mixes save me a step and require one or two less synapses to fire. They have no real theme, aside from being songs I'm into lately, which is a departure from the things I would do as the annoying, whiny, sappy pile of yuck that I was as a teenager, when every one seemed to have some sort of "love song" theme in one way or another. Thankfully as I've grown older I've devoted my energy to better, more mature things, like being devoid of almost all emotion, and staring through most people at the wall behind them when they talk to me as I think about how much better it would be if I was petting large jungle animals in Thailand. One glaring omission though, from the love song mixtapes of yore, was the lead off track to Sabbath's "Master of Reality".

"Sweet Leaf": Great love song, or greatest love song?




Black Sabbath - "Master of Reality" (1971)

VII

Got my first real good beach day in today. My pale irish skin is burnt to a crisp due to my insistence on forgoing sunscreen in favor of the 'ol au natural. We're still about a month away though from water temperatures high enough to take an extended dip. Until then it'll be drinking beer and falling asleep in the sun until work.

"Well life is a bitch/and life is a beach/you've got the sun and the sand and your shoes all within your reach"


Piebald - "If It Weren't For Venetian Blinds It Would Be Curtains for Us All"

VI

The same summer down here that I spent most of my time shoplifting, we spent the rest of the summer watching a summer's full of new videos on MTV. The videos for the Prodigy's songs "Breathe" and "Firestarter" were in heavy rotation after their first single, "Smack My Bitch Up" was relegated to late night spins because of the content. It took us awhile to actually catch that one, which depicts a pretty heavy night for what seems like a dude but turns out to be a 10. The spice girls had some video that haunted us for days. Blur's "Song 2" was our jam. The shit that really blew our minds though was the video for Radiohead's "Paranoid Android". The video was a swedish cartoon called Robin, with limbs being chopped off and dudes kissing. We must have watched it 25-30 times and it never got old.



Radiohead - "OK Computer"

V

It appears the weather has finally turned around down here. Though it's supposed to pour tomorrow, we managed to string together 4 nice days in a row. This limbo period kind of weather for some reason seems to be particularly jarring mentally, and I'm always thinking about similar days in the past. One in particular comes a few years back, when a girl I had been hanging out with was on her way over to my apartment. It was nice out, so I sat outside on my car listening to music and waiting for her arrival. As I saw headlights turn onto the street, I sat up, and watched as she pulled up behind my car, and then continued, pinning my legs between her front end and my rear bumper. For some reason she didn't understand why I was angry, which I guess should have been a sign of things to come. The record I was listening to is the post today: "Gentlemen", the stellar fourth LP by the Afghan Whigs. It's a great album from start to finish, but the highlights for me are "When We Two Parted" (New Amsterdams has a good cover of it on "Never You Mind"), and the opening riff of the closing song, "Brother Woodrow/Closing Prayer."


Afghan Whigs - "Gentlemen" (1993)

IV

I just woke up drunk after a 2 hour nap following an afternoon of celebratory drinking, and I couldn't think of any better way to underline that than by posting Raw Power by the Stooges, the greatest album to drink to. I have absolutely no story to tell that I can tie into this. My uncle does, he used to go see them at CB's back in the day, many years before I was born. Fortunately for me, by the time he was done with the club scene I was lucky enough to see the Bank Robbers many times. Seems like an even trade to me.


The Stooges - "Raw Power" (1973)

III

During my first vacation to the Outer Banks, my cousins, my brother and myself spent a good portion of our time roaming around stealing fireworks and then walking past houses, tennis courts, and pools throwing them at the inhabitants. The terrified screams of families enjoying their day then suddenly eying smoke and flame hurtling towards them brought us an immense amount of joy. The climax came when we were sitting on the porch watching as one cousin made his way to the field of sand and bushes between houses and threw a few smoke bombs into the neighbors pool with them inside. We were jealous of the pool they had, a luxury we were not afforded during the trip, and thus had to ruin their fun. He lit the smoke bomb just in time for his mom to walk outside, see him out there and wonder aloud, "What's Mitch doing?" Screaming ensued, and he fled through the backyards, out onto the street behind ours and then made a big loop to get back home. Needless to say, our parents were not impressed, and we were forced to apologize, a small price to pay for being able to torture strangers for a few days. Afterwards, my dad nicknamed him Smokey, a moniker which stuck for many years.

Anytime I see fireworks, it reminds me of July 4th and driving around blaring Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." We're still a few months away from the big day, but it's never too soon to listen to the Boss. I'm throwing up the first disc of Tracks, a box set of rarities. It's the best one of the four. There's also a thinned down version of the box set called 18 Tracks, a selection of some of the better songs.


Bruce Springsteen - "Tracks" (Disc One; 1998)

II

Around my junior year of high school I went to a show at Montclair State University which I had forgotten about until a conversation I had the other night with someone else who went, though I didn't know them at the time. Alkaline Trio and Piebald were headlining. The stage was outside and it was a beautiful day that we spent sitting on the grass watching the openers, and eating at the Six Brothers, a diner down the road. That meal resulted in me being introduced to the wonders of Tums, which I now swear by.

For some reason during Alkaline Trio's set, a fight broke out, by which I mean the MSU rugby team had all jumped one dude. That was my first introduction to Charlie Shelton, then singer of AllxHell ("we kiss, you spit, we kiss").

Amidst the chaos, a romance had budded that day, one which produced many mixtapes. The first one was the best though, and it included the song "December 27, 1990" by Appleseed Cast, a song consisting of a few sparingly plucked notes and a vocal track that sounds like a drunk wandering the streets and trying to piece together the lyrics to a Tom Waits song. Here's the album in which said song is contained, "End of the Ring Wars." It's their first, and admittedly the only one I've actually listened to.

Stay tuned for an America Rules post this weekend in recognition of Memorial Day.



Appleseed Cast - "The End of the Ring Wars" (1998)