My whole family loves music. About half of us are musicians to some level of competency. My mother is a classical pianist and a fair folk guitarist. My old man can play some guitar and I guess he played the recorder and this or that at one point. He’s passed playing much but damn if he doesn’t still love music. I’ve seen him shell out several hundred bucks for a single collection. He’s got drawers and drawers full of CDs. A couple nice amplifiers and various media players and speakers. Considering all the vinyl and hardware iterations, just thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars.

I’m a musician. I resist the temptation to put it in quotes as I resist the temptation to prefix it with professional. Either is fair. I’m so far out of the game, it engenders suicidal feelings but I’ve been paid to play and I’ve written several hundred compositions, some of which are, without reservation, excellent.

At the height of my chops I happened to be living at my parents’ house for several weeks. I had just banged out about 20 new tunes, from Sari-el to Nickel Girl with Copper Lips, almost all winners, and was practicing a lot to get ready to start playing in public again, even if it meant solo.

I was at the end of the practice set, playing The Fate of Man on my American made Jackson Soloist over midi tracks of drums, bass, and trumpet, when my old man stepped into the room. He’d been listening and I’d been getting it tight.

He said, “That sounds really good.”

What? Awesome. First nice thing I can remember him saying about anything I’d done in years. The only previous feedback about my music had been, 1) Turn it down, and 2) That’s pretty dark, isn’t it?

He allowed me about 30 seconds to bask in the rays of duodecennial paternal approval before working around to inquire what it was exactly I was planning on doing to make money in life.

Before you trot out the Phyllis Schlafly Strap-On™ to celebrate with a weekend of WASP-style hedonism I’d like to remind you—your memory does seem to be slipping lately—of other entries on Time’s “Person of the Year” roster.

• Yasser Arafat and FW de Klerk
• Ken Starr
• Mikhail Gorbachev
• Deng Xiaoping
• Richard Milhous Nixon
• Teng Hsiao-P’ing (pre transliteration spelling reform)
• Ayatullah Khomeini
• King Faisal
• Joseph Stalin
• Nikita Khrushchev
• Joseph Stalin
• Jeff Bezos
• Adolf Hitler

So, yeah, I do suppose he earned it. First thing he ever did earn.

My “friend” Barnaby, aka CM, is sort of from LA. I say sort of because I don’t like a single damn person who is from LA and I have to mitigate it somehow. I guess the amount he’s not from LA approximates the amount that I like him after all. ANYWAY.

Absolutely everyone in LA is almost famous or better (and none of them walks). Because this is true, Barnaby introduced me to Billy Bob Thornton one night. I’m sorry I didn’t know who he was to become then. It would have been more fun. It was 1990 or so.

To that starlet or pouting aficionado of other people’s children thinking of getting back together with him, I would like to remind you. The night I met him he was all over the 17 year-old exchange student from Rome we were bringing back from the beach with the others. He picked her out of a van full of teenage girls. Stop pretending like you didn’t know it before I told you.

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Rats may, and often do, climb into warm car engines on windy winter nights if you are unwilling to litter your house, yard, and watershed with diphacinone, brodifacoum, and warfarin. Anyone familiar with rodents knows the ro to the dent means those bastards have to chew constantly to keep their perpetual ivory machine from self-destruction.

While strictly speaking there is nothing edible in an automotive engine, there are plenty of plastic parts and wires to chew on. Apparently many of them have something to do with making a car start in the morning.

Bus poetry. Always alliterated anti-climatically. Blow me.

But really. No change, had to walk to get change. Sidewalk past offramp funnels one into a dark, urine soaked corridor not wide enough to entertain an umbrella. 100 feet of street lamp free no loitering signage between the Alaskan Way and the cyclone fence protecting the shipyard’s 0.5% inspected containers from political ad hominems punctuated radiologically.

But really! A blow job in that space?! Stinking so badly of the rain catalyzed piss of 150 different men that my R-complex sent my hand rooting for a firearm no longer inhabiting that pocket; missing for the permit is 13 months expired. Rolled up umbrella almost an arnis stick. Hold your breath and swim for it.

Walking past them, barely enough room to avoid brushing. Him looking up past me with a remarkably disinterested face. Somehow able to avoid eye contact even when my eyes break his line of vision. And him, on knees, bent further still b/c the customer wasn’t a tall man. Spaced face waiting for an order to be filled, or for the pleasure to drown the stench of competing pheromones.

Barely enough room to avoid brushing. What has happened to etiquette in this country?

Sex, especially public sex, really should have rules. The wife and I established the following and I beg you to consider them as well.

• Not with the good silver.
• Never in a graveyard; excepting Halloween.
• In hotel and restaurant kitchens, use hairnets.
• No sex in the same room as the Pope, even if he’s asleep.
• Check the elevator timing before going for it.
• Do a spot test with all new substances on a small patch of skin before the full application.
• Know your state laws and their loopholes: e.g., most live animals are illegal.
• 3 or 4 hours indoors is fantastic, 3 or 4 hours in the noon sun is a trip to the ER.
• Keep the help out of it (unless they’re on the way out).
• 115° is exciting, 150° is dangerous.
• Don’t tell the cops you’d really prefer to finish up before talking with them further.
• Organic fruit is healthier.
• Someone has to watch the road; flip a coin if you have to.
• If it can get lost, it will get lost. Tie a string or a 20lb test to it.

Now please try to enjoy yourself with a similar level of decorum.

great dream campus. the one with the sunken steps that’s off sort of by itself with the trees on the opposite end from the dorms. the building itself is one long, large hallway (taller than wide) with large rooms full of expensive furniture off it all the way from end to end.

there are also doctors’ offices on this campus (a medical annex) that remind me of the police building from UNM (while i was there, not the new one).

the house was also like the dream harvard house with the large basement where i’d lived on both levels at one point or another.

in the house (seeming smaller than usual and quite dark—it was dark) i was sitting with someone having a conversation or some food. there was a woman in the other room (i couldn’t see her, only heard her) playing meaty kashian music on an acoustic stringed instrument. the sensation of hearing it was like hearing in hallucination. it was loud and the tone of the instrument was thinner than an acoustic guitar would be and it should have been quieter too but it was extremely loud in my ears. from the inside of my ears.

the person i was with told me to go talk to her. i went and sat on a couch opposite her with a coffee table between us. the instrument was pretty. it looked like a cross between a mongolion instrument and a banjo but it was made of dark wood. the neck was not wide. she was amazing on it and played for only 3-4 seconds after i sat down. i remember thinking that it was polite she stopped right away to talk with me. and that i wouldn’t have stopped if i were playing that same music.

she had bangs cut in her jet black hair. she looked like a cross between helena bonham carter and that thin pretty brunette that’s always in mammet movies. her eyes were lined but i didn’t notice any other makeup. she was pale in the dark. her voice was pleasant and entirely american.

she was trying to console me for someone’s death, i think. i wasn’t sure. i just knew that someone was going to try to facilitate some tears and i didn’t feel like crying. i expected maudlin or heavy handed tales but she started to tell me about an after hours raid on a dairy queen, presumably led by the person who had died.

her story telling was in prose poetry. easy to listen to but you had to concentrate to get a story out of it. they broke into the dairy queen and someone wanted a chocolate drink and this was very funny for some reason b/c they only had chocolate syrup and it was cold anyway. the tone of a dairy queen raid in place of a “we-will-all-miss-him” was not silly at all in the dream. it was serious and beautiful and i found i couldn’t concentrate on her words b/c i was concentrating on not letting her open my emotions like so many poorly sealed tupperware containers.

Image/post removed at the very polite request of Ms Graves.

Arafat is dead. Don’t think about it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t bother about it.

You have a few minutes that you wanted to do so? Talk about this man instead: Anwar Sadat [more].

Where Arafat was a murderer, Sadat was a soldier. Where Arafat was a terrorist, Sadat was military commander. Where Arafat was a duplicitous toady, Sadat was an imprisoned freedom fighter. Where Arafat was a thief, Sadat was a reformer. Where Arafat was revered by every human swine who ever blew up a Jewish school bus, Sadat was assassinated by the very same because he deserved his Peace Prize.

You have a few minutes that you want to spend discussing what would make the world better? What could possibly solve the problems between Arabs and Jews?

Spend your time reflecting on a Muslim leader who did just that. Don’t waste your breath on a corpse that’s finally out of the way.