My uncle Charlie

The cigarette box was dented; it sat crouched on the table like a sack of flour leaning against the barn doors, bulging out at various points to let loose its burden, and jangling inside the box was the lone perfect stick of crushed up leaves and a filter…

Last week ended a pretty shitty run for the gene pool. The final week of October into the first weeks of November has been, save for one birth and two weddings, the week when every family member on my mother’s side had died. Last week, my uncle was elected mayor of Taunton.

It may not seem huge. He wasn’t elected governor or senator, but what’s most important is it mattered a great deal to himself and to me, that’s all the mattered really.

The best part was, it meant that when given the option, people will still vote for the man who deserves it. His opponent accused him of being uneducated saying that he had not graduated from high school. I got a report that they tried to condemn him as a homosexual for not being married or having children. They tried to make it a one-issue election on a problem his opponent had created while he was superintendent, one that as mayor, you have no authority to remedy.

His opponent didn’t win one precinct. He lost by over a 2 to 1 margin, and he put the steak in the heart of a political machine that has run the city for the past 40 years. Most saw the city in two lights:

1. You are politically connected, so everything went your way.
2. You aren’t, so go look in some other place for a fair shake.

Even he himself had not been given a fair shake. When he ran for his first election he lost by a resounding amount to incumbents that were put in place by a machine. I myself would have probably given up. Public defeat is a hard horse to climb back from. Instead he decided to go down to city hall every Tuesday for every council meeting for the next two years and sit behind the biggest loud mouth there was. He knew that guy would get camera time, and by proxy, so would he. He also decided to run a one man campaign and walk through the villages of the city introducing himself and stating his positions.

He ran again the following election and when he was waiting in city hall that night, the analysts didn’t even put him in the running. Out of nine slots, he was probably selected as 11^th. When the first precinct came in, he had finished first. I wasn’t there because I don’t think I was born yet, but Jesus Christ would I have wanted to see face on the establishment that night. There’s something so righteous about silencing the unwavering cock-suredness of self-proclaimed experts. By nights end, he’d come in third.

For the past twenty years, he’d served on the council, working more than anyone else really should have expected. He was a general outlet, taking calls and complaints on potholes and corrupt union workers that had been appointed by the machine, and stayed comfortable under the blanket of union protection.

Everyone says they are going to “work for you.” They Don’t.

Once, when he got a call from a citizen who complained that he couldn’t pay respects to his dead father because the grass in the cemetery had grown too high to read the stones, he took his own lawnmower to the graveyard and mowed it himself. The whole thing. And the next day the DPW complained because “if that job were to exist, it would be a union job, and he took work away from potential union employees.” That job didn’t exist. No one was paid as “cemetery lawn care manager.” He did something for someone who needed help. He didn’t legislate the job, or “see what he could do.” He just did it. And its those things where those of us who still believe in government and the political process; democracy and the civil service turn to. It’s inspiring for me at least to know someone out there still runs for the right reasons, and that maybe politicians aren’t all bad.

At this point he has never hired anyone because he knew them, or owed them a favor, or because they were related, the only time family came into anything is when he appointed the son of a man who’d died in office, and had only but three months left.

8 months ago, the former mayor was appointed to a position in the governor’s administration. To fill his tenure as mayor they put my uncle in his place. The machine, fearing its grip loosening, they ran the only man who was arrogant enough to believe that he could beat a sitting mayor who had written 4 books on the cities history, an elected official for the past 20 years, and who had a television show on local cable about the city and its rich past.

I’m sure I’ve bored the pants off of a lot of you, but for me little left in life is inspiring. I’ve grown unimpressed with all of my passions and feel like even the city that I had tattooed on my arm is vanishing. But I found this story so unrealistic and devoid of verite, so Disney-esque that someone who really cared would get elected over a money-fueled political dinosaur that it almost moves you to tears. I’ve never been more proud of someone in my life and frankly, never more inspired. In turn, I’ve found no one more worthy of my inspiration, and certainly, as a political junkie myself, no more worthy or noble a cause.

“Sing Muse with passion of the pistol

Sing Muse of the warning by the whistle

On a night so dark in the waning

A dawn obscured by slight sky raining, oh oh” – The Decemberists.

this ones for me.

Yesterday I saw the sun shinin',
And the leaves were fallin' down softly,
My cold hands needed a warm, warm touch,
And I was thinkin' about you.

To Write...I was flowing as someone else.

I suppose I find it relatively curious, exactly what the itch is that comes before one is inundated with something that he must write. I cannot speak for the conditions it comes upon. I thought that I might have, then realized that I would be professing an empirical knowledge that is neither true nor mine to profess. Still, I feel confident in calling it an itch. And I think I've come to grips with what I am aesthetically, more over what my voice is, and why it might be ok that some influence shows.

Writing for me is very much "the voice" that is attested to in your english 101 class, or the intro to journalism book you were assigned, but less how you speak, and more of what is speaking to you. Ideas come to me from somewhere else, and they are written by someone else entirely. That is to say I'm the lucky conduit by which great things are dictated to and by which great things are taken as dictation. Somehow out there in the unfair reality, I get to put my name on the bottom of the page, for better or worse. I consider it to be much like the popular conception of an out-of-body experience, but once escaping it becomes something else entirely. My soul escapes and becomes someone else long enough to pound the keys of the type-writer in such an elegant and decadent fashion that it could be, from a far of course, confused as some hotel lobby jazz pianist mailing it in on some old turn of the century standard.

I love to write, and have come to realize it is an affinity I must bear, and enjoy despite myself even as I look at great musicians and think "oh if only I'd drawn that lot." Sometimes I have trouble finding the words and think that dissonant creak across the old violin strings say better than I can with 32 fresh drafts. Still my lot is the written word and I should be thankful that I have such gifts as many a well learned guitarist can't write lyrics worth the paper their written on. And somehow, regardless of what I think, I have a lot more options and am respected more for being a writer than I am for a musician. I can write where I feel, but for some reason there is a time and a place for music, and it is not when your neighbors call the police.

And perhaps these aesthetics are that by which I have come to define myself. Or rather find it more easy to write. Part of me hopes that I am not confusing the muse, the itch, or good writing for the relative comfort of believing I can write well. It becomes satiate when I realize that I write when I don't think like that, and don't when I do. Piss poor writing I can work with. The blank page will only serve to mock you. Stare at it for three hours....its a son of a bitch.

The Manhattan high rise with its wall to wall books, and its Stylus; the Persian rug; the glass of Gin. They are all there somehow, the dream I wish I had. But you know full well that dreams like that are to be chased. Writing is about the journey. Maybe we all engage in Gonzo journalism and Thompson just coined the term. If I ever end up there, I'll never write again. That out-of-body, something-or-other will cease to be out-of-body, cease to be something or other, and just become me. To be up front and candid, I'm not sure if I can do the work. I like it better when I can just put my name at the bottom of the page.

Sincerely,
The Brow

"...He told me 25 years ago that he would feel real trapped if he didn't know that he could commit suicide at any moment. I don't know if that is brave or stupid or what, but it was inevitable. I think that the truth of what rings through all his writing is that he meant what he said. If that is entertainment to you, well, that's OK. If you think that it enlightened you, well, that's even better. If you wonder if he's gone to Heaven or Hell — rest assured he will check out them both, find out which one Richard Milhous Nixon went to — and go there. He could never stand being bored. But there must be Football too — and Peacocks..." - Ralph Steadman

Yay Kickball

Piazzolla Goes to a French Academy

Some inspiring words...

"When I met her, I showed her my kilos of symphonies and sonatas. She started to read them and suddenly came out with a horrible sentence: “It's very well written.” And stopped, with a big period, round like a soccer ball. After a long while, she said: “Here you are like Stravinsky, like Bartók, like Ravel, but you know what happens? I can't find Piazzolla in this.” And she began to investigate my private life: what I did, what I did and did not play, if I was single, married, or living with someone, she was like an FBI agent! And I was very ashamed to tell her that I was a tango musician. Finally I said, “I play in a night club.” I didn't want to say cabaret. And she answered, “Night club, mais oui, but that is a cabaret, isn't it?” “Yes,” I answered, and thought, “I'll hit this woman in the head with a radio....” It wasn't easy to lie to her. She kept asking: “You say that you are not pianist. What instrument do you play, then?” And I didn't want to tell her that I was a bandoneon player, because I thought, “Then she will throw me from the fourth floor.” Finally, I confessed and she asked me to play some bars of a tango of my own. She suddenly opened her eyes, took my hand and told me: “You idiot, that's Piazzolla!” And I took all the music I composed, ten years of my life, and sent it to hell in two seconds."

I love it.

Kinda cool

To the blogs or whomever

I don't know who left that comment in the last blog, but thanks. Sometimes its good to be reminded that you're appreciated. I put much more stock in comments than I should, but when I get none I feel like I'm writing for no one at all. Its depressing.

I've been too busy, and I've been getting old. Which I like. I don't take heartbreak as badly as I used to, I don't get as amped up for meeting new women like I used to. What I think I'm coming to grips with is the circular nature of life. I once had that very Christian ideology that life was linear and that we're marching toward some ideal of progression. As you can imagine, missteps on that path might give one reason for seizing, overheating stress.

Through subconscious osmosis I've come to grips with certain things: debt is irrelevant and obligatory, and fear of it actually is going to screw you much more.

I once avoided credit cards because of all that folksy wisdom that tells you if you misstep once you're going to be living in section 8 housing with a dead end job and settling for one-night stands with bar flies. Well it won't, and realizing that trying to limit yourself to the point of starvation is gross. I think the problem is I hang around with too many overprotected suburban white women whose fathers mandated that they save exponential amounts of money for that Blizzard of '76-like economic hardship that would strike suddenly, out of the blue, and would surely land you in the shackles of three-jobdom for the rest of your young adult life, releasing you on bail and good behaviour just as you escaped your youthful beautiful years.

It won't. It doesn't. I've stood on the debt, and in fact am standing on the debt of exponential debt, and the only real discomfort is pressing the quiet option on my phone when an unknown number calls me. Bad credit? Well I guess that means you won't let me get into further debt.

Once there was a time where i felt that I was under, I was the victim in the folksy story of bad credit card management and I thought, "why go on with life if thats my fate? if this is all that I have to look forward to?" I spoke to some people and asked what they thought. I asked on-line where if I'd decided to do something rash they'd have no way of finding me, or stopping me. They told me stories I was baffled by...2 filings of bankruptcy, loss of a house. And still these people were on their feet, functioning like anyone else who appeared to be CPA of their own bank account. I'd felt better after that conversation. They didn't know me, and they didn't know what I was thinking, so in a candid and honest response they told me "doesn't matter, money isn't anything to be concerned about."


I've going to quote freddy mercury here, as what will appear to be a non-sequiter but will later have meaning and a germane orientation to this rant. "I've fallen in love, I've fallen in love for the first time and this time I know its for real."

its a contradicting idea to anyone who hasn't felt that emotion. What do you mean "this time" if its the "first time"? Well its the way it goes. And I remember when it happened to me. And the most depressing thing about it, was that she was one of these people who believed the stories. She was governed by fear, marching in a linear fashion and reasoned, through the facts of scaremongering, that things would not work. I was most devastated not because of the loss of love but because I realized that she was trapped beyond my help. That the person I had for once actually felt genuine affection for was not going to make it. Not today anyway. You can't teach people freedom, they have to find it. And until you do you have this untrue understanding of what freedom is. Its just like love. And you can't teach that to anyone either, regardless of how we try.


I read a book by mark stein called "america alone" and in it he accuses the "parent states" of europe of leading everyone around on a leash of government regulation. He claims that in this system, no one is forced to grow up and be an adult because the government acts as a constant parent. I've been trying to wrap my head around this argument because there was some glaring flaw in there that I could feel but I couldn't name. A few days ago I feel as if I've figured it out. The so called parent states of europe are socialist, and for those less politically inclined, that means you get the shit taxed out of you but everything is pretty much taken care of. Any time you hear of places with socialized medicine where in no one pays to go to the hospital, thats socialism. Its apparently paternalistic because the government makes sure everything is set for you "like mommy and daddy."

But its not.See the problem with steins argument is that he associates personal responsibility with adulthood. But everyone at the age of 5 on up is personally responsible for things. Thats well before adulthood. In fact because are more inclined to give adults a break on the assumption that they've already learned there lesson.

Moreover, the saying "its better to give than receive"...kids don't get that. Its an adult thing. And more to the point, so is seeing things in a longview, like the good of society. The ideology that "i'm ok so who cares what you do" is like a child with the joystick. I'm playing so every things fine. The problems here are multifaceted and in multitude. That is to say, societies that aren't upheld are generally not worth living in. You can be a billionaire. it still sucks to live in Sudan. Or Algeria. Or Mississippi.

I didn't mean for it to tie together under this maxim but fear is leading society into godless ruin. And I'm not suggesting that people who don't use credit cards and save their money are turning America into the third world, I am saying that the fear of a lack of liberation seems to be shackling us tighter to the wall in Socrates's cave, and those who are saving and worrying for "someday" might do well to worry more about what happens when "someday" never comes.
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in a completely unrelated note, I rejoined the myspace-a-verse but if people are reading here I don't think i'll follow through. Still if you'd like to see me in all my sexy clean shaven glory give me a shot, the tail address is justanotherraindog. Hoepfully I'll see you there, or here or whever. And to whoever left that message, thanks again. It means a lot to a deadbeat writer that people still care.