Rants, ramblings, ravings and other ammunition used to wage the only war worth fighting; the war against the imagination. Photo (top) Robert Dean Nunez and Kalinda Gray from the "Don Juan Project," STAGES Theatre, 2006
From what I understand, to ensure that a blog fulfills all the essential requirements of a blog (fame, fortune, low carbs) frequent posts are necessary.
But what if you have nothing interesting to say? And what if the niche where your blog fits is the rather general category of non-niche?
This is an interwebz existential crisis.
I can’t go on. I must go on.
That is a Samuel Beckett pull
I just displayed my intelligence
Now I shall really launch this party with some incredible multi-mediaing
Yes, the rumors are true. It is my birthday today. But nip those perfunctory good wishes in the bud; this is not a day of celebration but one of lamentation. For this day, the day I turn an age I cannot bring myself to countenance let alone state, is a milestone that overshadows all others; and in that shadow lies the cruelest of indignities.
This is the day when the discounts become automatic, the day I officially join, and am constantly reminded of it, Them. And while surely the alternative leaves much to be desired, waking up and realizing you’re a member of the living built-in discount class is a hard row to hoe.
Although, I must admit, it does have its perks. I’m already six bucks ahead of the game, and it’s only 10 am., and I haven’t started puking yet.
But the instant the clock struck midnight, I could feel lured by its wicked seductions. Cheaper cell phone plans and airline tickets. Wednesday’s at Kohls, Tuesday’s at Ross.
But there is a price for entry into the member’s only portion of the Denny’s and IHop menu, this ultimate in backhanded compliments bestowed for doing nothing more than surviving to an age that eluded so many who deserved so much more. John Lennon. Bruce Lee. John Coltrane. Peaches Geldof (seriously, she was eighth on the fucking list!).
That toll is levied not only in aches and pains and fingers up your asshole that do not require a reach-around and the growing befuddlement that comes when one is saddled with a Tic Tac template in a Tik Tok world. But I cannot tell you what that price is; it is something that each of us must learn on our own, and learn it you shall if you reach this day, and does anyone know what time Sizzler opens?
To escape this unbearable plight, I am heading to the Channel Islands for a couple of days today. I hear it’s beautiful. I don’t care. I get four bucks off the ticket each way. But even with my improved economic position, I may hurl myself into the Pacific Ocean on the crossing; not out of depression or an inflated sense of my own mortality. Today is a day that ends in Y, and Those are constants. No, it is because I have a serious problem with the word ferry being applied to any moving conveyance that I am upon, and the strain may be too much.
So, as one is wont to do when faced with the prospect of ending it all, thoughts turn to legacy. What do I want to be remembered for? Nothing, really. What fucking good would it do me?
So instead, I will leave the two pieces of genuine wisdom that I have acquired in this quite useless and wasted string of years.
Pearl of Wisdom One
This is something that I already knew for the seed was planted by my dad who, on his days off when puttering in the garage, preferred to relieve himself in the nearest trash can rather than walk the 10 steps to the bathroom. While my mother found this horrifying, I sensed there was more at work. And that sense became manifest during the pandemic when, like so many, I embarked on a series of home improvement projects. Mine weren’t particularly impressive. They included nothing but basic shelving, brackets, dry wall screws, screwdrivers, and those motherfucking things that you are supposed to put in the wall before the screws. I think they’re called anchors?
anchors to the left; on the right my dad, John Gordon Beers, on patrol at a Missouri WalMart, circa 2012
Those who know me can readily attest to both my patience and carpentry skills. But without fail, at some point, usually around the three-hour mark of each project, covered in dust and with bleeding fingertips I hit a metaphorical wall while dealing with a quite real wall and suddenly found myself no longer holding a screwdriver, but a hammer. And even though the rational part of my mind knew that this was not the most prudent course of action, I had hit my Fuck It moment, and I would begin began whaling at that screw with that hammer like a 21st Century John Henry, hellbent on proving that nothing built by the hands of man was better at getting a job done than those hands, so committed he was willing to die of a burst heart with a hammer in those hands to prove the point.
And those screws did get hammered into those anchors, and that bookshelf did get completed and yes there very well could be consequences ranging anywhere from structural integrity to violating the willful destruction of property clause in the rental lease to the deep, intractable shame at not being able to complete what is, let’s face it, a pretty simple fucking task.
But none of that mattered. For with every fifth strike of that hammer ( when I actually hit that goddamn screw on the head), I was liberated; I had cast aside all social decorum, civilized constraints, all careful readings of instructions and basic common sense. I had hurled my Fuck It into the void of the universe and instead of the customary unrelenting silence, what came back was a resounding echo as life affirming as the sound of the pop when cracking a tall boy Modelo.
And you too can hear that echo whenever you are faced with whatever crisis may come your way. Keep slaving at screwing those goddamn screws into those goddamn anchors, or grab the hammer? Wait for Triple A to unlock your car or smash the window? Press send on that text or not?
The predicament is universal; the choice is yours and yours alone. But what I wish to impart to you is to consider seizing that day and owning that moment.
Fuck it. Go ahead and piss in that trash can.
Pearl of Wisdom Two
This might be the building. Photo willfully stolen from the Guardian website, taken by David Miscavige.
An anecdote.
Years ago, I was considering moving to a neighborhood in Hollywood, into an apartment complex across the street from one of the buildings owned by the Church of Scientology. When giving me the lay of the land, the apartment supervisor, or whatever, mentioned that there was a small theater inside the building that occasionally hosted theater productions. At the time I labored under the delusion that I was a playwright, and my curiosity was piqued.
“So they let outside people do shows there?.”
“Yep.”
“But do they have any guidelines around material. Anything off limits?”
“I don’t think so. As long as it’s not two dogs fucking on stage, I guess.”
Two. Dogs. Fucking. On. Stage.
Oh, this scrawny chain-smoking cat continually wincing at the harsh slare of the 11 a.m. sun didn’t look it, but he might as well been the Buddha contemplating his navel beneath his bodhi tree, or Jesus pausing for a few remarks in between the loaves of bread and the fishes. Never have I heard wisdom so succinctly and yet so powerfully, something that cut through all the rhetorical bullshit and moral relavitism and subjective perspective of the “We make our own reality” mantra that justifies every cock-eyed opinion and support for the most groundless beliefs.
No, there are limits, lines in the sand that demarcate what lies beyond the Pale. Places we do not have to go, things we do not have to see, words we do not have to hear. That doesn’t mean censoring or canceling; it means another Fuck It moment, one in which you realize that someone has the right to express themselves however the want, but you also have the right to not rationalize it or to attempt to see a situation through their eyes or unique perspective. One must be careful to guard against overt or implicit bias and to heed the warning against plucking one’s eye out if it is offended; but even with that said you still have the power to say Fuck This and move on.
So if you ever are in a situation that looks, smells, sounds or feels like two dogs fucking, listen to your gut and walk away.
And then go find the nearest trashcan and take a piss in it. And if someone sees two dogs fucking in your action, simply tell them to go grab a hammer and start pounding something, as long as it’s not your pecker.
Now where’s that Sizzler?
Talk about a bummer of a cutline: A sign at a Sizzler restaurant shows support for the victims of the Umpqua Community College shooting in Roseburg, Oregon, on October 3, 2015. Ten people were confirmed dead after a lone gunman, who used protective clothing and multipleweapons, shot and killed students on the Umpqua Community College campus yesterday. AFP PHOTO/JOSH EDELSON (Photo credit should read Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)
Second Grade. Pedley, California. 1970s. Unincorporated part of Riverside County straddling the Santa Ana Riverbed. No Black kids in my school. Not until the fifth grade when Ryan Knight showed up and my friend Curt called him the N-bomb and Ryan posted up and beat the living shit out of him. Years later, Ryan was senior class president of my high school, shattered every CIF record for a running back and got a full ride at USC (he never cracked the pros but his younger brother Sammy certainly did). Don’t know what happened to Curt.
Don’t know how old this photo of Pedley is (or where I stole it from) but if it’s current, I have no doubt it looks no different than when I was running through verdant fields like this
But I had one Black teacher: Mrs. White. Even in second grade, I noticed the irony. Anyway, one day I got in trouble for something or other (probably smoking a joint; no second grade, must have been blow) and had to stand in the back of the class, eyes facing the wall.
There were a couple of books on a shelf and one, in particular, caught my eye: Famous Negroes in American History, or something like that. After class, I asked Mrs. White if I could borrow it. Inside there were small chapters on famous Black Americans. Not exactly the edgiest; there was Booker T. Washington, but no W.E.B. Dubois; George Washington Carver but no Marcus Garvey. Harriet Tubman (basically a Black Clara Barton not a bad-ass liberator) but no Ida Wells. Frederick Douglass and MLK (both Bad Asses) but no Paul Robeson, Bayard Rustin, Ali or Stokely Carmichael. But they were not names I had heard of and, yes, I was only in second grade but I was already reading anything I could get my hands on and history was my favorite subject. But while I knew all the brave white heroes like John Smith, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, these were people who were part of a story that I had no clue existed.
It was the first time that I sensed there were things that were not in my school books.
This may have been the book. It’s ‘what came up when I Googled “Famous American Negoes 1970 book”
A couple of years later, my mom is driving and we’re on our way to Long Beach to visit my grandma. Grandma Elma Bailey was part of the large Midwestern contingent lured from the frostbitten breadbasket of America by the nascent oil industry, sun and lack of tornadoes, irony being that the year my mother, Donna, was born in Lakewood, a 6.4 earthquake flattened 70 out of 120 school buildings and killed 120 people.
Though informally known as Iowa-by-the-Sea in those days, Grandma was actually from Maumee, Ohio, a small town outside Toledo (I know it’s not exactly the Midwest, but who’s got time to type East North Central region of the Midwest?). It was farm country but other than fixing up some killer chicken and dumplings, grandma never felt country to me. She rolled her own cigarettes, liked her booze, and never said the N-bomb– unless there was a goddamn in front of it, and that was often usually something like:
“Goddamn n—–s always breaking in my goddamn house.”
This was a constant refrain, and Grandma lived on Easy Street in Long Beach, just west of the Los Angeles River in the late 1970s, and from near as I could tell, she was the only white person in that zip code. So hearing that her neighbors were always breaking into her house and stealing stuff–even though I was always struck by how her refrigerator and TV always looked the same and her home never seemed to be ravaged or pillaged–I was terrified. Would not step out of that house even though, looking back, if it was always being broken into you’d think it’d be the last place I wanted to be. But I guess i wasn’t too logical back then.
Anyway, on that fateful Sunday, while maneuvering whatever piece of shit car we had at the time from the 91 west to the 605 south, my mom started freaking out. The accelerator had broken and was flat against the floorboard. She’s yelling and screaming and pointing and I don’t know what the fuck is going on but finally I realize she wants me to pry it up with my fingers but anyone who knows me as a somewhat grown man knows that I am the last person you ever want in a situation like that, and I was probably worse as an 8-year-old. But somehow, through constant trial and error, I managed to finesse it just enough that we herked and jerked off the freeway and made it to grandma’s house.
Now, you can’t fix a car from inside a house and apparently Triple A didn t exist at the time so there the three of us stood by a car with an open hood, me and two old ladies (my mom was only about 40 at the time; ancient to an 8-year-old), with no clue how to fix a motor vehicle, and all I’m hoping is that whoever robs my grandma’s house is taking advantage of us being outside so they won’t be in there when we finally go back in.
And then a black man, kind of small, kind of old, walks up. I don’t remember him saying anything, nor my mom or grandma, but my silent screams of panic may have washed out any external stimuli. But he poked around a little bit under the hood and then left. He wasn’t carrying a carburetor or anything (not that I would have recognized a carburetor from a spare tire) so I figured that it wasn’t all so bad. But then he was right back. Holding a rubber band. He then poked around some more under the hood, stuck his head out and must have said something like, “that ought to get back you home at any rate,” but seriously I was so fascinated by what the fuck he did with that the rubber band he could have whistled Beethoven’s Fifth and I wouldn’t have heard it
And that was that. I think my mom thanked him and he walked away. Not much more was said about it the rest of the day, at least not that I remember. And we did get home and the car was eventually fixed. But I do know that on that particular Sunday on Easy Street,I didn’t hear my grandma say goddamn nothing once.
That was the first time I realized that maybe grown-ups didn’t always know what was up.
Neither of those two isolated incidents made me any more tolerant, empathetic or above laughing at or telling more than my fair share of racial jokes. And I would never claim that they gave me any wisdom or insight into what it is like to be Black in America; hell, if anything they taught me more about white people, especially the second.
But I do think the first put me a little bit ahead of the curve from some white people, not in terms of understanding the Black experience in this country but at least understanding there is, and has been, an experience different from that of white America in so many ways. And it’s mostly lip service on my part, as any perspective of that experience has not come from my living it, nor from any long conversations on the topic with any Black people, or other people of color. Like most everything in my life it’s come through reading. Because that little whitewashed sanitized book in Mrs. White’s second-grade classroom was the first chapter in a multi-volume set that would eventually include James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates and other writers of color, predominately Black, who communicate their stories and share their lived experiences in ways that, for me at any rate, are more powerful and impactful than any videos, rallies and protests–not that any of those lack power.
But that’s just me. And maybe that’s taking the easy route; unless you publicly announce you stand in solidarity with something, you are just all talk. But I honestly think that my words, like all of our words, are infused and shaped by those words and ideas and cries and curses that have sought us out and stick to our souls and lodge in our heart and serve as some kind of moral foundation during times when every house seems built on sand.
Reading hasn’t made me any more black, rainbow or any other color; but I’m proud to say it’s made me a little less white.
But I still wish I knew what the fuck that Black dude did with that rubber band.
But that was a long time ago and he’s so much younger than that now.
But thanks to the kindly auspices of the OC Theatre Guild, that gaping hole in the heart of Orange County theater since the brutally fucked closing of OC Weekly the day before Thanksgiving, if not filled, at least has a tiny heartbeat left.
He’s writing previews for that organization, and here is the first one, and here is the second one, and here is the third one. Yes, Virginia, they pay–although he won’t be retiring any time soon–then again, what critic in the shit-for-brains era of social media when anyone with one decent working index finger can reach a million other braindead dolts with their opining, can hope for that? (Actually, that one’s pretty good; I won’t crucify your eyes by linking to a garbage site). No, that one’s pretty good as well. Just take my word for it, there is a whole lot of nothing out there. And while that may or may not be good for theater, it fucking sucks for those of us who could bank on a few extra dollars a month.
Yes, these previews are not filled with his genteel rancor or predilection for toilet humor and gratuitous blasphemy, but to label him a sell-out just shows how jealous you are. Besides, where else are you going to read brilliance such as this, in his review of “The Great Gatsby?”
“For those who had the leisure time and income to enjoy it, the window between the end of World War I and the Great Depression was America’s longest, largest and most extravagant party. The great consumer Republic had been born; advertising and the automobile were everywhere; women finally gained the right to vote, and with it came a loosening of constraining fashion and opening up of sexual liberty; prohibition made alcohol illegal – and all the more exciting to drink; technology promised nothing but convenience; the middle class was growing right along with a booming stock market fueled by wild-eyed speculation; and even if America was still a painfully segregated country in the midst of enacting its most draconian immigration laws, the jazz that streamed out of the clubs of Harlem became the soundtrack of an urbanized America that seemed younger and more vigorous than ever.
Fitzgerald captured much of that, but he also anticipated the devastating hangover that would clobber the country, and world, at decade’s end. Alongside the free-wheeling, libertine lifestyle and ritzy high living of its main characters, there is also poverty, criminality, deceit and despair and a sense, as Newell puts it, of “somehow capturing the innocence of an era that was at the same time losing it.”
FERMENTED BEERS 