And Now Something About Myself...

I have avoided inserting much of myself into the writings on The Ozone Shack recently. That's how it should be. That's how all blogs should be, but it is a hallmark of the era we live in that nothing actually happens to you until you post something about it on the internet. I'm going to post something I allegedly wrote over a year ago when my friend essentially asked "what comes next after running?" I wrote this:

Nothing has to "come next" after running. If you want to do something competitive - swimming or cycling or triathlons or biathlons or telethons or midget tossing - you can go at it with all due vigor to try and replace it. If you want to stay fit you can lift or climb or box or even just carry a 35 pound cinder block with you at all times, something that would give you more functional strength than most weight room routines. There are a million things you can do with your life, from building bridges that cure cancer to copious drug use. What's "next" is you take what you've learned from running - dedication, pain tolerance, attention to perfection, patience, perseverance, delaying gratification, focus, tawny hamstrings, etc. - and apply it to whatever else God has in store for you. You don't get a refund when you're done, you cash out all the experience points you've been logging in the bank this whole time. Because nothing is wasted time; everything you do prepares you for the next thing you do. You won't find the next activity to replace it because nothing else will replace it. A lot of things are coming next, and I would tell you to get ready, but you already are.

 But still, I can't help but wonder if all I did was waste the meaningful third of the first 21 years of my life.

The Ozone Album Book Club

There's a new thing we're doing that I've wanted to get started for a while but never got around to: The Ozone Album Book Club. There are no books involved. But there are albums involved. One every week. It will be announced every Tuesday on our facebook page, or by following us on twitter.

There isn't a particular methodology used to select them, they're just albums that I think merit appreciation. We're getting the ball rolling with Pearl Jam's Yield. You and the rest of Ozone Nation can listen to it on Grooveshark here.

Hello Ozone Nation

I am here. I am still alive. I have things on my mind, most of which are centered around how I cannot write and why being tired makes me nauseated. Maybe this has something to do with gluten, or lack thereof, which I am cutting from my diet for three to four weeks to see if I am allergic to gluten. Gluten-free bread is scary. It sizzles for some reason when you pull it out of the toaster, and were Winston Churchill exposed to it, he probably would have had something colorful to say. But he was not. World War II was won with gluten in the belly of every soldier, except the ones in the Bataan Death March.

Please write your congressman or congresswoman or congressrobot about this situation. I need federal funding to beat my writer's block. Also ask them to send me clubs designed to beat back demons and a pair of hoverboots. And French fries. I like French fries, and so do you.

An Edible/Audible Tribute to Eric Clapton

Today is Eric Clapton's birthday, and since he's been in enough bands to get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame thrice, he merit's his own installment of Edible/Audible, the game for foodies and music lovers with bizarre forms of synesthesia. And to tie it together, they all need a common ingredient. I have decided that by virtue of its versatility, the peanut will be Eric Clapton. Let's see where this one goes.

The Yardbirds - Cracker Jack
Not just about the peanuts, also the big break for caramelized things. First packaged snack. Crispy and crunchy sound, now has a very old-school feel about it.

Cream - Curry with Peanut Sauce
If this is made right, the sheer volume of capsaicin will have your senses and your GI tract tripping for hours.

Blind Faith - Payday Bars
An underrated candy that should get more credit for what it is - a hard rocking salty blues band with a caramel center.

Derek & the Dominos - Peanut Butter, Banana, and Bacon Sandwich
Comfort food made up of an all-star lineup for when the love of your life loves the one person in the world who's cooler than you. Something we can all relate to. Also, the most likely food to have parts of it, namely the cholesterol-loaded piano coda, written by a schizophrenic.

Solo Career - Spoonful of Peanut Butter
Stays in your mouth for five minutes when you only really want it to last for about three.

My Springsteen Moment (The Tacoma Aroma)

You don't have to go to Jersey to get a quintessentially Springsteen moment. You can apparently find it in Tacoma, at Point Defiance State Park.

I think I've made my peace with Springsteen and all associated fandom. The factoid about music history that generally gets tossed around when discussing Springsteen is that by writing lyrics that people could relate to he saved rock from extravagant songwriting and lyrics about wizards and dragons. There is a problem with this. I don't relate to people, and sometimes, I don't even like people. And I like fifteen minute suites primarily in 7/8 about wizards with screaming guitar riffs, oftentimes way more than I like hearing about actual people and their actual lives.

But, in my education that is preparing me for a long and distinguished career in the unemployment line (subject matter that was definitely covered by Styx and not necessarily Springsteen, even though the former is seen as indulgent pretentious and the other is seen as real and authentic music for unemployed people) I just finished taking a class called "The Music of Literature and the Literature of Music," where we spent an excessive amount of time writing poems about the death of John Bonham. The consensus, of course was: "it made us all very sad." And although, like any discussion about music with people who have never been good at making music usually goes, we focused mostly on what the music sounds like instead of how it sounds - in spite of this - I was able to get past the philistine opinions of Mainstream (Mainstreet?) America and realize that maybe, at some level, he's a legitimate musician who made some pretty good music, separate from whatever cultural, anti-intellectual trends he might represent. (Because of course, if I simply discredited his music for this reason, for what it represents, I would be going against my one rule of rock appreciation.) And if the Gaslight Anthem likes him, he can't really be bad at all.

But I made my peace not in Jersey but in Tacoma. Tacoma is Oakland of Seattle, the retarded stepsister of a cosmopolitan city, filled with cranes, overshadowed by its more glamorous neighbor. I've been here almost a week, and I'm starting to wonder if it's ever sunny for more than a few hours. Point Defiance State Park is located at the north end, and in addition to a scenic drive where you can look out at the sound, there is a depressing gravel parking lot next to some batting cages and a go-kart track. They also have a cheaply constructed nine hole miniature golf course, obviously made in the proprietor's garage. For two bucks you get to play the nine holes twice, and my friends and I decided we couldn't refuse a deal like that. So we played, with the evening overcast sky slowly darkening and a couple large Filipino families using the batting cages. And over a pair of tinny speakers they were blasting a local classic rock station, and what else comes on but Born to Run. I don't really like the song. His voice sounds like the dick of a fifty something who has taken just enough Viagra to get it at half-mast, and the piano sounds schmaltzier than Billy Joel's overplayed greatest hit named after the same instrument. But as I looked out at the empty gravel parking lot and this little patch of land that passed for entertainment, I realized this is exactly what it felt like to be Bruce Springsteen.

If only I really had been born to run, maybe I wouldn't be in this mess. But more on that later.

Ten Albums Living in Another Album's Shadow

Because I like to listify things to constantly prove that I know -ish about music, here are ten albums that had to play second fiddle to something else. One can only speculate how things would have been different...

1) Paul Simon – Rhythm of the Saints
Unfortunately had to come right after Graceland, using Brazilian musicians instead of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. It might not have the hooks of Graceland, but he's had more time to perfect his songwriting craft.

2) Michael Jackson – Off the Wall
This album had the unfortunate fate of being just another album by the artist who had the best selling album of all time. Tough break.

3) The Beatles – Beatles for Sale
This might not count, since it wasn’t overshadowed by one album, but gets lost in the shuffle caused by the discrepancy between US and UK discographies.

4) Bob Marley – Rastaman Vibration
The only track that got remembered off this followup to Natty Dread was Night Shift, which doesn’t get as much radio play as the rest of Marley’s singles catalog.

5) Pearl Jam – Ten
Nevermind got all the attention, but the songwriting and guitar work on Ten proves that Eddy Vedder and Company were the real Johann Seattle Bach.

6) Sonny Rollins – Saxophone Colossus
For the album that essentially introduced calypso music to the North American mainland, this album doesn’t get nearly as many mentions as 1955′s Tenor Madness. Contains one of the greatest improvised solos in terms of motific development.

7) The Animals – The Animals
Were it not for all the buzz surrounding “Meet the Beatles,” these guys would have been leading the charge of the British Invasion.

8) Bad Religion - The Empire Strikes First
This got eclipsed by its retarded cousin, American Idiot, which came out the same year and stole all the attention. This album, however, does a better job of protesting the Bush Regime protocol, and, as always, with Bad Religion, does it in as high-brow a manner for punk rock.

9) Every album released in 1983
More casualties of Thriller Includes Synchronicity by the Police, U2′s War, and ZZ Top’s Eliminator. For some reason, it's just enough for people to remember that this was the year of Thriller.

10) Steely Dan – The Royal Scam
Came right before double platinum Aja and critics darling Gaucho. Now remembered as having a song that was sampled in a Kanye B-Side.

The Neon Mango

Been churning out a few of these in the last two weeks. Not sure if this will get turned into anything longer but I think it can be enjoyed for what it is.

                There are three things she told me to never do. Otherwise Squak – she didn’t seem to mind that I called her that even though she insisted the rest of the crew called her Captain Lestrade – let me do what I wanted on her ship, the Neon Mango, although most of the time I was content to sit in my tube and read. My quarters were separate from the rest of the crew’s, right in the nose. Having the feeling of being in the front of the ship was worth the extra few rems per month my body absorbed. Besides, she said, I could afford to absorb more anyway. I never talked to anyone else except Squak and sometimes her life support technician, who seemed as aloof and absorbed in his work as I was.

                Of her three rules for me, the first was to never make eye contact with the navigation octopus. Apparently this made it aware of the location of its fleshy body. It needed to constantly believe, spatially anyway, that its body was the ship. She could have used an AI but she insisted that an octopus was better, something about it having millions of years to perfect its spatial awareness in three dimensions whereas we only had about a hundred years of making machines that could do this. She called him Gumby. Whenever I would float by his tank I always wondered what would happen if I did, just to mess with things. I don’t know how I would feel if I thought my body was the Neon Mango. But then again, had I been bred to be a navigation octopus, I probably wouldn’t care.

                The second was to never talk to the crew about the circumstances of my discovery. It wasn’t much of a problem since I didn’t talk to the crew ever. The extent of our interactions was awkward waves as we floated past each other in the corridors and even more awkward silences in the gravity spinner. We had to go in there once a week, even me, to keep our bone density from degrading. And although I was allowed to make eye contact with them, they usually didn’t like to hold it for long. That’s how I passed the time in the spinner. Keeping how I ended up here and why Squak kept me around a secret made me more intimidating, or at least more mysterious. All the rest of the crew knew was that they were about to be boarded by a Combine cruiser when it spontaneously exploded, and there I was, in the middle, my spacesuit unscathed, and calmly asking if I could come aboard.

                And the third and most important thing was to never, as long as I was on her ship, was to never make contact with my people. “There are lots of people, bad people, on Earth,” she would tell me, “that will get involved.” As if I didn’t know this for myself. As if that wasn’t why we had left in the first place, become the first people to leave the solar system.

                “Look Squak,” I would tell her, every time, “I’m here, and they’ve detonated a couple thousand nuclear warheads just to propel their ship going away from here a little faster.” I never made eye contact. I couldn’t. Physically, it was something I couldn’t do and I could tell it unnerved her. “I have no intention of contacting anyone. I like it here.” And I did. I liked my tube and the pudding canisters in the commissary. I liked having the run of the ship, I liked scavenging asteroids, I liked sabotaging the Combine’s mining equipment. I liked the big explosions.

                But one Ionian night I was alone on the bridge by myself. Squak was giving herself a neural scrub and I had relieved the co-pilot of duty, citing some nonexistent authority bestowed by Squak. I was drifting off myself when I heard a faint crackle, coming in on a tightbeamed channel.

                “Yacto… Yacto… Are you there Yacto… This is the Four Winds Bar…. Are you there Yacto…”

                

The Enlightenment

                Crazy, Skinny Joe Barker turned to the stockade, hurling a sack in which rotten tomatoes and feces were stuffed. A woman covered her son’s eyes and hurried him away while the constable who had just locked Johnny McStabkins the Serial Stabber in the stocks tackled Skinny Joe Barker on the cobblestone.

                “Is this really necessary?” asked Skinny Joe Barker as the constable picked him up by the back of his coat and dangled him by it.

                “I could ask the same of you,” said the constable.

                “But if he is, according to the proclamation, ‘to be drawn and quartered on the morrow as the sun strikes the stained glass image of St. Beula the Awkward-and-Unfortunately-Pimpled- Yet-Still-Blessed-by-the-Savior on the parish church,’ what harm is a fetid sack of human and natural waste?”

                “Because,” said the constable in a gruff, low tone, “the bureaucracy, operating under the rules set forth in the township’s charter, dictates that his sentence must proceed without incident, and you, Skinny Joe Barker, as always, have caused an incident.”

                Considering the township of Featherbloomers had only a population of five hundred souls, it was entirely preposterous that its bureaucracy employed three hundred individuals, broken into horribly inefficient subcommittees such as the hay bale reclamation and redistribution committee and the shaming of the unwed maiden committee. Employing nearly a third of the employees was the Shaming in the Name of the Virgin Mary committee, which decided on things it didn’t like, and then distributed pamphlets saying that every time you did this thing, the Virgin Mary would weep tears of blood. But the bureaucracy had also established a complicated system of precedents dealing with criminals, including cases like Johnny McStabkins the Serial Stabber, where traditional public shaming rituals were eschewed in favor of cold, calculated, procedural criminal prosecution. As per stipulation on the serial stabbing subcommittee, Johnny McStabkins the Serial Stabber could not be publicly shamed in any way by anyone but a law enforcement official until he was to have his limbs tied to four horses facing in the four cardinal directions who would then simultaneously gallop away, ripping his limbs off and leaving him to experience a painful last few moments in his mortal vessel while naked and limbless in the town square among the jeering and boos of the townsfolk.

                “This is your third citation this month, Skinny Joe Barker,” said the constable. “I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to tar and feather you this time, there’s just no way around it.”

                “Aw come on man,” said Skinny Joe Barker, “you used to be cool.”

                “The subcommittee on constable coolness,” he said, “has unfortunately decided that I can no longer act in any manner that could be interpreted as ‘cool’ by repeat offenders such as yourself. Now it’s time to pay your debt to our primitive and morally warped society.” Fortunately for Skinny Joe Barker, the law would protect him from being pelted with anything, rotting tomatoes and feces included, as he was to be forced out of town with a public shaming which would cause permanent disfigurement as a result.

                Johnny McStabkins snarled at Skinny Joe Barker through the stocks. Half his teeth were missing, and the ones that were still in had been filed down to sharp points. His eyes were yellow and the left one bulged out every time he opened his mouth. His breath smelled like onions stewed in tar.

                “I’ll get out of this one,” said Skinny Joe Barker.

                “Why do you figure that?” asked the constable.

                “The enlightenment. It’s right around the corner. With any luck it will be here next Tuesday, long before the subcommittee on tarring can hear my case and pass it on to the subcommittee for feathering, and by the time they get around to forming a joint subcommittee to evaluate the use of tar and feathers in conjunctions, there will be a new world order, based on reason.”

                “Reason is the devil’s work. There’s no reason here. Only guilt disguised as filial piety, filial piety disguised as guilt, and an established set of precedents to protect us from the demons that dwell within us.”

                “Don’t you feel that, don’t you feel that change in the wind?”

                The constable reached for his shaming stick in his belt, but as he did, he heard, in the distance, the sound of great orchestras in halls yet to be built and laughter in cafes along streets yet to be paved. He released his grip on the shame stick, slowly. “Come on,” he said to Skinny Joe Barker. “Let’s take you down to the constabulary. I’ll even let you make a phone call.”

                “What’s a phone call?”

                “I don’t really know yet, but I'll wager it's something wonderful.”

Better posts are coming, I swear.