Reckoning/Reveling – Ani Difranco

The writing bug first bit me in 11^th grade.  I was taking a Journalism class, and for our final exam my teacher gave me two options: interview the gym teacher about the track-and-field team, or write a short story.  I had no idea what went into writing a short story, but interviewing the gym teacher about the track-and-field team sounded about as enticing as getting kicked in the nuts by every member of the track-and-field team.  So I picked the story.  Besides, when she said short story I heard only short.  How hard could it be?  For two nights after school I sat on the end of my bed, my word processor on a TV stand in front of me, Sportscenter on the television behind it, and I wrote.  The story was about a perfect nuclear family with a nuclear bomb for a father.  There was nothing memorable about the plot, and the characters were all cookie cutter, but writing it was exciting, getting in the heads of people that I’d created.  The last day, when the teacher handed the story back, on the back page she wrote, “You show a lot of promise.  You should take creative writing!”  So I did.  When you’re fifteen it doesn’t take much to convince you to do anything; someone says, “You should eat seventeen rolls of Bubble Tape at the same time” or “You should take creative writing” and it sounds like the best idea ever.

In creative writing, we focused mainly on poetry.  I didn’t care much for reading poetry, and until my teacher explained that music—at least good music; he was the one who introduced me to Bob Dylan—was poetry, I didn’t care much for listening to it either.  But poetry seemed easy enough to write.  It was short—again, I was the type of person that could get down with short—and a lot of the time it rhymed.  Girls, the few that I shared what I wrote with, seemed to like my poetry, what I had to say.  At that age that was the only validation I needed; if something I wrote could get me closer to someone I wanted to get close to, that’s a hormonal trifecta; I was off to the races.

I wrote bad poetry for a solid six or seven years before the burden of writing bad poetry for six or seven years finally wore on my psyche; I was both uninspired and unconvinced in my ability.  Though I declared my major as English-Writing when I moved away to college, it was more me being hopeful that I’d get back to the place where writing was exciting than it was me being realistic; how do you justify your major area of study being something that you don’t do anymore?  I don’t know; I didn’t have the answer, but I did it anyway.  My first semester, I took Creative Writing college style, and don’t you know it, the main focus was poetry.  Right before class began one day I started and finished my assignment.  It was supposed to be a love poem—aren’t they all?—and I remember throwing in some line about Milton and Paradise Lost; “Hey Milton, Paradise found me.”  When I read the poem aloud that line got a chuckle; my teacher even went out of her way to say she liked it.  As class ended, and I was packing up my things, a girl walked over to me and said, “I really liked your poem.  We should hang out sometime.”  I was twenty-two now, but sitting in that chair, the insides of my eyes a television watching myself time travel back to when I was fifteen; “Sounds great,” I said, shit-eating grin obvious to anyone looking.  My sense of validation apparently hadn’t changed much over the years.  Sure, I knew I was doomed; it’s like winning the lottery the first time you play it, or having the best steak of your life the first time you eat one; you get spoiled, your expectations can only go down.  A few weeks later someone else in that class wrote a better poem than I had and that girl was saying, “I really liked your poem, we should hang out sometime” to them, and I was right back where I started, a Writing major who couldn’t be inspired to write.

The first time I heard Ani Difranco she was opening in concert for Bob Dylan.  When she walked out on stage, I remember either saying to myself or aloud, “Who the hell is?” this girl with purple hair and Duct-taped nails.  Her guitar made her tiny frame look even smaller, but when she started playing, she had this massive sound; it was as if she was unleashing all Holy Hell on the world.  She was good, damn good, but that night I wasn’t in the frame of mind to get her.  Years later, single and miserable, I came across “Untouchable Face” and Ani’s music suddenly made sense to me.

My second semester, a major conference focusing on the writing of Chuck Palahniuk was coming to campus.  I was new to Palahniuk’s work; we’d read Fight Club and Survivor for my Modern Fiction class, and my teacher/conference organizer gave me her advance copy of his soon-to-be-released novel Choke, which I read in one, all-night sitting.  As part of the conference, and a requirement for class, I had to write a paper on some theme of Palahniuk’s work, and then I had to do a presentation on my paper.  I chose to write about the nihilistic tendencies of Palahniuk’s characters; the whole when everything is lost, that’s when you start to find who you are thing.  That weekend of the conference, I had also planned a trip to New York City with Natalie.  Myself, along with two other people I was grouped with who had similar nihilistic themes, lead off the first day of presentations at the conference.  The night prior to me writing my paper, to help get me rolling, a bunch of us were sitting around my dorm and we started talking about Fight Club the movie, and before long the discussion turned hypothetical; if you wanted to really hurt the US, would you aim for Wall Street (money), the White House (leadership), or the Pentagon (force).  In my discussion at the conference, I made this dorm room hypothetical a big part of what I said.  After I was done a few people, including Palahniuk, came up and we discussed what I had said a bit more.  Hurried for time—truth be told, I had ass, not Armageddon, on my mind—I handed Palahniuk my book to sign.  “Nothingness is the best place to start every time,” was what he wrote.  After he handed me the book, we shook hands, and he thanked me for my presentation, I walked back over to the dorm, loaded up the car, and we were on our way to New York City.

In the CD player was Ani Difranco’s new release, the double-disk Revelling/Reckoning.  The album was more jazz-oriented than the Difranco I was used to, but just as introspective; the perfect album for a six-hour car ride through the nothingness that is central Pennsylvania.  The opening song of the Revelling disk, “Ain’t That The Way” ends with the line, “Love makes me feel so dumb,” and that was my state of mind; not the Gomer Pyle definition of dumb, but where you’re constantly looking for the right thing to say, and that right way seems forever fleeting; the cat’s always got your damn tongue and its not giving it back.  On the ride Natalie and I talked about what we had to see once we got to the city, what type of food we had to eat.  It was stuff we’d talked about for weeks, but now that it was about to be a reality, it seemed more urgent to sort out details.  Long before the first time I stepped foot on the cracked concrete of Broadway, New York City was like my Atlantis; some mythical place where one day I’d arrive and it’d feel like I’d finally arrived.  On that trip, the transition to night almost complete, as the bright lights of the skyline came into view, it felt like walking onto a Hollywood set, script in hand, to make a movie starring us, Natalie and I, that was sure to be box office gold.  We’d been seeing each other for two months and so far our boundaries weren’t concrete.  We’d said a lot of things to each other but, “I love you” wasn’t one of them.  At night, when I’d walk downstairs from her dorm room to mine, I wondered if it would be.  As I reached across the center console and took a hold of her hand I felt the electricity that the city and her were giving off.  This weekend was going to be magic; if ever we were going to share those three words with each other it was going to come now.

I’m a good kisser

And you’re a fast learner

And that kinda thing could float us

For a pretty long time.

“Marrow” was the first song I fell in love with from the Revelling disk; perfectly serene, it’s the shining example of music as poetry, the way my teacher so many years before tried to convince a class that it could be.  We took all of the typical tourist sites that NYC had to offer: the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Twin Towers, Times Square, all the way down to Canal Street.  We devoured too many slices of pizza, ate too much street meet.  Our feet hurt and our wallets were empty.  We took a rest on some bench in Central Park and looked back on it all.  She asked me what it was that first attracted me to her and I said that line from, “Marrow.”  It wasn’t the first thing that attracted me to her—that was her eyes—but I was too wrapped in the moment to state the obvious.  She smiled at my response, her eyes a sparkling sheen on par with the majesty of city lights around us; that was all the validation I needed.

The night we got back from NYC, not too long after I’d finished unpacking, she called me up to her room.  So wrapped up in the revelry of the weekend I’d missed the fact the we forgot the formality of saying, “I love you.”  When I got upstairs, she told me to sit down.  She grabbed my hand.  We looked at each for a minute but the silence was overwhelming.  “I love you too,” I said.  I waited a minute before I really looked into her eyes.  They were distant; focused somewhere beyond me.  Her hand was cold, felt like bacon when you first pull it out of the package.  “My ex-boyfriend is coming up this week,” she said, “He’s staying with me.”  I don’t know how long it took me to stand up from her bed but it couldn’t have been too far off the World Record pace.  She tried her best to pull me back but it didn’t work; I was down the stairs, in my car, and halfway to nowhere before she could say, “Wait.”

That night, the miles were covered in molasses.  Every inch brought on another metaphor that somehow I’d missed; the streets were full of signs: caution signs, detour signs, the sort of signs you miss when you’re looking beyond what you can see in the two eyes in front of you, and for two months that’s just what I’d been doing.  Natalie didn’t tell me that she loved me because she didn’t love me.  Or even if she did feel something close to love, however you wanted to define the word, it wasn’t what I wanted it to be, what I thought it would be.

But as bad as I am

I’m proud of the fact

That I’m worse than I seem.

From the moment I heard that line I wanted it inscribed on my tombstone.  “Grey” was one of those songs that any sad bastard could appreciate; an anthem if you were looking for the autonomy of a brooding night alone.  After that talk, at least her part in the sixteen-word conversation, I told myself that I was in for countless brooding nights alone; I needed them.  I’d sacrificed a lot for this girl, a lot more monetarily than I had to give, and worse yet, I started sacrificing my opportunities.  Instead of spending a weekend amongst people with the same interests and ambitions as I had, I passed over a major conference that was a few hundred yards from where I lived for a pipedream an eternity away.  As much as I wanted to be able to say, “This isn’t me” it was me; this is who I let myself become.  I needed to find a mirror, one that told the truth, not one of those carnival mirrors towards the end of Mask that made Rocky Dennis look normal.  Things weren’t normal; they were ugly; they felt closer to a verse in “Tamburitza Lingua.”

and everything seems to have gone terribly wrong that can

but one breath at a time is an acceptable plan

she tells herself

and the air is still there

and this morning it’s even breathable

and for a second the relief is unbelievable

and she’s a heavy sack of flour sifted

her burden lifted

she’s full of clean wind for one lean moment

and then she’s trapped again

reverted

caged and contorted

with no way to get free

and she’s getting plenty of little kisses

but nobody’s slippin’ her the key

I’d been waiting two months on the other side of a door for Natalie to slip me some key and let me in.  I had let her in on everything, I gave her the roadmap to exactly who I was, and how I got here, and for as much time as we spent in the car, I assumed we were taking in the miles together, seeing the same things, breathing the same air, with the same destination in sight.  But that wasn’t the case.  I could see the key wasn’t the problem.  It was the asshole standing at the door.

As I pulled into the parking lot in front of my dorm I took a deep breath, trying my best to ignore the sight of Natalie, who was smoking a cigarette outside.  I could see that she’d seen me, and I considered putting the car in reverse and taking off again.  But in one quick motion I parked the car, grabbed the keys, sped-walk to the side door, ignoring Natalie’s call to me, I climbed the two flights of stairs, made my way down the hallway, walked through my open door, passed in front of the television and the group of friends playing Madden football, walked over to my closet, opened it, grabbed the bottle of Absolut Citron vodka, twisted the top off, and chugged a quarter of its contents.  I savored the first alcoholic drink of my life, expecting it in an instant to get me drunk enough to forget everything, everyone behind me.  But it didn’t.  So I took another swig.  And another.  It could have been minutes before I realized the room was completely silent save the blow of a video game whistle.  I turned around and five of my closest college friends, people who didn’t know half about me, let alone what Natalie did, were staring, eyes-wide, mouths open, at me.  “Holy fucking shit,” my roommate said.  Yes, holy fucking shit.  I don’t remember if I smiled at their collective cheer, one aimed at my crossover to, as they put it, “the dark side.”  But I felt better.  Or at least calm enough to reveal the happenings of the previous couple of hours.  I started to tell the tale of what had gone on with Natalie but my friends stopped me long enough to load up on a laundry basket full of Old German 40 oz. beers.  For the first time the group of us shared an alcoholic moment together.  In a ceremonial sort of way, more people starting gathering into the room once they’d been told that I had finally relented on my promise to never drink.  As I finally started to feel the effects of the alcohol, my face warm, my cheeks sore from smiling, I looked out the front window and saw Natalie staring up at me.  Reality sank deep into my gut like an oversized burrito.  She was waving me down, and though the window was closed and semi-fogged from the cold, I could read from her lips that she wanted to talk.  And as much as I wanted to, in spite of every vile thing I had just said about her, none of which I really meant, I couldn’t let myself lose what little I had left of myself that night.  I walked away from the window and played the best smiling clown that I could muster until all of the alcohol was gone and the crowd retreated for the night.  When it was finally time to sleep I put in the Reckoning disk and listened to the title song:

we thought we left possession behind

but truth is i was yours and you weren’t mine

and now i’ve replayed a thousand times

exactly what was said

cuz nothing is as it appears

in the funhouse mirrors of your fears

on the roller coaster of all these years

with your hands above your head

Drunk, angry, and heartbroken as I was, I could still hear clearly.  My friends did their best to cheer me up, and I appreciated that.  But sometimes nothing short of anything can do the trick; sometimes misery is a pool worth wallowing in.  That night I had company, and though it wasn’t the company that I wanted, that I was in love with, it was brutally honest and sincere, the best friend that I could ask for.  And so I had failed myself.  Again.  So what.  So I had nothing.  For the first time in a long time I could feel that beautiful urge coming on; the urge to write.  At least that gave me a place to start.  I saw that I was going to have to go slowly; I would need to learn everything all over again.

The Marshall Mathers LP – Eminem

Confidence is like a mountain.  Standing at the bottom, the apex looks a mile away.  When you’re down, the higher up you have to look, the more unreachable it seems.  Some like the challenge; they feed off it.  Others, it’s just as easy to say the hell with it; why bother, misery loves company and there are a lot of miserable bastards mulling aimlessly in the overgrown shadows.  There’s comfort in numbers.  Comfortable doesn’t always breed contempt, but if you’re looking for change something has to give; sooner or later you have to start climbing.  When you’re at the top it’s like you’re a cliché; you almost can’t miss: Michael Jordan when he got in the zone seemingly at the end of every important game, Bob Dylan when he wrote “Blowin’ In The Wind” in five minutes on the back of a napkin in some dingy diner, Bernie Madoff for decades before he got busted.  If you listen to what a wise man once said, and the secret to success is paying attention to details, when you’re standing atop the mountain, everything is that much easier; life gives you 20/20 vision.  The execution of things is almost a formality; you become a virtual hot slot machine; with each pull of the lever you hit another jackpot; everything you touch turns to gold.  Even when you misstep the potholes all seem to be filled in.  The people at the top of the mountains, they’re the CEOs, the All-Star athletes, the people who smile.  The people at the bottom, they’re everybody else.

In late summer of 2000 my confidence was all an all-time high.  I was at peace with my past, the fact that I was leaving everything I knew behind.  I was moving away to college; a college I’d never physically seen, but couldn’t wait to get to.  Outside of Ashley, who told me about the college, I didn’t know anyone there.  I’d never been so excited.  The already-beaten-down-by-life people talk about new beginnings as if they’re strictly a hypothetical; a pipedream.  My new beginning was a reality.  Financially, though I was leaving a decent enough paying job to become a non-working college student, I was stable.  I was single and damn excited about the prospect about being a single guy in college.  I was counting down the days, each morning crossing another yesterday from my calendar.  I felt as ease, comfortable in my own skin.  It was easy to smile.

The big social event of that summer was the wedding of two high school friends.  From the group of us invited, I was the only one without a built-in date.  I had to find one.  I wanted to go with Karen, but a few days prior she told me couldn’t go.  Strapped for a second option I swallowed my pride and asked Ellen, a girl whom I worked with in the warehouse that had moved home after having just graduated college.  Throughout the summer Ellen had made her interest in me well-known in more than one drunken email, in more than one stone-sober hint when we passed each at work.  More than once, knowing of the forthcoming wedding, she informed me that she’d like to go; all I had to do was ask.  We had become good friends, she was really easy to have fun with, but I was perfectly content to remain just good friends.  Stonewalling her advances only seemed to intensify her feelings for me.  I knew that by asking her to the wedding, I stood a serious risk of abandoning my pledge to keep it just friends.  But I needed a date.  So I asked her.

The wedding was a bomb, the chicken parmesan like a tire covered in melted cheese.  My friends and I, an entire table’s worth of guests, when the bride and groom were turned we made a jailbreak, reconvening at the Olive Garden.  Over spaghetti and tossed salad we poked fun at each other.  With a decade or more worth of ammunition they tried their best to embarrass me.  Ellen, she didn’t hold back, piling on me with the rest of them.  More than once we all laughed until we had tears in our eyes.  My friends loved her.  By the time we left the restaurant I knew my fate was sealed; this battle of attrition I was trying to fight, it was no use, my white flag was painted across my forehead.  On the way back to my house we listened to the CD everyone was listening to that summer, The Marshall Mathers LP.  Ellen mocked me, throwing up the four-fingered Westside salute, but she couldn’t hold back her laughter when Eminem said, “Skibbedy-be-bop, a-Christopher Reeves/Sonny Bono, skis horses and hittin some trees.”  It made me smile; Ellen’s sense of humor, the fact that she could laugh at a lyric like that as easily as I could.

I was a late comer to Eminem; as a suburban white-male, in terms of white guys in hip-hop, we’d been burned too many times before: 3^rd Base, Vanilla Ice, Young Black Teenagers, Snow.  In the car, “The Way I Am” booming from the speakers, I started thinking that like Eminem, maybe I was a late-comer to Ellen too.  A summer earlier, I was madly—and silently—in love with her sister, Charlotte, who home from college, had worked in the warehouse.  But I never pursued her; I was a coward, awed by her beauty, but I had the built-in excuse of still being in a relationship with Ashley, so I left it at that.  I knew I still had strong feelings for Charlotte, despite the fact that I hadn’t seen her since the previous summer, and that was yet another reason to not pursue things with Ellen.  By the time we pulled into my driveway, however, and Ellen decided she wasn’t ready to go home yet, that she wanted to watch a movie, even if I still felt something for Charlotte, if I still had reservations about my feelings for Ellen, it wouldn’t matter; no wasn’t a word Ellen would accept that night.  People like winning trophies.  For the first time in a long time—maybe ever—I felt like I was someone’s trophy.

A week after the wedding, with a couple that we worked with in the backseat of my car, the four of us cruised the streets of Niagara Falls, as The Marshall Mathers LP, a common language between us and our two Puerto Rican friends, bounced from the speakers.  We rapped—badly—along with Eminem as we looked out on the Technicolor-lit Horseshoe falls.  “The Real Slim Shady” will never be confused as a romantic song, but it felt that way; four people, two couples, hand-in-hand, looking out on a force so powerful that it left Wordsworth speechless.  As we got out and walked around the side streets humming “Bitch Please II” Ellen pulled me aside.  “What’s my middle name?” she asked.  Three days earlier, in a tear-stained confessional that came out of nowhere, Ellen told me her life story, from her insecurities and the reasons behind them, to the number of guys she’d slept with.  Somewhere in the tale was her middle name.  I could tell that Ellen thought I wasn’t exactly listening, as so many others before me apparently had not.  Without hesitation I told her.  She smiled.  “I love you,” she said.  I smiled and bit my bottom lip.  A fear the force of the nearby falls washed over me; I could hear my heartbeat in my ears.  This thing, after this moment it wasn’t going to be a casual thing anymore; it would either have to turn into something or it would have to end.  College, my chance at a new beginning with no commitments to anyone other than myself, it all started to look like the picture of Marty McFly’s fast-fleeting family before George McFly picks himself off the dance floor and reclaims his future wife from Malachai’s clutch.  The dotted-line we’d been carelessly crossing since the night of that wedding, it was being painted solid black underneath us; I could either cross it or turn away.  I’d finally reached the pinnacle of the mountain, stepping forward meant stepping to the edge; I’d have to trust my balance.   “I love you too,” I said.

It just so happened that two weeks before I was to move away to college, Ellen was moving as well.  And it just so happened that where she was moving was fifteen minutes away from where I was going to college.  That’s the kind of coincidence that gets confused as fate when you’re starry-eyed and you think that, “In the third grade, all I used to do was sniff glue through a tube and play Rubix cube/Seventeen years later I’m as rude as Jude, scheming on the first chick with the hugest boobs” is good poetry.  And we did; we were.

Four months after the move Thanksgiving break rolled around.  The break was officially supposed to begin after the conclusion of classes on that Tuesday, which happened to be my 22^nd birthday.  That Monday was unseasonably warm; my friends and I wore shorts when we played our weekly football game.  That night, I went to sleep around 3 a.m., the rain kissing my window.  When I woke up five hours later I couldn’t see my car that was parked twenty feet in front of my dorm.  The snow had covered everything: bushes, signs, Chryslers; the scene looked like the tall tales of your parent’s youth, about the great blizzards where they had to walk thirty miles uphill through chest-high snow to get to school.  It took three hours to dig out my entombed car, and those of my friends who were leaving, and another hour to make the typical ten-minute drive to her apartment.  When I got there Ellen wasn’t home.  I spent two more hours digging a path for Ellen to get her car in her garage.  I went inside to thaw, to breathe, and the phone rang.  “I don’t think I’m going to make it home tonight,” she said.  I asked if everything was all right, if she was ok.  “Yeah, it’s not that.  It’s just the roads are really bad.  I should just stay where I am,” she said, her voice trailing off.  “But it’s my birthday,” I said.  “I know,” she said, “I’m sorry.”  Two hours later Ellen was home, convinced that if she didn’t come home, I would take it personally.  I did, regardless of the fact that she made it home just fine.  The next morning, the roads passable, we drove to Buffalo to catch our flight to my sister’s house in North Carolina for Thanksgiving.  Four days later, we flew back.  After a somewhat rocky time, by the time we touched down things seemed to settle back to normal.  The next morning, after returning from my gym class, my phone rang.  “I think we should take some time apart,” she said.  “I just need to figure some things out.”  Ellen used the standard anti-Hallmark line: “It’s not you, it’s me.”   I said, “But…but” too many times, but after five minutes or so of trying to sell another chance Ellen decided she didn’t need time.  Two weeks later, I was wrapping presents while cooking dinner at her apartment.  Ellen was to be home any minute; we were going to have our Christmas together early so I could drive home for the holidays after classes ended the following day.  As I stirred the taco meat the phone rang.  “So I’m not coming home tonight.  I need space.  This isn’t working.  I’m sorry.  I really am.  Goodbye.”  The phone went silent.  Five months prior I was at the pinnacle of the mountain I’d spent a lifetime trying to climb.  As I listened too long to the hum of the dial tone, I was back at the bottom, just like the yodeler guy from Price Is Right when he takes a header off the cliff.  I wanted to throw up.  I wanted to scream.  I wanted to call her back, but I had no idea where she was.

I drove back to the dorm looking for someone, anyone, to talk to, just so I wouldn’t have to listen to all of the horrible things I was saying to myself in my head.  It was a Friday night though, everyone was out partying.  My roommate had gone home for the weekend.  I stood there, staring into the collage of pictures of my friends from back home; people I hadn’t talked to since I moved away.  The silence was overwhelming.  I sat on my bed and felt like an outsider in my own room.  In the months that I’d lived there, in this new town, in this new bed, with these new people, I realized that I didn’t know any of them.  And none of them knew me.  The one person who did, Ellen, an hour earlier she told me that she wasn’t coming home.  I knew what that meant; her vagueness was crystal clear.

That night, I packed up everything; my clothes, my TV, my laptop, my life.  I drove back to her place and did the same; I grabbed whatever was in view that was mine and threw it into a trash bag.  On the highway, on the drive back to school, there’s a stretch where the falloff from the road to the valley below is pretty steep.  For a second that seemed more like an hour I considered veering beyond the yellow lines, the rumble strips, and the concrete, through the steel barriers to see just how steep that drop-off was.  I knew those thoughts weren’t really me talking, but at that moment I could rationalize that voice.  It was my fault; I went against my better judgment with Ellen, I threw caution to the wind, I compromised what I had worked for and it backfired.

The first day after break had ended, after class was over, I tried my best to sneak out before my friends could see me but I ended up running into every one of them.  At first I tried to conceal my intention but after a while I just told them the truth: “I don’t think I’m coming back next semester.”  They asked why and I told each of them a different version of the non-truth.  When I was through with my goodbyes I got in my car and drove off, taking in the scene as if once I left it, I’d never see it again.  I felt a tear creep into my right eye and I tried my best to fight it off.  I couldn’t.  Furious, beaten, and on the verge of full-blown hysteria I did what anyone who is lost does: I called my mother.  She told me to calm down, that things would be alright, and that she’d have spaghetti and meatballs waiting for me at home.  I knew that I should heed her advice, that she was right.  But it didn’t work.  Driving eighty-miles an hour towards home, towards everything that months ago I was so happy to drive away from, I hated myself.  I was a failure; a complete and utter failure, on par with Crystal Pepsi and Pat Boone going metal.  I was a bad joke, and now I had a 160 mile drive to ponder over the steaming pile of “I told you so” shit that I was going to have to eat; the pile that I was going to force-feed on myself because I deserved it.  This was nobody’s doing by my own.  Everything I told myself not to do I did; I blew my second chance before it even started.

My thoughts were anything but rational, and all of them were soaked in anger.  As I drove I scrolled through the phone book on my cell, looking for a name, any name that I felt I could talk to, that would understand me, the things I was saying, the things I couldn’t.  But there wasn’t anyone; the names all looked like those of strangers.  As far as I could see, the only one who had that power that I was looking for was gone.  I pushed all of my chips to the center of the table, she called my bluff, and that was that; I was busted.

I tried to drown out the thoughts by putting on a CD.  I’d get thirty seconds into the first song and get pissed off at myself for not picking the right CD.  Nothing worked, I couldn’t even be a good DJ; Pantera didn’t work, Billy Joel didn’t work, Bob Dylan didn’t even work.  My one constant, music, my all-time best main squeeze was abandoning me too.  I was one CD away from completely blowing my top when I heard:

“This is another public service announcement brought to you, in part, by Slim Shady

(Tell ‘em I don’t give a fu@k)

Slim Shady does not give a fu@k what you think

(Tell ‘em to suck it)

If you don’t like it, you can suck his fu@king co@k

(Tell ‘em they kissed my ass)

Little did you know, upon purchasing this album You have just kissed his ass

(Tell ‘em I’m fed up)

Slim Shady is fed up with your sh!t and he’s going to kill you

(Yeah)

Anything else?

Yeah, sue me.”

And literally, like that, in an instant, the tears turned into laughter.  Hysterical—the first time you watch the outtakes to Grumpy Old Men—laughter.  In the months since I’d bought The Marshall Mathers LP I’d listened to it a hundred or so times and each listen brought something new: a verse I misheard, a diss that passed me by.  But I’d never heard it, really heard it for what it was; a masterpiece; a scattershot collection of emotional rants that run the creative gamut of someone who, at the height of his creative prowess, is royally pissed off.  And hurt.  And scared.  Eminem dealt with it all the best way he knew how; he spit it back at everyone, including himself, that did him wrong.  Hurt, betrayed, and angry I really listed to “Kim” for the first time and it floored me, the vulnerability behind his voice.  The easy laughs—“Will Smith don’t gotta cuss in his raps to sell records/Well I do, so fu@k him, and fu@k you too”—were just as easy as every previous listen, and I was grateful for that.  But it was the balance that I needed that night, on that drive, and I got it.  I was at the bottom of the mountain again, a certified failure, on my way back to my past.  Things didn’t go the way I wanted them to, the way that I expected them to turn out.  And it sucked.  But I had a friend.  His name was Marshall Mathers.  He knew what I was going through, and he wasn’t going to let me ride alone.  And I wasn’t going to let myself become just another Stan.

(**This is entry #2 of the ongoing A Decade Under The Influence essay collection**)

Supergroups are all the rave this decade. Velvet Revolver. Audioslave. The Raconteurs. Chickenfoot. Next in line are the Monsters of Folk: Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, super-producer Mike Mogis, Retro-Nuevo troubadour M. Ward, and My Morning Jacket front man Jim James. If the gold standard is the Traveling Wilburys—and it is—the Traveling Wilburys they are not, despite so many media types deeming them to be the next coming. Nor are they folk in the most Woody Guthrie sense of the word. Neither declaration is their fault– somebody inevitably has to label them something– but none of the four are far enough along in their careers to carry the burden of being mentioned in the same breath as eternal heavyweights such as Bob Dylan, George Harrison, or Roy Orbison, nor should they be held accountable (though in truth it is their own fault) for the awfully awful moniker. But their intent seems serious enough, and the Monsters of Folk set out for a full-on musical movement with their self-titled debut. Whether they come close to accomplishing that, however, is up for a serious debate.

Monsters Of Folk starts off with “Dear God (Sincerely M.O.F.)” and right away Jim Jones and the boys sound like they’re trying to harness their inner Thom Yorke; the song has such a Radiohead “Nude” remix vibe to it that it proves a difficult pace setter for what’s to follow. Next up is the Oberst led “Say Please” and it’s a complete about face; high on harmony, Oberst heads towards Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young country with Ward on guitar doing an earnest ode to Neil, and though it’s better than its predecessor, it too falls a few miles short. Ward leads the way on “Whole Lotta Losin’” and it’s as close as Monsters Of Folk comes to full-fledged romp; Ward is known for his reverence of yesteryear, and like most of his solo stuff, “Losin” is a all-in win; the first homerun of the album.

Monsters of Folk has its share of them, and they seem to come with higher frequency in the Jones-heavy numbers such as “The Right Place” with its alt-country twang that is perfect for this band of misfits; when Jones sings, “I’m in the right place” he’s spot on. “Baby Boomer” is perhaps the best compilation; with its Johnny Cash-chug-a-chug/The Statler Brothers “Flowers On The Wall”-esque foundation, Ward, Oberst, and Jones play off each other as if they were always meant to. When Oberst is left to his own device Monsters can too easily fall into a pattern of sounding too much like another Bright Eyes record however. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—he’s rightfully earned his place at this table—but the grey area lies in the fact that if you didn’t know any better, the “other guys” can too easily—and do—sound like other guys. “Man Named Truth” is an exception; the tune is equal parts of everyone he claims to be influenced by, from Dylan, to Young, to especially Emmylou Harris; the tune is tasty, as easily accessible as it is addicting, and the other guys stand out as much as they fit in.

If there’s one common criticism of Monsters Of Folk as a collective of creative guys at the height of their respective creating primes it’s that at more times than not it feels too shared for the sake of sharing, less organic than it probably should; too many times they trade turns shining in the spotlight than they share in shining in it together. There’s a lot or promise, more than a few payoffs, but it’s less cohesive, and even less coercive. That and at the conclusion of the album it loses steam quicker than a freight train out of coal. Monsters Of Folk concludes with “His Master’s Voice” and regrettably it’s a Rip Van Winkle yawn. People who want to like this album because they worship the guys behind it probably will see little wrong with it; for all intents and purposes, these guys are as close as their generation’s Traveling Wilburys as they’re going to get, and why not love that. But a more objective person will take pause, noticing the flaws as much as the promise.

As a whole, Monsters Of Folk, is definitely worth a listen, and it’ll be an entertaining one. Just don’t go in expecting a grand finale. There are plenty of bottle rockets here. Just be happy to take what you can get.

After nearly twenty years and five albums as the front man for The Wallflowers, Jakob Dylan has gone solo. At first glance the album’s title, Seeing Things, could look sort of ominous with song titles such as, “Evil Is Alive And Well”, “Everybody Pays As They Go”, and “War Is Kind,” considering who his old man is. But listen to the album and you’ll quickly realize the second coming of The Times They Are A-Changin’ this is not. Jakob Dylan paints his canvas with concise, impressionist brushstrokes. Dylan isn’t a man trying to make a statement; there is no ethos, no concrete message. Seeing Things doesn’t try to be more than what it is; a collection of ten songs lasting just under forty minutes sung by a man who’s got a penchant—and talent—for writing deeply personal songs. The Wallflowers, though fun, always seemed like they should have been a vehicle for what has now become a reality, Dylan’s solo career. And he seems at ease with that as he sings, “My line of work suits me fine,” in the song, “All Day And All Night.”

Seldom is gravel a synonym for smooth but Dylan’s voice is as soothing as a ride in the back of a pickup truck on a backcountry road in the middle of a cool summer night. And his voice has never sounded better; a perfect compliment to his acoustic guitar on this acoustic driven record. Seeing Things at times sounds like a not so distant relative of a softer Neil Young (think Silver & Gold) or Tom Petty (think Wildflowers) offering, or an E-Street Band-less Springsteen album. The songs weave comfortably in between blues, folk, and country influences and come out as a reflection of a man who has come to terms with his surroundings just fine, and as he’s looking out on the world through his sunglass covered eyes, he’s doing so with admiration. The album’s production is vintage Rick Rubin: sparse, intimate, and alive; you can hear the creaks of the studio. It’s not as stripped down as some of Rubin’s work with Johnny Cash, but it’s just as personal, and it sounds precisely like these were the types of songs Dylan was born to sing.