Growing Up Tristeza

When I turned sixteen I immediately began going to shows and there was this place on Welton St. called The Raven. It went from being a gay bar to an all ages rock club day by day and I found myself there about once a week watching local bands like the The Gamits and Pinhead Circus, I once saw Alkaline Trio there three times in one year. For a long time there was no stage and they were borrowing my friend Max’s PA for the shows. My friends and I would drive straight up Broadway for forty minutes to get there because we didn’t know any better way, inside the car you could hear Strung Out or Swingin’ Utters. We’d talk about the virtues of rock and roll, who was a poser and who wasn’t.

I remember waiting until the day I got my license to ask my first girlfriend out on a date. She worked in a coffee shop in the mall, I worked in a record store, it was destiny. It took a little while for her parents to get used to the idea of her palling off with me to this little shit hole in what was then a pretty shitty neighborhood. I suppose it still is now too though it doesn’t seem as bad. Marisa and I stayed together for a long time. She could never understand my anger and misery, I could never understand why she went to class or generally gave a shit about anything other than the two of us and music. She loved me because I was a bad boy and in a band, I loved her because she was kind and successful to say nothing of her beauty. In short we saw in each other what we wanted to see in ourselves but didn’t think we ever could.

The day after Marisa and I lost our virginity in a tent outside of Granby, CO a little mountain town in the Rocky’s my parents explained what to me was a secret that would change my life forever. My biological father was a rapist, the deed went down on St. Patrick’s Day in 1982 which probably explains the read beard I’ve since grown on my face. The idea was that particular bit of knowledge would help me understand what it was that separated me from my peers. I was obviously more intelligent than most of them very angry and very unmotivated. I remember my old man telling me I was a square trying to fit through a circular whole and it’s something I’ll never forget. It was strange and comforting to hear my father (the real one, not be biological one) acknowledging me in that way.

I slowly started reaching away from hardcore music and found bands I deemed to be more “intelligent.” A chronic elitism that I suppose I still struggle with to a degree though my fuck you Pink Floyd and Grateful Dead salvos feel less and less heartfelt everyday. It was bands like Jawbox and At the Drive-In who began to draw my attention away from the bristling 4/4 hardcore I clung to. Then there was the Clifford Brown and Max Roach album my cousin bought me for Christmas one year that really blew my mind. Brandon was the one who originally got me interested in hardcore music at a very young age. We were close growing up and then he got into playing the drums, started listening to Bad Religion and NOFX and I followed right along so when he was pushing me towards bop it had a pretty big effect on me even if the music was still a little unattainable for me.

I was such an angry kid. Angry at capitalism, angry at the suburbs, christianity, structure, angry at life. I drank a lot, smoked a lot of weed, dropped out of high school and promptly blew the scholarship I was awarded for high GED scores. The whole process left me to a lot of hard thinking. It blew my mind right open and no thought was illegitimate. I suppose I still have a tendency to over think most everything.

Looking back I realize now that Dream Signals in Full Circles was a sanctuary of mine. I used to have a pretty large room in the basement of my parents house and this massive king sized water bed that was one of my uncles. Marisa loved to lay on the bed and look at the little metallic sparkles that lay in my pop corn ceiling. We spent long nights listening to this record talking, making out, wandering around one another’s body. The months following this records release I found myself working a night job at the Denver Post, one of our local newspapers and skipping my classes at ACC, the community college I received a scholarship from. I didn’t even apply for it, they just gave it to me.

On the third day of my Grandfather’s coma I asked the rest of the family to leave the room so I could have a few moments with him. We had been sitting in St. Joseph’s for three long weeks waiting and the cancer had spread through most of his body by now. I had been told that coma victims can often hear what is going on around them even if they don’t respond. I cried, I told him I loved him, that all the music I would ever make in my life would be in his memory. I thanked him for everything he had given me and the family and I walked out of the hospital without a word to anyone else. It was late at night and Marisa was bound to be getting off at the coffee shop and I drove straight there. When she walked out of the store the first thing I said was, “Papa died tonight” and she replied “I know, your Dad just called.”

The situation between myself and my parents was deteriorating fast. I blamed them for catholocism, they blamed me for laziness, neither were willing to confront the other. My parents were so afraid of my mental well being they pretty much let me do whatever I wanted and I took care not to bring drugs or alcohol into their house but that’s about it. Somehow this record became a comfortable place for me to calmly reflect upon all the varying degrees of misery and happiness around me. For a time a built a cocoon out of it and rested, safely watching the world melt around me. The gentle reverb laden guitars, the cushioned keyboards and light percussion all soothed my anger and sorrow. Best of all there were no vocals, the songs were readily about whatever I needed them to be.

I saw them play while on tour for this record at The Raven. There may have been twenty people there. Marisa and I swayed here and there as they played the most relaxing music I’d ever seen performed. The lights were dim and the disco ball spilled out across the room slowly spinning. It was a watershed moment for me, not of a turning point but the ridge I was standing upon. The calm morose texture of Tristeza was just what my pensive mind needed so badly. Later that night I bought a t shirt form their booth with a strange design on the front. I remember wishing aloud to Marisa that they had shirts which actually said Tristeza on them and she looked at me incredulously. It was a classic example of my inability to see what was right there in my face, peering deeply into the obvious and searching for the abstract.

Marisa lives in San Diego now with the man I’m pretty sure she had an affair with before we split after some five or six years. It’s amazing to me how that can be blurred now in my memory. I’ve managed to repair much of my relationship with my parents and I still have the shirt. I think about all of these things and more whenever I wear it or put this record on. Imagine that.

On Growing a Beard

What is this and how have I got here? You snuck up on me you beard. I didn’t set out to create you. Rather I wanted a rock to sculpt from. I fancied myself the joker seeking a platform for yet another fantastic facial hair joke. I thought, maybe I’ll carve some wicked sideburns and a mustache. Everyone will laugh for a week and I’ll be through with you. But no, you had to be bushy and commanding. I feel like you have overpowered me. You’ve transformed me into a morose thinker when I wanted to be a johnny come lately jokester. You beat me to the punch and now I’ve got to live with you.

Really it would have been okay had you left the rest of my life alone but no. You had to be big and bushy, flaming furious red. Now I’m thinking I ought to grow out the rest of the hair on my dome. Why would you do this to me? I’ll never get laid with this raggedy bush on my face and yet, I’m drawn to you. It feels good to run my hands through your raspy mane. Oh how you torment me so! Why did you ever come into my life? Don’t you know I drool in my sleep? Can’t you see the complications?

Now, when I wake up in the morning, the first order of business is to shampoo you. I thought we would be friends. And yet I suppose we are. When I don my bicycle in the morning you keep my face warm. I cannot deny you that. And of course there are the comments. “are you growing a beard?” The masses have taken notice. You’ve got me between a rock and a hard place you goddamned beard you.

En guard!

On Getting Older and Looking Back

As a twenty-something coming of political age in the 2000’s I’ve never been subject to love and admiration for a politician.  There have been no JFK’s or FDR’s to win over my adulation and respect.  Instead, I’ve witnessed and experienced a general disdain for politics and it’s current state of affairs.  A climate in which everyone is a talking head, fearful that saying what is actually on their mind will automatically rule them out of favor with the largest constituency.  All this amounts to a stalemate in the public dialog and a general apathetic sense of helplessness towards the entire process.

I was excited to exercise my right to vote when I first got the chance in 2000 and felt demoralized when George W. Bush won and would later become furious with Al Gore for not contesting the vote count.  I eventually decided that Bush had bought the vote in Florida and had Gore fought for it he would have become our President, not the Texan with an ineptness for speech.  In short, the exchange played happily into the situation that I was destined to find myself in, general disgust for the entire political  community and process.   Here is the bullish right and the timid left, neither willing to engage in dialog but more interested in power than my and my fellow countryman’s well being.

Gore for his part has done all he can to make amends with me.  As President he could never have accomplished what he has in the wake of 2000’s failure.  An Inconvenient Truth has almost singlehandedly galvanized the world community’s awareness of the environmental crisis.  Still, I can’t get out of my head Tipper Gore’s censorship mania and will never forgive Al himself for laying down the Presidential race.  I voted for him, didn’t he appreciate it?  Why wouldn’t he want to see if my vote, and in turn my life, counted?  I felt betrayed and embittered.

I was nineteen years worth of anger and frustration on September 11′th.  My acridity lent itself to a feeling of  “we got what we deserved.”  It’s a shameful and unthinkable now at twenty four but that’s how I felt.  The record high approval ratings for Bush didn’t ease my woes but fanned the flames.  I remember running into an old friend.  He was generally like minded, though perhaps a bit dense if I remembered correctly, but here he was in a Navy uniform recruiting at the mall.  I laughed at him and asked what he was doing to which he replied “do you remember 9/11? I joined so you wouldn’t have to.”  (then why are you asking me now?) I wanted to vomit.  I was already convinced that Bush was going to use the attack as leverage for Iraqi assets and seeing my old friend play into his hands was enough to make me sick.  I continued on with my general anger.

In hindsight I’m beginning to understand what I was feeling and why.  The saber rattling, the fallout and division of Vietnam left the baby-boomers polarized.  Be sure too that this apathy still enjoys it’s firm grip upon our beloved nation.  I was being wedged out of our political process because I didn’t understand the extremism and subsequent sensationalism left in the wake of the 60’s.

In looking back into these times I wanted to identify with the Abbie Hoffman’s of the revolution but found the antics deplorable.   The anarchist community’s uncanny ability to organize events was a conflict of interest I couldn’t abide.  The zeal and intention was admirable but the argument untenable.  On the other hand the Richard Nixon’s of the time were less laughable and more frightening.  Hard nosed, fearful and power hungry were the tenet’s of the right, qualities that don’t speak to me of good sound judgment much less to say about a genuine concern for my well being and future.

What I’m realizing now is the public discourse in the past 50 years has been governed by this fragmentation.  The feeling so often cited of the time that we as a nation were obtaining our national identity was anything but.  The individual was finding new avenues for expression but the community itself was experiencing a brutal decomposition.  Perhaps the longest lasting effects of the Vietnam war wasn’t in our public and personal identity but a perpetual pigeon hole for our politicians.   The result is an apathetic national community and an apoplectic yet stagnant public dialog.  Years later the public personification was this, to the right was June and Ward Cleaver, the left Eddie Haskel.  Thinking about it now the whole situation reeks of a Cold Civil War mentality, the sabers were rattling and I can hear them echo today.

It was people like John Fahey, Captain Beefheart, Public Enemy, Miles Davis, John Steinbeck, Nelson Algren and Sam Peckinpah who would first subject me to my love for America.  The art world would expose me to the human predicament.  Then it was an intellectual community who would bring me around to the approach of living we have adopted here; Henry David Thoreau, Howard Zinn, John Lewis Gaddis, Sigmund Freud and Lerone Bennett Jr.  An elementary look into the Cold War and Mao Tse Tung’s China made it abundantly clear that the fathers of our constitution were on to something.    The human condition wasn’t fit to be nor to be governed by a dictator.  The idea of reassigning our need for conflict from physical violence to capitol gain intrigued me.  It was not long ago that I could pen a sentence with the words “our beloved nation” free of my former snide and condescending self.  Suddenly I found myself appreciative of my culture and our approach to living.  The capitalist framework, along with all its horrific faults, fit my view of humanity to the Darwinian T.

So where now does that leave me?  As I doggedly watch the Presidential primary’s develop I have to ask myself how I became so interested and why am I filled with hope after having been crushed so many times before.  One could say my general stubbornness and curiosity has led me here with little error but the real answer would be Barack Obama.

Obama is the open minded, pragmatic politician I’ve never seen before.  Here’s a man who can reconcile his Christianity with a pro-choice ethos.  That’s not politics, that is empathy, a quality I hold in the highest regard.  This trait of his, this empathy, is very telling once you put it into context.  Obama isn’t of the baby boomer generation.   The rift isn’t at play in his politics in defining his policies but rather his approach.  My disdain for this static age is his disdain too.  When I first became interested in Obama I noticed this immediately but it wasn’t without much thought and outside analysis that I was able to define it as such.

Of course the finer points of his platform speak to me but to go into detail would here would be of little benefit.  It’s more appropriate to say the Obama platform fits snug under this umbrella of empathy.  Perhaps of greater worth would be to speculate what he would mean to other people.  Who among us would have greater legitimacy in the Arab world than Barack Hussein Obama?  He grew up in Muslim schools and let’s not forget his continued objection to our Iraqi engagement. He’s a character that would be easy for the Arab community to communicate with (something we pretty much refuse to do currently) and possibly even trust.   If that isn’t an exciting candidacy I don’t know what is.

In writing this I recall the tears I’ve shed for this country.  I cried when Bush was reelected, when I read The 9/11 Report and while watching Obama speak.  They are tears of hope and love for humanity.  It’s kind of hard for me to sum up my excitement for his candidacy in any other terms.  I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed somebody seeking power to do what he feels is right rather than simply wield it for what it’s worth and that’s the feeling I get from Obama.  I wonder if this is how people felt when they watched Kennedy or Roosevelt speak.

I’m still afraid of what is to come but now I have hope.  From here on out I’ll have my eyes peeled to the blogs and newspapers to see what happens next in our early caucuses and if I was the type to cross my fingers, I’d do that too.