Your Thursday Regret: Pink Floyd

It is fairly common knowledge that back in the day I was a major consumer of alcohol. The popularly-tossed-about figure is "a bottle of vodka a day," and while that is a slight oversimplification it's close enough to accurate for our purposes (our purposes being, for this feature, a bizarre mix of nostalgia and mordant self-criticism). What is slightly less-known, or at least less-publicized, is that I was a recreational user of complex pharmaceuticals at the time as well, though certainly not to anything close to the same extent.

All the big words in that sentence were chosen with exquisite care. (Hm, there I go again.) "Recreational" and "complex pharmaceuticals" are the keys there - it was hardly a regular or even semi-regular thing, and your garden variety narcotics held no interest for me. I was a pills guy back in college, and when it came to pills I had one rule: up, up, gotta be up. This isn't that surprising when you consider the massive quantities of depressants I was ingesting at the time - taking Quaaludes on top of Absolut is not only a good way to ease yourself into hypotensive brain death, but it doesn't provide you with any sort of different experience; it's just more of the same. Plus, I don’t know if they even still MAKE Quaaludes. No, I was a stimulant guy, the more exotic the better. It is interesting to note that I don't directly recall ever taking stims while I was drinking, indicating that while my body was clearly trying to kill itself it apparently wasn't in any sort of actual rush to do so.

It is also distinctly possible that my taste for chemical enrichment did not extend beyond little while AWAKE! pills because one time around my 18th birthday I was at a party and I watched a guy drop acid. As I stood there drinking a screwdriver whose color was best described as a thin, pale, semi-transparent light yellow he proceeded to have what I still consider to be the Freakout of the Millenium.

This guy went BERSERK.

I've hallucinated before; never from drugs, just lack of sleep. I distinctly remember a class my sophomore year when I hadn't slept in about 40 hours previous and the print in my British Literature textbook turned bright red and started sliding back and forth across the page, and when I looked up the room was full of smoke. A few months back, driving home from New York in the middle of the night I started seeing cars and trees that weren't actually there. As hallucinations go they're kinda lame. The real problem with hallucinating isn't so much that you see all kinda of wacky shit but that moment when the conscious part of your brain realizes that you're seeing things that aren't there. THAT is what fucks you up, your conscious mind not being able to handle the disconnect between what you're seeing and what is real.

But this guy back at this party, oh my goodness, he just lost his shit. He was running around the room like his life depended on it, having shouted conversations with people no one else could see; he'd stop every few seconds and try to swat away imaginary insects from the air around his body; he'd clutch various limbs and body parts as though he were afraid they'd fly away. I believe the appropriate drug culture term for what he experienced is "a bad trip." No kidding. When he started screaming about "the monster" I finished my screwdriver, politely excused myself, and vowed never, ever, ever in my life to take LSD.

I have occasionally wondered in the years since if not ever taking LSD is what eventually led to the erosion of my love of Pink Floyd, but I'm pretty sure now it probably wasn't that. If acid usage and the concomitant flashbacks are necessary elements to enjoying a band I'm pretty sure the band wasn't that good to begin with.

The weird thing about Floyd is that unlike a lot of the things I've talked about here I can't remember what it was that made me actually like them in the first place. Back in high school I saw them in concert, for Chrissakes, and I have NO IDEA WHY. It was just one of those things you did back then. To an extent, I suppose, everyone discovers music - I mean really discovers that they actually have a musical taste, even if for most people it's laughably bad - in mid-to-late high school somewheres, and if you don't go hip-hop or country it seems that sooner or later, before you get to college, you're into Pink Floyd. It boggles the mind.

So I go off to college and I have all these Pink Floyd CDs. I did the whole bit with Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz around, I dunno, junior year or so, and even though I was still into Floyd I had long since determined that I really fucking hate the Wizard of Oz, so even drunk it wasn't as impressive as it probably should have been. I listened - looking back on it I honestly can't believe this - to Dark Side and The Wall OVER AND OVER AGAIN. What was I THINKING? At one point when I couldn't find my copy of The Wall I actually borrowed one from someone else and NEVER RETURNED IT. This is how much I was into Pink Floyd back then and looking back I really can't figure out what the hell I was doing.

There are still bits I like, to be sure. "One Of These Days" still works on some sort of primal level in a way I really enjoy (plus it reminds me of Life on Mars), and, since hearing it on the radio on the way to class earlier this week was what got me thinking about this whole thing in the first place, the line in "Run Like Hell" that goes "if they catch you in the backseat trying to pick her locks," as rock and roll metaphors go that's really just outstandingly good.

But honestly, my disillusionment with Floyd came into being a couple months back when I was driving someplace without my iPod and "Comfortably Numb" came on the air, and while I was sitting at a red light listening to it I just said out loud to my empty car, "what the fuck is this song about?" I couldn't come up with anything. My mind drifted as I drove - it was on Bustleton Avenue, I remember that, though God knows why I remember it or what I was doing there - and I realized I couldn't think of what a SINGLE Floyd song was really about beyond, I dunno, sounding neat.

I haven't done anything drastic like erase all the Pink Floyd from my iTunes - honestly Floyd sliding in my estimation must have started a long time ago because there isn't a whole hell of a lot of it in there, so at some point my albums disappeared for good and I didn't notice - because it's not like their music is offensively awful (like some other people we've talked about here). I just don't understand what I ever saw in it in the first place, and the fact that I am unable to determine my own motivations pisses me off more than anything else.

JLK

Your Thursday Regret: Billy Joel

For a very little while back in college I ran with this girl who loved Billy Joel. Like, LOVED Billy Joel. She had the whole shebang going: posters on the wall (odd, when one considers that he isn't that attractive), concert tickets alongside clumsy, blurred photographs matted and framed together under glass, and the entire top rack of a particle board CD shelving unit devoted solely to the complete Billy Joel discography and then some.

"And then some" meant cassette copies of every CD and a bunch of cassette mix tapes. Even in the deepest, darkest days of my obsession with the music of Bruce Springsteen (i.e. last week) I never had tape AND compact disc copies of his albums. Hell, since my music collection went all-digital back in like 1998 I haven't had a Springsteen CD (or any CD, for that matter) for more than a couple hours - buy it, rip it, and toss it was the name of the game, and I stopped buying CDs altogether in 2003 when I went 100% ITMS for music. But even back in college owning lots of CDs and displaying them proudly was something of an alien idea to me. Some people had trouble fitting their CD collections into their dorm. I had trouble fitting mine on my computer.

I was with this woman for a (thankfully) very short time, and her birthday happened to fall inside that (thankfully) very short time. While not as front-and-center as some of its contemporaries my psychosis about gift-giving is well-documented and I spent inordinate hours trying to determine what would be the perfect gift. Eventually I came to the conclusion that The Perfect Gift was a bootleg Billy Joel CD, but not just any old concert recording with terrible sound quality from the Indianapolis Coliseum, no, this one would be GOOD. One of those "import" bootlegs of a famous Billy Joel show, with high-quality sound (we used to call these "soundboard" recordings) and a real CD insert in the jewel case and everything.

I spent almost an entire afternoon canvassing used record shops for such a thing, and when I finally found one I deemed acceptable - I bought it at the old Record Castle on Cottman Avenue, which may or may not still be there, though ten-plus years on I have no memory whatsoever of what album it actually was - I paid a king's ransom of fifty dollars for it, an absolutely OUTRAGEOUS sum of money for me to spend on a gift at the time. Nowadays I feel like a heel if I don't spend at least that much on a gift (for someone in Gift Tier 1, at least: the parents, close friends, women I want to sleep with more than once), but back then, fifty fucking dollars! Great googly moogly. That was like a week's pay, and all for a woman who, looking back, I don't think I even liked that much.

Say it with me, folks: I was drunk.

But, in another phrase we should all be well-versed at saying along with me: I was right. It was, in fact, the perfect gift. It went over big. Huge.

So huge, in fact, that about a week later we stopped seeing each other. I was as distraught as one would expect from such a thing, though an alcohol intake as consistent as mine was back then tends to take all your emotional experiences, highs and lows, and just sort of smear them into one flattish line a few ticks below normal. I wish I could say I was so upset over the breakup - which really hardly could have been termed even that, the entire thing from start to finish went something like four and a half weeks - that I went and drank myself stupid, but I was already doing that on a regular basis to begin with.

In fact, the only unusual effect of the entire ordeal was that I couldn't listen to Billy Joel music for something like a year and a half afterward. It was the strangest thing. I wasn't the rabid stalker-person this woman was, but I had the double-CD greatest hits album and listened to it with some small regularity. I was a fan. But after the "breakup" (such as it was) I couldn’t bring myself to listen to a single song of his. I would change the channel on the radio when "Piano Man" came on. I would skip past "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" when it came up on Winamp. (Oh, god, remember Winamp? In the immortal whine of Luke Skywalker, "what a hunk of JUNK.")

And now, a decade on, when my musical tastes overall are essentially the same as they were in college - Bruce Springsteen, house music, and Frank Sinatra - now I still change the channel on the radio when "Piano Man" comes on (after cursing myself for leaving my iPod at home and being forced to listen to the radio in the first place), and I don't have to worry about skipping past "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" on iTunes (which thankfully replaced Winamp) because when it came on about 6 months ago, listening to it for the first time in years - with 6000 songs on your computer you can go a LONG time between plays - I had the sudden realization of, "this song fucking BLOWS," and deleted it along all the other Billy Joel songs on my computer. I've got 58 hours of Paul Oakenfold to listen to, I don't need this treacly, sentimental, overwrought shit.

Since this epiphany took place I have wondered a couple times if my current distaste for Billy Joel is really just a buried subconscious referent of the trauma - he said, with a snicker - from back then, or if I have actually grown somewhat and my tastes have experienced some small measure of maturing.

Then I remember a drunken conversation I had with a good friend of mine a couple days after the whole thing went pear-shaped:

"The only good thing to come out of all this," I said, "is that you know how much she loves Billy Joel? Right, well, now she's got that bootleg I got her for her birthday, and that is supposed to be some kind of historic shit or something, so she's never gonna get rid of it. And every time she listens to it, for the rest of her life, every time she listens to that CD, every time she hears a SONG on that CD, every time for the rest of her life, she's gonna think of me."

I took a long drink of vodka and said, "you know what that means? That means I win."

I still smile when I think of that little pearl of wisdom, so maybe there isn't so much maturing taking place after all.

Your Sonic Death Monkey Quizo Update

For someone who does not meet the clinical definition of a "sadist" necessarily, I do take an awful lot of joy in tormenting my friends. My one buddy, let's call him... say... "Ken Turner of Linwood, NJ," we had this conversation in his car on the way to dinner on Saturday night.

Ken: What are you doing?

Me: I'm plugging my iPod into your radio.

Ken: What? No! No! Don't.... oh, no.

Me: (searching for a song to play) What? What's the problem?

Ken: Oh, god, this is going to be horrible.

[music begins]

Ken: This isn't too bad...

[a few seconds pass]

Me: (singing) SHE'S ONLY SEVENTEEEEEEEEEEN!

Ken: Oh, god.

Me: (singing) DADDY SAYS SHE'S TOOOOOO YOUUUUNG BUT SHE'S OLD ENOUGH FOR MEEEEEEEE!

Ken: This is the most awful thing I've ever heard.

Me: Fine, I'll put something else on.

Ken: Why do you even have these songs on your iPod?

Me: (searching) I ask myself that all the time... ah, here we go.

Me: (singing) You've got style that's what all the GIIIIIIIIRLS SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!

Ken: Why are you doing this to me? Please, god, stop!

Me: (singing) All your suits are custom made in LOOOOOOOOOONNNNDOOOOOOOOON!

Ken: You're killing me. I can feel my brain dying.

Me: (searching iPod) Fine, fine...

Ken: Don't you have any music I won't hate?

Me: Probably not... ah! Found it.

[music plays]

Me : (singing): I NEVER MEANT TO BEEEE SO BAAAAAAD TO YOUUUUUUUU!

Ken: God you're annoying.

Me: (searching iPod) I'm not annoying, I'm charming.

Ken: Uh, yeah, here's the thing about that -

Me: LIDO MISSED THE BOAT THAT DAAAAAY HE LEFT THE SHACK!

Ken: Just... please, stop.

Me: (searching iPod) You love Coldplay, right?

Ken: AAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!

[bangs head on steering wheel]

Who needs to go out on a Saturday night when you can have that much fun just driving to dinner?

JLK

Your Good for Business Quizo Update

Aaaaaaaaand... we're back.

You know, once I quit smoking I figured that I would experience a cold like a normal person; instead of every little head cold being a two-week ordeal I'd be stuffy for three days and then get over it. (If you weren't aware, smoking while you have a cold makes your cold last a looooooong time.) This, however, does not appear to be the case, as I was sick for the better part of a week straight, though in fairness somewhat less so than was normal in the past. My cold, thankfully, never made it to the "hacking cough" phase, and for that I'm sure we're all eternally grateful.

After my recovery I made it down to Somers Point to hang out with my crew down there and for the first time in my life I went to a Japanese restaurant. Japanese restaurants can be somewhat difficult if, like me, you for the most part do not eat seafood. (For the record, I don't eat seafood unless I or someone I know and trust caught and cleaned it. You know how many things there are in a fish that can kill you?) So we're at the restaurant and I appear to have found the one thing on the menu that breathed gaseous oxygen before it decided to be food - Hibachi steak. I figure that even with all the other things that will be piled around the steak - rice, vegetables, etc - steak is, at its heart, pretty hard to screw up. It's steak, for god's sake.

Of our large group I'm the last one to order, and everyone else, being suicidal nutcases, is ordering vast quantities of exotic-sounding Mercury and Other Fish-Based Toxin Delivery Systems. They and the waitress/geisha are tossing back and forth all these Japanese (or at least Japanese-sounding) words, and after I order the waitress/geisha looks at me and very clearly says, "and how would you like that cooked?" like I'm at Nick's Roast Beef and the moment was totally ruined.

The food was great though, and my friends? The ones who ate sushi and eel and that water-dwelling shit? All dead. Ha ha, suckers!

Also, I am now totally down with the whole eating in a restaurant without shoes thing.

Driving back at 2:30 in the morning I was listening to the BBC World Service on NPR - I get twitchy if I don't hear an English accent at least once every 24 hours or so - the big story was that the UK is now entirely smoke-free in all public places (except the main terminal of Glasgow International, ba-dump-bump!) and how no one in England really gives a shit.

Except, of course, Joe Jackson.

You may or may not recall Joe Jackson. If you don't, that's okay, because he sucks. Imagine if, instead of being Elvis Costello, i.e. a vastly talented songwriter and performer who is, to put it charitably, not exactly the best-looking guy in the universe, you were an incredibly, horrifyingly untalented songwriter and performer and were, in fact, so hideously, mind-blowingly ugly that the subatomic structure of the very universe itself would recoil in horror at your approach and that all matter in your path would shunt itself into a parallel dimension when you were near to avoid your Medusa-like countenance. That's Joe Jackson. He's like Elvis Costello, only he sucks and is uglier. He had one semi-major hit in the US, "Is She Really Going Out With Him." He blows.

Anyway, this dickrag was so incensed at the smoking ban in New York in 2003 that he actually fled the city and the country and moved to England (where, it should be noted, he is fucking well from in the first place). He in fact wrote a song about the great injustice of having to go outside to smoke. No one, by any reputable accounting of the incident, cared. Now that a smoking ban has been enacted in England, he is so incensed that he is fleeing THAT country and moving to Germany.

Now understand, I do not say this as some kind of ex-smoker zealot, crusading against the evils of public smoking. If you want to smoke, go ahead. If you want to smoke near me, go ahead. I don't care. And when I did smoke I always tried to accommodate people I was with or near who did not appreciate it. I never once (I don't think) refused a polite request to please take my cigarette outside or flaunted someone's "no smoking in the house" rule. I don't especially care if people smoke or where they do it, nor do I care whether it is banned in public places (and similarly did not care when I did smoke). I care more about the fact that Joe Jackson is an obnoxious asshole whose songs suck and is so ugly that, if you are not properly shielded, his face could actually permanently sterilize you if you walked past him on the street.

Joe Jackson claims that a smoking ban is the first step towards a nanny or fascist state. Here's a hint, Joe: you are in England. You ALREADY live in a fascist state. The difference between our Colobus monkey of a president's attempt at secretly creating a fascist state and your government's long-since-successful implementation of one is that the English are much more pleasant and upbeat about it than we are. Here the government tries to curtail your rights and install a fascist architecture in secret and then acts like nothing happened (or, alternatively, like you're a terrorist for asking questions) when they get found out. In England, the situation is more like a nice gentleman in a top hat who says, "yes, well, here's a very short list of the rights you do have, here's a rather long list of the rights you DON'T have, and the tube will be here in precisely 94 seconds. Cheerio!"

And you know, Joe, a word of advice: if you're worried about living in a fascist state, Germany may not be the country for you.

JLK