OUT OF GAS AT THE STARTING LINE
You know, it's so nice to have a truly bitter cup of coffee.

I finally got around to making a pot this morning, after extending my vacation a little longer (okay, I just slept in after getting home late/early Tuesday Morning) and kind of padding around the house for a day, not thinking about anything. The only people who knew I was back were the people who randomly called. I didn't even turn on the computer yesterday.

But last night I actually wound up performing some improv comedy with the Funny Sheesh at Don't Tell Mama. I pretty much stayed out of everyone's way on stage, which was probably the best that could have happened.

Normally, improv is just a cool way to hang loose, but I was just bushed. So I'm just kind of getting my head around what's left, having had a big brunch (oh, brunch! If all this writing and performing crap goes down the drain, I'd move to England and open a brunch place and make a killing - they have absolutely nothing of the sort, and it baffles me, especially as they close the bars at 10 pm - everyone should be up nice & early, you'd think...?) and having made a couple of phone calls, well, I just feel like I stepped out of a vertigo-inducing thrill ride.

So today's job has been to get a press release to send out and to start putting together the zine. That's a full day right there.

IN WHICH A MINI-EPIPHANY ABOUT THE STATE OF ROCK AND ROLL IS EXPERIENCED
So I've been thinking a lot over the last week I've been in England about what (aside from the massive amount of rest) I can bring back to help me get a bit more together and on my merry way along the next few months of my professional life. What do I do now? How do I do what's left to be done a little better?

Tonight I got a clue. Leyna & I went to Cambridge to get a little nightlife. We were going to catch a movie, but neither of us recognized anything playing at the multiplex (except for Little Nicky or Blair Witch 2, so -- no.), so we wandered about the town and watched the drunken (and soon-to-be-drunken) college students throng about in the streets. We padded about the perfectly manicured lawns of the college, listening to the choir practice their caroling from outside the chapel. As the breeze shifted, the various parts of the (obviousy huge) chorus panned in and out of earshot, despite the fact that we were just outside the walls (along with about a dozen others, just standing quietly listening to the goings on inside). As they finished, deeper we went into the grounds, to the huge, completely dark back lawn* and watched the students walking hither and fro beneath the huge expanse of stars (a clear night! Huzzah!), before turning a corner and finding ourselves back in the city.

Cambridge is a gorgeous town. A lazy river rolls through the middle of it (you can rent gondolas), there's lots of upscale and downscale pubs and restaurants and lots of nightlife. We wound up at the Boat Race, a place Leyna had been before which she had enjoyed, and it was here I had a little epiphany.

For the first time in what seemed like forever, I heard a couple of rock and roll bands that were really into playing rock and roll you could dance to. Maybe it's just the songwriters I know, but I haven't been exposed to a whole lot of it of late. There's been plenty of that angsty stuff, and occasionally something with a beat, but nothing built for dancing.

These cats weren't the most original (in fact, they both played more covers than originals), but they played with a spirit I kind of miss. Maybe that's because I haven't been looking for it.

The first band, the Positives, were a trio the had the Clashy punk/ska sound down, even though the bass player clearly didn't have his heart in it. They had one song that was apparently called Jesus Christ, though for the whole song I thought they were singing about Vincent Price (damned accents). Then they announced they were going to do a Ramones tune, and they started Blitzkrieg Bop, but then segued into The KKK Took My Baby Away and a couple of others and brought the thing home in under two minutes anyways. I didn't know whether to be disgusted or impressed, but the audience ate it up so who cares.

The next band was Big 10, a true-blue full-on ska outfit. Three horns, guitar bass drums, and two count em two skinhead lead singers, both of whom were all into the funny faces and easy skankin, neither of whom could sing, and really who cared. The place was full of their fans, singing along to every song they played. That was only because they opened the set with three Bad Manners songs, and then segued into the English Beat's Ranking Full Stop. By the fifth or sixth song, the yobbos in the front were all sweating & shirtless, hanging all over each other and pouring their pints on each other's heads. It was enough to make an old rocka like meself shed a tear in gratitude. Yes, they were a cover act. And like Leyna kept saying, they're probably just working their way through law school. But, um... so? You could say the same for Genesis, and they were cool once.

My point is this: I just forgot something for the last little while, and these two bands helped remind me. I'm in a rock and roll band. There are precious few songwriters in the world (hard as that sometimes is to remember in the East Village), but a really cracking dance band is rarer still. I've got a shot at having both. And if these semi-talented wonks can put together a decent outfit or two, just think what the near-geniuses I'm in the midst of could produce with a little coaching.

Guys, thanks for the pep talk. I have some songs to write.

* I later found out this superdark back lawn was probably the inspiration for Dark Side of the Moon, according to the press kit (which was on the wall of the Boat Race) for Pink Fraud, which has to be the best name for a tribute act, like, ever.

A YEAR WITHOUT THANKSGIVING
So for the last two days I've been tootling around the South of England, staying in motels and seeing extremely old things and quaint little towns that look absolutely fabulous. It's been great, except I can't -- stay -- awake.

I've literally been sleeping between 12 and 16 hours a day, every day. It's all I can do to get out of bed before going to see something really cool, and finding another motel somewhere else and crashing again. This is great -- this is exactly what I needed, but -- here's a perfectly representative example. This has not been exaggerated one bit.

At one point, We rolled out of bed and grabbed breakfast (grease and coffee - no one does it better than the Brits, well at least the grease part) and I get into the car, and it's grey and crappy, and I promptly pass out again.

Suddenly, there's an elbow in my gut, and Leyna fairly shouts, "Tony! Look! Stonehenge!"

And I open my eyes, and right beside the road, behind a fence, is Stonehenge. The Stonehenge.

And I go back to sleep humming Spinal Tap's Stonehenge.

I have to admit - this little trip is maybe the most expensive nap I suspect I'll ever have.

DISPATCH
You'll have to pardon my childish writing. It's 2:30 am local time, and I slept as long as I could. I'll get some more story down as my way of trying to get back to sleep.

I'll have to ask her if she knows who Lorne is.

The house she rents is just off the main square in downtown Thetford, a town that through my few walkabouts seems to be made up of new parents and drunken hooligans (Leyna has kind of confirmed this too, though we're not really talking about sociology at this point; in fact we're not really talking about much of anything, aside from little snippets of catching up between these long, easy silences punctuated by banter with one of the kids. All of this kids are full of questions and stories, and even I am shocked at how well I seem to be getting on with them). The house itself is a detached Edwardian thing with no central heating (there's a couple of fireplaces, but the place, and everyone in it, is always a little chilly) with an arch over the front door that says LORNE HOUSE in that austere druidic block script that we Yanks only see on 4th rate celtic album covers from the mid 70s.

Aside from the cold, though, the place is wonderful, and perfect for four kids. Three big bedrooms upstairs, a kitchen/loo that is completely separate from the rest of the house (no open concept here) - oh, the fridge is in the garage - and the living room comfortably holds two couches and a playpen.

Yesterday we went to the site of an ancient abbey, which by now was little more than a series of stones marking where the walls should have been. It was a wet and cruddy day, but the town square was full of happy people talking really loudly. We horsed around a bit (I was the monster, someone always has to be the monster, I'm always the monster, arrrerrr) at one point and I dropped Meirion, the oldest, on her head (in my defense - moss grows everywhere, and Chuck Taylor All-Stars don't lend themselves well to running on slimy surfaces, and she was okay and even forgiving, though I was mortified) and then after a quick grab of sandwiches, arnica cream and a disposable camera (my digital one, bought for trips just like this one, is sitting in Kris Sour's car in Yonkers, I was such a schmuck to forget) we were on our way to the ruins.

It seemed to be the site of a school now, with a lot of uniformed children horsing around and a modern playground and some tennis courts just a fence away from this fairly huge medieval abbey, with little knee-high rows of stones all about with the occasional still-surviving column. the kids went and hid in the holes for the fireplaces (I'm guessing; we didn't get a guidebook) while I hummed Max Metrault's Knocking About The Ruins and pushed words around with Leyna. It was wonderful.

Then we came back here and she and I made fajitas for everyone, and well, that was about it for the day. See, mom? I'm vacationing!

At one point, she asked me if I wanted to actually do the driving someplace because the baby had kept her up all night and she was tired. I hope she was kidding. Just sitting in the passenger seat without a steering wheel was enough to give me vertigo, and at night, the urge to cross over in front of the oncoming headlights would have been a source of great humour to the middle-America small-town newscasters. They love that idiot-of-the-week stuff.

There's a few other things - it's always dark here, which was why I got up in the first place - I figured it could 8:00 am and it would be black (also, I've made a point of not looking at clocks -- my watch is in my suitcase). The cats, some of which date back to when she lived in Canada, must stay outside except for one, Pieshop (I love that name), who is completely deaf and tame, and who just regained his sense of smell, so he's always looking for love (read: food), which is nice. There's a few other things - but I hear the baby crying upstairs, and it's time I stopped anyways, at least for the moment.

NEWS FLASH:
ENGLAND CHILLY, DAMP!
SOME REST GOT!

So the biggest problem with the flight I had actually booked was that it left from Newark, an airport I had never been to before (like I hang out in airports or something, but -- still), which meant I had to basically leave right after brunch on Sunday, and it was to get in at 6:11 in the morning, into Gatwick (which couldn't be further away from where Leyna lived, which meant we were talking maximum effort and time-wastage for a 6 1/2 hour flight).

But it worked out okay. Customs were quick, but I thought they had lost my guitar (turns out they had placed it in a special area for fragile items), and then Leyna was in the wrong terminal so it wound up being almost 8:30 before we finally met.

We spent most of yesterday catching up and meeting the kids (it disturbs me how well they all get along. I refuse to think it's simply because they're all girls - it's definitely completely attributable to the parenting), and then I went to sleep and slept for about 85 hours last night, which if not a complete cure-all sure was a substantial step in the right direction.

It's damp and chilly here (Really, Tony? In England? In November?), and I just really hope I brought enough sweaters. Everything else seems to be taking care of itself.

(On a completely unrelated and pointless note: On UK keyboards, the @ key and the " keys are switched. What's with that?)

Today we're going to visit some 1000-year-old something or other, and then I don't know. By tonight, I'll be an expert on everything I saw, though, and I'll post again when I can.

SMALL BIT OF EDITING
Change yesterday's entry about work to the past tense.

I got laid off today.

I came in this morning, and the company was being restructured, and they were laying off a lot of staff, and -- and they handed me a neat little severance package envelope and suggested I take the day off and come back at my leisure to clean my stuff out.

If I wanted, I believe I could get an equally lucrative and flexible gig somewhere else, especially now that I have local references and a bit of history working in the country... you know.

But there's a part of me that's wondering if I could live off my savings and put the music & writing thing in motion enough that I could start supporting myself before the gravy train ran out.

We're at T plus six hours here, so of course I have no idea whatsoever.

Anyhow. I hope I enjoy this vacation next week. I'll not get another one for a while. Whatever I wind up deciding (hey, at least I have some choices), I'm going to be getting to work on it pretty quick.

So please erase my work number from your address book - they never like me giving it out in the first place. I think I'm going down to a whiskey bar and listen to some standard old torch singer absolutely butcher some old standards, and then tomorrow morning I shall brunch with my Toronto friends who happen to be visiting at what just happens to be a slight bummer of a time (for me, for of course my opinion is the only one that matters. Right? Right?).

Postings of substance and humour to come after a good night's sleep. Or six.

A TRANSPLANTATION PIECE
The office I currently work in is a block from Central Park.

For the last few months, it's been wonderful to go over on my lunches and sit in the grass all summer while the neohippies flung their frisbees way over our heads into the woods repeatedly and the illegal beer vendors bounced sweatingly along between the blankets and picnics with the glass bottles clinking loudly in their heavy square backpacks, especially if I was with my acting friends who have the enviable talent of being able to relax completely for many minutes at a time and then sproing back to life like someone plugged them back in, a talent I have yet to master (to my current dismay; see previous posts about burnout ad absurdum). Not that I don't dig my music friends, but -- they just can't calm down sometimes. You know.

The smell of the cart-horses standing at tired attention was (and is) pleasant and sweet, and even if the sandwiches in this neighborhood are 8 bucks and the endless cell phone cacaphony made a Christmas in Hell-type din all over the place, still, it was nice to have a welcome green patch close by on which to spend a few middays over the last few months.

Course, the building I work in is something like 800 years old, with the electrical system powered by a few hamsters in the basement and a Flintstonesque pterodactyl frantically plugging phone connections in the wall somewhere I'm sure (or at least that's how the flickering lights and spotty on/off telephony sure feels). And the elevators -- the elevators don't break down as much as they work almost completely at random (although there are some vestigial buttons to keep you occupied while you bump and trundle up & down the shaft).

But all this pastoral backward perfection is about to change. Next summer, my early afternoon chill sessions will be strictly pavement once again; the slivers of light between the endless rows of skyscrapers shall be my only source of color, and the sandwiches will cost more not less (nay, can it be?), because I think we're moving to Times Square.

Ah, who needs that yucky greenery anyways? I wanna hang out with more tourists!

THE END OF THE IGNORANCE
Aaron Shuman's post-mortem (in the excellent zine Bad Subjects) is elegant as hell. It tries to put the Presidential race in context with the many other local races, and talks about how deep (and eerily equal) the real divide is, between the power elite and the rest of us. To wit:

When the Democratic and Republican party machineries consolidated in support of Prop. 21 [California bill proposing harsher penalties for juvenile offenders] behind police, prison guards, and district attorneys' associations, the opposition coalition was a unique formation of students, teachers, civil libertarians, clergy, judges, parole officers, social workers, and others who worked closely with youth through the system. Perhaps we're seeing the first electoral successes of that formation, arriving as stories of youth organizations uniting with teachers' unions to push a broad swath of educational reform. And college students are uniting with campus workers to unionize schools while prison moratorium activists are uniting with labor progressives to divest union pension funds from prison construction.

But I have yet to find mention of any of these alignments in the mass press. Nor has any attention been paid to local politics, nor has there been a desire to provide political context, or a willingness to consider the Greens' effect on any race other than the presidential. Instead writing has defined the Green Party as one man and suggested that both should have consigned themselves to the dustbin.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees this virtual tie, and its resulting open debate literally everywhere in the country, being the perfect consciousness-raiser for everyone, from the academics to the laborers, from the center to the fringe, from couch potato to the workaholic, from the... um, you get the idea.

MHEH HEH. HE SAID "ENGORGED". HEH HMEH HEH.
I will admit that it's possible I'm seeing the world through burnout-colored glasses at this point, but ... I think the people I know and read might be all a little electioned out at this point.

No matter how interesting I find this whole back & forth about vote counts and deadlines and lawsuits and old white guys from another era rising in what they feel is righteous indignation that the Constitution requires the Florida State Commission to blah blah blah good of the American people something something etc they're trying to steal this election yadda yadda yadda, and quite frankly I am absolutely thrilled about it for a ton of reasons, but -- I'm a little engorged on it. The petty people on either side of this little shitstorm have been a lot quieter than I thought they'd be, and people are bordering on civil. And it's great, it's fantastic, but it's a lot for an unstudied mind to take in all at once. To go from candy to caviar in terms of quality news reporting would give anyone indigestion, and quite frankly I'm glad I'm leaving the country for a week. All this intellectualizing and historical research creeping its way into the journalism of the major news outlets is starting to make me a little lightheaded. Dude, I left college for a reason.

Look. I know it can't last, and I'm loath to take a break from it because I fear the headlines'll go back to every possible variation on "Who Blew Who" right quick after Tweedledumber wins (and we just know he somehow will, don't we? Like it matters, but -- don't we?), but -- I wish I felt a little less guilty spending my valuable time reading up on stories about, oh, for example, Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband suing Pfizer or advances in cereal creation technology or something, you know?

Maybe my perspective will be different on the other side of the ocean.

DEPRESSING RARE OCCURRENCES II
You know, I was just pulling out of my two-week funk. I found out some footage of me playing the Summer Antifolk Festival in Tompkins Square Park is online, the England trip is approaching, the zine has been well-received, I wrote a couple of pretty good songs on the weekend, I got some sleep, the press kit is almost ready (I'll let you know when you can read it), it's been a good couple of days.

And then, in the wake of the whole ever-continuing election debacle (waiting sucks, eh?), Mister Rogers hangs up his cardigan for good, and (and!) the Harlem Globetrotters lose a game. Same day. Boom. Strange and terrible days, these are. Strange days, indeed.

But for a moment there, for just a second, for just a teeny tiny millisecond there, I almost forgot: it never, ever, ever ends.

Anyone up for ice cream?

T MINUS 6 DAYS TILL ENGLAND
I've been excited about leaving for England all weekend. It's still too early to pack properly, so instead I've been channeling all my energy into cleaning house, seeing as the housemate was away for the weekend (not that Peter's a slob, cos he's not, but -- it's easier for me to do stuff like this when there's no one else around.)

In fact, I had a large rant about how filthy my apartment was, and then I thought, dude, why don't you just clean it instead? (I'm paraphrasing.)

Anyway. What with Lu coming down from Toronto on Wednesday for a few days and then my departure, this beautiful map struck a chord tonight when I saw it (through fark). Perhaps, when I return from my transcontinental voyage, you and I can retire to the sandy beaches of Northern Alabama, and we can drink Sleeman Honey Brown ale and quote old SCTV episodes until my Rheostatics tape runs oot. Total bliss.

AND THE CAT SHALL LIE WITH THE DOG
So how do Pat Buchanan and his people come off being the class act in this election?

From Salon, but these quotes are all over the place by now:

"Do I believe that these people inadvertently cast their votes for Pat Buchanan? Yes, I do," said [Buchanan's Florida coordinator, Jim] McConnell. "We have to believe that based on the vote totals elsewhere."

Says [Palm Beach Reform Party Chairman Jim] Cunningham of Buchanan's numbers in Palm Beach County: "It's in the hundreds; it's not a significant amount." Asked if the county is a "Buchanan stronghold," as the Bush campaign has asserted, Cunningham said: "I don't think so. Not from where I'm sitting and what I'm looking at.

"They can say that because they would like to believe that," Cunningham said, "because the votes we received they would like to believe were not mistaken votes." Asked how many votes he would guess Buchanan legitimately received in Palm Beach County, Cunningham said, "I think 1,000 would be generous."

Both McConnell and Cunningham say that they agree with the comments of Buchanan himself on Thursday's "Today" show: "When I took one look at that ballot on Election Night ... it's very easy for me to see how someone could have voted for me in the belief they voted for Al Gore," Buchanan said.

Between Bush continuing to offer jobs to his friends and intellectual superiors despite the fact that the election isn't over yet, and Little Al talking about lawsuits like they're the only promise he was ever gonna keep in the first place, with the petty little debates over how things are going to be counted and revotes and breakdowns in communication even with the whole world there to watch and gawk, it just baffles me the only person seeming to concede moral ground he's not really entitled to is... the Nazi.

100 YEARS OF SOLID FOOD
It wasn't so much that Lunchin was low energy in their show last night, or that the people that came weren't enthusiastic and screamy and clap-alongy like they usually are, or that it was a pretty small audience (it was, after all, midnight on a school night when they went on), although all of those things were true. It was that it didn't have that air of Importance that great gigs have. There was very little special about it.

Now I know that's not a disqualifier. You can't hit a home run every time at bat, and if they were going to have a low-energy show, it was good to have it when only their hardcore fans were there, but -- I got more pure satisfaction out of the long rainy walk I took before the show than out of the show itself.

There is a certain amount of guilt for thinking this. But not a lot.

My current state of burnout has reduced me to kvetching about politics and insomnia, and escaping through the creature comfort of wandering about the city on a warm wet night with just my head for company, and you know, it was nice to be reminded of the inescapably sweet conclusion that a little bit of solitude sometimes goes a long, long way.

I GUESS IT'S A MOVEMENT, THEN
This week's New Yorker (an obligatory link - they don't post articles on their site) has a piece on the sine qua non of this page and the whole weblogging phenomenon. It basically outlined the growth on online journaling using Meg and Jason's online romance as a backdrop. It's a charming story, which I had never heard before (apparently I have been living under a rock), but the article makes a couple of assumptions that I've been thinking about all day.

First, I don't have a job in the internet industry someplace. I don't design webpages (can you tell?), I don't work in the Valley, I often sleep nights, I'm nothing like what allegedly is the very model of a modern major blogging guy. I know I'm not the only reg'lar working stiff around, but -- I'm a secretary by day, and a performer by night. I don't have the luxury of being able to surf for a couple of hours a day to find the truly interesting or insightful pearls among the amber waves of dreck, or even read all the blogs I want to read, let alone keep up on the events of the rest of the world as much as I'd like. I barely have time to write for myself, and certainly I don't do it enough. (Writhing's what I do, fergawdsake, it's my life's work, as much as I have a life's work, and I don't do it enough.*)

Like everyone, I have favorite sites and logs (and magazines and bands I follow and novels and sports teams and whatnot), which I read, watch and otherwise dig as often as I can get away with, and I would love that favorites list to become as long as my bookmarks page at home, as big as the Library of freaking Congress. But it gets back to the whole busy thing.

And I despise the whole busy thing. One can do a billion things at a time, and still not be busy. And I know way too many people who are just swamped, even though they sit on their asses all day and all night.

That being said.

I would love to design my site a little better (this gaudy pastel blocks-and-pigs design, originally put up as an incentive to make something real, has been up for, um, since, like, um, it's been way too long. Damn). I'd love to do more, always I want to do more than I'm doing. I would love for there to be world peace. I would love it if Bush and Gore were disqualified from the Presidential race. I would like to dance more. I would like to be more involved in this new blogging movement that the New Yorker belittles while glorifying it. I'm just a soul whose intentions are good.

I'm just going through a moment of being overwhelmed. It'll pass. It always does.

*oh. Root of the angst has possibly been discovered. Damn.

BIG SHOCK - SMUG BASTARD CLAIMS VICTORY
Despite the fact that no winner has been declared, and the Florida body count continues with no word yet on the outcome, Bush has already started appointing cabinet posts. Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Andy Card have already received job offers from this guy.

Last I checked, he doesn't have a job himself yet. Dude, it's way too early to start being "gracious in victory." Never mind the implications of not knowing how to negotiate a victory for yourself, and put aside for a minute that this lack of attention to detail (cart first, then horse, Mr. President!) will beget scandal after scandal after scandal in an all-Republican government sure as I'm typing these words, but -- it's just plain rude.

Again, I'm not crazy about Gore, but I hope Bush has to eat some public crow here, for probably the first (and last) time in his whole life. I fear it won't happen, but if it does, those whoops of laughter you'll hear, wherever in the world you are, well that'll be me.

DENOUEMENT (or I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW)
I'm going blue for a little while for the way the election has turned out. But I'm not really too saddened, all told.

Voter turnout is up. Everyone I know voted. (Except for Aashish, who forgot to register, and he's caught lots of grief about it.) It was way fun as elections go. And really, everyone felt like they made a difference. I made a difference. This is good. It's all good.

Time to resume my actual life. Maybe put some real clothes on this page, you know, clean it up a bit (like some others have done so very well).

The rain is gone. It's gonna be a bright sunshiney day.

VIGIL
The news hasn't finished happening yet tonight. We threw a party here, with a few people over and our broken TV that keeps turning off whenever it feels like it, and a couple of six-packs and order-in Chinese food. We had a couple of Democrats, a Republican, a couple of Naderites and a non-voter. It was real fun to feel out the spin each of tonight's developments has had on everyone, and I'm shocked on how much we've all agreed.

We tried writing Hillary Clinton's acceptance speech by committee and got it disturbingly close to being right.

As of this writing, we're down to the last four states (okay, down to Florida and three states that the news sites insist no longer matter), and we're also down to me and Peter's girlfriend Kim (R), who is dozing on the couch under my faux leopardskin coat which I got as a present for helping Lois move last week. Every 10 minutes or so, she wakes up and smiles at whatever they're saying, and then passes out again. Everyone else is home or in bed.

You know, I kind of figured Bush would win, and it completely sucks that Nader didn't even get 3%, let alone 5%, but still, I'm happy at the fact that there were a lot of people I know who actually give a shit. These kind of people I can actually get on with, even if they all think I'm some kind of pinko liberal anarchist or something (I've certainly been called way worse, since lunch).

This is not the time for analysis. There'll be a lot of postmorteming going on for sure in the days to come, on this page and many, many others. But this moment, after the party, with the decision still kind of unsettled, with everyone all electorally sated ... there's a kind of peace in the apartment tonight.

Now would they finish counting the freaking ballots in Florida already so I can go to bed?

INSOMNIAC DIARY
Tonight I went down to the open mike (shoulda known I wasn't gonna relax) and there was a little election fever in the air. (I guess it's just everywhere, and I'm simply resigned to it for another couple of days, after which it becomes long-haul public awareness training.) Anyway, the host, Lach, calls me out for everyone (hey, this is Tony, he edits the zine you're all holding in your hands right now...) and then asks me if I have a favorite candidate.

(I thought everyone knew. I've been more out about my Nader-philia than Phil Donahue, fergawdsake.)

Anyway, I mention Ralph's name, and the murmurs sound about half and half dissent/assent, which is cool. But Lach rips into me. Apparently he wrote a song earlier in the night called "Nader is a Scumbag," which baffles me because, while there are some perfectly valid (I'm being generous here) reasons to not like Nader, far as I can tell, scumbaghood is not really one of them.

Nerdy? Sure. Asocial? Okay, that could be off-putting. Don't believe in his policies? Fine. Can't be bribed? That could be a problem if you're in the bribing business, I guess. But Scumbag? I don't see it, not even under sarcasm.

But whatever. If the song is funny, of course none of that matters. But there was a bit of that nasty vibe to the goings on. It was that desperate, closing-time-at-the-Undecided-Voter-Corral feeling again. I started talking for the sake of talking, and when I got home my mouth was still in full-on rhetoric mode, and I ran down another 15 minutes with my housemate about how important Nader's candidacy has already been to the political landscape, before I finally came down. (Peter is, incredibly, still undecided. He's got me in one ear and his Republican girlfriend in the other. Poor fella.)

I've already got a bunch of articles for the December issue of A/M, and this one's only about 6 hours old. It's nice to be in motion. So anyway, now, to bed, for real.

ON THE DOWN SIDE OF MARRIAGE
I finished A/M at about 3:30 this morning, and I've been in a blue funk all day. It's been nice and quiet, but I find I have the attention span of a hummingbird.

I'm aware that I'm not a natural writer. I love it, I don't totally suck at it, but I definitely understand that there's something else that maybe I was a natural talent at that I'd have been able to glide through this life doing.

That being said, I've been writing since girls were still icky (see I ain't always been the mack daddy I am now, and I know how hard that is to believe), just not well. I've written three novels (including most of one this summer), all of which are terrible. I mean, unreadably bad. Trust me. I've written some songs that are pretty damned good, and some of my reviews are pretty inspired in parts, and when I get a full head of steam up, I can rant like an 83-year old Dennis Miller whose Geritol has long ago been replaced with crystal meth. So it's not that I hate everything I do. But still. It's just something I've worked really hard at for a long time.

I've been doing it most of my life. And now it's like I'm married to writing. It's a relationship that has kind of taken on a life of its own. Some days I write because I really feel like I have to say something, this particular thing, before I die; other days I write because -- it's a marriage, and you make sacrifices so that the relationship continues smoothly. I get my great marital reward whenever something good pops out of the end of my pen or printer, but do I ever I pay my price sometimes. (By the way, it's not the weblog that's putting these demands on me - I've been feeling like this since I was in high school.)

I want the zine to be more politically aware and in touch with the world than it is. I want to be able to write polemics and inspirational hymns and share them with other people who write inspired polemics and hymns and convince people that the enemy is not the guy in the red tie or the guy in the -- the other guy in the red tie, or even the corporate elite in their concrete bunkers and their gated communities.

The real enemy is apathy. And my ability to string words together, such as it is, which I've beaten into myself pretty much because I really just wanted to be good at it, is the only cure for apathy I can think of right now.

I'll keep thinking, but first, I think I'm going to go home and listen to some Johnny Cash and have a glass of red wine and pass out on the couch as the sirens blow past my windows like any of this matters. (And we'll see how long that lasts.)

NADER: A LONGER VIEW
Yes, Michael Albert is one of them longwinded lefties, but these are the kind of times where his words are a genuine inspiration to me. He paints a bigger and more coherent picture than I've read anywhere of what has to happen both before and after Tuesday, and why:

The [vote Gore to keep Bush out vs. vote Nader to get him his 5%] discussion denies that with elections, you lose, you lose, you lose -- and then you win -- and thus all those losses weren't really losses at all, but were, instead, part of a process of building eventually definitive support.

For my whole active life, the left (such as it is) has been in utter disarray. I came to consciousness during the Carter presidency, when he was under attack every day on stupid little things that clearly didn't matter in the long haul, even to my 8-year-old mind. (Now that I've grown up and read up on some of the things he was trying to do, I'm even more appalled at what the (soon-to-be) Reaganites did to his image.)

The election this Tuesday, and beyond, represents a chance to finally get the anti-corporate majority in this country at least facing in the proper direction again, for the first time in a generation. Any candidate that doesn't pay more than lip service to taking care of its working class is a candidate that doesn't have the best interests of his future constituents at heart. No matter who wins, the hard work is coming after Tuesday, when this little army of Naderites has to stay together and hold Bush's (or Gore's) feet to the fire on every small-print kickback, every cut to a basic human service, every contract awarded to a school buddy without due process, every bill that erodes the quality of life for the other 98% of American citizens, and every unnecessary headline-diverting military intervention that comes down the pike.

Because regardless of what happens in a couple of days, there's gonna be plenty of that action going down.

THE OTHER NEW YORK MARATHON
It is merely a coincidence that this morning is the start of the New York Marathon. Today A/M has to be finished, and it might be a few hours yet. I still have to finish the editorial, and there's a lot to cover in there (Right now I think I'd be able to bang out 600 words on the stuff that's between the cushions on my couch, but I won't*), but everything else is just plugging in edited text and proofing masters.

From what I've seen, pretty much all the weblogs I normally visit (over on the left there) seem to have kind of taken it easy this weekend. Any particular reason? Change of season? Election burnout? Do good weblog entries, ah, come in spurts? Mine sure seems to.

So as a break from this zine stuff yesterday, I went out with the boys last night, which was great and necessary. We went to Al's house and watched True Lies (it's a pretty good movie to heckle - the plot, continuity problems [how does detonating a nuclear device with eyesight of South Florida possibly double as a romantic moment? The Harry Potter books are more realistic than this], the racial and sexist stereotypes are handled so poorly you just have to laugh, especially if the movie was chosen before you got there) and drank cheap Panamanian beer which made the idiocy funnier, anyway.

From the Obvious Dept: Tom Arnold is so bad, doesn't even deserve a metaphor for piss-poor in this weblog. I just spent a minute of my life that I'll never have back trying to think something adequate and unpointless to say about him. Ugh. Oh well, at least he's not as repulsive as Jim Carrey.

As I was watching this flick, I was thinking about the actor who played the head Filthy Arab Terrorist(tm). He did a fine job, and I'm sure he's justifying reinforcing all the horrible things the world thinks of His People somehow. Maybe he did it for the paycheck, maybe for the exposure, maybe because it was his fantasy to slap Tia Carrere around or something, I don't know. But what kind of work does being Filthy Arab Terrorist Number One lead to in Hollywood? Maybe the Academy looks well upon taking roles like this before people know who you are. A part of me (a very large, majority part of me, in fact) does not really want to know.

*You're welcome.

WHY THIS WEBLOG ISN'T CALLED "THE MURDER OF BRYAN ADAMS"
It occurs to me that I haven't explained where the name Evil Twin Theory came from.

My first band, The Toes, like all First Bands, was, if I may say, terrible. There were flashes of hubristic inspiration every once in a while, but by and large we stunk. We couldn't play, I couldn't sing, our songs were repetitive and stupid... Only certain bands can get away with that and make it work, and that's generally due to something else - desperation, or chemistry, or chemical dependency, or something.

Anyway, we did okay for a crappy band. We screwed around the club scene in Toronto for a couple of years, and then broke up (well, from what I heard the breakup was a ruse to get me out of the band - they're apparently still together, though they haven't played a gig in 6 or 7 years*).

Anyway, I played solo for a few years, actually learning how to play and y'know, write and stuff, and then I got another band together, a pretty rocking zydecoey punkish outfit, and we had the hardest time thinking up a name. We actually reached an impasse where we had no name that everyone could agree on. So we went with a name that had a natural time limit on it: The Murder of Bryan Adams.

It looked great on a marquee, and had we had a bit more marketing savvy we might have been able to do something with it, but after about six months of local press and the odd national piece, I finally got a phone call from Bruce Allen, Bryan's manager, one Sunday morning at about dawn, basically saying Ha ha, very cute, we have big lawyers, cut it out, fun's over.

Stupid me acquiesced. Anyway, the name we took after that (after a couple of other names we couldn't settle on) was The Evil Twin Theory, a name inspired by the cheap plot device, and the fact that Bill's (the old lead guitarist for the Toes) favorite band was Game Theory, who I wasn't crazy about, but that name... that name had something to it.

So the Evil Twin Theory lasted a couple of years as well, toured Canada a couple of times, and ultimately went the way of all bands. But I loved the name. We printed t-shirts up, of which I still have maybe a half-dozen.

That's pretty much it. This weblog means the name gets to survive. Maybe I'll print up some more t-shirts again.

*which doesn't mean anything. I mean, look at Boston. Tom Scholz goes a decade between meals ferchrissake.

TREADING WATER IN A SEA OF LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND -- SOMETHING
So is it just me, or is everyone starting to get electioned out a little bit? The few people I know that are still on their respective crusades (here in New York, at least) are starting to get that desperate look in their eyes that says, one more vote, we just need one more, please, will you be the one?, like it's fifteen minutes to closing time at the last singles bar on Earth.

Everyone I know knows I'm voting for Nader, and I'm happy to talk about it with anyone, but there's a lot of people who just don't want to hear it anymore. They're voting Gore or Bush or Browne (lot of Browne voters in the songwriting scene, actually - I guess their thinking is something like if the government isn't going to support the arts or aid the poor properly, might as well not bother having anything more than a bare-bones government at all). I respect that. At least they've thought it through.

There's very little apathy in the scene that I see, and that's wonderful news.

Now I'm aware that statistics and polling are fairly exact sciences, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't put an equal amount of faith into this poll, conducted completely on Antwon's limited preconceptions and hunches about each of the 51 states (Somehow, the state of Cindy! is still undecided). It sort of reminds me of the Diane Chambers or Jeff Johnson methods of NFL prognostication. And just as accurate.

STATE OF THE EVIL TWIN ADDRESS
So now that I've been playing with the form in this web-log thingy for about a month, it's time to think about... steering it a bit.

I mean, on one hand, doing all this personal talk and whining about how tired and sad and scared I sometimes am is certainly a kind of catharsis, which saves the people I speak with from having to smile transparently and pretend to listen when I spill over the edge (not that I've stopped that in the last month, but... well). And on another hand, it is nice to have a Lower Manhattan society pages thing going on (like in today's other posts, for example).

And part of me thinks that no one really wants (or certainly needs) to read another didactic bully pulpit to harangue the two people that read this every day as to what my semi-informed opinion is on the coming election or popular culture or human nature or whatever.

My point is, I'm aware that making and maintaining this log is a bit egotistical. Okay, a lot.

Part of me says, yeah, so what? Keep in practice with the writing thing, be as transparent as you can, let your friends and whoever may be even temporarily interested in on what's going on inside your head a little bit, this is all right and good, especially for someone intent on entering (semi-elected) public life.

And even in the last month, I have seen some people I have greatly admired.

I have learned to really admire people like Amber at following eden, who have the strength of conviction to continuously explore what they want to explore in the face of a crushing amount of day-to-day.

And I admire weblogs like lines & splines, for taking an esoteric passion and turning it into a perfectly accessible thing of beauty.

And I admire Steven Baum at ethel the blog for being able to boil down immense amounts of information about myriad things and derive conclusions that resonate with the force of truth.

And I admire Greg Knauss' Entirely Other Day for his brevity. I'd do good to learn me some of that brevity stuff.

The best way to get better at anything, be it writing, being classy, giving speeches, solving Rubik's cube, taking breaks when you need to take breaks, humility, writing a relevant and enjoyable weblog, slam dunking a basketball, or being patient while the world occasionally catches up to you, is to just get better at it. There's no secret. That's all it takes.

The above four examples are how I define better right this minute.

Next up: the brevity thing.

THINK OF IT THIS WAY, THEN
I absolutely love this analogy, even though Erin at Smile, Asshole thinks it's lame:

Voting is like singing along at a Foo Fighters concert. When it's just you, you don't stand a chance at being heard over the drums, bass, guitars, etc. unless maybe it all hits a quiet point and you scream your lungs out, like the fairy girls at Tori concerts wailing, "I WANT TO HAVE YOUR BABIES, TOOOOORRRRIIIIII!"

But: If your friend next to you starts singing along, and the guy next to her gets in the spirit and starts singing along, and, of course, there are patches of singing groups all over the amphitheater already, and all the little patches of people inspire the non-singing people to start singing, and pretty soon [!] EVERYONE is singing along! And then Dave Grohl notices this, cuts out the music, holds the microphone out towards the audience, and a massive sea or people are singing, "YOU KNOW YOU MAKE ME BREAK OUUUUT."

("make me break ouuu-howwww-ouuuut...")

So, you see, you have to vote. Because those "cool concert moments" fall flat on their face when only 1/3 of the people in the audience know the lyrics.

So. anyone want to start a pool on whether we'll get over the 50% mark for voter turnout next Tuesday? I hope so. The higher, the better. I'm pretty much of the opinion that those who choose not to vote get no right to complain for the next four years. Which for some people would be positively crippling.

RIIIIGHT, THE MUSIC, I FORGOT
So Sanjay dragged me out to the Raven last night, kicking and screaming (well, certainly against my natural instinct to run off and hide), and Brer Brian was playing when we got there, with his beat-up busking acoustic guitar pumped through a fuzzbox (way overloading the signal to the point where he didn't even have to actually strum the chords, it was all feedback, even though it was quiet enough to talk over), and he sang this lovely song about Shania Twain getting into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was energetic and tense and funny and cool. This is what folk music is now, or should be.

And The Voyces played a couple of songs, just Brian Wayne and Laurel Hoffman and the guitar, and I hadn't heard them in like forever, and they were sweet, and I missed them for not having seen them (they're both playing house a little bit and rehearsing a new band a little bit and, well, I've not been around much myself, I guess).

And I even borrowed a guitar from Last-Up Larry and played the Katharine Hepburn song. It's still very new and I really like it, even though it's a little plaintive, it's what passes for the blues as I sing them these days. (Oh, and hey Amber, I'll be putting up some MP3's again soon, probably this weekend, at some point when I'm playing hooky from laying out the zine. Which will happen, guaranteed.)

I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW (cough, cough)
I haven't felt much like writing at all. I went on a bit of an internal rampage yesterday, and skipped out on all the amazing things I could have done for Halloween.

But a couple of people have taken the time to make the point that all this is temporary and it's all going to work out, which (vague as these homilies are) was a little of what it turns out I needed.

My friend Lu has an extra bike in her garage which I can use. This is wonderful, even if the garage happens to be 600 miles (and an international border) away.

(All problems have solutions. I keep forgetting.)

So Lu rocks. Sound the clarion call. Also I want to make sure Mary knows I'm real grateful for letting me vent a little into her ear.

Tonight I think I'm going to the Raven for a drink with a couple of friends, because that's exactly what my body doesn't want to do. Left to my own devices (like, say, last night, when all the parties and the big parade were happening), I'll just stay home and stare at the wall and slowly, incrementally, lose what's left of my little mind.

So. Beer it is.