american election result

President-Elect Donald John Trump (2024)

The only thing to do is rip the bandaid off, so let’s do it. Walk through the front door in broad daylight. 

I spent Election Day 2024 at a polling place in a well-off suburb in California, so my observations have no writerly power or character of place. No declining manufacturing town or Route 66 voodoo. The people I saw were comfortable but annoyed, whether from getting scripts that need complete rewrites (“the literal dick-measuring contest just doesn’t have the propulsion it needs, the third act dies there”) or not getting the financing production deserves (“so if Atlanta gets back with fucking this, you’re somehow totally okay with that”). I got asked to participate in two comedy sketches. The hell with me.

In retrospect, I could have spent more time reflecting on how the average dude I met in real life at like the gas station had become Trump-sympathetic, and on how the average person I know is unemployed or wildly underemployed and everybody’s too embarrassed financially to meet for coffee. The lumber mill my brother worked at went out of business. Going to the grocery store actually, tangibly did become a weird nightmare.

Culture war stuff always goes cancerous when something real basic is real wrong. The economy felt horrible under Biden, and voters didn’t forgive him for it. Voters wanted to punish him for it. Harris had the professional class bloodlessness of a boss from head office who flies in to fire your ass and she said the main problem with Biden was nothing. Everything sucked. Maybe that’s all there is to it.

Before the election, it was kind of interesting that Biden took a year too long to get out of the race. But it’s now clear that if he had been the nominee, he would have lost in an electoral landslide people broadly thought was impossible in the 21st century. His legacy is secure before he even leaves office. He’s ruined.

The only interesting thing is that Harris didn’t lose. She got killed. It wasn’t even close. The campaign failed catastrophically in every single way that we can measure. The Democrats didn’t lose. Losing is boring; leads to boring articles “analyzing” “missteps.” The Democrats got hurtled into a ravine and we burned their house down. 

Trump didn’t win. He achieved flight. He’s Mega-President now. Forget that stuff about Clinton just being a historically bad candidate because this guy is Super-Reagan. His comeback is exactly as insane as it looks.

What to do with the Democrats, those perverts, that barely legitimate cover for a humiliation fetish? I don’t care anymore. Make it look like an accident and make insurance cover it. Somebody else’s job. Have fun, kids.

It’s important to be plain about that stuff because the media is complicit. It’s an enabler for misery. No more flowery bullshit about trying to understand Trump voters, no more digging deep in holy books to find enlightenment, no more clucking our tongues and stroking our beards and saying “what’s to be done with this Homer Simpson?” because this thing is precisely what it looks like. No wallowing in it. Time to assess and respond. Art of War type shit.

It all boils down to this: when Juror #2 was announced, there’s no way people really believed the production would succeed. The pandemic was still an X factor. Clint Eastwood was well into his 90s and had to call in sick several times. Strikes kept holding things up. It didn’t really have any stars. And it’s, what, a legal thriller? Sounds like a fake movie so a 94-year-old can feel like he has a job to go to.

Yet it’s apparently amazing. Every single impression I’ve seen has been “this reminds me of something I’d click by on basic cable and totally fail to turn off, in a good way” or “wow, this thing is actually lit correctly.” Quietly, it’s (by consensus, I haven’t seen it) Major Eastwood. 

You’d think Zaslav would let go of his monstrousness here. Clint Eastwood didn’t just become the oldest human being ever to direct a real movie. He made arguably one of the best movies of 2024 as a 94-year-old. He’s Old Hollywood. Been in the business since the Eisenhower administration. You don’t have to be a “Clint Eastwood guy” to admit he’s one of the finest Hollywood directors and one of its greatest stars ever. Hell, it’s enough just to point to Unforgiven and High Plains Drifter. Those are two of the best movies ever made. 

You’d think Zaslav could set aside cocaine blowhard thoughts about ROI because this is something to confidently brag about. Warners should be celebrating the fact that one of Hollywood’s greatest icons just made one of the best movies of 2024, which is comfortably The Future, and he did it at an age where the average American has been dead for 17 years. That’s Evel Knievel stuff. That's heroic. That’s not just good for, as Philip Chevron of The Pogues liked to say, the Brothers Warner, it’s good for the whole town. It’s good for movies as a concept. The frustrating thing is that Zaslav doesn’t care at all, he never will, it’s beyond him, and that’s all there is to it. 

I thought about doing one of those comedy sketches about the election. I was supposed to be outraged that a dog was voting for Donald Trump. I wanted to do it! I really wanted to do some comedy again. But it wasn’t funny. Even talking about how it wasn’t funny wasn’t funny.

The Unsolvable Problem

It feels wrong to say much right now. People hear what they want to hear, and do what they want to do. They want comfort and pleasure and they want to kill each other. They’ll stay that way until they don’t exist anymore, and I don’t have any control over that.

The days are getting shorter. Nights are colder. I’m still here, doing what I always do, for reasons I’m not supposed to figure out. At some point I’ll drink water and eat and sleep to keep doing it.

One of the things I always do is writing. I don’t know why. Time is too short to ask why. I guess I want to make people happy or show them something pretty. Some neurotic “humble” answer like that. Maybe I just want to feel connection with people, the magnetic pull I was never good at finding any other way. Whatever. I just do it and I keep moving.

I don’t need any more than what I have right now. Sometimes I daydream about living in a huge house in California and paying other people to do my work for me. But I’ve met people who have that and they get just as miserable as anybody else anywhere when they’re not doing what they always do. They still get tangled in the fundamental friction of life and blow it the same way I do, worrying themselves insane thinking about the future, falling into uninterrogated selfishness, where fear and anger like to hide.

I don’t know anything, and nobody does. Life is a problem that can’t be solved. A question with no answer. Drill down to the core and that’s all there is. It’s all we have. Ex nihilo. How?

We could easily destroy the unsolvable problem, but that’s the ultimate sin. We shouldn’t do that. If we have any imperative, it’s to keep life going, to stop it from being destroyed. Something turns to nothing constantly. Something came from nothing only once.

It feels like I’m on fire if I don’t try to live, keep facing the problem that can’t be solved. I guess that’s true of everybody, or we wouldn’t have invented drugs.

There are three trillion trees on earth and as far as we will ever know, there are zero anywhere else. Ex nihilo. How?

My mind keeps circling back to the ending of a book I haven’t read in years. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. I guess because it makes me happy and it’s pretty.

I’ll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.

I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.

Let's Go Dodgers?

To those who think that sounds too much like writing, just think about the Larry Sanders scene where Hank says “penis vagina” over and over, because that’s what I’m thinking about. 

I’m sitting in a dark apartment looking out a window I didn’t think to close and practicing guitar. It’s dead dark outside, quiet, no traffic. I could be in Wichita right now. I could be in Arkansas. Banging on an F chord and thinking about Hank Williams. Not because I’m moody but because I’m wondering how common two dollar bills ever were in Alabama. The only one I ever got I got from Disneyland. 

A gunshot. Another gunshot. One last gunshot. Maybe from the house next door. So I’m probably not in Wichita. Then a firework goes off across the street. Then three more. So I guess I’m in Los Angeles. The Dodgers just won the first game of the World Series.

I go outside for a cigarette and listen to distant cars merrily driving way too fast and honking their horns a bunch, strangers in the apartment complex down the street hollering like crazy. It must have been a good game. There’s way more hollering than the last time they were in the World Series. I go back inside and watch an Orson Welles documentary and that’s the day done.

To those who think that sounds too much like writing, just think about the Larry Sanders scene where Hank says “penis vagina” over and over, because that’s what I’m thinking about. 

Nobody’s surprised I never took to sports. Didn’t have a favorite game, didn’t have a favorite team, but my dad was in a better mood when the Chiefs were up so I like the Chiefs and bought the Los Angeles Times when they won the Super Bowl. I also enjoyed that game a few years back where they scored 51 points and still lost. I never took to sports but I’m a complete sucker for somebody racking up too many points at something on the TV, don’t care what it is. Watching the odometer roll over is like drinking a good domestic beer and watching stuff like that is like blowing angel dust.

Lately I’m trying to figure out what went sideways: what the hell is wrong with the electrical wiring in my brain that I never liked sports? I remember playing baseball maybe once as a kid, being sweaty, the smell of dust and body odor and the parking lot. And I remember being on a football team, playing whatever position allows you to be 6 foot 3 and do nothing. The other kids yelled sometimes and said I wasn’t good. One time a kid scored a really good touchdown while his pants slowly came completely off, and everybody laughed, so I figured it must have been the funniest thing I’d ever seen. I liked tennis but I sucked at it.

That’s all fine. It’s a type. But as I get older the more it bugs me. That experience and life trajectory is probably why I don’t like being in groups. I like being invisible in crowds but I never want to be part of anything. I was in the mosh pit at an Iggy & The Stooges show once and felt it a little bit during Search & Destroy, started to get it, understand how it could feel awesome, but I never really followed up on it. If I could have figured out how to be part of something, maybe I would have finished school or danced when I got married. Maybe this whole fucking bullshit would stop being such fucking bullshit. Oh well, too late. 

But the wanting is still there. I don’t want to go dancing but I want to want to go dancing. I want to be a baseball fan so bad. A lot of my favorite writers are huge baseball aficionados, and the early days of itinerant dirtbag baseball sound amazing. The history is rich and nuanced, it’s the history of my country as I know it. The stories are unreal. It’s an epic, but I never bought a ticket. I don’t get it and don’t know where to start. I understand a guy swings a bat and runs around some bases. I understand another guy catches it. There’s guys in a dugout and at least one old Irish guy smoking. Everything I know about baseball I know through Looney Tunes or Bad News Bears. 

I try fairly often. I keep up with news about the Dodgers so I can talk to people who aren’t me. Memorize names and learn the stories and talking points, but I have no idea what I’m talking about. Foreign language. I love the Dodgers though, and hate the Yankees for some reason. Geography I guess. Going to Dodger Stadium is a profoundly pleasant experience. Feels innocent and virtuous. Nobody can talk shit about you for going to a baseball game. It’s one of those things everybody agrees on as being fine and good. I teared up when Vin Scully retired and cried a little when he died. I loved that guy. I knew the significance, the impact he had on peoples’ lives, how many people can chart their careers concurrently with the Dodgers. An anchor for a billion memories. The thing that brings your brain back home.

If you can speak baseball in Los Angeles, you can make it in Los Angeles. It’s gonna be okay. Your mind will be occupied and you won’t think so much about dying. Won’t feel too alone. Baseball can fill any space in your head needs filling. That’s amazing, an absolute wonder drug. It doesn’t even necessarily cost money. And I can’t get there.

Last night I watched the game at some pizza joint. There, I watched Shohei Ohtani play baseball for the first time in my life. He hit his arm weird. Maybe hurt his shoulder. Then the game was over. Lots of people said woo and fuck yeah and all that stuff. Felt good to be part of it. Somebody said something to me and I guessed that I should say “man, it’s not over yet. That was rough for Ohtani. Gotta wait and see,” so I said it, but had zero idea what it meant. The alternative was saying “I know nothing about baseball,” so then the conversation is stupidly about me and the guy just turns back to his beer. 

Felt good as hell to be there though. Had no place else to be and otherwise I’d just sit on the sidewalk and play the New York Times spelling bee and get mad for the hundredth time that “elote” isn’t a valid word. But I knew I wasn’t there, not really. No sporting event could ever get me to shoot a gun in the air.

Sports are a VIP lanyard for participating in society. Keeping your feet on the ground. Part of the planet. Gets you in almost anywhere. The antidote to dead air and having nothing to do. It’s a glorious thing. Used to think I hated sports but I’m actually just mad at myself for never learning it. If I ever have a kid he’s gonna know all about the lanyard and he’s gonna know who he believes in (Mahomes), who it’s proper and Christian to support (Dodgers), and exactly what the devil looks like (it’s actually gonna always be Bill Belichick, I’m not blind). If he’s anything like me he’ll feel ripped off if he doesn’t. So I’ll whoop and holler and I’ll say it with confidence and joy: Let’s go Dodgers?

As Goes Akron

This newsletter is sustained by donations and paid subscriptions. Any help is deeply appreciated. I’m also looking for a day job in the Los Angeles area. As always, holler if you hear anything.

What the hell happened to the Black Keys? That’s an honest question I ask myself a lot when nobody’s around and I’m not evaluating my thoughts based on how publishable they are. Today I want to give that question an honest answer, so let me back up. Let me back up because it’s a question most people can answer in five seconds. And yet it bothers me. It shouldn’t bother me.

I’ve been writing about music since high school, when Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer were alive and staging comebacks. Since then I’ve written for a lot of recognizable music magazines and I’ve wasted a billion hours on music forums. So I’m aware when writing about certain acts is embarrassing or cringe; I know when certain topics can cost me gigs down the line. 

I’d never write about The Black Keys at a serious publication. Everybody who wants to read work by me specifically would sigh or roll their eyes or quietly understand my motivation was four hundred dollars. Writing criticism about a band like that is best left to real critics, who can write about a wide range of music with the disciplined precision of a doctor. I can’t. I’m too emotional. I say “oh my Lord, this rules” or “fuck this” too easily. Leave me in my comfortable bubble of obsessing about albums featuring Benmont Tench.

But the Black Keys were huge for me growing up. I have three brothers and a cousin who are all serious guitarists with cowboy complexes. They all like cigarettes and whiskey and Eastbound & Down. They all practiced Black Keys songs constantly and I was always in the room listening. They wouldn’t call themselves fans and I never did either but the Black Keys were a solid representative of their musical outlook. 

Mine too. I worship R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. I revere hill country blues and I should just send Fat Possum a check for $100 every month on general principle. Dirtbag blues. Party blues. Punk rock blues. It excites me today as much as it did when I first heard it. And that’s the exact world the Black Keys come from. They’re foundationally a hill country tribute band, and now that all the old guys are long dead, they’re the only band with any commercial viability still advocating for that sound and history. I think that’s worthwhile and important. Even if the music winds up in car commercials. Maybe especially if it winds up in car commercials. I hope Junior Kimbrough’s family gets some cash out of it.

The Black Keys have now done several albums of straight-up blues covers. They are the only white blues cover albums that I would even consider listening to. They get the sound, groove and grit right, with just enough modernization to get non-hobbyist interest. All the trappings of authenticity. They did their homework. They get As regardless of whether you like them.

And they have some songs that, just as some dude, I consider bangers. Dead & Gone, Gotta Get Away, Lonely Boy, and Everlasting Light even though it’s just T. Rex. Knowing them primarily for their proximity to R.L. Burnside, it’s mind-blowing that they were once a huge band with songs in Super Bowl commercials and didn’t seriously change their sound to pull it off. 

And Dan Auerbach has done some phenomenal work as a producer. He produced Dr. John’s final serious album and it’s a monster. Yola’s debut is also unstoppable. His work with Nikki Lane is great too. He produces the people I would produce if I was in Nashville and had the knowhow and the means. If I’m at the El Rey and see an opener who’s going places, Dan Auerbach probably has their cell phone number.

Here’s where I try to grow up and trust and examine my intuition a little bit more. When I listen to them, I basically like every individual part of the song. They do what I would do with the material at hand. They’re the kind of band I wanted to be in. I hate blues-rock and that entire scene, Joe Bonamassa makes me want to pull a Leonard Cohen and become a monk, but playing R.L. Burnside songs for an audience of inexplicably young and normal fans was my teenage fantasy. But something about the Black Keys is just off. Every time I listen to them for more than two minutes, every time I think about them too much, something is wrong.

I started to notice with John Anderson’s last album, Years, produced by Auerbach. I know there are Anderson fans out there. I get it. He’s fine. Swingin’ is great. But I found that record viscerally repulsive. On an animal level. It was a somber late-life Johnny Cash talking to God type thing, sure. It’s all fine in theory. But that song Years is one of my most hated songs ever, at least in its studio presentation. Maybe the childish rhyme scheme, or the redneck rock guitar solo, or the drone-shot music video, I dunno. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s almost biological, kinda like how some poor bastards think cilantro tastes like soap, and it's not something I'd say as a music critic.

And that’s increasingly how I feel about every note of music the Black Keys have ever recorded. They’re whip smart and very good at their jobs, they collaborate with the exact right people, but there’s an X factor. Something is driving the specific feeling that I urgently need to take a shower. When I listen to their stuff, I feel bad, feel hungover, and it lingers. I love music for scumbags so that’s not it. I love doing bad things with bad people. I never had the courage to do crimes but they sound great. There’s something more specific with the Black Keys.

The bad feeling they give me is a lot like the feeling you get when you’re complicit in something morally wrong. But that’s not even it. R.L. Burnside killed a guy for maybe no reason and he’s great. My favorite live album ever is by Jerry Lee Lewis. The best Warren Zevon album is the one he made when he was on enough cocaine to kill Warren Zevon. I count all these men as musical heroes. So this isn’t me being churchy.

Today I think I cracked it. I’d been bothered about it for a long time, but today I might have cracked it. The problem isn’t that they make scumbag music. Of course not. I’ve paid hard earned money for albums just because they had pornographic cover art. It’s the sense that they’re conmen. That they’re lying to me, and can’t be trusted. That they’re cold and cynical, maybe even nihilistic. You can be a conman and have good taste, they’re not incompatible. (And never mind the sordid stories I’ve heard and you’ve maybe heard too about cocaine and ex-wives and smoky motel rooms. I wasn’t there, I’m not investigating anyone, that’s their business.)

Awhile back, they booked an arena tour and swiftly canceled it. Shortly after, they put out a statement to the effect of “I love the Clash and I am punk rock.” I didn’t believe it. We all know what happened. It didn’t sell. I believe somebody fucked them over but I also think they were arrogant enough to think the gambit would work. I suspect they had insane sales expectations for their last album and generally think they’re more legit than anybody else and more famous than all these, you know, fucking bullshit pop kiddies who need to leave music to the grown-ups.

Here's what did it for me. I heard they played a private show for a vape company. And now I've learned their next gig is at a festival that sounds spiritually repulsive at a minimum, just baseline. It's called “America Loves Crypto,” and it has all the Musk-adjacent foul-smelling baggage that entails. It was the final aha moment you’d think I didn’t need. There’s a line between being a scumbag and openly admitting you believe in nothing, and you know it when you see it. 

That’s the problem. That’s what was gnawing at me. They don’t believe in anything. That’s the ugliness, and what turns a good musician into a bad one. The bridge you cross that turns you into Mike Love and makes you way too aware of the meanest lawyers in town. That’s what curdled everything.

Don’t get me wrong, I was never going to recreationally listen to the Black Keys, but I could have had fond memories of them from when I was 16. Instead I’m just sickened that their music has taken so much space in my brain. I wish I could kick it out for good, and maybe writing this is what it takes.

The Schwan's Man

Schwan’s is going out of business. You’re probably thinking “hey, that doesn’t matter at all,” and you’re completely right. Bang on. Couldn’t have said it better myself. This isn’t gonna be one of those poignant posts where the secret theme is me having depression. I don’t have enough time to get wistful about some company I have no financial stake in. But I got lots of time to reflect on stuff that doesn’t matter at all. I love shit like that.

Schwan’s was a frozen food delivery service. Started in the ‘50s in Minnesota, selling ice cream. They eventually branched out into frozen meals. Bags of mixed vegetables, chicken pot pies, pizza, fish sticks. A bunch of wholesome, family friendly food of suspect nutritional value. If you remember them, it’s because of their big yellow trucks. They’d drive around the neighborhood, real slow, the delivery man would come to your door with a checklist, you’d check the items you wanted, then he’d bring it to your door.

They’re going out of business because their business sounds like something you’d see in The Wonder Years, where kids ride bikes around Burbank and wonder if the United States government is going to murder them in Vietnam. It’s the most midcentury business of all time. Nuclear families and TV dinners. 

There’s no secretly interesting corporate history of Schwan’s and I have no liminal space death of retail fixation on it like I did with Kmart. It was just a 1950s thing you could participate in as part of your “I have a family and a house and everything’s normal” starter kit. The fact that it lasted until 2024 is wild. They even rebranded as YELLOH to sound like they could exist at the same time as the internet, which is very “elderly pastor namechecking Pokemon in his sermon.”

And yet I think about Schwan’s a lot. Maybe it’s because my youngest brother is a Gen Zer and the difference between 1988 and 2007 boggles the mind. I grew up with a rotary phone. He was messing around with my iPhone when he was still in a stroller. I looked at movie showtimes in a newspaper. He can just torrent them in five seconds and cast them to his giant television. I remember when “Donald Trump” was just a crazy TV guy who was always threatening to run for president and actually did once now that I think about it so forget that one. Anyway I’m lying, the generational difference is kinda cosmetic and whenever people do that bit for real it always winds up being about phones. I met a guy once who grew up when cars were new but he figured them out fine. Even figured out how to drive them and drink at the same time.

(It’s always a hoot to see tech perverts talk about the amazing gizmos we have now, how people from olden times must think we’re gods or demons. Reminds me of when academics tried to explain the moon landing to remote tribes and the remote tribes were like “oh damn, you guys are wizards, now give me a gun, you said if I came to your stupid thing you’d give me a gun.”) 

So the generational difference thing isn’t part of it. That’s just a way to pat yourself on the back for the random number generator that constitutes your birthdate. But I do think it’s interesting how long you could get away with 1950s cosplay and that Schwan’s managed to be part of the fabric of my childhood. Their ice cream was good, but it wasn’t that good. And I don’t miss it because now you can buy gelato at the gas station.

And it’s interesting that I was obsessed with the Schwan’s man even though I didn’t care about the product at all. I probably associated him with family stability – if my dad orders stuff we don’t need from the Schwan’s man, it’s proof my dad didn’t get fired. If we were eating ice cream, that meant there was more ice cream in the freezer. But that doesn’t explain why I’d get all freaked out whenever the dude came over and I’d run outside to take pictures of the truck on a Polaroid camera. Why I wanted to know all about the job and would ask him work questions. I mean, I even wanted to do ridealongs, shadow him.

The easy answer is just that it was kid brain: I liked the sunny yellow trucks. I liked seeing them move. I’d draw them in my free time, recreate them with LEGOs. 

But I also liked that if they were stopping at peoples’ houses, something good was happening. I understood it. That’s the deeper thing that goes beyond kid brain, the thing that’s still in me. I understood that someone was getting paid to deliver food, which everybody needs, to people who could afford it. That was a job I could grasp. It was work in the purest sense. A guy did labor that provided tangible worth for his customers. I could do that job. 

To this day I don’t really know what my dad did for a living. He was a house insurance adjuster. There was lots of paperwork, he was never home, and never happy. He complained about contractors a lot. That was one kind of work, a kind I didn’t think I could do. But here was something like what my grandpa did. He hauled oil from Bakersfield to Los Angeles. Makes sense. Oil makes cars work. Got it. This was the same thing but with ice cream instead of poison.

Try as I might, that’s still how I’m wired. I sift through dozens of job descriptions a day without comprehending word one. All written in a foreign language, inaccessible, closed-off forever. The ones that pay actual money, which is probably not a coincidence. The white collar economy and being part of it is something that fundamentally baffles me. But I can drive a truck and I can swing a hammer. I can move things from one place to another place. That sounds true and honest. And it’s part of why I write, to work through my confusion, to approach understanding and own up to my need to figure all this shit out that feels beyond me.

The Schwan’s man came until all the kids got grown. The time when our life was structured such that we could use his services had ended. It was sad to see him go but really just because it was one less guy my dad could have friendly conversations with, conversations that had no risk of going sideways because they weren’t about unsolvable problems. One of the last times he showed up, he gave me something he got for his 20th anniversary with the company. Imagine that, 20 years at one company and they pay you the whole time. Unbelievable. I’m sick with jealousy.

The thing he gave me was a little model of their first round of yellow trucks. A ‘50s Dodge. I loved that damn thing and looked at it all the time. I still keep it on my shelf as a reminder of valuing honest work even if it’s silly and irrelevant, of keeping the equation of society simple. It’s a truck and you do your job with it. It’s a Dodge. Merle Haggard always said they were more reliable than Fords and Chevys. Says the company’s in Marshall, Minnesota. I’ve never been to Minnesota and all I really know is it gets cold in Minnesota. In the winter I guess you’d need to wear a coat.

London Calling

London, England (UK)

I never talk about this. Mostly because I’m off social media. I have good reasons for that. It’s a way to think you’re working when you’re actually not. It’s no longer a great way to get jobs. It makes you overrate the importance of ephemeral topics, which makes it harder to talk to people in real life. Try explaining any Twitter joke to a real person and watch the light in their eyes die. But even there, this is something I still wouldn’t talk about.

I grew up on radio. My grandparents always had it on. I learned about transmitters and border blasters and how the business actually worked. I could probably make one if I had to. My uncle is a talk radio host and he’s been doing it for something close to 30 years. I also grew up in a car and always looked forward to listening to local shows. It’s how I developed relationships with whatever town I was rolling through, and it gave me a sense of where I was.

Had one by my bed and listened to it every morning and every night. Hearing news breaks was how I woke up. Hearing Art Bell was how I fell asleep. I saw Dr. Demento in a diner and was hopelessly starstruck. I saw Rodney Bingenheimer in a different diner and was hopelessly starstruck. I saw Sean Hannity in front of me in line at a sandwich place and wanted him to leave. It’s in my blood.

Radio was my dream job, to be frank. Just sitting in a little room in a little town, running my mouth, doing ad reads, talking about local fundraisers and making little private jokes to myself. Creating fanciful thought-pictures of where I was or what I was talking about even though I imagined my view, if the room was anywhere near windows, would be of some blinking lights and a cup of coffee and maybe a parking lot. The idea of radio was like a blank canvas. I could say I was on the moon. It didn’t matter.

I called into shows all the time and even have recordings of some; I’d hold a tape recorder next to a radio in another room. I still have fond memories of calling into a Sacramento morning show and talking to “Grandpa” Al Lewis, of The Munsters, who was low-key advertising some real estate scam and for some reason lying about his age. He claimed to be in his 90s. Called into a show in Los Angeles to talk up Arrested Development when it became clear it was in danger of cancellation.

That feeling in my stomach is something I’ve chased ever since. Talking to the screener, then hearing the broadcast, waiting for my name, waiting to go live. I didn’t want to get famous or anything, I just wanted to be part of radio, make the radio acknowledge me. I got drunk off that feeling. Words would come out of my mouth before I had time to think of them, and it was like improvising a song on a stage. Once the song started it could only stop when the call was over. Something about it was voodoo. It’s why I did a podcast, which isn’t the same but it’s all there is, for all those years, and why I still have the recording equipment to do it again if I can find balance in my life (hi, Big Jim, email me sometime). 

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It’s funny how often radio keeps coming back to my life. My uncle still has his show. I always listened because I knew my grandparents were listening too, and it helped me feel literally tuned in to family news. Sometimes I’d go on it and we’d talk about it later. It felt very grown up, that I was trusted to say things out loud and adults had to listen. I still listen today because as everybody gets older and family spreads to the winds, it’s kind of an anchor. A grounding ritual. It’s like going home.

Radio’s mostly dead now. My dreams of being in radio are shipwrecked way back in 1997 and my Lewinsky and Dole material is useless anyway. But radio always finds a way to keep coming back into my life. The latest instance is baffling.

For reasons totally mysterious, at some point I got put on a list of American music writers available for commentary on British news radio. Not talk shows, but the actual news. I never really tell people because radio is such a personal thing for me and I enjoy having this imaginary secret life.

I don’t get paid or anything, and I don’t get exposure. It never comes back to me. But every few months some British lady will call me and say “would it be a bother for you to deliver some comments on this music story?” and then she’ll say “it would be at half past four American western time, half past twenty three forty her majesty the Queen Mum’s time” or whatever it is they say. Then I’ll say I need to gather my thoughts before committing. But that’s always bullshit. I just spend five minutes thinking of material. Then I call back and say yes. I always say yes.

It’s a really interesting exercise. I always take the prompt seriously and try to fill their air time as best I can. I know they’re just killing minutes before an ad break or whatever, but I don’t prank them. I’ve talked about Fleetwood Mac, Coachella, the Grammys, the murder of Tupac, whatever they need. It’s usually pretty good. I took an alarming amount of pride at making a serious newscaster with an affected (I can still tell, we have British people here too) posh accent actually, earnestly break up laughing when I described Jerry Lee Lewis’ criminal past on the occasion of his death.

Today, I was on the edge of falling asleep. Just filling out job applications on a cold gray day. Got the call. Twenty minutes later I was live on air in England. I stand by everything I said, even though it already doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t enjoy doing these calls if I was just doing schtick. I take broadcasting seriously because it’s a trade I respect. It’s been ruined for decades but I respect it.

We live in a time of total connectivity. I have friends in Australia and New Zealand I talk to pretty regularly. Canada. Ireland. That’s not special. But there’s something uniquely powerful about knowing that in the afternoon in a Los Angeles apartment, I can start talking into my phone and with the absent turn of a dial, some security guard in Bristol or a cab driver in London might actually hear my voice. A transmission from some place he’ll never go. And it’s statistically unlikely I’ll ever set foot in England, but somehow every few months my voice winds up in buildings and cars out there. A human voice, traveling 5,000 miles to a specific place, making real sound waves. I dunno what that feeling is. I guess there’s poetry to it.

paid post: from the archives, volume one

Big news: starting today, for paid subscribers only, I’ll be regularly posting writing from my archives. That’s a heavy word and usually it only applies to dead guys, so let me explain myself for a bit. I’ve been writing on the internet for money since 2011. Almost all the websites that have ever hosted my work are straight-up gone. That includes the shiniest one, where I was staff and where I did the most work, MTV. It also includes countless professional blogs and even one actual magazine. 

But I’m cynical and know how internet money works (doesn’t), so I kept copies of everything. There were a lot of, you know, Saturday Night Live recaps, but some of it holds up and I think it’s worth sharing. So to that end, when the mood strikes or I remember something I actually liked, I’ll put it on this site and it’ll be around as long as I can host stuff here.

These will basically be my final submitted drafts. Occasionally I’ll tweak them a bit because they were filed on insane deadlines and I didn’t get to something, or because they had material requested by editors that I didn’t actually want to put in there. (I always said yes to edits in those days because I wanted gas money way more than a professional reputation.) Otherwise these are fully my work, from when I was in my twenties.

I wanted to share this week’s entry because I brainstormed it with my brothers and it made us laugh all night long. I still remember finishing it at 3 in the morning and thinking I would never write a better piece ever again. But none of you have ever read it because even back then, it was kind of a secret. For a couple years, I wrote video game features for a subsidiary of a company you’ve all heard of but I shouldn’t name. There is no longer any trace of it online.

And even then, I did it under a pen name. That was partially to preserve my “googlability” on the straight job market, and partially because the nature of the job was such that I didn’t treat it with the rigor of a true video game writer. Usually I had my brothers play games for me, and I would reflect on topics I actually wanted to write about. Family, history, nostalgia, how people distract themselves and why, how games differ from film and television as mass media, and why I found them interesting at all. It was never for normal reasons. I liked old stuff. Failures. Outliers. Bizarre experiments. Anything with a scandalous production history. Anything considered “the worst game ever.”

This was usually work I did at night, from the bed I had in the corner of my dad’s office. I thought my adult life had gone to hell. I didn’t want anybody at all to know about this stuff, and I was deeply ashamed. But it paid more than Target, more than retail merchandising, and I was endlessly thankful for that. It kept me going. It paid for road trips that led to work at places like Vice. Completely changed my life, and I like to admit that now. Here’s one of the pieces I wrote. It’s a review of BMX XXX.

---

Think about the last twelve days of John Wilkes Booth. He killed a president, stood up on a stage, yelled "Sic Semper Tyrannis!" and immediately became the most wanted fugitive in America. Most of his co-conspirators scattered, it was just him and some guy named Dave, and they were totally outside society, crossing the Potomac in a little boat. For twelve days, among the fields and dirt and trees, they walked toward oblivion as America's most hopeless, delusional outcasts. They were on the exact, mathematical wrong side of history. Think about that death march.

Eventually John Wilkes Booth made it to a farmstead owned by a man named Richard Garrett. You know how the story ends. That's where he dies. The Garrett farm. But try to put yourself there, at the edges of the quiet exploding into sudden spectacle. One day Booth shows up at their door, clumsily pretending to be a wounded Confederate soldier. The Garretts were rightly suspicious of him. He was ostracized from them. Excommunicated to a tobacco barn. Then the soldiers showed up. Then he was burned in the barn, then he was shot in the barn, and finally he was dragged to the porch of Richard Garrett's house, where in a few hours his mistakes caught all the way up with him.

Of course it doesn't end there, but we usually stop the story there. What came later wasn't nice. The Garretts never recovered from the trauma, and they never recovered from the huge financial hit caused by the destruction of their barn. The family's moment in history now ended, they slowly faded away. Their house became a morbid tourist destination. Thousands shuffled by in the late 1800s – it was widely known that part of Abraham Lincoln's story ended at this house outside Bowling Green, Virginia. But the tourists slowly stopped coming and the house ceased to exist even as mere rot sometime around World War II. And today it's nothing. You can't even find it. This part of history is just dirt and shrubbery between stretches of a highway.  Hold on.

Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 is a game where computer women play volleyball in hardly any clothes at all. It comes out in February of 2016 in Japan and comes out here, according to recent posts on the game's Facebook page, never. The goal of the game, if it has a goal, is to ogle the computer women. It's the third in a series. The first came out in 2003, when Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball arrived for the Xbox. If it goes down in history at all, it will go down as a bizarre curiosity from the adolescent phase of the games business. As a relic from a time when games hadn't quite graduated to mainstream acceptance and you could still sell a title like that to depressed teenagers without taking particularly visible media heat for it. You were more likely to see Entertainment Weekly give it an 80 word write up to the effect of "golly, those games sure are different now."

Okay, I'm back. America is bad at preserving history. What we preserve, we explode into myth. We curate and inflate. We tell tall tales. And that's just for our nice history. The good parts. The parts that happen in widescreen, that can get turned into movies directed by Ron Howard and documentaries directed by Ken Burns. Our disreputable history is a different discussion. We shun that. We ignore it out of existence. In between two lanes of a highway in Virginia, there's something we should have kept; the end of an insane and desperate story. But in a hundred years, people won't know anything happened there. Hold on.

Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball will endure as a disreputable game that peddled cheesecake photos to teenagers. It was ridiculous. But it was not the most ridiculous dirty game that managed to get mass market awareness. That honor goes to something so conceptually putrid, so disreputable, so monumentally misguided, that it could absolutely never be made now, and not just because everybody involved is out of business. It's impossible to imagine it on a shelf in 2015, but it was almost impossible to imagine it on a shelf when it came out in 2002.

It was BMX XXX. Came out on all three consoles. It got considerable media attention, all of it rightly terrible. It was one of those "have video games gone too far?" news items FOX News or CNN could easily kill a segment with on a slow day. You can imagine how the segments went. The beats they hit without saying anything.

"Here to talk about what these game developers are selling to your kids is Some Guy In A Suit. Some Guy, thanks for being here."

"Thanks, Greta, or maybe Wolf Blitzer, you know, it's like you said earlier. I want to know how they got away with this. I want to know why this isn't banned. I want to know why there's…"

"No legislative oversight, exactly. Thanks for joining. Up next, some vaguely sketchy West LA-based doctors weigh in on the health of Steve Jobs, Bob Hope, and Johnny Cash, all of whom are still alive."

And like most slow day news padding, it was forgotten the second some actual news materialized. So what was it? Well, originally it was a sequel to Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX. But development wasn't going according to plan, so publisher Acclaim Entertainment freaked out, pulled the ripcord, and put developer Z-Axis to work on a stunt-bike game crammed with both simulated nudity and clips of real strippers.

The whole package was repugnant. It had the sense of humor of a bunch of 14-year-olds drinking Miller High Life in a gravel quarry. It was about as close as mainstream video games got to being actual Tijuana Bibles. That is to say, it looked like something that should only be sold by carnies. It was a game that felt like the instruction booklet would have nicotine stains, a game made for bad kids to shoplift. There is no reason to ever play it.

It was a total failure of publisher conscience and it was a massive setback for those who wanted games to be taken seriously as a valid entertainment media. Cannon fodder for the politicians who thought video games should be regarded as a vice, with any and all attendant sin taxes.

It's disreputable history. The temptation is to forget it, because it would be so nice to forget it. But its ugliness, its moral and aesthetic hideousness, is a reminder that progress has been made in interactive entertainment. Games are too legitimate for something that monumentally tasteless to get bankrolled by a major publisher. In a few years it'll be easy to forget that's a recent development.

And it's what Tom Waits in The Fisher King would have called a moral traffic light. As a monument to bad judgment, it slaps us across the face and looks us in the eye and asks exactly one question. What are we doing now that will one day embarrass us so much we pretend it never happened?

Memory & Nostalgia

Blockbuster parking lot (2013)

Nostalgia is a drug that eats memory. It kicks in right after you say the word remember, and when it works it starts flooding you with warm and pleasant lies. It’s insanely addictive. Works fast. Everybody sells it. It doesn’t kill you but it can destroy your brain; break the discipline of your memory. It’s fine and good to rifle through the past – time is something we’ll never understand, we’re just stuck perceiving it in one direction because we can’t outsmart entropy – but nostalgia invents a fake past we can’t learn from.

There are companies powerful enough to stage coups, be their own countries, that deal it out like Pablo Escobar. Coca-Cola, Disney, the NFL, McDonald’s, whoever it is that runs Nashville, pick your poison. But anybody can do it. Reminiscing about the good old days is cocaine cut with talcum powder.

This is starting to sound flowery but that’s really because I want to be good at identifying it. To be able to tell the difference between a real Depression-era 7up sign for my kitchen, or a decent replica, from a horrible one that belongs in a barber shop next to a sign about whiskey being cheaper than women that belongs in the garbage. An authentic old diner from one with Marilyn Monroe memorabilia that’s owned by a hedge fund. Why I’ll drive an hour to Pann’s in Inglewood but would have to let my entire life fall to ruin to eat at Mel’s. Why I’ve read multiple biographies of Charles Schulz but would rather claw my own eyes out than rewatch The Peanuts Movie. 

Memory is sex and nostalgia is pornography. You can do incredible things with memory, grow and love and learn from your mistakes, find reasons to live, but with nostalgia all you can really do is get a little closer to the grave and buy something about it.

First time I ever played a video game. My grandma had a little 1970s RCA TV in the sewing room of her back house. We had a Nintendo, it was only “the Nintendo,” and one game, that Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt two-in-one. Nostalgia says that was heaven on earth and I’d kill God to go back there with some pharmacy oatmeal cookies and a bottle of Yoo Hoo, but memory, which I have to work at, tells me something way more interesting, which is there were no windows in that sewing room and there was dirt everywhere and sometimes it’d get in your mouth when anybody opened a door and I had to stop playing when I was soaked in sweat and felt like I was in a coffin. 

Nintendo has considerably improved on that experience. I can play Super Mario Bros. whenever I want on a huge TV in an apartment with windows and a ceiling fan. I do this for maybe ten minutes a year, which sounds about right.

Used to hit a local diner after church. Nostalgia tells me it was perfect and I’m never eating that good ever again. Memory tells me the booths were comfortable but mostly I just had a high sugar tolerance and when I ate the leftovers out of a styrofoam container, they were terrible. The diner has since franchised and there’s one I drive by twice a week. I’ll probably never go.

Nostalgia says cell phones used to be more fun. All the metal and the sliding and the flipping. Pretty lights. Playing games in environments where previously no games were possible, magically tolerating waiting rooms. Memory says it cost several thousand dollars to send a text message and if you logged on to the internet, Motorola would send a man to harvest your organs.

Tried to watch a movie last night. Not a film. Just trying to zone out and capture that sense of watching some junk while eating leftovers. I put on The Naked Gun. It sounded like something I used to enjoy as a kid. But I had to turn it off because it was just Get Smart, an entire production of mostly just remembering that show and getting it right sometimes. I hated it. Right, here’s O.J. The juice is loose. Got it.

Went to find the real thing on streaming, but nobody had it. Lots of Naked Gun stuff, a Get Smart remake and a made-for-TV thing from the ‘80s, but the original was $2 an episode. Streaming is amazing at courting nostalgia but taking away the source material for that nostalgia, asking you to settle for reenactments unless you pay a premium. It’s a great tool, prying nostalgia from your brain when money is involved, because you’ll know when something actually used to be better and you’re not imagining it. Get Smart is as good as I remember. It’s Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. One of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

We used to go to Blockbuster every weekend. What a joy. Pizza, great movies, staying up late, laughing with my brothers. But actually the place was a racket. They never had anything good, it was always a wall of Armageddon plus miscellany, so I rented Dirty Work and Meatballs 30 times and my dad thought about Double Jeopardy but put it back. It was basically a scheme to make busy families rack up late fees and I always felt like I’d done a low-level sin when my dad had to pay extra money when he returned Mario Party, which wasn’t even good and I knew that then, four days late.

After my parents got divorced, I drove to the old Blockbuster with my brothers for the legitimate real life reason that we wanted to corrupt my youngest brother with Lethal Weapon but the torrent wasn’t downloading fast enough. It was the last time we went and I don’t even think we wound up returning the movie because the place was going out of business.

Forgot all about it, but years later, our youngest brother was now a properly corrupted teen. A pandemic was in full swing. Got a cell phone picture of him in a mask, strangers hovering at the edge of frame, a few feet taller looking like Rasputin and get a haircut if you’re reading this I’m still finding strands when I vacuum, standing in “the last Blockbuster.” That horrible little store that leeched like a thousand bucks from us was now a tourist attraction. There’s a documentary and a show about it. What an insane thing to elevate into nostalgia. You don’t miss Blockbuster, I swear. You miss being young. But I remember being 8 and getting miserably sad about things I used to do when I was 5. And now it doesn’t matter. You have better things to do.

Killing Calvin

bad calvin & hobbes fanart, upside down because I hate it

I want to be more like Bob Dylan, and I want to get it right, so I study him like my life depends on it. I pore over every word, study him like holy men study the words in red. A recent example. The day after iconic songwriter Kris Kristofferson passed away, Dylan logged the hell on as fast as he could to tell us he just learned Bob Newhart had died a couple months ago and he was sad about it. There’s a lesson in there, one I’m trying to internalize: just write whatever, it’s fine, I’m Bob Dylan.

A couple weeks ago I saw a disgusting thing and I stared at the disgusting thing for the better part of an afternoon. It was on the level, truly, of those old internet shock photos where men do things to their bodies that feel vaguely illegal, but then you look at the law books and find out they don’t really get into the weeds about grotesquery. And somehow I hadn’t seen it before.

It’s been bothering me ever since I saw it and the feeling that there’s slow-activated poison in my body hasn’t gone away. So I’ll explain it now as pure bloodletting. I won’t link to it, don’t worry. Basically, it was a fan-made epilogue for the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes. No drawings or anything, no personal kinship to the material, no sense that this was tribute. Just an obnoxiously long prose finale to the strip, which of course ends with the protagonists continuing to do the stuff they always did. Outside of time. Being themselves. Signing off and encouraging us to be imaginative.

When Calvin & Hobbes promoted imagination, it usually meant, like, going to Mars or fighting monsters or turning into dinosaurs. What this epilogue thing does is dare to imagine that Calvin is a decrepit old man dying in a hospital bed. Presumably in the 2070s, though it provides no commentary on the future as such. It’s just a regular hospital, not a space hospital or anything.

For some reason Calvin, in the last stages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or emphysema or good ol’ cancer, it never really gets into the medical details, never uses the hospital setting, is married to the first girl he ever met and he’s probably still in his old hometown. He’s got like two or three minutes to live and he’s surprisingly cognizant of this. Not on too many sedatives. He chokes out a few words to his wife about how he wants his stuffed animal from 70 years ago and how he wants her to leave while he talks to it. 

I guess the painkillers kick in and the stuffed animal comes to life like in the comic strip and tells him some shit like “it’s been a hell of a ride, old chap” and “you certainly look familiar, but oh my, we’ve aged, haven’t we?” Then Calvin starts crying and says some shit like “I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I hope you find it in that broken heart of yours to forgive me” and then Hobbes is all “I never forgot about you. I never stopped waiting for you, my dear friend.” You know, like in the sad part of a legacy sci-fi sequel where a marquee actor wanted too much money to keep doing the character. 

So they reminisce about the glory days, all gone now, lost forevermore, dust in the wind, and Calvin’s wife is outside on her cell phone or whatever, and remember it looks different because it’s 50 years from now, the bevel might have a different grade and they’ve got this whole new process for the glass, and she’s probably questioning whether she should have obliged somebody who’s too close to death for any meaningful decision-making or true catharsis. Precious moments where she could have made eye contact, which is the most important part of comforting the dying, just thrown in the garbage for a stuffed animal.

Then the grandkids all run in there and one of the grandkids takes her grandpa’s antique stuffed animal and Calvin dies, gets out of his bed and throws away his cane and shuffles off to heaven or whatever. The end. They don’t get into detail about the funeral arrangements or anything like that. No clue whatsoever what kind of car his wife is gonna drive home in or how the grandkids are dressed. No real visual sense of the environment or what kind of drugs and gizmos they got in that hospital. 

It was the worst thing I’ve ever read and that’s fine because I grew up on bad stuff. I remember email forwards. The reason it bothers me is that a bunch of people worldwide read it and said it made them cry and feel all the feels even though it reads like your aunt forwarded it to you in 1997. (A zillion people have since come out of the woodwork to say the author should be shot out of a cannon on the moon, but for all I know that was the intended effect.)

It’s a very old school variety of mawkish internet drivel that you’d think would only apply to people who still think people driving at night without their headlights are going to murder you in a gang initiation. We spent an entire generation on the internet humiliating people who fell for that stuff, and I thought it was a crowd that was literally dying off. I didn’t know it could still work. 

Never mind why it was written. Best case scenario is it was a 4chan nihilism thing so I’ll give the writer the benefit of the doubt. I’ll even compliment how many things about the strip it gets wrong. In the strip Hobbes is actually just a guy, there’s no secretly sad gimmick about innocence. And Calvin is an anarchistic smart kid who’s basically normal and knows a lot of ten dollar words. He’s not a dying old man in the future.

But it’s ultimately the fact that its breed of bottom shelf quick-hit gas station sentimentality is still a force in society. You see it all the time online. You see it constantly in politics. We live on a planet where there’s a Ghostbusters sequel that positions Dead Harold Ramis at the intersection of Santa Claus and Jesus Christ and it made more than zero dollars. 

It’s not dissimilar to being a Disney Adult or crying at a Pixar movie even though those little bugs and robots aren’t actually real, they’re computers. That Calvin & Hobbes fanfic stuff, it’s emotional pornography. It’s bad for your dopamine and neural pathways. It’s too easy. 

Yeah yeah yeah. Calvin & Hobbes was important to me growing up (I am very smart and I’m the noble kind of lonely). Bill Watterson has a lot to say about authorial integrity and copyright and merchandising. By the numbers, the strip isn’t actually that sentimental. If you pay close attention it’s actually funny. Krazy Kat and Ignatz. It’s a completed art project with intent, and walled off, and outside the wall are barbarians with Calvin pissing on like a box that says “liberalism.” That was pretty well covered before the strip was even finished. Don’t need to watch reruns.

It’s just kind of remarkable that these radio transmissions from the bad old internet of 1997 can still work on people. AI slop, which this fanfic may as well have been, is the same thing. You churn it out in 5 seconds and think wow, I can’t believe that worked. It legitimately is horrifying how many people are susceptible to this craven emotional manipulation, this “what if a late Rob Reiner movie was even worse” nonsense. It looks for all the world like internet literacy, critical reading, critical evaluation of images, suspicion of the intent of any anonymous author, ability to detect con artists, hasn’t gotten any better since I was a kid. As AI or crypto scams get easier and the internet gets faster and more ubiquitous, those defense systems should be taught more. 

And for all the people who still make sad adult versions of comic strips, go reconcile with your parents or jog. You’ve spent too much time on the computer. It’s too late for me but you can still go outside.

Note: if you like this newsletter, consider a paid subscription. Money encourages me to actually make it instead of being a bum.

A Complete Unknown (2024) Disney Official Bob Dylan Trailer Reaction Review Longplay

bob dylan, 2004

The trailer for A Complete Unknown came out this morning and I didn’t want to think about it, but it was either think about it or do the laundry so here I am, thinking about it. I’m aware of exactly how useless that is, but the exercise is interesting because it’s really hard to do. This is not an easy thing to care about or even pretend to care about.

Seems like it should be easy. I am staring at a Bob Dylan poster right now. The sun is catching it just right and it draws the eye. I check his setlists after every single show. Just two nights ago, in Prague, he opened with All Along The Watchtower. He’s putting Desolation Row and It’s All Over Now Baby Blue in regular rotation after a long layoff. The incomparable Jim Keltner is still on the kit but I miss Charlie Sexton. I just put Tempest on in the background, which I do most mornings. His dying lunatic schtick on that album is really funny and it wakes me up. But this movie profoundly resists my attention. I would rather watch an industrial film about sawmill safety. 

I mean, I know why, and without seeing it. It’s directed by James Mangold, who made Walk the Line. I saw that thing opening night because it was new Johnny Cash content and everybody was buzzing about it and I was getting paid as many as fifty dollars to write about it for a paper. My whole family saw it. One of the few new releases my Arkie grandpa watched (his correct review was that Reese Witherspoon was cute and it would be better on mute). Awful movie. Hagiography. Totally on rails, every idiot moment profound and inevitable. The ultimate “this is the part of the movie where this happens” bore. Such uninteresting product you could see the Walmart DVD endcap display before you bought the ticket. The work of a director incapable of being anything but what the studio release calendar needed him to be.

So a Bob Dylan biopic by the same guy has no chance. I’m 100% sure that if I burrowed into my nihilism, I could try to write its script by guessing and match it page for page a couple times. Bob goes electric. The ‘60s are an exciting and important time. What is identity? What does it mean to shape-shift? I just learned what “enigmatic” means. Play it fucking loud.

This is true: I watched the trailer four times before I sat down to write this. Here’s what I remember. It stars a guy named Tim who spells his name wrong. Ed Norton plays Pete Seeger. Bob rides a motorcycle. Drinks a beer in a shitty apartment. Writes some lyrics on the floor of the shitty apartment. Commits implied sexual intercourse with a woman and she finds him difficult because of all that art he’s doing. He’s famous but he doesn’t like it. Rides a motorcycle. Where’s he really from? He cuts Like A Rolling Stone. I wonder who they’ll get to play the guy who plays the organ on that. He’s a buddy of mine’s neighbor, is why I’m curious. How’s that actually work? Does his agent call him and then he goes to the dude’s office on Wilshire or whatever to sign some paperwork? Does he get any mailbox money off it?

Johnny Cash is in this one too, so Mangold has a bit of a cinematic universe happening. He needs to hurry up and make a Red Hot Chili Peppers biopic so we can see Old Johnny. Joaquin “Leaf” Phoenix can play Rick Rubin, as a clever little nod to the fans.

Anyway it’s swill and you know that already. Bob Dylan as a tortured God figure, all that Joseph Campbell stuff about guys with too many faces. Designed to employ people who work on award campaigns. Tim spelled wrong will probably get an Oscar for it.

It’s clearly something you see when you’re visiting your family for Christmas and it’s the only thing playing that knows some of its audience went to college. We all have better things to do, up to and including laundry. But the fact is, this is the only major studio production that hovers anywhere near my interests, the only thing that markets to me. So it’s almost funny, threatens to be interesting, that it’s terrible at it. This exact template for exactly this movie is now more than 20 years old and they obviously haven’t updated it at all. An industrial film about sawmill safety would actually be more compelling. At least that might have some gory reenactments.

Ghosts

In the spring I went to see some petroglyphs. Rock art. It was about a three hour drive, up into the mountains, out into the high desert. Like a lot of the most beautiful things you can see in California, it was a three hour drive through a bunch of nowhere. No real towns and I saw more wild horses than people.

The petroglyphs were outside of Tulelake, which consisted of a main street with about half a grocery store and a saloon and enough electric poles and new cars to know the surrounding houses had people in them. They may have had a shuttered movie theater and a pool hall that was probably run by a guy who lived around the corner and only opened it up for old-timer social events, if at all. Maybe not. May as well have. It wasn’t a ghost town and this made it much lonelier than a ghost town, because in ghost towns you can buy a T-shirt. 

At the site, there was an infinite sprawl of nothing (I feel like I’ve written that sentence before and now I wonder why I keep winding up in places like that). It used to be a lakebed and you could feel it. I’m pretty sure that in a subconscious, primal way, you can just tell when a place used to have water and the water dried up. You can tell something was there. It always calls to mind that Wendell Berry line. “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

Once you tune to that frequency, the feeling can hit you anywhere. That time, life, death, they’re beyond our power to comprehend. We can try, but we’ll never get the answer. We can only be ready for the answer. 

I approached the big rocks in the middle of the nothing. Started walking toward them. A few other people may have been there. It was cold and threatening to rain but it didn’t quite. There was no real indication that the rocks were worth a damn. There was a little rope and a little sign so I knew I was in the right place but it was exactly the opposite of the tourist center at the Grand Canyon.

When I was close enough to see the details on the rocks, I began to notice intentional markings. Usually it was dots and lines, just deliberate enough to know it was the work of humans. As I quieted my head and expectations I started seeing a few more, a few more, then a zillion more. Outlines of people and animals all over the place. 

They didn’t aspire to grandeur and weren’t meant to be seen by many people, which didn’t make them feel disappointing, but instead made them feel intimate. They were between 2,500 and 5,000 years old. It gave me pause to think people have been in California that long, that they fished and hunted out here and took little boats out to these rocks to chisel art on them. And here I was, Jesus Christ and a few millennia later, all those people dead, all the people who understood what I was seeing, just staring, trying to make sense of all this design. All these hours spent in a deliberate act of creation. It was unspeakably beautiful and explaining it with words is obscene.

They were annoyingly mysterious too, because it was obvious that all these symbols, the work of so many tired guys on boats, had concrete and often practical meaning. Sure, you can get all mystical and dwell on the assumed ritual elements, but damn it if it didn’t look like there were maps, directions, data, signposts, the specifics just out of reach and permanently lost.

But some sort of communication was happening and I could feel it. The fundamental connection of one human being intercepting a signal from another human being, making one tiny precision cut through the veil of time. It’s not so much what the cut signifies, but that the cut was there at all. 

It’s fall and night is coming earlier and it’s still a billion degrees outside but the autumn thoughts are creeping in anyway. A while back there was this prompt on Twitter. What’s your most woo woo belief? I know. A prompt. Low hanging fruit. But let’s not pretend we always have something better to do. There’s no way. I’ve seen the TV shows you people are watching. 

I thought I didn’t have an answer but then one darted into my head immediately, and I don’t care about coming off cool because you don’t get paid for it. My answer was that ghosts are real, but not in a way we’ll ever understand, and not in a way western religion or storytelling even helps explain. I stand by it. There’s some sort of connective tissue threaded through the entire history of humanity. No idea what it is or how it works. It’s beyond the thing that we are.

I had this dream one night, that my grandpa was unloading his barn and packing it up in his truck. I helped him haul a few boxes and he drove off without saying anything. When I woke up I learned he had just died. Is that the same thing as a ghost? Don’t know. But the feeling was the same one I had seeing those petroglyphs. It was the same connective tissue and that’s all I care about and I don’t need to convince anybody. But I’ll say ghost because that’s only five letters.

(Note: if you like the writing I do here, donations and paid subscriptions help me do it more. Tell your friends. All that salesmanship type stuff. And thanks for reading. I mean it.)

Remembering Kris Kristofferson

Note: I finally got a new computer. That means I can get back to the newsletter in earnest, and also that I’m more broke than normal. Paid subscriptions or donations (my PayPal is kaleb.c.horton at gmail) are especially appreciated right now. And if you live in the greater Los Angeles area and are hiring right now, I have over twenty years of professional experience at whatever the job is.

I hate writing obituaries. Swore it off when Harry Dean Stanton died because I had just interviewed him for a profile and didn’t, still don’t, want to think about him in the past tense. Skipped it when Tom Petty died because I had just seen him a week ago in his capacity as an alive guy. Made an exception for Norm because I knew him and made an exception for Shane MacGowan because he was the first performer I ever saw in concert.

Now Kris Kristofferson is dead, but this is not an obituary. Just a reflection on the culture I grew up with, a culture I want to document and remember before the picture fades too much. It was a culture where it was always 1978 and Jimmy Carter was always president and the last hit on the radio was fucking Convoy. It was a culture where Kris Kristofferson was omnipresent, whether you liked him or not.

Was Kris Kristofferson CIA? A captain in the army and he was offered to teach English literature at West Point and he went to Oxford? What was he really doing in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas? Do your own research. That’s not why we’re here today, we’re not here to spread baseless rumors that Kris Kristofferson was a CIA asset. We’re here to reminisce about an American cultural icon.

Whenever all my family was gathered under the carport at my grandparents’ place, the conversation was always about two turns away from arguing about and subsequently ranking The Highwaymen. We usually landed on the following: Johnny was the coolest, Waylon was the real outlaw, Willie was the singer and the best guitar player, Merle was simply too talented to be there, and Kris was there to stand around and look pretty. Kris was Hollywood, always said with a bit of a sneer and an eyeroll. Nobody took him seriously as a vocalist and they made fun of his singing whenever possible.

I even did impressions of all the Highwaymen, and I was pretty good at it; I actually practiced. My impression of Kristofferson was just clearing my throat, making sure I held one note the whole time from as far back in my mouth as I could get. Because Kristofferson wasn’t a singer. He was a actor. Lived in Malibu. A actor. 

That’s how I always thought of the guy, and how I always talked about him when his name came up. He was a superhunk with annoyingly great taste in roles. A lot of this was sublimated jealousy. He went to the best university that exists, served in the 8th Infantry, lived in a better part of California, had any woman he wanted, played total badasses in any movie he wanted, and he was one of the greatest songwriters in American history. That’s part of why we all made fun of his voice. This guy had to be lousy at something. It was too unfair otherwise. He was the perfect 20th century man. 

In the wake of his death, everybody’s gonna talk about his songwriting but nobody needs to. He wrote Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down. The end. Don’t need to pad the CV on that one. I always knew him as an actor of surprising skill and subtlety. I almost want to use the word thespian, maybe because of that Oxford business. 

He’s wonderful, the definition of rugged American charisma, in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (maybe the most underrated Scorsese), A Star is Born, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (his songwriting always felt like it was in competition with Bob Dylan, but we know who wins in front of a camera). He’s a totally confident leading man in Heaven’s Gate, which would have otherwise gone down in history as a combination horse crime and cocaine explosion.

Cisco Pike is a perfect little movie, The Pilgrim Chapter 33 at feature length, that bottles an entire 1970s Los Angeles aesthetic: sweaty cowboy clothes, marijuana, being a dirtbag, Harry Dean Stanton, and driving a beater to the Troubadour. I’m partial to George Armitage’s bicentennial-themed vetsploitation flick Vigilante Force. My grandpa would probably tell you the best thing Kristofferson did with his life wasn’t Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down or Me and Bobby McGee, but Blade. 

Kris Kristofferson was a hell of a guy. I was always jealous of him. I still am, even though I’m probably a better singer. I’ll shut up after one quick memory. One of my very oldest:

When I was little, I had a kiddie tape player with a built-in speaker. Had some kiddie tapes to go with it, all of which I’ve forgotten. Probably Disney songs or collections of public domain stuff like Home on the Range. But sometimes my grandpa would give me a tape or two, probably stuff he wanted to get rid of because he didn’t have room. The tapes always smelled like 20 year old cigarette smoke and the smell would linger on the kiddie tape player even after I put them back in my closet. One night I put on a tape by an artist with a funny looking name, and the song made me cry and cry and cry, just endlessly, to the point where my mom had to come in and console me. For years afterward, decades afterward, just remembering that song or even that old tape smell would make me cry, make me terrified of being alone, make me bodily aware of loneliness and how thoroughly outrageously physically fucking painful it is. It was Help Me Make It Through The Night.

The Only Article Ever Written About Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson.

There’s a new Bob Dylan movie coming out this Christmas, and you couldn’t pay me to see it unless you’re a magazine editor who can pay me to see it. Even if it were executed perfectly, the whole idea is pointless. First because Walk Hard, the greatest comedy of the 2000s, exists. Second because it so clearly leans into a selfish, romantic conception of Bob Dylan, where he’s an album cover, a song you remember from college, a tool for your spiritual awakening, a nostalgic totem of the boomers, an answer to the question of what America means, stranded in time. 

And that’s fundamentally bullshit. Check with your local library or news desk and you will find that Bob Dylan recently had his first #1 hit on the Billboard charts and he is a demonstrably living man. He gets out of bed, has coffee, sits at a table, writes for awhile, does a show that night, all sorts of alive stuff. 

He’s a legend, yeah. But treating legends through the veil of hagiography is boring. It’s almost masturbatory; making it about you. (For this reason, Love & Mercy is maybe the only big musician biopic I really like, because it’s about Brian Wilson, not how Brian Wilson makes you feel.) I wanna know about the actual guy. Even at its most mundane, life is compelling. You know what I’d rather see than yet another movie where I’m reminded that Bob Dylan wrote The Times They Are A-Changin’? Bob Dylan making toast in the morning at his place on Point Dume. 

Which is why I was so excited to see the Outlaw Music Festival at the Hollywood Bowl this summer. Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson sort of co-headlining. You can look at them as two legends, or you can look at them as two men who are objectively amazing at the jobs they do for money. Going to their show is the only way to do that. They want you there. They want you to see them do their jobs. 

Got to the show a bit late because it is impossible to get into the Hollywood Bowl during events, even though it’s three miles away and takes me about nine minutes to get there during work hours. It’s harder to get to Costco during work hours. But getting inside the venue during an event is like trying to get on a ride at Disneyland on Labor Day; just this confusing crush of humanity and $20 beer. 

But the magic trick of the Bowl is that once you fight your way through the labyrinth and get seated, it’s actually relaxing. And the giant crowds, in this case around 20,000 people, seem cool. Because this thing is bigger than you and you’re so unremarkable that you’re invisible. It’s not like being at McCabe’s with 60 people and the guy sitting in the folding chair next to you is Jackson Browne. 

I found my seat midway through an opening act, this guy John Mellencamp. I’ve gotten some grief from Midwesterners for not caring about his set, or not taking him seriously. Not gonna argue about that though, because the reason I don’t care is almost interesting: I’m not from the Midwest at all. Never been there. And I’ve never heard a John Mellencamp song. Never seen him play. All I know about him is he used to go by Cougar, he “discovered” the brilliant James McMurtry, and he’s got that one about sucking on a chili dog. Whatever. Seems fine. I just totally missed him.

In a world trash-compacted by the internet, he’s still regional, and my blind spot is at least somewhat because of geography. Reminds me of when my mom’s Northeastern husband played a burned CD in the car and a Bon Jovi song came on. I wasn’t remotely familiar. Couldn’t have identified him in a billion years. Walking into Mellencamp’s set was like showing up for the final of a class you never enrolled in.

He was good. Came off like an Indiana Bruce Springsteen who either smoked the entire Philip Morris factory or is really good at faking it. Excellent sound. The guitar was especially potent. And I’m a sucker for something he did and I don’t get to see much: lead electric guitar and violin interplay. I loved it when Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros did it and I loved it when Mellencamp did it. Still don’t know his songs though.

Time for Bob. Get ready here comes Bob.

I’ve seen him a few times, the last being the Rough & Rowdy Ways tour. I was thrilled by the promise of how different this show was going to be. The last one was dominated by new material. This one promised to a) ditch all of it and b) get a bit loose. Nothing from the new album. The set is half covers. And not covers people at a summer festival are likely to know. In the merch area, he was selling shirts advertising a tour for the Tempest album that didn’t even happen, complete with fake tour dates. (Yes I bought it.) This is the crotchety, antisocial Bob Dylan who likes screwing with people. He’s a natural troll and it powers him.

Set was pretty much as-advertised. The band was tight and never got in the way of the songs and Mickey Raphael, America’s only harmonica player, sat in for a few numbers. Bob spent the whole thing behind the piano and as my pal Molly Lambert pointed out, was definitely on a Jerry Lee Lewis kick. I’m not trained on piano but I like what he does with the piano. It’s like he’s talking to you with it. I like the bass emphasis and the directness. If he was “better,” I wouldn’t enjoy it as much. It’s ragged. The songs are ragged. It works.

Bob was in fantastic voice for Bob. Straight-up robust. He did an extremely faithful Little Queenie and sounded like he enjoyed Six Days on the Road more than any of his own stuff. I was positive he’d turn off the cameras for the big screens on the sides of the stage. I was shocked when he didn’t. I was not shocked that they were so distant and static it looked like surveillance footage from a 7-Eleven.

But again, there’s that gulf between legend and reality, which for Bob is huge. The sound was a bit too quiet. Just a bit. Everybody by my yes-I-spent-too-much-money-on-this seat talked over the majority of the set. Like he was a lounge piano player. They weren’t even talking about Bob. They just weren’t paying attention at all. Drove me nuts. He’s 83. He did speed and coke. He could die in 30 minutes. This is like seeing Woody Guthrie in 1995. Don’t you care? Don’t you want to see this, whatever it may be?

Answer for a lot of people is nah, but if you’ve seen him before, you know that. Luckily, he did get around to a jaw-dropping performance of Simple Twist of Fate, which made a bunch of the crowd shut up and left several people in my aisle in tears. Then, after about an hour, he did I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight and left the stage like a ghost and that was it. No refunds.

It was one of the most interesting Bob Dylan shows I’ve seen. He was fully himself, there to play music, and that was all. It actually was about the music.

But Willie was something else. If seeing Bob Dylan is as fucking nuts as seeing Woody Guthrie in 1995, seeing Willie Nelson is as fucking nuts as seeing Hank Williams during Obama’s second term. He’s 91. That’s 350 in country music years. And he just canceled a lot of East Coast dates. He can’t or isn’t allowed to play standing up. He could have talked through the songs for 30 minutes, do that B.B. King thing where you stretch out a few numbers until you run out the clock on the contract minimum, and you’d be lucky to be there. But he didn’t.

Willie’s longevity is a miracle, but his quality control in recent years is a miracle too. He puts out an album or two every year and they’re all really good. His latest, The Border, is properly excellent and one of my favorites of 2024. Excellent without a handicap for age (Many a Long and Lonesome Highway knocks me out). His understanding of what his voice can and should be doing is nonpareil. I’ve never even heard of a 91 year old singer having an excellent new album. I dunno if they got him on experimental drugs or what, but it’s unbelievable.

Willie got to the stage. Sat down. The cameras shot him from all kinds of cinematic angles, and he didn’t look like Bigfoot at all, but a movie star, and he kind of is. Everybody was suddenly paying attention. Total crowd control. He did an excellent survey of all his classics, but I truly think he’ll be able to do that for at least a few hours after his death. What was impressive was the new stuff and the stuff he doesn’t play much. Bloody Mary Morning drove the LA crowd insane. I Never Cared For You was the contemporary Lanois version, which sounded sick. And he did his new single, The Border, totally successfully, which I’ve never seen happen at his age. 

He told jokes. Introduced guests. Cracked wise. Absolutely relished saying “bullshit!” during his kid’s song Everything is Bullshit. Sang at the top of his ability the whole time. Took guitar solos. The actually diverse audience sang along to everything, laughed, cried, and generally acted like this was the greatest concert of all time. I saw a teenage girl completely break down during Always On My Mind. That’s powerful stuff. This guy had 20,000-ish people in the palm of his hand. 

He also did a Billy Joe Shaver song. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance in seeing him play Shaver material at this enormous, world-famous place, because I remember seeing Shaver play that song for maybe a hundred people at a dive bar downtown shortly after he shot that guy.

Willie closed out the show with his usual Will The Circle Be Unbroken/I’ll Fly Away rave-up, a perfect, cathartic way to end a concert that also makes it feel done, like you got your money’s worth and it’s okay to go home. It was like going to the most awesome church of all time; sends the dopamine levels off the charts. 

It was a hell of a time. Reminds me of that Letterman quote about Levon Helm, that everybody who isn’t here should be jealous of everybody who is here. I appreciate how fortunate I am to see these guys play, and as often as I have. But it’s weird too. A monster of a show in Los Angeles and the headliners are 83 and 91. That didn’t used to happen. Musicians didn’t live that long. This show was barely possible and it’s historically unusual that it happened. And it feels like the live music industry is ignoring that (see: Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney), clinging on to 20th century monoculture as long as they can. What’s the plan when these people are gone? Hologram tours? What abomination are they gonna come up with? Trust me, nobody’s replacing Willie Nelson when he’s gone. He’s it. He’s one of the inventors of what we think of as country music. That’s the end of the line. 

He’s got another new album out later this fall. Try to enjoy how profoundly unlikely that is. If there’s one thing I want to get across here, it’s that it’s actually not possible for these guys to last forever. One day soon it’ll just be over and we’ll be left thinking how peculiar it was that these historical figures were still here. We’re a bunch of lucky bastards.

So Long, Bob Newhart

Bob Newhart is dead, and that’s all right. There’s no cause to mourn: he was an incredibly famous, wealthy man, and lived a long good life. He was almost a hundred. He had a huge house in Los Angeles. He spent almost his entire comedy career being universally recognized as one of the most important people in his profession.

In fact, it’s surreal to even be writing the phrase “Bob Newhart is dead,” because it’s surreal to think of him as just some guy. He wasn’t just a comedian, he wasn’t just a stand-up. He was one of the architects of the entire thing modern TV, modern American comedy is. He was like a president, like Neil Armstrong: so important and foundational to the landscape that he transcended concerns of mortality. He was the kind of guy they make statues of, the kind of guy they name parks and awards after.

At a glance, you know, to someone born after the year 2000, he didn’t seem like it. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say he didn’t advertise it (which is funny because he started in advertising and was very shrewd about maintaining and controlling his public image). He’s so quiet, so retiring, sometimes almost-whisper quiet, that you can barely tell he’s there. At any moment, it seems like he could outright junk the lines he was reading and just fall asleep in front of you.

But it’s important to know how radical that actually was. Comedians simply didn’t do that. It was a new concept in comedy, and a concept that, once invented, felt like it had always existed. 

He was a virtuoso of control, choosing which notes not to play, and watching him perform actually is like watching a great jazz performance. The pleasures are slow to unravel. They take and require patience. There are no quick or easy laughs. Whatever it is Bob Newhart is doing is miles and miles away from whatever Adam Sandler is doing, which is not an insult to Adam Sandler. They’re just playing different instruments. I mean, there’s a reason he’s idolized by pretty much every major name that came after him, from Norm Macdonald to Conan and Letterman. Those men simply would not have had their careers if Bob Newhart hadn’t come before them and demonstrated a different way to perform comedy in public.

This will sound tangential, but it’s not. And I’m not going to name names here. I worked with a film executive once who I absolutely adored because he was intelligent and never talked down to me and he was a supernaturally active listener. I admired him for being able to be that and still find money and get projects financed, make them actually exist, without pulling his hair out or screaming.

One day in a meeting I noticed something he had that Bob Newhart also had, and I think it’s the key to his genius. When the stakes were really ratcheted up, when people were hysterical or melting down or just being showbiz stubborn, he would get quiet. As quiet as he could. It was often a legitimate struggle to hear him. Because of that, you had to pay attention to him 100% of the time. You had to hang on his every word.

Newhart was the king of this. The crazier the stakes of a scene, the more absurd the scenario, the calmer he got. Because this forced your attention, he could get laughs out of a barely existent smirk, a smirk so minimalist you weren’t even sure he was smirking or if you were imagining it. He could almost carry a script without talking at all, with just knowing exactly when to sigh or how to pick a phone up. It really made you appreciate that people in comedy are usually working too hard, and you’re seeing them working. Comedy doesn’t need to be all spectacle. The camera is more subtle than that. 

And you know what? It made him come off really fucking cool. He didn’t need it. Every time he was ever on camera, he came off like he could just leave the stage and never come back. Like he might just retire right then and there and move to New Mexico like Gene Hackman.

The Bob Newhart Show is one of my favorite comedies ever. I’ve probably spent thousands of hours in the company of that show. But to this day I’m not exactly sure why. Sure, it’s got a perfect cast and Suzanne Pleshette is one of the most gorgeous women to ever live. The opening credit sequence is low-key one of the most stylish in the history of television. The whole thing projects a quiet confidence and charisma. And as a big time insomniac, the soft melody and rhythm of the show is guaranteed to lull me to peaceful sleep and not have my usual programming wall of insane nightmares.

But there’s some other X factor. Truth be told, I don’t laugh at the show much, or very hard. Maybe just a chuckle now and then. It definitely doesn’t have the joke density of something like Arrested Development. 

I like to think it’s the patience. That show was never in a hurry for you. Somehow, it was never stressed out. It was just doing its thing, and you could pay attention or not. It never needed you. Before The Bob Newhart Show sitcoms were roundly not just terrible but profoundly childish. This felt like finally talking to an adult, with professionalism and maturity. After something like Bewitched or My Mother, The Car, that felt almost heroic.

(And shout-out to the end of Newhart, one of the most revolutionary television endings ever. The sort of instant before-and-after moment that makes TV rewarding. It’s exactly as good as advertised, a joke that took 18 years to finally get to the punchline.)

Bob was grown up. He was cool, even suave in his way. He pretty much invented deadpan comedy and very few of my favorite comedians would be here without him. Now he’s gone. That’s fine. He had one hell of a run and he got to enjoy it. Rest easy, pal.

P.S. Bob Newhart was a comedian. Let’s end on a joke. I love this gag he did with Conan at the Emmys. I think it’s the individual funniest joke in award show history, and his face is doing 95% of the work. I won’t spoil it.

The End Result of My Herculean Big Bang Theory Spec

Author’s Note: This is the first newsletter where I’m reposting a piece I wrote that’s no longer hosted on the internet. My archive is pretty solid because I always figured this would happen eventually. In the future, I’ll probably be paywalling archival stuff unless it’s insanely popular. 

This story is tough to explain if you weren’t following me ten years ago, but it basically goes like this: I went to Pepperdine, and through Pepperdine I knew a bunch of aspiring comedy writers. A hip thing to do back then was write an “edgy” spec script for whatever was popular at the time. You know, like a Seinfeld where Jerry kills his whole family. By and large, I couldn’t stand this stuff, because it never actually felt radical. Just felt like adding cuss words and murder.

So I decided to do a Big Bang Theory spec that actually felt edgy to me personally, and then bother people at CBS with it until they blocked me on social media. I picked Big Bang because I’d never seen it, wasn’t going to see it, and couldn’t stand the promos. 

Who knows what I was going for all these years later, but I know I wanted to riff on Leopold and Loeb, MKUltra and midcentury scientific hubris. Something about the actual problem of evil. There’s some Screwtape Letters in there.

I think it holds up. Sorta wish I’d written a “real” version instead of something basically meant to go viral, back when people did that, but I never aimed to use it in my packet or anything. I just wanted to bother people with it, do these little micro-blasts of insane bullshit and post them bright and early to 10,000 followers on a school day. (Me and my guitarist cousin used to call this “bringing the doom.”)

I had plans for two sequels but then I got a real job and never had time to write what was quickly becoming three pulp books.

The first, here, was gonna be about MKUltra and I kinda pictured Sheldon as a James Mason character.

The second was gonna be set in Guatemala with Sheldon as a vague stand-in for both British colonialists and Pablo Escobar. The story was going to be mostly co-opted from what I guessed the plot of the then-lost 1941 film This Man is Dangerous was. Leonard (Gene Hackman) goes looking for Sheldon, once thought to be dead but rumored to be alive, with the intent to bring him to justice. Car bombs go off, drug deals go bad, churches burn down. Eventually Leonard tracks a viciously dexedrine-addled Sheldon to a boat he’s using as a safe house. They get into a fight that graphically and specifically almost kills them. Sheldon hits his head on rusted steel and starts to bleed out, choking out the words “useless, useless,” like John Wilkes Booth said when he was killed. (I read a lot of Guatemalan history books and half-memorized The Judges of the Secret Court, because I think it’s endlessly funny to totally over-research something that clearly doesn’t matter at all.) 

The third story was kind of a Warren Beatty political thriller, something like The Parallax View plus The Manchurian Candidate: Sheldon survives, sneaks across the border into America, kills a cop when he’s busted in El Paso, and makes his way to Washington D.C. to assassinate the vice-president. Leonard, a retired and divorced detective, chases him the whole way, through seedy motels and gas stations, sleepless nights, cartons of cigarettes. Sheldon beats him though, and kills the VP at a whistle-stop in Baltimore. When Leonard finally catches up with Sheldon at a ranch in Virginia a few days later, Sheldon prepares a grand monologue about his justification for the murder, but Leonard shoots him at point blank range and burns the body. Vultures circle overhead. It would have been the least funny thing ever written and I was prepared to read tons of Robert Ludlum and John le Carre and I was going to watch Sidney Pollack and Sydney Lumet even-more-too-much than I already had. 

But I was too far from the joke by then and if I want to write stuff like that I should just write it. I still haven’t, because the joke was the engine. Recluse writes deranged 150 page Big Bang Theory spec, that kind of thing. Anyway, here it is. 

---

I knew I had to stop when Bill Withers called The Big Bang Theory his favorite show. Normally I don't defer to the tastes of celebrities, but this was one of about four possible exceptions. I had been listening to Bill Withers all day. I had just returned from a road trip that was largely an excuse to sing "Lean On Me" without public scrutiny. I was reading his interview like it was gospel, and I got to that aside, recoiled in my chair, took a deep breath, and said "this is over."

Right, but what was over? My days of trying to crack sitcom writing with the world's most challenging Big Bang Theory script were over. I should have known it when the work stopped being fun. I should have known it six months into the process of writing a 30-page project that I never even came close to registering with the WGA. I should have known it when I started mining archaic philosophy books for dialogue inspiration. I should have known it when the show's executive producer explicitly ordered me not to send him my rough draft. And yet I didn't know it, because I didn't want my life's work to be over.

But the show's season finale is tomorrow, and that's a good time to bring the curtain down. I'm not going to sell my Big Bang Theory spec. I'm not going to copyright it. I'm not even going to distribute it to Chuck Lorre via leaflet campaign, like I repeatedly threatened I would in moments of unchecked bravado. I'm just going to show you the script in its entirety, so that you may know what I tried and failed to do: write the world's greatest study of dictatorial thought, revolutionary priming, the moral decay and relativism of the Harvard curriculum that led to MKUltra, the philosophical motivations behind torture, and above all else, science.

A great many of you have asked me, "Kaleb Horton, did you ever watch a single episode of the damn thing?" and I always hung my head and answered no. I felt it would compromise the integrity of my vision to know more than what I already knew, which was that The Big Bang Theory was about two scientists. Two scientifically driven men of impure motive and questionable morality. I considered it my job to take this simple reality and use it to probe the nature of evil. Because the television landscape was not addressing this question. It hid away from it. I had to shine a light on the cowardice of Hollywood.

Enough rambling. Let me show you the script so you may learn by it even if the masses will never see it. Absorb it. Absorb the privileged information of its pages. And as you absorb it, permit me to note that I have condensed it somewhat. That I have taken concepts originally explored for dozens of pages and reduced them to mere sentences. That I have taken a novel, perhaps a series of novels, and reduced it in pursuit of a pure truth. So gradual reveals become sudden reveals. Major characters are reduced to single lines or eliminated entirely. None of the pages are numbered. And the first page wasn't even relevant to the rest of the story. Do not blame me, however. Blame CBS for failing, yes, me, they failed me, but you also. They failed the country.

The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

The internet is bad now. We all know this and it’s not news. It’s not dead, but as a tool and a presence in culture, its glory days are firmly gone and they’re not coming back. Never mind the why because that’s out of our control and can’t be fixed. Just think about the overall experience. Websites as hang-out destinations and communities where you could make friends and waste a whole weekend are basically extinct. There’s no good reason to stay up until 3 a.m. to use it anymore. Search engines don’t even work anymore. It sort of feels like a mall in a mid-size city. You still need to go there sometimes to get glasses fixed or keys made, but it’s unthinkable to linger there and there’s a dull feeling of I swear this used to be fun that you don’t wanna dwell on.

That feeling of discovery, that you might find something, stumble on a secret, learn something, meet authentic weirdos, that era is gone. The barbed wire has come up on the frontier. It’s over, and it’s been over. There are no more discoveries to make. You’ve reached the end. You read it all. Even a theoretically endless content mill like Reddit is something you can kind of complete in a couple weeks. It’s all stuck on an endless loop, it’s all reruns. 

And social media as we know it is not and probably cannot be a substitute for that old feeling of community. Even if all your best real friends are there, it just feels like you’re doing free advertising for sinister companies that algorithmically, complacently push the worst news in the world in front of your face all the time. Someday we’ll probably find out social media is as bad for you as cigarettes. (Social media companies probably know that already and it’ll trickle down to us officially in ten years.)

Unfortunately I still need to use this thing for work, to maintain a footprint on this planet. That’s just how society shook out. It’s the only place to publish writing and it’s the only way to look for jobs. So figuring out how to use it healthily is a huge deal to me. It means, for starters, restricting exposure to news. It means seeking out any weird rabbit holes, especially hobbyist rabbit holes, that are still left. They exist, but it’s like getting a silver quarter in change. Wikipedia crawling is still alright though I’m starting to think I read most of it. On Twitter, I really like the Discontinued Foods account. 

Enter The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet, a phenomenon I still check in on once a week or so, which feels like one of the last rabbit holes left. It’s a community, somehow, that still fascinates me. The story broadly goes like this: in probably 1984, a teen named Darius is hanging out in Wilhelmshaven, in northern Germany. He regularly tapes songs off the radio. One night he’s listening to Musik fur junge Leute on station NDR 1. Tapes a bunch of post-punk and goth stuff. You know most of it; it’s all downstream from Joy Division. But there’s one song where he doesn’t catch the title or the artist. And it bugs the ever-loving hell out of him. He’s been looking for it ever since, and in the last few years a huge Reddit community has sprung up to help him find it.

The song itself is unremarkable. In fact, I strongly dislike it. It’s a dour little bastard. Thing sounds like any number of German or Austrian bands that wanted to sound like XTC or whatever. The melody is hilariously similar to (I Just) Died In Your Arms. Nothing about it stands out. If I was feeling charitable I’d say it was designed to be anonymous, but nobody does that on purpose unless humans still work at the muzak factory (which I picture as somehow having smoke stacks). I never want to hear the song again. I wish that guy had thrown his tape into the ocean.

This song is what they call “lostwave,” a song by an unidentified artist. But it can’t just be the demo tape your cousin made. It has to feel like it could be a segment on a TV show. When people talk about songs like this, become fixated on them, there’s a deep undercurrent of wanting mystery, some virtual equivalent of going out into the Arizona desert in the late 1890s looking for Egyptian artifacts or something. 

We’ve all seen those “lost” album covers, the crazy-looking private press stuff like Ken: By Request Only or All My Friends Are Dead. There’s always a glimmer of hope among lostwave people that maybe you’ll turn that rock over and find something really fucked up. But you know what all those albums basically are? Christian music. Soft Christian music. Sometimes they’re the work of one dude with too much hubris. Like L’Amour, by “Lewis.” I happen to like that one but I know exactly what it is: cocaine romance music from ‘80s Los Angeles. So people tend to gravitate toward goth stuff, anything vaguely spooky. The mysterious song checks that box.

Thing about seeking out flea market detritus like this is that there’s not really a mystery, it just doesn’t have an internet footprint. With some exceptions that usually wind up on the news, flea markets don’t really have anything interesting. There are people who catalog this stuff their whole lives and know exactly what they’re looking for, almost with forensic precision, and you’re not gonna beat them. You can’t play the lottery and plan to win.

Another recent example, maybe the most famous lost song, was called Ulterior Motives, or Everyone Knows That. Long search, huge community, lots of memes and dead leads, and what was it? What was the answer to that bigass mystery? Turned out to be by a horror filmmaker and composer who very well could have met with my wife in Burbank when she worked for The Asylum. Guy recorded it in the valley, by Michael Jackson’s house. It was for a porno film, available on all the websites where you get your pornos.

That’s a fundamentally funny part of being a “lostwave” fan. This stuff is not that good. You’re not gonna find a single-ready demo by The Clash. They would have put that out. Johnny Cash didn’t bury his songs in his backyard. They’re all indexed and filed someplace. What you’re gonna wind up with is downmarket amateur synthpop or downmarket amateur country-folk. Go listen to Joy Division and Jim Croce and you’ll have a better time.

Back to our mystery song. The last big thing in lostwave. Why have I spent years rubbernecking at this community when I want to run it over with my car and take a blowtorch to its corpse? Hell, this thing has a Yamaha DX7 on it. I used to and still do think those things were poison.

Maybe because it’s fascinating to see what people want out of a mystery. This drive to go searching but not finding. To have unanswerable questions. We clearly need those. Some people try to get it from God, some people try to get it from German radio stations 40 years ago. 

And it’s fun to indulge a community where a cross-section of aging European sound engineers and barely literate 15 year old Americans share the same space, in the pursuit of something that doesn’t matter at all. The results of mixing those two are insane. There are tons of people who fantasize that this song was recorded in East Berlin and the band got killed getting over the wall. People who think the singer was a murderer. All sorts of scenarios that would make, frankly, a pretty stupid movie.

And there are yet more people, kids mostly, who think the internet is all-powerful and has been here forever and can still solve our problems, even though it's all flatly garbage now. They endlessly try to parse the lyrics, which are impenetrable nonsense, in the hopes it will make them able to google it. This wouldn’t even work if the thing was on google, but that’s okay, they don’t really care. The end result of all this is a massive search party that’s so dysfunctional that they’ll never find the answer, or they’re not ready to admit they don’t want it.

After awhile though, like with true crime, you tire of gawking at internal politics and other peoples’ gossip and just want some professionalism. Some grasp of the scientific method. There are ways to find answers to things like this. These answers are boring, but I happen to like boring answers. I was thrilled when the Golden State Killer was found through shoe-leather police work. I want to actually know who D.B. Cooper was (was he CIA or work for the airline or what; I love theories about him but after awhile I just think why isn’t this story moving, why is it stuck here?). I want the Zodiac found (I got five bucks says he was in law enforcement or didn’t strictly exist). I get the need for mystery but there’s a time for them to end, for books to close. I hate having stories I’m not done writing. There’s satisfaction in finality, in coming back to earth and realizing it has a pretty concrete set of rules. That we’re all mammals moving in one linear direction through time for 60-90 years and then it’s lights out, usually in some fucking hospital bed.

I want this mystery-if-you-can-call-it-that solved not because I care about the song, but because I want people to hear how normal it really is. How explainable the world is. It’s so much easier to go through life when you can treat it that way. Where’s Amelia Earhart’s plane? It’s in the ocean. Where she crashed it.

Road Food

So I did the math on this. Sat down, got out the legal pad, crunched the numbers. I have been to In-N-Out one billion times. I’ve spent so much of my life there that I have to earnestly say it’s part of my identity as a Californian. Which I don’t like admitting, because the place is so profoundly, suspiciously mythologized. The half-drunk celebs going there after award shows. The t-shirts, the hats, the shoes. The palm trees out front. The fake secret menu. It can feel like a satellite campus of Disneyland, so iconic it’s not to be trusted. Every other fast food joint has lost or pivoted its brand identity with time, and here’s exactly one holdout with a fanbase that can get radioactively cultish.

What’s hard to see if you’re visiting from out of state, or if you go to one of their blockbuster openings in places like Utah, is that they’ve always been the only 100% reliable place to get food if you’ve been on the road all day and you’re sweaty and exhausted and broke. Sometimes it’s the only thing in town that’s open, and it’s often the only place that’s clean. If you roll into Merced for gas at 10 at night, you can confidently say “this is the best thing I can possibly be doing in Merced right now.”

The food is fine. The real trick is just that the overall experience is balanced. That burger has the exact right amount of stuff a burger should have, almost cartoonishly so. The ingredients are fresh and it’s an acceptable amount of unhealthy. You’re guaranteed to get the exact same product at every location. And they don’t overload the menu. If you’re there, you know what you’re doing. You’re off the road for half an hour. 

I don’t even think it’s the best. I don’t really care. It’s more that it’s a platonic ideal of the postwar roadside California burger (they invented the drive-thru). A California burger should be dead basic, like a Chuck Berry song. Meat, cheese, bread, etc. You should be able to eat two, and they should be kind of cheap and smallish. Not terribly messy. This is the exact kind of thing that used to populate our highways that takes you back right to the beginning of fast food as a concept, as a new luxury for the working class. Cheeseburgers have been ruined by gimmicks, and the trick to the perfect California burger is to not have any.

I didn’t really grow up with restaurants. Not just because of the money, but because they were seen as bad, dated, a crapshoot, places to get food poisoning (there are few things in California that can be sadder, more haunted than a midcentury steakhouse). When my grandparents drove on Route 66, they never stopped at any of those cute diners with neon signs, they just packed Vienna sausages and Saltines. But they made an exception for fast food when it started to explode in Southern California specifically. There was this new promise of reliability, that you could just get a sack of cheeseburgers and that’ll take care of the problem of road food.

As much as I dig the uptown dignity of In-N-Out, what I most remember was piling into the Grenada to go to places that were glorified shacks, places with like freeze or frosty or root beer in the name. Places I’d go with my dad when he handled auto claims; that distinct ambiance of back offices with five year old calendars on the wall and the doors don’t shut anymore and the bathroom is a closet with a toilet that was never even new when it was old. Some of the best burgers I’ve ever eaten tasted almost like they were grilled on the hood of some old Okiemobile. 

It’s an experience I’m always looking for and I apologize for nothing because food is one of the least embarrassing places to get nostalgia out of your system. It always winds up feeling like chasing ghosts; old parts of town, mechanic’s rows, tough old neighborhoods that won’t be rebuilt when they burn down. It’s always haunting when I find one of these places and it’s good. They never feel like they’re really in business. You half expect to see dead relatives at the counter. “Oh, so that’s where you’ve been hiding since 1993.” And they’re getting harder to find, as people who came of age in blue collar postwar California rapidly die off.

The best one I’ve ever found is Bill’s Burgers in Van Nuys. Been there since the ‘60s. Surrounded by mechanics. It’s the best cheeseburger I’ve ever eaten. I don’t know why. Sense memory is part of it but there are intangibles. Perfect condiment balance. Uncomplicated taste of meat. A well-seasoned ancient grill that looks like it magically appeared one day in a junkyard. Why is No Particular Place to Go one of the greatest American songs? Because it just does exactly what it needs to.

It might be the most crotchety business in all of Southern California. There’s not really any seating. The building looks like it could have been a gas station and there’s no cute vintage signage. They’re only open four days a week and they’re only open from 9 am to 4 pm. There’s some fun in the challenge of getting there because the line can be huge, you sort of have to have the day off, and it’s always 105 in Van Nuys especially if it isn’t. It’s cash-only, always packed, they run out of food, and they have an unaffected “what do you want,” “that,” “eight bucks” attitude that isn’t even cute for tourists. They’re not rough, they’re just kind of jerks in a way that feels like time travel.

It’s run by this guy named Bill Elwell but really, his name is just Bill. Works with one of his ex-wives. Charitably, he is in his mid-hundreds, and he always struck me as a true icon of the old San Fernando Valley, when it was beaters and farmland. An almost obsolete but very specific kind of hardass you know when you see it. He claims to be a WWII veteran. He told a buddy of mine that two of his sons died. One in a shootout following a drug deal gone bad under the pier, one from going into shock getting his back tattooed too soon after getting his torso tattooed. I’m pretty sure these are Rockford Files or Law & Order episodes specifically, but never mind.

After going there for years, one day he very deliberately came up to me and said he liked my boots. It was the longest conversation I ever heard him have. Apparently a reporter with the Los Angeles Times or some such tried to profile him for a piece called “The Best Burger in America.” Kept coming, Friday after Friday, until he finally told her to fuck herself. Another time, Jack Black came by with Mr. T, or maybe they came separately, whatever, and someone told Bill those guys were really famous and it could be great publicity. He said he didn’t fucking care and didn’t wanna hear about it. 

I highly recommend this place to anyone who wants a living snapshot of the kind of roadside burger that was perfected in this state, best eaten when you are dirty. Actually wait that’s not true and go to hell while you’re at it. But even more than In-N-Out, it feels like a miraculous historical outlier, a reminder of the kind of place we used to be and what we used to do. It also actually is the best cheeseburger anyone has ever made, but that’s none of your business.

Dreams

Howdy all. I’m back. Took some time off to figure out a new contract gig I’m hoping to land. Wrote a scene as Homer Simpson but it wasn’t for The Simpsons. Maybe I’ll get to talk about it sometime.

Also took a day off writing because it was my birthday and I don’t have family in town and my wife was away. Thought that’d be a nice little treat, but I wound up spending the whole day dully regretting it because of something I believe from the marrow of my bones: 36 is not a birthday. You don’t really have any business commemorating it.

Eighteen? There’s a birthday. It suddenly gets legal to join the military and I dunno, commit sexual intercourse or something. Twenty one? Absolutely a birthday. You’re through with college and you can legally buy the booze you previous had to make grad students buy for you. Thirty? One hell of a birthday. You’re officially an adult and they take away the get-out-of-jail free card of “hey, I was in my twenties, it happens.” You have to go be whoever you decided to be. But 36 is nothing. Maybe a couple friends call you. It’s a decent but hollow excuse to spend too much at a restaurant. But most of the birthday wishes you’re gonna get will be from credit card companies, and I’m still trying to figure out how to never hear from those again.

And I never really celebrated my birthday anyway. It’s on June 14th so everybody was always out of town and it was too hot to do anything. There is some novelty to the date though. You know when people say something random and whimsical then say “there’s gotta be a joke in there somewhere” and there isn’t because that’s not really how jokes work? My birthday is not only Flag Day, one of America’s dumber holidays. It’s also the birthday of Famous President Donald John Trump, who blocked me on Twitter. Sounds like that could be funny but come on, it’s trivia. The story of him blocking me isn’t even funny. I was harassing him about how much his hotels suck so he did the same thing anyone would do: groggily smash that block button at like 1 a.m. and immediately forget about it.

Not much has happened since the fake birthday. Went to get my car smogged so I could replace the tags, and it failed. Guy said it was because it was off the road too long, so I should go put 60-100 dirty miles on it. Figured I’d just go find an abandoned parking lot and drive it around the perimeter until somebody told me to stop. Within ten minutes, that’s what I was doing. Thank God for Los Angeles, a city of infinity people that is somehow teeming with abandoned parking lots.

I also had the most insane dream of my life. To be clear, I have on multiple occasions mixed bad whiskey with worse tequila and passed out listening to the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band on loop in my grandpa’s guest house that was on its way to being a shed. (The realtor called it a cottage. Love those guys. Keep it up!) This was definitely the most insane one, and it meant something. Something huge. People say dreams make them have realizations, commune with the dead, and I never believed it. I believe it now. Goes like this.

I get a job opportunity DM from a social media influencer girl. A real influencer, with half a million followers. Very pretty but in a way that’s invisible to normal people over 30. We hit it off. She says she likes Steely Dan a lot and I probably like them too because I’m old. I lie and say sure. 

Then she calls me. I accept the call. But I didn’t notice it was a facetime call, and I just got out of the shower and I’m nude. Profoundly, horribly nude. I look like a drawing of the nude guy they put on the Pioneer probe, but like if he was exploding. She sees everything and I hang up. I apologize profusely, delete all my social media, try to change my phone number. Then I remember she lives in my neighborhood so I find some huge sunglasses, a hoodie, a duffle bag, and catch a plane to my mom’s house.

I get there, finally, 700 miles away, and there she is. The influencer. Sitting on my mom’s porch swing. She says don’t worry, it’s easy to find addresses, and she doesn’t want me to be embarrassed. The job offer is still on the table and she wants to explain it, hold on just a sec, as long as I still like Steely Dan. Then a bunch of big rigs show up with a hundred alternate versions of people who look like her. A film crew starts unpacking and hauling out generators. There’s a catering van. They set up a podium in the front yard and mic her like this is when Mark Felt announced he was Deep Throat. Teamsters are stringing wires everywhere, just destroying my mom’s house. Somebody sets up a sound system and it’s playing Steely Dan. Somebody takes too much ecstasy and pukes everywhere and ruins my mom’s couch. Somebody starts a grease fire in the kitchen.

As the influencer approaches the podium, I notice a two-headed fox is standing next to her, and its ears are on fire. I’m terrified, and she says to me “oh, that’s my dog Belvedere. He’s a good boy.”

She starts talking to assembled reporters and cameras. “This man next to me,” and she gestures to me, “is special. We have something special planned. We just need to know if he’s alive or dead.” 

I run to the garage and get on my bike and take it to the police station, where I meet the old police chief smoking a cigarette. It’s clearly Michael Lerner from ‘70s television and Barton Fink. I explain the situation.

“Yeah, we’ve been tracking these guys. They call themselves a flash mob improv group, but you know they’re not that. We have cause to believe they’re associated with an evangelical church in the mountains, and we have further cause to believe it’s a front for Satanists. SWAT Team will be over in 5. Whoever these guys are, they don’t have guns. They have something else.”

I bike back to my mom’s house after waiting 5 or 6 hours. I go inside and she’s made cookies. I take one to the porch swing. There, again, is the influencer.

“You know what’s funny? You’re going to see me again.”

Then I woke up, drenched in sweat. This dream was loaded with symbolism. It was the most detailed dream I’ve ever had. I remember every frame of the thing. I’ll remember it forever. I tried to put it out of my head, forget the fear, the sense that I was dying in my real actual life.

Then I remembered an old wives’ tale. And I remembered that at 9 p.m. last night, I went to In N Out and got a double-double animal and animal fries. And I knew exactly what the dream meant: don’t eat cheese right before bed.

Perihelion & Aphelion

By the skin of his teeth, my youngest brother had finally graduated high school. I was in my dad’s garage, going through all my brothers’ old homework. After some thirty years, it was time to ritually destroy most of it. Leave it all behind and render it to memory, where you get to embellish and lie whenever you want because there’s no paper trail. Life’s more fun that way.

Trick to throwing away family artifacts is to be a mercenary, a cold-blooded murderer. That’s how my grandma kept her house, a house the same size as my one-bedroom apartment, from bursting at the seams. You’re 18? So long, Evel Knievel stunt cycle. That typewriter reminds you of the good old days? Not anymore. Goodbye. Those photos from Aunt Betty’s funeral? Depressing. There’s dust all over them. Adios. 

Most of our homework was trash, a bunch of work-for-hire gigs we didn’t get paid for because apparently we were getting paid in education. By and large, it was ready for the fire, with two exceptions. First was my brother Daniel’s Warren Zevon obituary, which opened with this hall of fame line: “Warren Zevon was one of America’s best gun-slinging, piano playing, binge drinking, chain smoking, drug abusing sadistic cynics ever.” Couldn’t toss that.

Second was something I wrote when I was 6 or 7. Some assignment about working at the newspaper. It asked what I wanted to be paid, and I answered with a child’s hopeless optimism about the future of media: a day of food for a day of work. Then it asked what features I would write. Answer: wars, funnies, and the space program.

I had to keep this one. Good time capsule of an era where we had newspapers, and a souvenir of the ten years where I was obsessed with outer space. When it was the only thing I cared about. When I would take a book about astrophysics to youth group and hide in the corner and actually read it even though girls occasionally tried to talk to me. When I subscribed to Sky & Telescope and read it so much it made me question my relationship with God. My parents even made me have a sit-down with my pastor over it. Space had become my god.

Beats the hell out of me why that was. I didn’t like science fiction. I liked Star Wars but I liked it as a car movie by a dude from Modesto, and it may as well have been a sequel to American Graffiti. Star Trek was fine but even as a kid I kinda knew they were just going to Planet Griffith Park and Planet Agua Dulce. I liked Jules Verne but mostly because he was so prophetic I wondered if he could give me winning lottery numbers. 

The banner achievements of the American space program didn’t even interest me that much. Landing on the moon seemed like a boring waste of money, and a glorified demonstration of military dominance. For one thing, I could go outside and see it so well I had a decent sense of its geography. The damn thing was right there. My attitude was the same as my grandpa’s back in 1969: Howard Hughes could have gone to the moon if he wanted to bad enough.

If I cared about the moon landing at all, it was because of two men: Michael Collins and Harrison Schmitt. Michael Collins because I couldn’t comprehend what it must have felt like to get that close to the moon without getting out of the car. One shot, ever, and he couldn’t go. And Harrison Schmitt because he was the last guy to put his feet on the thing. What could that possibly feel like, to walk on the moon, get back on the ladder, and know deep down you would be the last person to ever do that? The only thing interesting about the moon, which is deader than dead, is it makes earth look breathtaking and miraculous in a way our brains normally can’t process without a shitload of drugs.

Mars was a little bit more interesting. It sort of has an atmosphere. It sort of has water. It looks exactly like a worse version of Arizona. The prospect of getting there was more of a logistical challenge, more of an adventure, a voyage. And there was the outside chance that maybe we’d find the fossilized remains of life, but with the hilarious asterisk that it would be extremophile bacteria and nothing else. Just like Arizona.

(Digression, because this is a newsletter, not a magazine: I have a short story idea I can’t shake off but for whatever reason won’t actually write. Goes like this. A guy at NASA is sitting at his computer in Alhambra, driving a decommissioned Martian rover. He crests a hill and discovers a desert ironwood. He’s found life on Mars. But the tree is in bad shape and it isn’t photogenic and it’s not intelligence, which is all anybody cares about. He heads over to Baskin-Robbins for a butterscotch ice cream cone and debates whether to make an announcement. It’s life, and theoretically it changes everything we know, but it’s just too anticlimactic. Who cares? When he gets back to the office, he turns the rover around and goes home early.)

What ultimately did it was Comet Hale-Bopp. I wasn't even ten years old, puberty was way off anyway, and my only hobbies were collecting coins and complaining about editorial decisions in Hardy Boys books. I just didn’t care. Oh boy, a huge chunk of dirty ice. But my mom’s friend had a nice telescope and I had to go outside, so when it hit perihelion, we drove to the desert to gawk. 

That’s what got me into space. That, by itself. Nothing else. That was the punch in the face. Not movies, not toy spaceships, not tinted photos from the Hubble. Just the sky. I had thought of the sky as immutable, but now here was this huge anomaly, this busted exhaust pipe kicking up so much dust that even the sun had to call attention to it. The one constant ever in my life was now fundamentally different, and it would stay different for almost two years. There was poetry in there someplace. If the sky could change, then anything could change.  

Most nights, until it was gone, I’d go to the backyard at night and look up. Say hello to Hale-Bopp, maybe look for shooting stars. I finally cared about something beyond earth. Something bigger than us. I didn’t want anybody to invent gravity boots or land on Mars, I just wanted to look up. Hale-Bopp was a reminder of infinity. It was a miracle. Makes you understand how Comet Haley drove kings and navigators nuts.

Two dudes discovered Hale-Bopp at about the same time, in the summer of 1995. Alan Hale (astronomer) and Tom Bopp (factory manager). Tom’s story is the one that got stuck in my head. He was in the Arizona desert using a friend’s telescope, he spied something fuzzy, said hey what is that, used his cell phone to call the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, found out there was no reception, drove out to a payphone and realized he forgot the number, then got all literal and sent a telegram from Western Union and altered the life of every single human being who ever went outside at night.

Tom wasn’t happy about the discovery. He got famous for a minute and went on television and he was treated like he won a twenty billion dollar Powerball. But when his comet was at peak brightness in 1997, his brother and sister-in-law died in a car crash after photographing it. “This has been the best week of my life. And the worst,” Tom told National Geographic.

Tom’s dead too. Not convinced he ever got over that tragedy which wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t closed his left eye and put his right eye to that lens in 1995. But I hope he had at least a dim awareness that he got people to go outside and get away from streetlights, to scan the sky for anything, to look for something they won’t ever find, to do what makes us human. By the time Hale-Bopp was out of sight, I was bored with it. I was used to it. I’d gnaw my own arm off to see it again, but it’s not playing an encore for two thousand years, and I have to drive home anyway. Just have to remember I was lucky to be there.

P.S. Shortly after I finished writing this, I cared about the moon again. William Anders, an astronaut on Apollo 8, died (he crashed his WWII-era plane in the Puget Sound at the age of a million, which is basically the plot of Secondhand Lions and makes me burn with jealousy). When he was orbiting around the moon, he shot probably the best photograph anybody will ever shoot. Earthrise. Bottom of the frame you see the moon in all its deadness and up top you see the earth in blinding glory, a billboard not just for the existence of life, but the unique conditions necessary for it to keep on going. Look at that, you son of a bitch.

Big Fish (Not That One)

My little brother hasn’t been sleeping. I know this because I’m staying with my folks up north in advance of his high school graduation and most nights I’ll notice light from the crack under his door at 4 a.m. and hear him noodling on his guitar. He’s practicing for his performance at the ceremony, where he’ll be playing More Than a Feeling by Boston*. That’s totally fine. I did the same thing, except with frantic typing, banking on the reward of sleeping for 18 hours after. That’s what we do. Blow off school work in the name of fretting about school work, then do a month’s worth in the worst long weekend of all time.

My problem is the same one everybody has, which is that he’s clearly still 6. Every couple hours my brain will play back a thousand memories at once; of him camping out with me in the living room insisting we watch cartoons and conking out as soon as I turned them on; lining up his stuffed animals and taking their portrait shots on an old point-and-shoot; watching Stevie Ray Vaughan videos and playing along on my dad’s tennis racket. Somebody ripped me off because that was definitely last Wednesday. It doesn’t make sense. Our parents are empty nesters now. My dad’s retired. I know what an IRA is (Irish Republican Army). My God, that time is gone and I barely got to use it and I used it wrong.

The isolation of where we are, Redding, doesn’t help. I get too many opportunities to remember this stuff. It’s so quiet I have to hear my own thoughts and talk them off a ledge. Nobody I know has even heard of this place. Everybody thinks I’m in Redlands, somewhere in the Inland Empire. This place is palpably different. It doesn’t feel like California. As far as I can tell, nobody here wants anyone else to ever know they exist, and it feels like living on the moon.

There’s a sadness to it. The unemployment has always been high, and the stagnation is like a permanent recession, a town on pause, shipwrecked in the ‘90s. We had one of the last Kmarts and I actually worked there. We had one of the last Blockbusters (a terrible store that bled you to death on late fees that we went to every weekend). This is where chains, and the town is half chains, wind up when you thought they died, like a grandparent going to a nursing home in another state without telling you. I always hoped my brother could be someplace with something more.

The stillness is isolating and confusing. My brother’s with me now but something about him is leaving. He’s still in the same room I lived in as a teen. I walk in there and squint and don’t know what year it is. Everything’s still here but I don’t feel like I’m here. It’s like I’m intercepting a grainy radio broadcast from 20 years ago reflected off a satellite. This isn’t nostalgia, it’s more like losing my grip on time. Like if I walked back to my high school my teacher would be waiting for me and he’d reprimand me about that calculus final that yeah I cheated on when I quietly left a janitor’s entrance just a bit ajar so I could go back in at night and scan the answers from the teacher’s edition. 

The gravity of it all has been making me sick, the pencils down feeling of mistakes I can’t fix. This isn’t my home anymore. I can’t keep seeing the bleaching memories of everything that happened here. I want my brother to know life can be sporadically miraculous and not just a series of rooms and that the good parts are gonna be worth the bad parts even though it’s usually bad parts. We gotta get out of here and see something beautiful. See some land. 

So on Memorial Day me, my brother, my mom and her husband who I won’t call stepdad because come on you can’t say stepdad when they got married when you were 30 and they didn’t tell you, piled into the truck and headed north. Vaguely toward gold country, to Burney Falls, then to some ice cave, then to a lake in Modoc County, population 8,700. 

The whole trip was gorgeous and more people would know about it if the region weren’t so hellbent on seclusion. As we drove, our “small town” gave way to real small towns with one gas station and some houses a mile off the highway, then to deserted trailer parks, then nothing. We drove a full hour toward the cave without seeing another car. We just saw trees. A billion trees. Fucking trees. You couldn’t even see the horizon. This was my dad’s territory when he handled claims, this whole drive, and I realized it would have made me much more insane than it made him.

Eventually we hit snow. End of May. California. Snow. Finally we parked just to stretch our legs and I headed out alone into the forest on some serenity through nature kick. Maybe a quarter mile out I heard crunching steps, branches jostling, and stood still, heart racing. I felt ill. The nature wasn’t working. All I could think was if I died I just wouldn’t exist anymore. Then I realized it was a deer and weird noises are always deer. This dream of finding inspiration and spiritual connection with my brother gave out and I wished I was on one of the really stupid parts of Hollywood Blvd., just so I could be annoyed by other people I could prove existed. I’m an idiot. I’m an idiot and I hate trees.

Back to the truck. Finally to the ice cave. The ice looked like crystals at a hippie gem shop and it was beautiful and the ancient volcanic detritus all around us made it look more beautiful. Then we pressed on to the lake but couldn’t get there because the snow had become totally impassable. Fantastic, let’s hurry on back, no reason, I just have emails to answer probably. Big day tomorrow.

But there was one more nothing to get to. We were gonna go to the train bridge on Lake Britton from Stand by Me. Beats the hell out of me how anybody scouted it. Felt impossible to find.

I figured it would be just as empty as every other place we went, but there was a truck parked directly in front of it, and there was a twentysomething couple in the truck bed getting out their fishing equipment. We all got out anyway, except for my brother who fell asleep, because we’re here anyway, what the hell.

Guy turns to us and talks. Really thick accent, the kind people look for when they’re casting hillbillies in southern shows. Smiles.

“Now goddamn if that ain’t the biggest fuckin’ fish I seen in my goddamn life!”

He’s basically jumping up and down.

“Look at that! Look at that goddamn fish!”

I smiled back at him and went to go look at the water. 

“See it? See that black outline? Looks like a big black blob. Yeah, put on sunglasses.”

I do, and the water’s pretty murky. I secretly think I’ll never see it and I’ll just politely lie and we’ll head back to the truck. 

“Just hold on a minute, you’ll see, you’ll see.”

Right then, I do. I have no idea if it’s actually big but I remember the fishing minigame in Legend of Zelda and know that’s definitely what the outline of a Big One looks like.

“Hoooooooooolly shiiiiit,” I say, and I’m not faking it, he just has a contagious accent and it is indeed crazy to me that I can see a fish at all from this far up. It’s somehow crazier than seeing a whale in an aquarium, maybe because it’s discovered, not on display.

Everybody is gathered on the ledge just gawking and I say I’m gonna go try and wake up my brother.

“Yeah, yeah, go get ‘im, he’s gonna wanna see this sonofabitch!”

I wake up my brother and he gets out of the truck like he’s wading through molasses. He puts on his sunglasses too and we start peering again. He doesn’t say much and he’s not emotive because of being a teen, but he points down.

“Hey, is…”

“Wow! Yeah, yeah! That must be a breeding pair. Damn, it’s just as big. Goddamn, a breeding pair. That’s somethin’ else, that’s somethin’ else.”

Then the guy and his girlfriend inched down a steep trail toward the lake and we all headed home. Kept going home through a billion more trees but all of a sudden they got perfect, because they were part of the same planet where we saw that big ol’ fuckin’ fish, and my brother fell back to sleep.

*I can’t stand Boston and I suggested he do a Steve Albini tribute instead. He said he’d love to do a Steve Albini tribute but this whole thing was the school’s idea.