I’m in the process of putting together a “mixed tape,” one that, depending on how you look at it, could be considered long overdue. But in my defense these sorts of things are not easy for me. The first “draft” is going to have easily more than 20 hours of music. I’m guessing the whole thing will take me way, way more than 40 hours to put together. If you think I’m joking, you don’t know everything about me as well as you might think you do.
Just now I added some Tom Petty and some Eddie Money to the draft playlist, and I want to share a couple things:
Tom Petty
Old Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers stuff is just awesome. Unfortunately, Tom Petty seems to have had totally lost his mind by the late ‘90s. I blame it on what I assume is his totally out of control drug use. I don’t know how to feel about this. Can I damn the drugs that killed his brain, and thus ruined his later musical output, when I think the drugs probably had a lot to do with his earlier production in a positive and possibly necessary way?
An aside: One of my sisters once ran into him at a gas station in the Valley and shared a joint with him. I just heard this story and for some reason feel grossly slighted for not having been told such awesome news earlier.
Here’s one of my favorite Tom Petty songs and definitely my favorite TP&tHB video:
Don’t Come Around Here No More
Eddie Money
Eddie Money is the man.
One of my sisters died a little more than 12 years ago, when she was 29. It was undoubtedly the hardest thing I’ve suffered. She really liked Eddie Money. One of the most precious memories of my childhood—of my entire life—is of watching Eddie Money and Ronnie Spector perform Take Me Home Tonight on David Letterman’s show. It aired when I was 10 or 11, but I remember it like it was a couple years ago. My sister and I were simultaneously rocking out, and also laughing hysterically at the fact that Ronnie Spector spends about half the video facing away from the camera, shaking her butt. Never ending is the butt shaking. This moment was, seriously, one of the top-five most memorable moments of my entire childhood.
When I was thinking about this, just now, I thought, “I bet that video is on YouTube.” And sure enough, it is. In a few important ways I think the Internet is ruining my life, but this is one of its magical, wonderful, amazing properties. In less than 30 seconds I was transported back to the late eighties, was instantly taken back and offered the chance to live in one of my most precious memories. YouTube, with all the ridiculous crap on it, has allowed me to relive a moment, has allowed me to relive a brief few minutes with the memory of my sister, and for that I say God bless you Internet.
(Check out Paul totally rocking the keyboards! and I’m pretty sure that’s David Sanborn on the sax—who knew?)
If I could walk on water, and if I could find some way to prove—if I could walk on water, would you believe in me? My love is so true.
[Beer for this post: Port Brewing Company’s WipeOut IPA]
On to the fourth essay in Manhood for Amateurs—it’s called:
D.A.R.E.
In this essay Chabon talks about talking with his kids about drugs. He admits to having smoked quite a bit of marijuana between 1980 (his freshman year of college) and 2005, and much of the essay involves the various issues involved when a former, long-term drug user is trying to encourage his kids to stay clear of drugs. [n.1]
I have never done an illegal drug. Not once. I have never “experimented”—I have not had the slightest interest. I am convinced that my roommate Brian and I were the only people in our entire freshman dorm who did not smoke pot, and all the others not only smoked pot but they did it every single day.Along with Brian, my friends Chad and Gary, and my first girlfriend, Lianne, were also fiercely anti-drug. [n.2]
I don’t know why I have never had any interest in “experimenting” with drugs. My parents smoked pot well before I was born and well into my lifetime, a fact of which I was fully aware from a relatively young age. [n.3] They had also done other drugs, but I wasn’t so sure of that until more recently. One of my sisters also used drugs when I was young, and I was aware of it. I see that experience as having two possible effects: (1) either my exposure would make me more likely to try drugs myself; or (2) because my parents smoked pot and tried to hide it from me I’d develop an aversion to pot smoking. Obviously the first didn’t apply to me (though it did to a friend of mine), but I’m not sure how much the second applied either.
I’ve always been convinced that I am a D.A.R.E. [n.4] “success story.” I did most of my growing up during the ‘80s, a time when Nancy Reagan was telling us all to “Just Say No,” [n.5] D.A.R.E. was blossoming, and anti-drug after-school-specials seemed to be flooding the airwaves. I even went to a D.A.R.E. day-camp when I was 12. My young brain fully believed that drugs made you stupid, rotted your nose to the point that the divider between your nostrils ceased to exist allowing for disgusting tricks with tissues, and that drug users had all sorts of horrible, nightmarish experiences involving perceived spiders crawling all over their bodies, or young girls whoring themselves out, and so on. Some might use the term “brain washed.”
Aside from my parents, sister, and one friend, the only other people I knew who used drugs were schoolmates of mine who smoked so much pot that they did it at school. These people, “stoners” we called them, were invariably very stupid. So I could not help but deduce that either: (1) smoking pot made you incredibly dumb; or (2) only incredibly dumb people smoked pot. Either way, it would be an understatement to say it didn’t spark a desire in me to burn one down.
Chabon has this to say about the first time he saw someone (his mother) smoking pot (he was in his mid-teens):
“Nevertheless, smoking marijuana remained for years afterward nothing I had any interest in trying myself, not so much because I feared its effects or even because it was against the law but simply because I was a good boy, and as such I looked down my nose with a cosmic, Galactus-sized censoriousness at the kids I knew—stoners, burnouts—who smoked it.”
Now I would not usually call myself a “good boy,” but I can totally relate to this. I certainly have, and continue to, look down my nose with a certain censoriousness at most people I know who do drugs. I have a hard time with balancing this with my fierce libertarian ideas that those people can do whatever they like, and it has never bothered me to have friends or fellow dorm dwellers smoke a bowl right in front of me—to each their own. But I also think it’s dumb, and remain certain that it isn’t for me. And when it came to people I cared about, love interests in particular, the thought of them getting high has always been enough to gut me, emotionally.
I don’t know where this disdain comes from. There’s the illegality, but given that I freely break the law in at least one other context (I tend to view speed limits as loosely advisory), and also firmly believe that marijuana should be legalized, it would be strange if the illegality is what gets me. There’s also the mind-altering aspect, which has typically been something I disapproved of. I always viewed drug users as the weak who can’t deal with life, which is something at certain points in my life I would’ve considered one of the most damning things I could say about a person. But over the last year and a half, a time of much emotional strife in my own life, I have quite obviously self-medicated with alcohol, comfort foods, and self-pity, so you’d think I’d get off my high horse already [n.6]. Perhaps in this respect I’m like a Republican Senator—I see nothing wrong with drinking myself into a stupor [n.7], but I’ll be goddamned if I’ll condone some hippie drug.
Chabon and his wife decided in advance that when the drug conversation came up that they would be honest with their kids (though he does balk at telling his kids, when his son asked him how many times he smoked marijuana, that he has done it approximately one million times—he instead said “a number of times”). I’m not sure how my wife and I will address the drug conversation. Let’s just say that my wife’s experience with drugs is very different, perhaps even a near exact opposite, of mine. I’m not sure how I can be honest with my son about my ideas about drugs without saying things that he may construe as a direct attack on his mother. I will almost certainly have to qualify my old ideas that only dumbasses and weaklings do drugs, and my wife will have to come up with an explanation for why she did the things she did. I imagine we have several years before we have to get our story straight, but it’s something we’re going to have to work on.
Note 1: Chabon also says that 13 “is the age at which you begin to become fully aware of hypocrisy, contradiction, ambiguity, coded messages, subtexts; it is the age, therefore, at which you must begin to attempt to sort things out for yourself . . . .” I find the precision, and lack of qualification, in that statement to be odd.
Note 2: I have some truly excellent friends, and I’m convinced that my good taste (or good fortune) in friends has much to do with my relative success in life. But that’s a topic for another post.
Note 3: Note to parents, teens, and others: Spraying air freshener does not remove the odor of marijuana—it just makes it smell like marijuana and vanilla (or whatever bouquet the air freshener has).
Note 4: Drug Abuse Resistance Education.
Note 5: She even invaded one of my beloved sit-coms, Diff’rent Strokes:
Note 6: There was a time though, when I never would’ve considered ingesting anything mind-altering at times of grief and struggle—I firmly believed that I was supposed to feel what I was feeling, and drinking or using some drug would be a cop-out that would deny me what I was supposed to feel. I wish I had hung on to that.
