016: Which song is ours?

I was eavesdropped on the train the other day. Thjis girl and this guy were talking, and she says to him, "It's funny how you can't remember smells until you smell them again." And that's not true. It's mostly true, but it's not completely true.

There are two smells that leap immediately to mind. Before Oakville Place was renovated, before we had HMV, there was Music World, which was originally Sam the Record Man. In both incarnations -- but not its current life as West 49, to the best of my knowledge since I don't shop there -- it had this distinct smell, this stifling, proper, New Car Library odor. I can't put my finger on it. I might never smell it again, but I'd know it in an instant if I did.

The other one that leaps to mind came as I was reading old blog entries. I was reading back my old posts from early 2005, when I was young and cynical, but too young to have anything serious to be cynical about (and thus way more cynical than I am now.) I was reflecting on my high school experience up to that point, and it triggered a memory in me, not of the grade 12 days from which the post originated, but of an even earlier time, of Grade 9, the smell of the auto shop.

In the post, I was bitching about how, in Grade 9, I had the disadvantage of bringing along all my baggage from Grade 8 (and oh boy was there a lot) and being shunned by the Montclair kids who were mostly insular. River Oaks kids were pretty insular too, which wouldn't have been a problem without my baggage.

But this is a false memory. A fabrication, or at least a stereotyping exaggeration. I remember my tech rotation class, which had very few River Oaks kids (I think it was me, Becky, and Kenzi, and then the rest were Montclair kids; Hilary might have been there too.) In between the two factions was Josh W., who had spent most of his grade school time at River Oaks, but in Grade 8 transferred to Montclair. And because he was a ridiculously personal, charismatic kid, he was friends with everybody. And luckily, he had a good enough impression of me to form a sort of three-man group in that class with me and Spencer, who was also in my drama class at the time, thus opening up the doors considerably.

It was also in that class that I made many feeble attempts to talk to the girls. Then as now, there was a difficulty accessing that smoothness, that magnetism that all the really, um, successful dudes have, but back then it was worse. I remember trying awkwardly to strike up conversations with both the girls I had known all through grade school and the ones I had just met (who all seemed to have a much greater degree of sexual maturity, since I hadn't known them all this time.) And I remember that room, the auto shop. I remember the odor of motor oil and heavy iron machinery and drills and cement floors and bad ventilation and worst of all pent up adolescent sexual frustration practically bursting at every moment.

The girls mostly humoured me, I was a harmless presence until I started writing creepy poetry (yep.) There was one, though. I think her name was Megan. She left after that year. If it weren't for the fact that she was at one time dating someone who ended up being a very good friend, and that there wasn't enough time to erase that fact (it was high school after all, things change quickly) we could've gotten on well, oh, what might've been.

Things happened the way they did. A lot of it is recounted, through the cracked lens of my own perspective and commentary, here on this blog. amazing how, reading wrods I wrote 5 years ago, I think "I said that? I can't believe I said that, and yet I totally believe I said that."

I have two conflicting visualizations of myself expanding back the 5 years. One is that I didn't know anything and was an inexperienced young naive fool. The other is that I was exactly the same, overthinking everything the same way I am now, only now my frame of reference has expanded to the point where little things mean less, which is nice. I guess that's what they call maturity.

The truth is probably somewhere in between. I know more, have seen more of the world,. have lived more, and put less stress on each individual relationship I have; living more or less like a drifter has enabled me to understand the way people come and go in one's life. In early 2005, grade 12, I was existentially troubled by a lunchtime schism in my group. Now it wouldn't even faze me. also have one very strong, consistent friendship that isn't contingent on having a shared time and place such as school or work. Many people aren't lucky enough to get that in their lives. I remember when Cary stayed over in the summer and asked if I had any plans for the next day, and I mentioned I had my standing coffee date with Manda, and he said that was neat that I had that. I think it's really had a positive effect on my life in the last 3 years or so. IN all of this time I have been constructing an identity, a narrative about myself, and modifying it as I go, as needed, as convenient, sometimes inadvertently. You cna probably draw non-inaccurate conclusinos about who I am -- if you know me or if you don't -- by what gets written here, what doesn't get written here, and how whatever I write gets written, and how I deal with the things I don't appear to be writing.

Michael Cobb would be proud. Maybe.

So I was re-reading those Jan-Feb 2005 posts, mostly stressed out bummer stuff. I did this and deliberately reminded myself of a girl for whom I carried a torch. I didn't know her well. In all we only met a few times, I knew her through Reach. Somehow we just kept running into each other at those things and talking and I thought maybe she was into me and maybe I was into her, and I always wanted to ask her for her MSN or something. I was often funny around her, I was often the person I like being but found it hard to be in those days. After meeting up with her again in December that year, I was really looking forward to seeing her again in February. Then February comes, and we're at Reach, she's nuzzling up on some dude on her team. And I don't know. I took it bad. Then she wasn't in the final. That was potentially the last time I ever saw her.

I saw her one more time, randomly, I was walking to he comic store and she pulled up alongside me in a van and asked if she could give me a lift somewhere. Feeling too cool to say comic store I said pizza place (which is where I would've gone first, per my routine at the time.) We talked a bit. She said that there were girls (girl? girls? I can't remember the exact quote) on her team that would've wanted a piece of me. When I was in my zone at Reach, I was something else, something I didn't have access to in normal life. I rolled my eyes, though. What a postscript.

Later, I Facebook stalked her to find her last name. Didn't add her or anything. Hardly ever think about it. But I did tonight, for nostalgia's sake. The link on her Facebook profile is a PornoTube channel, and I clicked it out of curiosity, because hey, what if I got to see this girl I like doing nasty stuff? Yes, it's horribly perverse, even moreso when the girl isn't anonymous. But whose blog are you reading anyhow?

Well the link didn't work, which leads me to believe it was probably a joke. All for the best, too.

Guy comes into the store. Older guy, in his 40's or so. This was over a couple weeks ago, because Cait was still there, I think it was the last time I worked with her, her second last shift. Guy comes in and asks for the White Stripes. "Yeah man," he says, "I just got Icky Thump and I really wanna hear their earlier stuff, do you have Get Behind Me Satan?" "Sure, it's right here." "Okay, he says, mind if I give it a listen?" "Not a problem, but this is a very different record." "How so?" "Well, he doesn't use electric guitars as much on it, it's a lot softer, a lot more acoustic, piano, even marimba." "But it was Blue Orchid on it, doesn't it?" "Yeah, but the rest of the album's not like that. Here, give White Blood Cells a listen." "Hold on, I want to listen to Get Behind Me Satan first, I don't have much time."

He takes a few minutes to skim through the songs. "Yeah, you were right about that. Can I get a listen to White Blood Cells?" "Sure, here you are. This is their best album," I say, having not listened to either of their first two albums, but confident my assertion can't be refuted concretely. "Lots of great songs, lots of hits." "I decided I really like Jack White's music," he says, "Loved Icky Thump, loved the Raconteurs album." "This one is more like that." I maybe could've given him Elephant too, but for whatever reason I was feeling like White Blood Cells and he didn't have much time.

He gives it a listen, again skimming the tracks, and then stops abruptly. "Nah, not this one either." And then he leaves. I'm left scratching my head. How do you not like White Blood Cells? Some people, man, some people can't be helped.

That's it for tonight. Interesting stuff is not really going on lately, and this post has taken way too long to write. Trying to get some productivity in. Maybe do my dishes for once.

Keep on rockin
-Scotto

015: Cling

In the "Things I'm Not Gonna Be Able To Let Go" department.

I just got my first paper back from American Pop Music class. I was given the impossible task of having to write it after only one class, having barely had time to wrap my head around the class' nuanced approach to music and its relation to modern culture. It was due in the second week of classes when you've got plenty enough other crap going on you can barely focus on any one class, let alone one in which you have no prior experience.

It was a bad paper and I got a bad mark on it. In the time since I wrote it I have dreaded that mark because I know it was a bad paper. Unlike other papers I have done at the last minute after weeks of procrastination, where I got bad marks (or occasionally rather decent ones) I had exactly one week to think about this, and most of that time was not spent thinking about it, because, as I said, there was enough other stuff to think about: I was working crazy-ass hours, getting called into work every other day (accepting it about half the time) and trying to unwind when I got home in the evenings. I can remember writing the paper and thinking "I really don't know what I'm talking about but I feel more or less on topic."

It was a bad paper written badly. I had about a thousand words in which to encapsulate the very difficult idea of the "Culture industry" as outlined in that stupid Adorno and Horkheimer article. I say it's stupid because its point is dismissive and only vaguely argued. In turn it inspired me to be more than a little generalized in my arguments, but not at a level of sophistication that goes with, you know, having a shitload of words and unlimited time to think about your bullshit.

My biggest regret about the situation was that I was in a situation where I could not possibly have performed much better. A week later I was thinking about it again and I realized what an idiot I had been in that paper. Only a week.

The problem is bound to repeat itself with my cinema response, which I also felt came too early. If I had been able to give it a bit more time, I would've written about Blue Velvet after all. I didn't like the question, but I could easily have addressed that. The question with Blue Velvet was how it was a coming of age story. My answer is: not at all. It's a reconciliation, or a failed reconciliation of the light and dark side that transcends age and experience. At the end of the movie, Lumberton is still the same suburban paradise, and though it lacks Frank Booth's presence, it still has a dark side. Kyle McLachlan's character is still a nice kid: even though he's seen something more twisted and dark than he could possible have imagined, he hides it. That's what it's about: the duality that always exists. And just because he has seen darkness doesn't mean the lightness is gone. It's more complicated than that.

That would've made a half-decent paper. I just wrote it on the spot and again, it's pretty general (and it's only a paragraph) but I went for something unambitious and that succumbs to many of the pitfalls present in my Music paper. The stupid Breakfast Club/Glee/teen question. I don't even think I did it right. I was just on this kick, this broad generalization kick. Somebody should kick me in the head. It's going to suck. I don't even know what the paper I wrote has to do with movies. I can only hope I wrote a decent paper by accident.

The music paper. I wish it were simply a matter of me saying "This is actually a good paper, what's wrong with them?" Like I said, it's not, and I got the mark I deserved. I need to work past it, I need to improve. It's just going to bother me for a while that a one week extension would have improved my mark at least to a B-.

Franzi, an Austrian exchange student I am acquainted with, told me about how, in her country, nobody cares at all about marks, they just want to pass. If I could get this mindset, my life would be awesome, but as it is, it's just not my style. I was discussing it with Daron before AmFic yesterday, blah blah, marks, blah blah assignments, blah. The marks themselves don't necessarily matter: I'm not in competition with anyone, or for any sort of scholarship or anything. No desire to study abroad (if I go abroad it will not be to study) or to go to grad school. I just want to not suck, to be told I'm all right, which is what those stupid-ass marks would represent. What's the word I'm looking for, validation? That's sad, man: real sad.

Especially since, if I want that, all I've got to do is put on another play.

Profs are not your parents, asshole: they're not here to reassure you.

Having worked through that, I actually feel much better. In no small part it was my own fault for taking a rather nuanced subject, a complicated case study, and treating it broadly, badly, because I didn't have time to get into the subtlety.

Which is of course not a word typically applied to my topic, which was the Monkees.

I wanted to say it all, and ended up saying nothing.

Hm.

Would've been nice to have seen Stop Making Sense before writing this paper. Talking Heads would've made a pretty decent subject. Like I said, the thing I regret most was the time crunch, because it looms large over all the other problems I have with this paper.

Hopefully I will be able to write about Stop Making Sense in film, but that of course would be to address the postmodernist and aesthetic qualities of the film itself.

BUT WHATEVER. Onward. I currently have three count 'em three papers on my plate, to start with a thousand words on modern drama, 2000 on American fiction, and then 2-3 pages on my follow-up to my masterpiece of mediocrity in music. Hurray for alliteration. It doesn't help that I fell asleep briefly in class today when the TA was talking Jazz, which is of course the assigned topic of the paper. Hrm.

But first up, modern drama. Oh, modern drama. I am so bummed by the lack of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, or even Edward Albee. Despite the fact that I've spent plenty of time with those plays, they would've given me something to look forward to, that I could get a handle on. This week we did Beckett again for teh second and I believe last time this semester.

Beckett. Done with Beckett. Done with absurdism, with abstraction, with ambiguity, with nothingness. Is it so wrong to crave the conventional? We get Endgame. I can appreciate it as something that goes on in a theatre, something that follows in the tradition of Brecht, to contemplate what is on the stage and where that reality is. I get it, I do. It's metatheatrical. But Beckett was writing at a time when that shit wasn't EVERYWHERE. Now it is, and it feels like the most daring works actually bother to address what a character is and what action he might take.

Not insulting Beckett. Just tired of his experiments. Someday I'll maybe appreciate him more. He's not overrated, he's praised just enough. The man was a genius, he knew what he was doing and he did it well. It's just not my thing, not right now.

I should settle my shit about it though. It's actually a brilliant piece. as literature, serious literature, Beckett's work is unequalled. I would just rather watch a play that engaged with the world rather than denying its existence.

I'd like to be like John Lennon. From reading many interviews with him, there was so much about the world that escaped him -- he knew his limitations to a point and yet also didn't know them -- but so much he understood that few other people do, myself included. Things both about the world at large and about the art he intended to make. More than that, he was, at his height, incredibly intuitive, which is an enviable trait. I'd rather be intuitive than smart, but you can't really sell intuition.

And judging by the state of the world it doesn't look like smart people do all that well either. And I don't think I'm either, I just talk a lot and hope the truth emerges at some point.

We're reading this book in American Lit. The Things They Carried. It's about Vietnam and it plays beautifully with the notion of storytelling as an action. It plays itself like a memoir but proclaims itself to be fiction: it complicates the matter by introducing the idea of story-truth. For a kid who considers himself a writer, it's an immensely satisfying read. It would be pretty interesting if it were just about Vietnam, but it's way, way sophisticated. Gonna write a paper about it. Makes me think about my own book, even more than the Human Stain did.

It just occurred to me that I may have lost my tax info envelope somewhere amidst the clutter of the basement, amidst my cleaning of that clutter.

I have too much going on in my life and yet I crave more. Write write write write write.

This post has more or less accomplished its goal of helping me get over my awful paper.

Brandon's gone to England, which doesn't make that much of a difference except in how I eat and whether I hang out naked in his room pointlessly. Actually, scratch that last part, that has nothing to do with anything.

And I don't do it, I swear.

Funny: at work on Monday, my main assignment was to make the TV section, which has been picked clean by Christmas, post-Christmas, and returns, look half decent, mostly by "facing" product (displaying its face, as opposed to its spine) and loading the rack up with fillers. As it is there were a lot fewer gaps when I was done and it doesn't look like we've been robbed. It's an artform, balancing all the elements and making it work; and a highly impermanent one, as by now I'm such a bunch of stuff has been sold and messed with, making it at least a little more barren like I was before. But this is my work, and I dig it.

Many more thoughts to safe for later. For now I think I'll get lunch and tromp on down to Innis. I'm really looking forward to going home tonight.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

014: Alternate Routes

I woke up this morning with the inexplicable urge to talk about Aerosmith. As you may or may not have surmised from this blog, I have a tendency to go on at length especially when I think there's no reason anyone should be listening, or if they are, that they would care. So after leaving my bedroom, hearing the morning DJ alluding to "Dream On" coming on after the break, all I could think about was Aerosmith, my favourite band, a fact that I have had to defend oftentimes in my travels to self-professed music geeks who don't understand that sometimes a song about fucking is the most insightful statement that can be made.

It's not really that inexplicable. The curious side-effect of their half-a-breakup (when the most visible/important/interesting member of your group decides to take a break, you're pretty much broken up) is that they're getting a lot of radio play and a lot of coverage from news outlets likely to cover such things.

I used to really look forward to Aerosmith's next album. They haven't recorded anything important since 2003's Honking on Bobo, an album of blues rockers mostly from way back. They haven't recorded an album of original material since the baffling (yet I maintain often terrific) Just Push Play. That was in 2001. They've had a new album in the works forever, but it might never materialize because Steven Tyler decided to just up and leave. If it does, it'll probably be with whomever they end up picking as the new vocalist, if they ever do. Big shoes to fill.

In the history of rock and roll there are exactly two examples of a rock band replacing their lead singer and it not sucking. The first was AC/DC, which replaced the deceased Bon Scott with Brian Johnson. Johnson was Scott's hand-picked replacement, as he believed, rightly, that he would not live past 1980. The second was Sammy Hagar replacing David Lee Roth in Van Halen, which some people accepted, but many didn't, probably because Roth's flashy vocal style contrasted with Van Halen's tight technical playing, whereas Hagar's vocals were like oatmeal. Palatable but not special. In my humble opinion, that is.

On the failures side, you can take your pick. Many, many bands who were already halfway or further toward obscurity. INXS and its much-abused relationship with JD Fortune. Ronnie James Dio in Sabbath. The third guy who fronted Van Halen. Judas Priest. Paul Rodgers front Queen mainly so that Queen can continue to tour, because hey, it's Queen. But this is supposed to be about Aerosmith.

I convinced myself to stop being excited about their theoretical new album and more curious. In some ways it was being conceived of as a back-to-the-past affair, a real rock album unlike their recent (well, it's all relative) output. And as much as I want to hear that, I fear what the actual product would sound like. So I'm happy with it staying as a hypothetical.

I was reading some interviews with the remaining bandmembers and their former A&R guy John Kalodner. Kalodner, no slouch in the music business, mocked the retro-rock premise, because he was adamant that you can't go back. He boasted about how he managed to convince Bon Jovi to hook up with Nashville and was thus, in an existential kind of way, was responsible for their recent swerve toward the middle of the road. It was that quote that really sparked something in me; and that something was "Good."

Aerosmith is too good a band, too cool, and too much themselves to produce the kind of radio-friendly crap Bon Jovi puts out. Lost Highway? We Weren't Born to Follow? Are you shitting me? Dreck. And Bon Jovi was never that great a band to begin with but they know exactly what kind of music they want to be pushing on the poor public.

I'm not saying they have a pure spirit of rock and roll. They recorded fuckin "Don't Wanna Miss a Thing," and "Crazy" and "Angel" and all of those, and that's probably what people are rolling their eyes at when I say they're my favourite band. But the Aerosmtih I like -- the Aerosmith that anybody likes -- isn't the purveyor of feelingless musical wallpaper like that. My Aerosmith is the Aerosmith of Train Kept A Rollin and Walk this Way and Janie's Got a Gun. Of Back in the Saddle and Hangman Jury.

Say what you will abut Just Push Play. If it was a terrible album, at least it didn't sound anything like any other Aerosmtih album, or anything else that I can ever remember hearing. Even Jaded, that far-too-radio-calculated hit single, was built around a weird snakey jangly Eastern-sounding guitar riff that resembles nothing else from the time. You probably haven't heard the rest of the album, but the thing it reminds me most of (apart from my extremely awkward preteen years) is Lady Gaga. And she was still 7 years away. Like I said, whether the resemblance (if anyone else hears it) is a good thing, that's up to your personal taste. But if they suck, it's because they were doing something interesting. Their worst albums are still very interesting to listen to -- Nine Lives, Rock in a Hard Place. If Just Push Play had been some anonymous band's debut album, I really think people would've lost their shit over it. But it was made by a band with the expectations and the baggage of 30 years in the business and a notoriously neophobic fanbase.

Effectively, the rupture in the band hinges on the clash between the double-nature of Aerosmith. The potential to be a cash-cow radio-ready act with broad appeal, and the desire to keep playing hard rock like they're a bunch of 22-year-olds in the garage salivating over a sweet pair of tits. The people in a position to profit want them to be the former. For the most part they do their best to be the latter.

Anyway. I've always dug them because I sensed a sort of authenticity, aside from the fact that they've been more than willing to follow the money over the years, they know what they're about. They're not the kind of band that goes to Nashville to cut a phony country album to appeal to the Keith Urban set. All their puzzling stylistic flights (from the out-of-era Indian tones of Nine Lines to the out-of-era psychedelia of Rock inn a Hard Place to the somewhat-ahead-of-time dancerock flashes of Just Push Play) have felt more or less like natural extensions of their clash between authenticity and commercial viability. They are the great American rock dream run amok. They're not a half-decent, proficient, acceptable staple like Foreigner or Boston. They're not known for their inventiveness either, which is why they've not run out of gas until now, because they have been able to keep it their way, and all the horns and synths and shit on Pump don't get in the way of that, only enhance it. They only look dumb because their music grabs you with its immediacy even after it's been out there for 30 years. Aside from Satisfaction, how many rock singles are as prescient about music's future as Walk This Way?

Anyway. That's half my rant. it's badly organized. My lfie hasn't been terribly interesting lately, although if I remember tomorrow I'll share more random thoughts about work and stuff. My mission, while Brando is away in England starting tomorrow, is to straightn this place out. We'll see.

Also, writing. Gah.

Well, I wrote this, it oughtta do for now. Now I've got to get some sleep. Early day tomorrow, though not as early as Brando's. His flgith is at 9, soi he's up at 6, approximately 6.5 hours before he usually gets up, by my count.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

013: Sometimes it still works

I have seen the future: it is three 5-hour shifts per week.

It was quite a weekend. A busy one, for sure. It began with my somewhat reluctant (okay, not somewhat) agreement to come in to work on Friday. I treat it like a hassle to get called in to work when I'm not booked, but when I'm there I don't actively give a damn. Yes, the world would be a stupendous place if I had loads of free time but there's not a lot of money in that (not until I make this whole writing thing work for me anyway.)

The weekend proceeded in this way. Saturday was particularly bad as I was scheduled to work 1-5. Andy was also booked until 5, but he was on cash, so when he counted out his till, he was gone and I was still helping cutomers. By the time I got around to telling Karen "Okay, I'm gone for the night," she managed to wrangle me into staying late to help with returns. Sigh. Again I struggled but to no avail, the lure of money is too great for a man who hasn't worked a steady (non-temporary) job since 2005.

So I ended up staying until 9 or so, well after we should already have vacated the mall, which closes at 6. But we did finally get those blasted returns done, which is why they kept calling me, so that's over with and now we can settle into a recurring rhythm. And for my part in it, I'm a hero. as much of a hero as one can be doing mundane tasks for a giant corporation that doesn't care about you.

But then I got home and had wings, so all was right with the world.

Sunday, Andrew didn't show up, so I ended up working until close, rather than the 10-3 shift I was booked for. Because I have a secret personal vendetta against Andy, I couldn't keep from making a little comment about how this proves I'm better than him. It's an extraordinarily petty thing for me to say and I don't think anyone wants to hear that shit, so I oughtta keep my mouth shut.

It's not really his fault, the vendetta. The truth is, we get along well and he's entertaining, because he's so damn weird. He will say anything that comes into his mind. He hits on all the female customers in this guileless baby deer way. He is capable of repeating the same shtick over and over and making it seem like this is the first time it has ever occurred to him to say it. He has no self-consciousness whatsoever. He is my opposite.

He's what you might call a Cloudcuckoolander. We were talking one time on the weekend and I asked him if he'd gone for his break yet. And he says "Oh, I'm only here for 7 hours, I don't think I get a break." Uh, of course you do. "Oh, well okay, I still don't think I'll take one." Really? Do you not need to eat or anything? "Oh yeah, I forgot about food. Yeah, I guess I'll take a break. Hey, I'm gonna take a break if that's okay." Knock yourself out. Literally, if possible.

I kid. I make fun. I have a vendetta, a non-violent one, because there are people I liked working with (durr, Caitlin,) who were easily more qualified, but did not get the job, but he did. I have nobody to bitch about this to at the store. Hence my frustration.

But I don't hate the guy. You can't hate him, he's too good-natured. The act of hating him is futile. I don't think it would accomplish anything but frustration. So I vent by goading him into these bizarre verbal traps, like discussing the finer points of statutory. It serves to amuse, and to keep my own wits sharp.

So there's some value with this guy. I just need to keep my abuse from being overt.

When I got home on Friday, I was feeling bouncy, so I decided to take my new keyboard for a real spin. I took another shot at the first chapter of my constantly-revised book. I really liked the results. I'm maturing as a writer, getting better at curbing some of my less welcome tendencies, (to editorialize, to theorize, to write essays in my prose.) Part of the humour in Melancholy comes from this sort of behaviour, so it's okay if I keep doing it, so long as I never take it too seriously. That's the key. You do a story like this seriously, you're done. It don't work. It's a myth, a fairy tale, and yet it's modern, so it needs to view those types of fantasies with a healthy skepticism. So comedy happens. Can't make it any more clear than that.

Spring of 2005, I'm in Grade 12. I'm doing a stage version of the Breakfast Club with many of my Grade 12 friends. Playing John Bender is a talented kid, a Grade 9 or 10 who can really hold his own. But he seems utterly in awe of the world, uncertain how to approach it. Socially awkward. So he turns to me one day while we're rehearsing (I played the Principal, most of my dialogue was to him) he just flat-out asks me, "What is comedy?" I can't remember his exact phrasing. Maybe he said "What's funny?" or "How do you do comedy?" He was asking for instruction on how to learn comedy, I'm saying. I stammered a bit, theorized on some stuff, but there was nothing I could say. You just are funny, if you're funny. And if you're funny, you have innate knowledge of things that are funny and an intuition for why they might be, but its not something you can put into words, or at least not something I could, either on the spot at the time or now with nearly 5 years to think about the question. You take something that's expected, a human behaviour or a social convention. And then you do the opposite, or you do it properly but in the extreme. How can anyone explain this shit? I'm the guy who still doesn't know how he managed to make a room full of people laugh with Half-Past. I'm sorry kid, but you can't ask how to be funny.

Comedy is taking an impossibly complicated concept and summing it up with a quick, yet accurate phrase. Comedy is splunge.

Shit, man. Watch some Monty Python. If you can't conceive of why Monty Python is funny -- I'm not even saying, if you don't find it funny, I'm just saying if you don't understand where the humour is supposed to be, you're completely hopeless.

I love punchlines. It sounds like a hack comedy-writer thing, but consider, from a formal standpoint, the punchline to a riddle or a knock-knock joke. The nature of a punchline is its inevitability -- a bizarre route taken to an unstoppable conclusion. I watched the Cheese Shop sketch... and I know, Python was really, REALLY not about punchlines, but the lack of a punchline WAS the punchline. So, when Cleese tells Palin, "I'm going to ask you once more whether you have any Cheese in this shop, and if you say no, I'm going to shoot you in the face. Do you have any cheese?" "No." Blam. Where did the gun come from? Who the fuck cares? He said he'd shoot him. Over cheese. Get it?

Comedy is swearing there's now way you can explain a concept simply, and then attempting to do so, and getting caught up in attempting to state and re-state my premise in a complicated way, exactly as I said I would, exactly the reason why I said I couldn't.

Last point about comedy. This poem I write a little while back, entitled "Success":

Success
has ruined me.
I now
no longer know
if I am writing
poetry
or a grocery list.
Bacon.

Cute, funny, at least, it's intended to be funny. It was one of many poems I came home from work to find a commenter had reviews, positively. This girl, Lola, had stumbled upon one of my pieces on Writers Cafe and really seemed to dig it, and I read her stuff out of politeness, and to my surprise, I dug it. It's so rare that I find someone whose work I actually liek on that site, which makes doling out reviews a difficult prospect because you don't wanna be the one who's crapping on everyone else's work. At the same time, it's never been within my capacity to fake it. If it's important enough, I can be kind and reassuring (see my brief rocky stint as a CD reviewer for sceneandheard, where I gave an outright positive review to pretty much nothing.) In most of this girl's writing I could find something that really struck me, a word choice, an image. There was a repetitive nature, she implied mostly the same unstructured free verse strategy, but she was good at it, so I enjoyed. And she's been reading the chapters I've posted.

Except now I've really gotta get back to that play. Oy, ok. It'll be good.

Today was more work. Went right from school, although I had about an hour and a half to just kill, so I caught up on reading. It was chill (not much of a rush on a Monday evening) but we did have to set up new releases, which was quick, so though I was booked til 10 we got out of the door at 9:47. Last time I did New Releases, with Karen, we were there 'til about 11. Today it was with Alan.

Tomorrow, I'm meeting up with a person from drama to read over the next play. This person is a female, and you can draw your own conclusions, and whatever happens will be happening, but we have yet to see if that is anything at all. Got it?

Don't ask how to be funny, ask how to be sexy. I have absolutely no idea.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

012: She don't look like that no more

I've been thinking lately, among other things, about the early days of the internet. Specifically, my early days on the internet, before I was swallowed whole by its massive gaping maw.

I would've been about 10 when we first got it. I remember being shown Webcrawler by my brothers and being told "anything you want to see, you just type it in there." I used it, primarily, to find Star Wars content, having just seen the pictures for the first time (in re-release form.) Then came e-mail, and later ICQ and message boards.

I remember when I was about 12, in Grade 7, being welcomed into the tumultuous world of wrestling opinion boards. Oh God what a horrible, life-scarring scene. I had made the decision about a year earlier to abandon the real world and live my life on the internet. I had been a half-smart, charismatic kid, although one who was prone to outbursts. The internet made me even more anti-social, and for a while affected my ability to actually interact with others in person. And here I was, a kid of 12 trying to match wits intellectually with all the shut-in high school and university types on those wrestling boards. Looking back, it's completely unbelievable that they could've taken anything I had to say seriously, but I was well-spoken for that age and managed to fit in decently with, and get positive feedback from, these guys who, looking back, are sort of the forerunners of today's Cracked.com-type writers (one of the biggest names from back then went on to found x-entertainment.com, a site that, though revolutionary at the beginning, has seen better days.) They're the forerunners, but they're mostly what got cut away by the Darwinian process. They didn't have what it took. That includes me.

One of the first guys I wrote with, back in Early 2000, when I had just begun my "Magnus" identity that I would stick with for nearly 2 years before I final outgrew the dying scene, was Chad. He was a year or two older than me, from Oklahoma. We had a similar sense of humour, but he wasn't around much since he actually had stuff going on in real life, both for better or worse. According to his stories -- which I have no choice but to believe -- his mother had died when he was young, and his dad died while I knew him, of a snake-bite in the Amazon. Yeah, it's tough to actually believe, but I'll never know the truth. I had no reason to doubt him and he never hinted that his stories were in any way fictional. Anyway, he moved on past the scene, which was probably for the best: the entire premise was that a collection of sites (with names like Explicit Wrestling, Lethal Injection, Hate, and mine, Disturbing Behavior) ostensibly created to cover Pro Wrestling but in actuality served as a sounding board for petty feuds, in jokes, self-promotion, oversexualized ramblings (we were after are mostly young males) and assorted observations about the world around us. Mostly though just dicks and rambling.

If I had the kind of time and energy that I had back then, as well as the potential audience (there were a lot of people floating around each others' boards) I could rig up a really sweet site. But alas. I actually do have more of a potential audience thanks to ComiXtreme, but my time and energy is infinitesimal. I don`t have the extra effort to put into rambling about things people might actually care about, hence SWP: where I can come when I please to ramble to no truly intended audience about things only I should be interested in. DB was actually the prototype for SWP as far as I was concerned. I takled about any fucking thing without even the level of self-awareness I currently use (which is admittedly not even a 100% level.) I was convinced that whatever I had to say, people would dig. When I think back about some of the pointless shit I foisted upon the internet between the ages of 12 and 14... well, it's not all that different between the pointless shit I've been foisting upon the internet since I was 17. But at least now, I don't have a readership to consider. When I write for an audience now, I write for an audience.

If you're wondering what prompted this flight of nostalgia, I was just trying to remember the phenomenon of internet friends. I still have some internet friends, people I write with and interact with on CX, but I don't put as much of my consideration into them as I did on Chad and others from that time. When I got to high school, I started coming back to the real world, although I didn't really arrive until grade 11, by which point the Op Board scene was beyond dead and buried.

When I started this blog in 2004, my only recurring visitor/commenter was a girl named Coral. I think she was younger than me, and she was from California. One day, after a few weeks, she disappeared, never to be heard from again.

I flew off on this flight of flashback because of something that happened recently. I was browsing FailBlog last week when I came across an amusing Win, a screencap of an Omegle Chat (this one) and, because I have tried Omegle, and am absolutely frightened of it, (yet at the same time fascinated) I posted it on my Twitter. Remarkably, the originator of the win, the anonymous female correcting her conversational partner's grammar, a Welshwoman from South America who shares my last name (and thus will henceforth be referred to as "Cousin Pixie") found my reposting of it and now we, like, talk on Twitter, and she's reading this. And I think that's cool, how random that was, so I thought I'd address it.

It's been a busy few days. My new computer arrived on Wednesday, which was quick considering I ordered it Monday night. It works really well, I'm particularly impressed with the keyboard, which is something I'd been looking to replace before my entire computer went up. My general discomfort with my keyboard was one of my major obstacles to producing new writing. This keyboard, flat and muted, is a lot more fun to type on, although it keeps slipping into Multilingual keys, which turns my apostrophes into é's. I don't get it -- there's contractions in French. C'est l'amour and all.

I was thinking recently (this morning) about a script I started writing back in Grade 12. It was a manic pixie dream girl script, which if you're unaware, was defined in Nathan Rabin's AV Club review of Elizabethtown: "The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family." The uber-example of the MPDG is of course Garden State. Some of my favourite movies are actually subversions or deconstructions of this trope: Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, even Annie Hall, which predates many of the most prominent examples.

I'm not sure to what degree my script played it straight or messed around with it, but my opinion of the project has worsened over the years. It certainly started out cliche enough. A would-be writer is stuck doing greeting cards, in a relationship with a domineering businesswoman. She breaks it off with him, which inspires him to get back to real writing. It is only after that occurs that he meets the manic pixie. I hadn't even written up to the point where they begin the relationship. I don't remember the way things were going to go from there, but as I recall, the relationship was not going to go all that well, and they probably weren't going to end up together in the end. Sketching it vaguely like that there's some potential, but the particulars weren't all that strong.

It's one of two things I ever remember writing about a writer. I try to avoid that because then it just seems like you're writing about yourself, and what does a writer mean to a regular viewer anyway? Writing isn't an everyman job, and for whatever reason, I'd rather have the everyman angle. Adaptation, I loved. I have this sense that, to your average consumer of media, writing is an abstract process that they don't really care about. Plus, we have enough people trying to write nowadays, myself included. We don't need to go glamorizing it. To write a story where the character's greatest conflict is writer's block, seems a bit self-fellating. I don't mean to judge, though: especially with the internet, writing (as an activity) is a very prominent past-time. It's just my own hang-up.

The other thing I ever wrote whose character was a writer was a bit more detached, although it still deserves some revision, to the point where the next draft may not even feature him as a writer. It is the last story of my collection, which I wrote in advance so I'd know where I was ending up. The main character is a university-aged would-be writer who is actually a fast food jockey. He over-analyzes his past relationship with a woman he intends to meet up with at a party. That story actually serves as the basis for (the first draft of) my next play, although I've drafted and re-drafted it to the point where the two, despite sharing a title, don't resemble one another.

As you can tell, I'm thinking a lot about writing lately. We'll see if anything productive comes of this.

Keep on rockin
-Scotto

011: Pretend like you know me

Sitting at the computer late at night unsure of what to listen to, I inevitably choose the Coral's Nightfreak and the Sons of Becker.

It's a remarkable choice, an esoteric one. I have all five of the Coral's albums and the majority of my friends, and many strangers, have never listened to them. Those that have usually get mixed feelings (although Alyssa seemed to really dig them and Ryan once told me he went through a Coral phase after hearing Dreaming of You on Scrubs.) Nightfreak is their most maligned album, from a band that is generally well-regarded, so long as one only ever listens to the opinions of Allmusic.com.

It goes like this. Their first album (self-titled) was ridiculously inventive. I haven't listened to it the whole way through in years, but its mix of pop sensibility, raucous energy and psychedelia made it a potent breakthrough. Their second album (Magic & Medicine) was by far a more precious affair, with sweet guitars and jangly melodies. If their first album was 1968, this was about 1965 or 66. Their most recent two albums (The Invisible Invasion and Roots & Echoes) have continued on this route, purifying their neo-60s retro sound of much of its initial punkiness. The band remains a talented group of composers and performers, but their objectives appear to have shifted considerably since their first outing.

In between is this bizarre little bit of business with the attention-demanding name of Nightfreak & The Sons of Becker. Famously, it was written and recorded nearly spontaneously in the studio, and it definitely sounds like it. It's ragged and rough, and weirdly funky and dark and paranoid, even ominous. It's the only album where I think the group sounds sexy, possibly due to the heightened presence of bass. Listening to it one summer night while I went for a late coffee, I decided it was the ideal nighttime album. Most of the tracks are wafer-thin compositions with rudimentary lyrics and guitar noodling, but it's that tossed-off, minimal feeling that gives the album so much character. And at only a half hour or so, it slinks by.

I ought to get back to writing. My new computer is on its way. I owe the world another play and have been thinking constantly how to restructure it for two acts and juggle these characters without making them seem 1-dimensional. In a comedy, two-dimensional is largely okay as it's harder to laugh at someone if they're a fully-rounded human being. I've also been thinking about those short stories I keep writing in my head, and keep re-drafting without satisfaction.

The writing, I stress over. I stress, if you can believe it, over things I am not writing and not thinking about writing. Things I think I can't write. I keep getting hung up on little details and the fact that I'm not a details guy. I don't know why I fret so much over the fact that I envy other writers' product. I can't just enjoy, I need to analyze and marvel at the fact that I could never do that, whatever it happens to be. I could never write about that topic, or write from that perspective. Well, that's bull. Nothing to get too stressed about. I probably write pretty well for the perspective I have, for the style I use. I've been told as such and I worry about it constantly. Self-evaluation is important, maybe. I try not to get complacent, almost to the point of paralyzing insecurity (luckily I'm not paralyzed, I'm still writing. Sometimes.) But they say, write what you know, and I just need to learn more so that I can write it. For now, I do write what I know.

First book we read this semester in American Fiction was The Human Stain by Philip Roth. I really admire his writing style, the free indirect discourse, the voice he employs as Nathan Zuckerman. I was influenced by it before I had ever read it: it's largely the same effect I've tried for on Melancholy Catatonia, when I have written it (it was my 2005 NaNoWriMo-winning project that I later scrapped and restarted because I thought I could do better. Also I lost it in a previous harddrive mishap that helped characterize my reaction to my little scare. I still think I could do better than the unfinished redraft, in places.)

The Human Stain works on a lot of levels, about representation and race and narrative structure. Great example of an unreliable narrator. At one point at the end of Catatonia, I intend to have the main character sit down with the narrator, having read his draft for the story based on her, and say "The parts I liked best were the parts you flat-out made up." It's a bit on-the-nose, but I think true to the messy, unacademic tone I try to get in the book. But enough about things I haven't written yet.

End of the Night is top priority. I need to make it cohesive and funny. Or at least, comprehensible and enjoyable. If I give it a strong enough framework, the laughs will come, I have faith. The way Cary goes on about it, I feel like I've really gotten something right. I felt that way before I showed Cary anything, but that confirms it. This works. Now it's just got to work harder.

Having listened through Nightfreak, I cracked open the first Coral album, which really took me back, since I haven't listened to most of these songs in years. They have the capacity to take me back to the first time I listened to them the whole way through, which would be grade 10. I've gotten all the way to "Waiting for the Heartaches," a really cool song that I think I need to get back in my life, once I have iTunes again and can command the arcane forces of my iPod.

Toiday was feeling like one of those exasperating days when everything is shitty. I was getting easily frustrated and annoyed by every little convenience early on but by the end of it things had eased up. I had to write a response last night, because not only did my computer crapping out mess up my attention span, I would've forgotten that due date anyway. It was about the Breakfast Club, its depictions of high school social structures in comparison to "a show like Glee." Having 900-1200 words to play with, I invoked both Glee and Degrassi for comparison and contrast - Glee utilizes Breakfast CLub's clique structure in order to dismantle it (or perhaps strengthen its reality, in a way) while Degrassi disregards it to present an alternative situation in which high school cliques are related less to personality type than by individual situation.

And I probably just summed it up there better than I did in my paper. SWP, you win again.

So my frustration about that fuelled me for the first half of the day, and then I mellowed out by the end of it, finally conversing with people in Drama, actually getting to know people, which can be hard to do in the university classroom.

I feel like I accomplished something today. Small victories. I need to keep my Zen going, though. That's on me. It's late. Sleep sounds good,

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

010: There are monsters here

Anatomy of an SWP post: Organizational assignment (to be modified and played out month after month, no exceptions) non-sequiter title that may either be a reference, a rumination, a quote, a thought, an image, or any random string of words. Its meaning may or may not be explored in the body of the post. The body is to be comprised of a summary of everything of note that has happened since the previous post, or anything that is not of note. Mix in cultural and societal observations, season with venting of stress, add self-deprecation, self-loathing, white guilt, western guilt, male guilt, self-doubt, fear of the future, fear of technology, and ultimately cultural complacency as subtext. No matter the topic, sexual frustration is always present and usually made into the primary topic of discussion. Everyone is reminded that if they didn't care they would not have visited. Occasionally ending on an unrelated observation, final thought, rumination, observation or reference, and at last the phrase "Keep on rockin'."

I have a folder in my e-mail entitled "Blog Replies." The earliest e-mail in it was from march 21 2005, under a year after I starter this blog and a few months before I graduated high school. I use it not only for SWP replies, but also for replies to any other blog I have used like LJ, most services that include notifications including Facebook and POF. It contains 3591 e-mails. I have never made it a point to re-read any of them. My proper inbox, from which I have deleted very little since yahoo began offering unlimited storage (and very little before that) and active since about 1999, contains 3865 e-mails. I can't even imagine what most of them might be.

I took a peek at a random selection from Blog Replies, a reply-to-your-reply from a friend's LJ. It reminded me of the early part of my relationship with this friend. I'd be lying to deny that, when we first met at the beginning of grade 12, I entertained some attraction to her, but it faded over time, not because I felt the need to reluctantly give up, but because, as is so often the case, we had a real friendship going. I'm not sure if, prior to grade 12, I'd have believed honest friendship was possible between a guy and a girl. Since then, the majority of my meaningful friendships have been with women, to the point where the only wonder is that I've failed to make any of them into a romantic relationship.

The first 17 or so years of my life beat the fucking romance right out of me, as I got hung up on the wrong girls -- first the very, very wrong girls, and then the right wrong girls. The very wrong girls were the girls I lusted after, the ones who, true to high school cliches, wouldn't give me the time of day (so to speak) and it didn't help my case that I was as socially awkward as they come. The right wrong girls were the ones who were "my type," ones I had something in common with, to whom I could relate, but still didn't want me that way, because of their own business (or because, despite my improving ability to interact socially, I was still a bit of a creeper.) I'm a very different person than I was then, yet I still remain largely clueless about women. Maybe it's because I overthink it (let me think about that one for a while.) Pressed by Robyn for reasons as to why I'm still in the situation I am, I could only turn my face away from her and sigh to myself, "Because I'm a coward." And that's probably part of it but not the whole thing. It's complicated. I'm a complicated dude and I deserve complicated neuroses.

Of the small handful of women who have ever wanted me that way, two were already in relationships when they admitted it to me, and one never admitted it but we proceeded as though it was a foregone conclusion, until we were both so incompetent it became something of a romantic write-off and we now pretend like it never happened, because I guess it didn't. To my knowledge, I have never been wanted by someone I wouldn't have been willing to try going out with. Amongst the girls who want to be my friend but not date me, I think the consensus is that someone should want to be with me, but not them. The words "you're a catch" have been ringing in my ears (with all due respect to the one/s who said them.) I'd rather think I was an asshole. It would fit the facts so much better.

I talk about it a lot, I analyze. I don't cry about it the way I did when I was in high school. Shit happens in its own time and I do try, to the extent I feel comfortable, and for the results that I've been getting, so be it. I remember a conversation I was having with Cary, about why relationship problems dominate the themes of my plays. "It's because, what else do people our age have to care about? We're not the ones who get to have big important jobs, not yet. We don't have the weight of the world on our shoulders. This is it. All we have is our relationships." That, and trying to prepare ourselves for the future, and to some extent, the relationship is part of that. It's the extent of what is within my control, and even that is way beyond me.

It was the last of my schoolboy crushes. I think every girl who has come along since then has had a different context from before. No more romanticizing, no more admiring from afar. I was afraid to approach her, to break the illusion, but I did, and I got a friend with whom I remain, if not close, at least around. Since then, my MO has been to break through and see what happens.

I remember the first time I saw her. It was the first day of school and we were arriving late to the same class from opposite ends of the hallway. She struck me a way few had before or since. I didn't say anything to her for a while, but I felt like I absolutely had to get to know her. So what started as an anonymous attraction from afar became a very good friendship. And I omit her name because I suspect she would find it startling to find that, even for an instant, I would entertain those notions toward her, even though I didn't know her, and I think that way about, well, virtually every anonymous female the first time I see them. In fact, it's a very similar scenario to the one that brought me to Vasa nearly five years later. And the outcome was very much the same.

The weekend, except for the computer chaos, has been rather mundane. I'm still on the borrowed laptop, but I am now in possession of a portable hard drive that contains all of my precious, precious files, thanks to dad. So that's settled, all I have to do is buy a new computer. For a while I was considering a new laptop, because it seems logical that if you're going to get a new computer, and you're a student and you commute, why not a laptop?

Then I decided, well, for the same reason as always why not a laptop. Don't need, don't particularly want. It's just gonna sit on my desk anyway. I'd have a laptop as a supplement to my regular computer, but I don't love those things on their own.

Aw, now I feel like I've offended my new laptop buddy on whom I am typing. Sorry guy, you've been very accommodating, but I don't see it working out long-term. I hope you'll understand. If it's meant to be, it'll be.

I sleepwalked through my first permanent employee, post-temp shift today with Matt, Gus and Andrew. This is the first job I've had in a long time that resembles something permanent (in that it is permanent.) The last time I had a job that I did not know an exact end date for was Tim Hortons, for whom I worked two shifts in September 2006! Since then it's been Halloween kiosk (prematurely ended) various HMV Holiday stints and one summer job that ended less than halfway through the summer. Go figure.

Just re-affirms my belief that this is where I belong. It may not be with the people I belong with, but it's where I've gotta be. The rest will fall into place.

Keep on rockin
-Scott

009: I didn't know I was special

I have been undergoing what can best be described as a crisis. There are times when I have gotten extremely despondent over issues over which I ultimately have no control and which, in the long run, have no serious impact on my longterm wellbeing. I get pissy about this and that. Girls. Entertainment. Buses. Important to my daily life but not serious issues. School. The future. Things that are problematic, but issues that, someday, will resolve themselves natural. "Sometimes," wrote Philip Roth in the Human Stain, "problems age themselves out of existence."

In light of this, my current crisis is considerably more substantial. More tangible. At my lowest, I referred to it as "my Haiti" which is of course grossly insensitive to the poor folks in Haiti who are currently dealing with the complete destruction of their entire world. When put in that light, it's hard to believe anything else is important to anybody, but this, this is my world, and on this little shadowy corner of the internet, that's what's important. Don't go out into the world and think SWP is important. Don't think too much about these words when you click off this browser, but while you're here, this is what's important, this is the earthquake.

I woke up Friday morning and, as I have every morning of my life, turned on my computer before going to the washroom. When I got out, I saw that Windows had not yet loaded, in fact the screen was reading the cryptic message that a boot disk needed to be inserted, which, with my limited knowledge of computers, even I knew was incorrect because after all, there was no need for a boot disk.

I didn't have time to ponder this concept, however irritating it clearly was. I had to get to class. In class, American Fiction, which I had missed on Wednesday for reasons that generally boil down to my questionable priorities, we discussed Obama's speech on race, first in small groups then as a class. Having not read the speech due to my having missed Wednesday, I was only able to discuss the matter in light of the book and in light of what I know about the world in general. I made a fairly decent remark about the judgment on Sonia Sotomayor's appointment to the Supreme Court a while back. I know my colleague Craig disagrees with me vehemently when I defend her, because hey, she dared address the issue of race, and that apparently makes her a racist. She didn't say she was out to get whitey, she said she had a different perspective, as a Latina, than a white male. That's just a fact. And that's how it's supposed to be in the supreme court: people with different viewpoints arguing and voting about whose is more popular. Why would anyone think that it was her job to look at things from the same perspective as all the other people on that bench. But she dared acknowledge it, and that caused a furor. America is clearly not living in a post-racial state. If anything, it's gotten more complicated over the years, more nuanced, now that it isn't so (cough cough) black and white. Oh, I don't feel proud about that one.

I got back to Oakville at the usual time. Figurinjg I had the afternoon off I set off for the comic shop, retracing in reverse the route I took one very nice day in November (damnit Scotto don't, don't get emotional here!) and about halway up Trafalgar headed for Lakeshore I feel that familiar ominous vibration in my pocket. Drr. HMV calling. Come in at 5? It's 3:30 and I am walking in the opposite direction. I knew my friend Cait was working that night. Okay.

I continued onward to the comics, because at this point if I make good time it wouldn't make a difference. I did make good time too, rushed home on the bus, packed a pizza pocket for "dinner" and appraised B. of the situation both regarding my work and my computer.

The shift was marred by an overhanging sense of dread. A dark cloud had obscured what could obviously have been a very cheerful time for yours truly. Because unlike all my co-workers, I knew this would not be my last shift. I knew my last shift was not on the horizon. On Wednesday night, when I arrived for my shift, Karen took me aside and asked how I'd feel about staying on.

Obviously, I accepted. That has been my goal since 2006. I wasn't ready then. 2007 I took off because it was my first year at U of T and I did not see how commuting and working could possibly work together. And I was more or less right about that, especially if my marks this past semester are any indication. But I persisted last year. Last year I was probably ready, but there was no room for ole Scotto. This year, I told anyone who asked, if it was ever going to happen it would be this year. Trevor was gone before most of the temps even showed up. Chantelle and Kas were peacing out for their respective destinations. Plus, Karen had been praising me up and down, left and right. I felt like I would be in my rights to take it personally if she didn't offer me a position.

But, she says, we may not have that many hours to start with, and I say, that's exactly fine by me since I have all this school and hey, I could probably stand to focus on it. Just book me on the weekends.

So I knew this but I was keeping it under wraps. Cait and I had been speculating for a while about who was going to be kept. I felt that if there was more than one person staying, it should be me and her. I said this not only because she was, in my estimation, the best temp other than me, but because of course, on a personally greedy level, she was the one I most liked working with.

When I first started back in October, I was complaining about how I was missing the presence of a cool girl I could joke around with. And a few weeks later, I was granted one by the universe. And I knew right away -- like, before I'd hardly said a word to her -- that she was exactly what I needed. Not because there was any serious attraction there (I have no idea what use a girl like her would have for a guy like me) because having her around to amuse, (because I knew I could say virtually anything to her) brought out all those qualities I knew I had been missing during my employment up to that point.

I had heard about other potential coworkers that might've been held on, but nothing about her, which had me bummed out. I found out today that the shift she worked today was her last. Such is life, I suppose. But I can't help but feel like I'll be holding a little resentment for the ones they keep, especially that one guy. Oh, that one guy.

The crash and burn, yesterday, was when I got home and called dad to find that there was nothing he could do about my computer, and there was a slight chance that the entire harddrive was donefor.

This was not what I wanted to hear. In fact, I broke down a little on the phone. If this was the case, then everything I had built up over my lifetime was now gone. All I had written, all my music, everything I was. A real identity crisis. A veritable psychogenic fugue. It's amazing how much of ourselves is tied up on these ineffable digital narratives... how fearing I was cut off from it forever made me feel like I'd lost myself.

I was understandably gloomy about this all day until dad confirmed it was not in fact the case. But I will now be a backup junkie, that's for sure. I don't want to be brought face to face with the stark reality of how easy it is to lose one's own sense of past ever again.

So now, until that bad boy is repaired, I'm using dad's laptop, which I have borrowed. Considering he doesn't use it much, it's not that big a deal, but it's awkward to try to go on like it's not different. I mean, it uses Vista!

This entry wasn't all it could've been because of this laptop and how easy it is to get distracted from it. Or maybe that's just me.

Work in the morning. The first day of the rest of my CD-selling career.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

008: Big hats everywhere

I'm having one of those selfish mornings where the only thing i can think about is how things inconvenience me. Tragedies and catastrophes I can handle. An earthquake in Haiti, a tyrant on capital hill, life goes on. But if I miss the bus on a Thursday morning? Ugh!

I did miss the bus. I took too long getting ready, because after work last night dad had left me some leftovers. I didn't need them, but it was a roast for crying out loud, how could I say no? So I decided I'm gonna pack up my leftovers with some bread and make a sandwich for lunch, but I might as well keep it separate because I've got to microwave the meat. By the time I get out there to the bus stop, the bus had already passed, and I waited until quarter to until it dawned on me. And I felt like an idiot anyway, because the paper I had skipped class yesterday to write was still sitting on my printer tray. So it's a good thing I missed the bus. Missing the bus was good. This entire ordeal shouldn't have occurred, I should've put the paper in my backpack the night before, but I'm glad I didn't get on that bus, because apparently late papers are not accepted in that class.

Oh, that class. Love-hate. So conflicted. There's a lot of interesting perspective that goes into it, there are worse things to study, it's good. As with many papers I was rethinking my entire piece long after the point was moot, but anyway. I really start to hate the class at 11:55 when there's five minutes left and the prof shows no signs of stopping, or wrapping up. He has a train of thought problem, he goes on and on at his own pace without much organization, and when he's still got a lot to say with the minutes ticking down and a room full of 300 students shuffling anxiously, zipping backpacks, closing notebooks, and he's just about to make what could very well be his final point, except not, and he's repeating himself... you get the idea.

Plus, I was late. Obviously. I missed the bus, so I walked to the station and caught the 9:30, which made me about a half hour late to class. Had to hand in my paper at the end, which is why I was squirming. I just really wanted to go. So crowded.

So I had to get to Pratt and get this out there, to vent, not stew on it. I have enough inconveniences in my life, living the way I do. I just accept them and try to find zen.

I've been thinking about Nirvana lately (talk about a bizarre segue, I mean the band this time.) There was an FML a few days ago where some dude wanted the same car as Kurt Cobain, but discovered he couldn't in good conscience because it is also the same car as Edward in Twilight. I made the mistake (I should've known better) of glancing at the comments to this particular FML, which derided Cobain as, among other things, a hack.

Now, see here. There's a lot you can say about Cobain. You don't even have to like his music. But hack? To call Cobain a hack is to misunderstand the entire concept of what a hack is. A hack is somebody who makes a living appealing to the lowest common denominator, who shuns originality in favour of whatever will make a quick buck. Stephenie Myers is a hack. You don't have to love Cobain, but if nothing else, he strove for originality, to play his music his way. A hack wouldn't have written Sliver or Rape Me; a hack wouldn't have covered Where Did You Sleep Last Night or The Man Who Sold the World. I'm way more of a hack than Cobain was, and I don't see myself as a hack. Hack my ass.

You can call him a druggy, a suicide case, a failure (in that he failed to keep living and endure life's despair -- some real Hamlet shit there.) I posted the link on Twitter and my colleague Blake responded wondering whether it was even the best idea to want to emulate Cobain. I replied summarily, "Hey, it's not like he wanted the same brand of syringes or shotgun."

Can't look to musicians as role models, folks. If you only enjoy music made by morally upstanding people, you probably have shitty taste in music. Even Karen Carpenter was an anorexic. And I don't care for the Carpenters' music, but she did have a hell of a voice and it's tragic what happened to her. The Beatles were pot heads after being amphetamine pill poppers and before being LSD space-cases. Bing Crosby was a child abuser, the Rat Pack was made exclusively of alcoholics. I haven't even mentioned Michael Jackson, and HEY DID YOU KNOW THE FATHER OF THE FIRST BOY TO ACCUSE HIM ADMITTED IT WAS A SCAM?? Armed with that bit of information I could've ended numerous summertime arguments about his morals. he was weird looking, had a plastic surgery addiction and a major Peter Pan complex. "He diddled kids" some drunk dude harangued me for even thinking to defend him; he was acquitted. Phil Spector is a murderer. A fucking murderer, he was convicted. A terrible human being, but I don't boycott his records.

Six months later I'm still having this argument.

I think it's because in recent years, now that we're nearly 2 decades removed from the initial success of Nirvana, Cobain & Co. are starting to be looked at in those reverent critical circles reserved for the sacred halls of rock, your Lennons, your Elvises, your Jaggers. And a lot of people resent that, because a lot of people don't care for Nirvana, don't get what the fuss is about.

I've talked about that phenomenon before. When a large group of people -- people you don't typically disagree with -- love something you don't. And you feel compelled to scream out "You're wrong, it's not good, it's not!!" Like the film geeks who hate Charlie Kaufman. They look at their cinephile brethren and see admiration for these works that simply do not understand, and maybe they feel betrayed. Only Sane Man complex. it can't be you, it must be everyone else. the erstwhile TV columnist in Metro was an obnoxious case of this, with politics as much as entertainment. I guess that explains the erst.

So a lover of rock and roll sees the hagiography of Cobain and thinks "This is madness! What did he do that was so special?" And it's just like Louie Armstrong said. "There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." I love that quote, it nails down the intuitiveness of, well, everything. If you've heard Sliver and you don't understand, if you've listened to their Unplugged album and you still sniff and say "Soundgarden was better, Alice in Chains was better," then you're not getting it. I don't know much about those bands, I don't mean to deride those bands. They're probably very good and have endured a lot of consideration, but there's a reason Nirvana looms large. Who fucking writes a song where the chorus is a screaming plead of "Grandma take me home, Grandma take me home!" There's a good deal of literary theory in that: Consider Jakobsen. Don't mind if I do. There's the content, the form, the sound of the message. What is being said and how it is being conveyed, and what it is really intended to mean. Brilliant. Drain You. What a lyric: "It is not my duty to completely drain you" with a catchy tune and distorted guitars.

But if you haven't already figured this out, I may be wasting my time trying to explain it. If the music doesn't move you, it doesn't move you, and that's the brilliance of it. But you're not going to help anybody by trying to convince them otherwise: they've made up their minds, too. You just look like a lunatic. Like that guy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. "Don't you understand?? They're already here -- critically appraising In Utero!!"

I like this topic. I told a girl recently I could talk on and on about music (or movies or TV) endlessly. Mostly I'm talking out of my ass, but it's fun to watch, I should think. I'm hammering away passionately at the keyboard here in Pratt the way few do. The girl in question, I met on POF. I have no intentions. She's in Waterloo and long distance is so far beyond a bad idea for me right now. I just saw her profile, she had a photo of her with a log, and all I wanted to say was "Nice log." If only she'd been among the majority of girls who don't reply to me. But lines like "Nice log" don't come along very often. Mostly I just try to be charming and end up coming off as creepy.

I could go on about that. In fact, I did, but I deleted it, because that's a rant for another time. Let's just say that my standing with the opposite sex is a little more complicated lately, and that I don't mind.

At Robyn's behest, I e-mailed Alicia. At this point, it's not necessarily about the girl, but what she represents. About not quitting too soon, about trying to make things work out. I have absolutely no faith that she will actually respond, but at least I tried. And now I can move on and get back to being happy being single, instead of being miserable about it.

Damnit, I've come this close to ranting about it again. better cut myself off.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

007: Plastic spoon show

Early on in the break, I was doing dishes. There were obviously more dishes around due to Eric's presence, although the volume of the load has nothing to do with the story. I had this plastic serving/mixing/stirring spoon resting in the lower tray. It slipped through the grate and was melted on the heating element, sliced in two as if by lightsaber. It was a shame, too, because I liked that spoon. I finally got around to replacing it today, with a metal one.

As promised, I took the day off. It was maybe not necessary, but it was a good precaution. I got up at my usual time (okay, I slept a little later than I would've otherwise done) and after a routine pre-procrastination of webcomics & assorted distractions, got down to writing my response for music.

I started with a long-winded intro that would've been blustery enough for an 8- or 10-page paper. About the Monkees, and how they fit into, manipulated and exposed the "Culture Industry" described in the Adorno/Horkheimer (there's a hell of a duo name) article, I had a lot of big thoughts. I had to restrain myself, pare down my intro, and keep my content snappy.

I don't know how it's going to turn out. I make some decent points, probably not as academically as I might. I use a couple quotes, mostly relying on summary of the article. I think the strength of my thesis (if I did it properly) is that I don't assert that the Monkees were in any way revolutionary, but that their existence, their story, exposed a number of difficulties in the classification that Adorno and Horkheimer (it's fun to say in my head when I type) level on the entertainment industry. My conclusion was that the reality is more of a compromise, and that the industry isn't so stagnant and resistant to change as they would've thought. But that's just my interpretation, having skimmed the article. I'm a bad student. I've come to terms with it.

I chose the Monkees because they have a very particular place in this argument, and because I sense that nobody else will realize that. I might've chosen the Beatles (easy topic) or Nirvana (only slightly less easy) and even considered Beck (nobody thinks about Beck.) I know an awful lot about the Monkees, too. In my overanalytical preteen internet geek days, I wrote an article about them for one of my little sites.

Work was quiet. Dead quiet. I was mostly just there with Jaime, we spent time shooting the shit, doing busywork.

Big things have happened. Been listening to a lot of female-vocalist synth-rock. Metric, Paramore, Sounds, Ida Maria, Tegan and Sara, that kind of thing. There's a lot of it. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Dragonette. A lot of this stuff, we have on the playlist at work. Not sure if I'm just letting myself be brainwashed or if I'm just getting on a kick. But if I knew I was being brainwashed, it wouldn't be a brainwashing.

Food for (not particularly deep) thought. Keep on rockin'
-Scott

006: Scumbag

I remember this exchange I had back when I first got twitter. It was of course ON twitter, ABOUT twitter, with the woman who had been most interested in GETTING ME on twitter (and I'm sure the world will have its retribution.) This would be my esteemed colleague (friend's mom,) Linda.

She described twitter as a crowded bus where everyone has something to say and you can participate at will, and you overhear interesting things. Of course, if you've ever been on the bus, you know not everyone is a world-changing philosopher.

I'm an eavesdropper. You can't help it in the city, especially the way I do things. I'm not sure I'd want to help it, either. It certainly livens up the day, and as a writer, I use it to my advantage (I professed to Robyn that I liked hearing what other people had to say, and about their problems, partly because it does help fuel my writing, helps add dimension.)

Most of the time I have my earbuds in. Obviously they drown out the chatter on the trains, which I usually find unbearable. Every so often I overhear something I'm interested in, so I pause the iPod and try to make like I'm not listening. Yes, I am a bad person, but they're the ones having these conversations in public.

Last week, I was on the TTC juggling a coffee and a doughnut with my earbuds in when the young woman sitting across from me made some remark toward me I couldn't hear. Unable to smoothly pause the iPod, I tugged one of the earbuds out and looked at her to signal she should repeat. She did, but over the continuing song and the squeal of the subway rocketing toward Union, I couldn't hear her repetition, and couldn't figure out a way to ask her to repeat whatever minor icebreaker she'd made without feeling dopey.

Today, with a doughnut and a coffee, I entered the subway without my iPod in just in case such a situation were to repeat. As I waited for the train, I suddenly heard a deafening cackle next to me; a group of girls/women had sidled up next to me and were energetically, giddily conversing. Without even the pretense of an iPod, I eavesdropped, and they didn't make any attempt to make their conversation private.

The conversation didn't last long and wasn't about anything important, other than context-sensitive talks about lesbian acquaintances and idiosyncratic roommates. Still, when they got off at St. Patrick, the cute one smiled and waved goodbye to me, acknowledging the obvious fact that I had a front row seat to their entire giggly discussion. I smirked that wry Scotto smile and said "Have a good night."

It was nice.

Not a lot else to report. Got a a response paper back in Film, got a good mark on it. I'm doing well in that class, I get it, I pay it the attention it deserves, unlike some of these other ones. All my failures are my own fault. This is not news. I'm skipping class tomorrow to catch up on a reading for Music so I can do that paper (2-3 pages on industrialism vs. art, I'm using the Monkees as my case study in what I consider to be a stroke of brilliance.) I mainly need to do some quote wrangling. And then I'm going to work (at a music store, no less.) They keep calling and I keep going "I can't, for this reason or that." I could've worked last night (Monday) but they had called when I was about to start dinner, and by the time I'd have finished cooking and eating and I got down there it'd be like 7. They called again tonight, when I was getting dinner.

But I said yes to tomorrow. Probably shouldn't have, but Karen had the courtesy to call a few days ahead; I don't care for the "can you work tonight?" call, but ask me to come in a couple days, I can't help but take it, even if it's to my detriment. When I go in tomorrow I think I'm going to flat-out say "Please don't call me tomorrow, but if you want me Friday or Saturday you might as well ask now." Maybe. If I've got balls.

Well, the night is slipping away, and I've got stuff to take care of tomorrow. Let's hope I don't get too carried away distracting myself (who are we kidding? I'm boned.)

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

005: Whatever moves in the wind

When we last saw Scotto he was engaging in a very public freakout about anything and everything he could get his hands on. The circumstances haven't changed, but the attitude has. It's softened. I have no really good reason for that. Well, there is sort of, but it's not something I am going to detail scrupulously here on SWP, as much as I like you people, the tragedy is that you don't always get the whole story.

Thursday was a tough easy day that involved getting up early to go to a class of 300 students to listen to a guy, a singer, a prof, talk about music as a larger social force. The music class is exactly as I imagined, exactly as I'd feared, but not in a bad way. The thing you have to realize about me is that in addition to having an often overactive imagination, I am very good at freaking out about anything I see in that imagination. And while I don't suspect the music class will be a cakewalk, it's something I feel like I can wrap my brain around, because I've been thinking about music, not just as a form of entertainment but as a social phenomenon, for a long time now.

I'm not saying that I'll excel at it, but I don't expect to fail. I ran into this girl before film later that day, and she said something that was more or less my happy thought for the rest of the day, and indeed until now and beyond. I had Modern Drama p1 with her, and later in the semester found out she was in the film class, and though we never talked, in the last week she realized I was in both classed and asked if I could provide her some notes for the term test, which ended up being unnecessary. Anyway, we were catching up, and in her funny Austrian accent, she noted that in Austria, people just wanted to pass, and here people were so obsessed with marks. And it's funny, because thinking back on those last couple posts, that's largely what it's about for me, even though I profess (and largely in practice) not to give a shit about the marks themselves. I know what I am capable of, and I know that I am attempting to procrastinate mostly with writing, which is being done at a semi-professional level, so it's not as though I am pissing my future away (inasmuch as I may already anyway by hinging it on these aspirations.)

In that class, we watched the Breakfast Club. I couldn't believe it when I realized that, apart from channel-surfing or the occasional clip, I haven't watched that movie since I was in Grade 12, since most of the cast got together in Barrett's basement to watch it, to study up. I still don't know why I was cast as the principal. I've never thought of myself as exuding authority. I went way over the top when I did it.

Re-watching it, and paying very close attention to it, rather than just letting it be a movie I have watched many times, I thought of the fact that it's not just a dialogue movie. It is very deliberately a movie punctuated with quiet moments, moments where characters can't think of what to say. The most fascinating moment I saw was toward the end, when Bender goes into his speech to Claire about "Did you work for the money for those earrings?" And the camera just stays on her, watches her taking this abuse as her eyes are filling with tears. Eventually it cuts away but the damage is done.

All of the characters cry by the end, there's a lot of catharsis. It's not quiet, meaningful sobbing, either. They're speaking through their tears, which is something I never seem to see in movies. They are fighting them. They're not breaking down and crying, they're struggling all the way.

It always stirs up a lot of discussion about the ending. Shane, a friend of mine in class, and I had a considerable conversation about the end, particularly the Allison/Andrew coupling. The girl behind us preferred Allison/Brian. The harsh reality -- which I lived through -- is that Brian doesn't get anyone, even in the comparatively progressive atmosphere of this movie. Everyone hates the makeover job Claire does on Allison. I think maybe it isn't meant to improve her looks -- because of course she looks better as a quiet, dark goth with hair in her eyes and big overcoat and sweater. Everyone knows it. At best it works as a bonding moment for her and Claire, because that's all Claire has to offer her. Maybe it helps to get Andrew, the Emilio character, to notice her, but he had already noticed her. Knowing how it turns out, I paid special attention to the little side-glances each character gives throughout the movie; there are a lot, at meaningful moments, whose meanings are not immediately apparent.

Friday afternoon, I had a fairly significant hangout with Robyn. we ended up having one of those big cathartic talks people sometimes have, the kind that leaves you feeling clear-headed. I suppose my distressed entry from a couple days earlier had affected her... which I guess it was kind of designed to. It's nothing new, me bitching about my life.

We examined some stuff in ourselves. With her, it's never just talking, it's a conversation. This is why I have always tried to keep from lapsing on our friendship, why whenever I know she's available, I seek her out. There's reality in our conversations. Sometimes too much.

She poked into my fixation with relationships. As you're well aware it's a topic that comes up very often on this blog. She phrased her question, why I haven't been snapped up, in a way that, had it come from anyone else, (of the female persuasion) would have really, really irritated me. But coming from her, it was a legitimate question with an actual meaning behind it, and I answered back as best I could, with what insights I have.

The weekend disappeared quickly since I worked both days. I may have worked my last shift today. I'm not sure. This entire thing is up in the air, and as much as I want to keep working there, having a bit more time and energy to myself wouldn't hurt, and the likelihood that they'll play along with my rather inconvenient schedule feels small. But they need people. This is a fact.

Man, I'm so passive. I live so much in my head that I don't try to make things happen. It ain't healthy. But hey, I'm like Hamlet.

I need to get back down to Earth, if indeed I was ever there. I started back on my comic today, because sure, I need another thing on my plate. Sheesh. I still have a half a play to write. I have to read stuff. I need a life. Cripes.

We'll see. This post has been all over the place. Not a great representation of what life is actually like -- or perhaps an all-too-accurate one, depending on your vantage. Nyah.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

004: Words on my mind

Watch out, it's that double-post I promised. See the post below.

2009 AD has been over for a week nearly. I once heard that whatever you're doing at midnight on New Year's, you'll be doing for the entire year. I had this in mind On Dec 31 2008 when I was sitting in Cary's basement watching zombie movies, bummed at my lack of prospects for the future. The prophesy turned out to be rather accurate, as I did spend a lot of the year with Cary. If it turns out to be true this year, it's a bleak notion. Bleak, bleak.

The entirety of 2009 can be summarized by the events of July 2-4. If I had spent the rest of the year in a constant state of burning to death it still would've been okay. I guess that's my way of saying that there were a lot of highs and lows in this year, more than my usually-moderate life ought to be able to produce. I have Cary to thank for that. On a whim he decided to try directing a version of Half-Past Eight PM and somehow it worked better than anyone could have imagined, especially myself. Well, I should quit the modesty, I know I'm awesome.

From February through July we worked on it, workshopped it, modified it. He cast it, he got the performances he wanted out of the actors. I visited as often as I could, we drank together, we drank together a lot. Years from now when I have utterly failed, I will look back at this first success as the misstep taking the wrong path chasing this dream. Of if I'm successful, the opposite I guess.

Many other things did happen this year, making it so notable. I've managed to surprise myself by keeping my writing output up, although I'm not always on task. I met a lot of friends. I actually dedicated myself to that cause, despite often frustrating myself from not quite meeting the people I want to, I end up pleased with the people I do. That sounds insulting but it's meant to be loving. Martina, Rosie, Jamie in Film. Vasa on the train. A few girls through the internet (this is a trend that started in late 2008.) Numerous people at work, most particularly Cait. I spent one very perfect afternoon with a really cool girl in November and I haven't seen her since. Another thing to blame myself for, I'll carry that one around for a long while.

I lost a grandparent and a dog in 2009; the grandparent more suddenly than the dog, but I was prepared for both, and sad for both, and weirded out by my comfort with both.

I strained against reality for most of the year. I re-read some posts from January and it turns out my New Year's Resolution was to be a better student. That didn't happen, not by half. I actually slipped into some nearly inexcusable scholastic habits this year, culminating with some ridiculously lackluster marks in the first semester of my third year. In first year, my Narrative prof, Cobb, told us that it was conventional wisdom that people get to University and though they may expect A's and such, they usually end up with C's, and then catch on. I started out with A's, and then straining under my own frustration with the Academic institution and distraction with potentially-more-important endeavors like play-writing, found my way down through B's and to C's. This semester represents a low water mark. I could've done better in Drama and Theory, but I didn't. There's no other explanation than that. either I was capable of better but didn't provide it (I feel like I am but I can't seem to put it all into words) or I was simply not meant to do write-ups about Eichenbaum and Jameson, despite the fact that I felt like I mostly got it. Since I did decent work on my presentation and write-up in Drama, but pinched a loaf for my mid-term test in Drama, it's not hard to see how it evened out to a C+, Blackboard says I got a 65 on my final exam, which sounds about right, although I should have been able to produce a 70, I know I didn't, so this is my cross to bear.

My marks shouldn't come as too grave a surprise and shouldn't therefore disappoint me too much but hey, maybe that's motivation (but probably just frustration.) I choose to blame class participation marks. Which oddly enough, is all on me. De Groot gave a long spiel yesterday about the insanity of participation marks. Other profs don't seem to have caught on. But it all happens on Blackboard and I hate going on Blackboard. I don't have my short story mark yet, but I can guess it'll be about a 66. I'll drink to it if it's higher.

I have a feeling that I am going to go through the motions for this semester. I oughtn't and I don't try to, but if I do, I'll do what I need to to survive and keep sane and more importantly, to write, to write, to write. 2009 has shown me, for better or worse, that it's what I'm meant to pursue. It's all I've got, and a paper on Saussure isn't going to help the way more work on End of the Night will.

So my resolution for 2010, if I am to have one (I don't think I will really) is just to take it easy on myself, to keep my shit in perspective, and to do my best not to flip out when shit gets tough. All I need to do is to live, and I'll be fine.

2009 was also the year I twittered my way through. I find myself obsessively composing little micro-thoughts. It's sick. I can't escape.

I was bummed as all hell when I started writing. I'm still not great, and lord knows I'll still feel some moroseness tomorrow, but I've got a bit more perspective, I'm feeling more level-headed now.

2010 will be more of the same, but hopefully better. Listen to Damien Rice's cover of When Doves Cry/Babe I'm Gonna Leave You. All will be well.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

003: Moment by moment

There's no pleasing some people. In this case, me. I'm depressed. There's nothing about my situation that wouldn't depress me. The opposites of all the things that I find depressing about life right now are also depressing. And I write the word "depression" like it means something to me, or like my possible depression should mean something to you, and I almost laugh, because of how stupid that sounds. Scotto depressed again. A laughable premise. I'd laugh, if I weren't so depressed about it.

I hugged a stranger today. A sorority girl outside a frat house. Every year around this time they stand outside - sorority girls and frat guys - and give out hot chocolate and fliers and the girls hug random dudes like me. I don't know if this is their way of asking people to join. I don't think I'm what they're looking for, I don't think they're what I'm looking for, although in a perverse way they kind of are, because I need some consistency, some companionship. Maybe I don't need to get shitfaced and have fight clubs or whatever other ridiculous things I imagine frats do. According to their flier, they do a lot of charity work and they maintain good GPA's, which kind of discounts me, since I've been seeing a lot of C's on my last semester marks.

I didn't have my shit together last semester. I was distracted, by the sheer weight of school and the immensity of life. And trying to escape it all by writing. Writing is all I've got and I hope I am not shitty at it, because that would be a cruel joke of life. I keep saying, I should've been a plumber. Anytime I am hating on myself, I think of the plumber thing. If only. Somedays I'd rather be elbow-deep in shit than trying to picture myself as a successful writer of anything.

I'm listening to the Beta Band, that's how depressed I am. It's not depressing music, it's just very meditative, helps clear my angst. Very simple. Takes me back to the simpler days of first year. Puts me in a very specific place and time, especially since many of these songs I have long since dropped from the iPod and haven't listened to therefore since mid 2008.

It's just... it's a lot of stuff, life. Eric went home earlier this evening. As irritating as it was that he was here -- I mean, that he was in one place the entire time (one of the things over which Robyn and I commiserated the last time we talked) -- I got used to his presence and now the place feels a little empty. Eric and I have such a strange relationship, it's so totally a brother-relationship. We're capable of hating each other, of intense frustration with each other, but we're still willing to hang out, to joke around, we relate. We get tired of each other, but at our best, we're a good match. Maybe I'm just depressed because I had been craving a moment to myself, and now that I have it, I hate it. There's no pleasing me. You know, he hates my typing? I type fast/loud, he hates it, I get self-conscious and am therefore not productive when he's around.

I'm stuck in life. First week not yet over and I'm feeling a little stuck about it. This always happens, goddamn it, every semester, every year, every time I start something new. Maybe it's because I cheated myself out of a break (by *gasp* working a part-time job. And the brother thing.) Maybe I just need a girl. That's usually what it boils down to, ain't it? I could go on about that shit, but you know and I know what is going on (nothing) and if you need more please don't hesitate to ask -- or wait until I do feel up to sharing (which is still nothing.)

It's amazing. I have felt recently -- just in the past three days since returning to school -- a drastic desire to leave school behind. It's stupid; I should do no such thing. I've gotten a few bad marks lately. I know I'm not a very good student. I'm not an academic. I am torturing myself. It's the only way I know how to do it. I'm looking over the readings for this North American Music course I'm taking, starting tomorrow, and I'm just like, "What was I thinking? Who am I kidding?" I can't force myself to be academic. I don't know what they want from me. After three years, I'm worse at it now than when I started. After I graduate - because you can bet your balls I will, I haven't come this far to drop out, no matter how frustrated I get - I'm going to need to just take some time to relax. I don't know what I will do, probably write. I have this crazy idea of myself going to Asia to teach English for a while, but that's a fairly ridiculous prospect for such a homebody as myself. But it'd be great to get away, to unplug myself from my rut, you know? And put this degree to good use, despite it being essentially unnecessary for that. Urk. Catch-22. I don't want to leave the things I hate.

I should get myself locked up in a nuthouse. I think that might be best for all concerned. I could be the family skeleton. Oh, we don't talk about him, we miss him, but we don't bring up his situation.

Nothing happened today other than I dwelt on my usual failures as a man and as a human being. Nobody likes a bummer, though. Least of all, me. But that's what I've gotta be sometimes. I have to be a drag. It's what makes the good times possible. The only virtue I have is that I'm in touch with my neuroses and failings.

In the syllabus for that Pop Music course, the essays are described as such "When you write, please remember that the point of this course is to cultivate a critical
view of music as a social, cultural, historical phenomenon, not for you to develop your own unreflective relationship to music; effusive musical autobiographies or fan manifestos will not be acceptable." I find it sad that this sentence even needed to be included. It sounds very stern, and the word "unreflective" which as a word is nebulous at best and made-up at worst, hurts most of all, partly because I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean (best guess: you're in school for God's sake, don't write a paper about how Zeppelin rules.) But I will keep it in mind.

If I had to guess, I'd say I'll end up writing a throughline of first and second wave rock and roll, from Chuck Berry through the British Invasion to Psychedelia. But I say this having attended no lectures and done no readings, so who the fuck knows. Incidentally, the readings are all online, so bonus for not spending money.

We'll see how it goes. I usually learn to tolerate things I expect to hate, which is weird because I expect to like this and yet I expect to hate it all the more due to my expectation of disappointment.

They refurbished the McDonald's by Museum station for the first time in like ever.

I have got a lot of shit I am going to have to work through if I am ever going to make satisfactory dick jokes again. Everything should be about me. I'm going to be right back with a post about 2009. this calls for a rare double-post.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto