[Scene: Kitchen. PHIL is present. APPARITION OF SOME YOUNGER PHIL appears.]

APPARITION: Uh, what are you doing?

PHIL: I am putting flaxseed and frozen raspberries in my soy yogurt.

APPARITION: That's ridiculous!

PHIL: Dude... look at your hair. *That's* ridiculous.

APPARITION: Did you just call me dude?

PHIL: Uh... yeah.

APPARITION: That's ridiculous!

[Exit APPARITION.]

We finally saw the Phil Ochs documentary tonight. I recommend it, but I recommend it from the perspective of having read all of the biographies, and I encourage people to read the biographies too.

Phil, in my mind, was the quintessential actor of the Sixties. For what it's worth, historians think of "the Sixties" as either 1961 or 1963 through about 1975 - you pick either JFK's inauguration or JFK's assassination as the starting point, and the end in Vietnam as the end. Phil, who wound up in New York in 1961, and who died in 1976, pretty much fits the era exactly. He rose and fall as the era rose and fell. In this respect, I've always found him to be a more fascinating figure than, say, Bob Dylan, who was always more of an iconoclast, someone who was (and still is) fascinating for ahistorical reasons.

Phil died in April 1976. I was named after him (or at least, the genesis of my name came from him) seven months later. He was 35 when he died. I'm 35 now.

One thing the documentary brought up, which I think is very important but easy to lose sight of, is something Sean Penn addressed in talking about Phil's outlook on the war: the idea that no matter how horrific Vietnam was, it was more ridiculous than it was horrific. The terror, the tragedy, the destruction - and all of it had no real point. That distinction, that understanding, it's an important one for me as well. The gubernatorial races in 2006 and 2010 are best understood as these utterly ridiculous fragments, things that don't really make a lot of sense and which need to be adapted to.

I think if I got caught up in the horror of existence without being able to step back and regard the sheer absurdity of it all, it would just drag me down. And I think what happened to Phil and to the Sixties more broadly is that people couldn't help but get caught up in and dragged down by the horror. It's the absurdity which is easier to fight than the horror. The horror makes you despondent. The absurdity makes you feel capable. It's a hard thing to explain. But I think complacency comes when you accept the absurd, and despondency comes when you get caught up in the horror, and I don't want to be complacent or despondent.

I wish I knew others who had read the biographies and seen the documentary. These are things I'd like to talk about, but I feel like I'll inevitably do all of the talking.

When I was in college, I legitimately thought that I would "grow up" surrounded by peers who were from all kinds of different backgrounds from me but who all had similar tastes as me. I thought my musical opinions said more about who I was than pretty much anything else I could think of. Look: I'd spent pretty much my entire life surrounded by Midwestern white kids my age. They were almost all Protestant. They were almost all from wealthier families - especially when I was in grade school, and then again when I got to college. And since I went to a rural high school, and then I went to a small college, I never got any kind of urban studies education or anything like that. I didn't think in terms of my whiteness, or in terms of my protestantness, or anything like that. By the time I was 20, what was pretty clear was that what distinguished me the most from most of the people I knew was my music, and what created connections between me and other people was mostly music (and computer-geekdom a close second.)

For reasons which will be immediately obvious and understandable to some of you, and completely obscure to most, the band which I most closely identified with at the age of 18 was Pavement. Either you know what I mean or you don't, and if you don't, it's hard to explain it. But there are literally tens of thousands of people who know exactly what I mean. There's a broader connection there than maybe any other connection I've ever really felt, and I say that fully conscious of the inherent outlandishness of the idea.

The 1960s - by which I really men about 1963-1975 - were a reaction against the 1950s, and the 1980s were, sociopolitically, a reaction against the 1960s. The 1990s were not really reactionary in that sense. I went to a college in 1996 where there was no organized College Democrats group, let alone anything to the left of that. But there was real change afoot, and I was part of it, it's just that it wasn't really discernible as change then and it's still hard to discern that change now. Toward the end of the decade irony became hip. The reactions people were making against the dominant paradigm that surrounded them were more subtle. In some ways it was all like a really pleasant nihilism, everybody watching Seinfeld, a show supposedly about nothing, and then in turn Friends, which actually was, in retrospect, the show that was about nothing. And yet profound meaning was gleaned from this nothingness. The nothingness, of course, had this amazing political undertone that was semi-corporate but also profoundly liberal, so in reality, even the most vapid nothingness was still about something. We were groomed to embrace the vapidity and find the delicious irony in it.

Pavement was, I guess, ahead of the curve, though it's hard to say how conscious this ever was. The touchstones which supposedly explained Pavement's appeal don't objectively sound remotely appealing: their lyrics didn't make a lot of sense; some of the songs didn't sound like they were completely constructed from start to finish; their original drummer was maybe a burnt-out hippie; their album titles rhymed; the music didn't sound super-professionally recorded; one of their members didn't exactly play instruments so much; the list could go on and on. All of these things are of course among the reasons why they were such a great, amazing, important, influential band. But I can't really expect most people to understand that.

The word most closely associated with Pavement was the word "slack". I think people were and would still be remiss to simply conflate slack with laziness or with some sort of laid-back California mentality. This is the best way I can explain it: I believe that I grew up with very strong senses of symmetry, of completeness, of geometric order. Taken to a clinical extreme, that might be seen as obsessive-compulsive. Taken to a societal extreme, I think it explains a lot about the world of the 1980s. I was very interested in collecting things. I collected collections at one point, and I was very keen on completing sets whenever possible. I was imbued with a very strong sense of order, which was naturally reinforced by all of my WASP surroundings, and which probably reached its zenith when Van Halen released "Right Now" and we got to hear pieces of the song every morning in school while watching Channel One since it was the theme song for Crystal Pepsi. Van Halen, Channel One, and Crystal Pepsi had a lot of things in common, after all. They were all supposedly about change and freedom and individuality at some level ("Hey! It's your tomorrow!" "Hey! Anderson Cooper is in Cambodia!" "Hey! This cola is clear!") and yet of course all were really primarily about conformity (and no, I'm not claiming that David Lee Roth era Van Halen was conformist, at least not yet.)

Slack, see, was all about throwing off that sense of symmetry, that sense of completeness. The idea wasn't that you accept imperfections, but rather that you embrace imperfections, without passing judgment on the perfect or the imperfect. "Forklift" is no "Hallelujah", but it doesn't need to be and shouldn't be expected to be. But more importantly, "Forklift" is no "Right Now". And it's no Crystal Pepsi. And it's sure as hell no Channel One. What's most interesting in retrospect is to understand that slack culture was really a reaction against not only the Republicans but also the Democrats, but it was a very antipolitical reaction, and as such, it was powerless in the face of a political entity like Bill Clinton. What I find in retrospect is that slack culture was sort of a cultural gateway to a more profound sort of anti-corporate critique; it's not a coincidence that my own journey into anti-corporate political ideology went through music.

Everything I've written up to this point is an attempt to provide some sort of tremendously profound context for having seen Pavement at Pitchfork on Sunday night, so I suppose I should get on with it.

Pavement broke up at the end of 1999. I saw their then-final show in North America, at Bogart's in Cincinnati. It was the fifth time I'd seen them, in five different cities: Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, and, of course, Camden, New Jersey. That Milwaukee show, in June 1995, was the first club show I'd ever gone to, where by "club show" I mean a) a rock show held in a rock club as opposed to an arena or whatever and b) that I hadn't seen with my father. It remains one of the five best shows I've ever seen, from the early Wowee Zowee tour, with the Dirty Three opening. In a lot of ways it set the parameters for what I thought a real rock show ought to be: minor chaos on stage, a crowd of people packed in looking like they were all on heroin, swapping instruments in the encore, driving to Milwaukee... that was rock and roll.

Sunday night I found myself half-assedly waiting until near the beginning of the set and then squeezing in as close to the middle front as I could. Most of the people I squeezed past were notably younger than me; contrast this with the Milwaukee show, where most people there were older than me. I swear that I can not remember seeing a single black person in the crowd. These were, by and large, young white people, probably mostly raised Protestant, probably mostly from the Chicago area... basically the same people I spent the first 21 years of my life surrounded by, except that now I was older, and... well, just older, mostly.

Since that Pavement show in Milwaukee in 1995, I've long since lost count of the number of rock shows I've seen. I know people who have seen a lot more than I have (especially my father), but I'd say that in the last 15 years, I've probably seen 200+ concerts, which is way more than most people. I've seen phenomenal performances and I've seen some absolute crap. I've been to shows where I was the youngest person in the audience, and I've been to shows where I figure I must have been one of the oldest people. I've been to shows where there were only white people, and I've been to shows where I was in the racial minority.

This was the first show I'd ever been to where, when the band took the stage, I thought to myself, these guys don't look like a band, they look like a bunch of uncles goofing around. Then I thought about it later and thought that what they really looked like was a pickup basketball team. Then I thought about it some more and figured that what they really looked like was a bunch of guys who played basketball together at some rural high school (like my own) and maybe won some games because they had a tall guy but in general weren't that good overall but all got along real well. They certainly did not look like any kind of rock heroes.

About halfway through the show it dawned on me that it'd been 16 years since I'd been at a concert where I was so well-versed in the songs that were being played. The last show like that, for me, was seeing Pink Floyd in 1994. I still don't know what to make of that.

The crowd around me seemed to be at least fairly familiar with most of the songs, but clearly nobody else in my immediate vicinity was as pumped up as I was about all of the songs. I was actually a lot more excited than I thought I'd be. Where else could I be in the middle of a park and be screaming "FORTY MILLION DAGGERS!" and have it be considered reasonable?

I didn't really feel like anything especially profound was happening, and I'm still undecided as to whether that was me just reacting strangely, or whether that meant it was some kind of let down, or whether it just is what it is and means pretty much nothing at all. Unlike 1995, when I had to drive two hours to some place in Milwaukee I'd never been, on Sunday night, I rode my bike to a park four miles from my house, after having spent a chunk of the afternoon using the Social Security Death Index to try and see if people whose names were on some list has passed away in the last two years. I suppose that as much as anything I miss that sense of momentousness that used to come with seeing a concert. Or maybe I'm just saying that.

I don't know what place Pavement has today, for me, for society a a whole... it seems weird to think that they should, or that they would, or that they wouldn't. What seems profoundly odd to me, though, is how my life today seems to be so distracted from what I thought it would be when I was 18. The person I hung out with before the set used to be my girlfriend... in 1997. I did see a couple of other people there, but the only other person who texted me back and forth was my assistant music director... in 1997. Most of the people I see on a regular basis outside of work - they weren't there, and they wouldn't have been there. I mean: shouldn't my 50 best friends or so have all been in that crowd somewhere on Sunday night? I've given a lot of myself over the last 10 years to trying to build a political alternative for this country, but my real connections, aren't they with the people who were there on Sunday? Isn't that how I always thought it would be? And if not, then who were those people there on Sunday, and what were they doing there?

Am I just a character on Friends too?

For a lot of reasons, over the last few years, I've increasingly lost touch with what's happening in new music. I managed to hold on during grad school, and then hold on after grad school when I got a show again at my old college radio station. But as I got more involved in politics, and started seeing less shows, it kind of slipped. And then I didn't do the show anymore. And I saw even less shows. And I got more consumed by politics. And every so often I would think to myself, gosh, have I lost part of who I am? Is it possible to get that back? Have I screwed up?

Back in 1995, on a Saturday, I think, a couple of guys were with me, and I went to the front desk of our dorm, and checked out one of the games, and went outside with it. And instead of participating with me, those two guys just stood there and watched as I lobbed horseshoes at the street sign pole at the corner of East and University. In retrospect, that's got to be one of the most slack things I've ever done. And I hope that that's still how I am. And I hope that the people I've surrounded myself with are like that too.

I think I need to make even more of an effort to simply be me. And if that's what I have somehow gotten out of seeing a bunch of guys who look like basketball playing uncles crank out intimately familiar songs in a park in the middle of the City on the Make, then thank god I was there.

I finally upgraded Drupal and have been working a little on the blog. I'll play with graphics at some point and make it look all pretty and reestablish my geek credentials.

For now, a little hit and run on stuff that probably doesn't help my geek credentials... but really should.

Huckelberry on LeBron. The whole thing is pretty lame to me, but I think more than anything it reflects why the NBA is in some ways really probably the least interesting of the major professional sports. I'm even comparing the NBA unfavorably to the NHL there, and I grew up with pretty much no interest in hockey. My point is that the superstar in the NBA is way more important to his team than the superstar is to a team in the NFL, NHL, or baseball. Of course part of this is that the team is smaller. But whatever. I'd dwell on this some more but pppth who really cares.

Huckelberry on Gilbert and Jackson. My favorite part of the whole thing was Dan Gilbert's reaction. He got fined $100k for it. He got ripped by Jesse Jackson for it. And, of course, he got widely ridiculed for his unfortunate font selection. Fonts aside, I thought it was awesome. I think that the ripping he's taken has been unjustified. This was a major blow for Cleveland, and a multi-millionaire owner coming out like that with something off the wall like that in defense of his organization and his city - I thought it was great.

Jesse Jackson, on the other hand, is an idiot. His "runaway slave" comment was one of the most pathetic things I've ever read. I think the media have their collective heads up their asses for giving a hypocritical washup like that any ink at all. And, yeah, I know, I'm an "important political type" or whatever. Other people should be calling this man out for his destructive race-baiting garbage that does nothing to advance racial harmony and only serves to try and maintain his own place in the system. He's undermining what he claims to stand for, and I think the African-American community is growing increasingly tired of it.

Huckelberry on Uruguay. A couple of weeks ago, the Uruguayan consulate moved in two doors down from us. I thought that was pretty neat.

And of course Uruguay made its spirited run through the World Cup. I was in my office watching the end of the Uruguay-Ghana match via some crazy web live feed that was really hard to follow. I thought that the ending of that match was amazing. Suárez sacrificing himself? Gyan missing the penalty kick? Come on! That's amazing stuff. The grief Uruguay got was totally undeserved. The "Hand of God" thing was maybe a bit much, but so what? And yeah, they beat the hosts, and they beat the last African team standing... that's just the way the draw played out.

Forlán and Suárez were awesome. Forlán deserved the Golden Boot and Uruguay did more than any other team to keep me potentially interested in European league soccer into the future.

Huckelberry on "God Bless America". I don't know when or where this crap tradition started, but whomever is responsible for the playing of "God Bless America" during the 7th Inning Stretch of baseball games ought to be arrested for indecency.

My Facebook friend list is up to 500, and I think it's amazing how high a proportion of that 500 won't give a dip about anything I've written here, except maybe the comments on Jesse Jackson. I've got to say, it's really freaking weird being a straight American male at age 33 and having almost no friends who pay any attention to sports.

Somehow a week, almost two, went by before I heard about Mark Linkous. Here is the incredibly short version: Mark Linkous fronted/was Sparklehorse. He was, at his best, on a level almost with practically nobody else. And he apparently went outside, sat down, and shot himself in the chest with a rifle on March 6.

Three months ago, Vic Chesnutt did just about the same thing. Vic was also one of the great ones. I really wanted to say a lot about it, write a lot about it, and I guess I just never did. I never really could figure out what to say. I guess I'm mentioning Vic now as a way of apologizing for not having said what I should have said before, even though I still don't know what that was.

I feel a little better equipped to talk about Mark Linkous, for a few reasons, including that it's been 10 years since I've seen him, and because I feel like I can much more directly explain where and when and why he mattered most to me.

The first Sparklehorse album was Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot. It came out some time in 1995 but damned if I know when. There was a minor hit from it in "Someday I Will Treat You Good", which managed to get airplay a couple of times on 120 Minutes, which we watched fairly religiously, at least in so much that freshman in college do anything religiously. I don't really remember what the reason was, but at some point in 1995, or at least I think it was 1995, maybe at the beginning of the summer, I was with my dad, and we were going into Evanston, or at least into somewhere near Evanston, and we stopped at a record store, and they were selling Vivadixie with a free t-shirt to go with! So that's when and where I got that album.

I listened to it fairly frequently over time. "Someday I Will Treat You Good" and "Rainmaker" were frequent plays over time on my radio show (GOAT-SPIEL for those of you who don't know). Honestly, the album didn't sound like anyone or anything else. In fact, it made almost no sense at all that this recording existed like this. Inexplicably, it was released on a major label (Capitol), even though half of the songs sounded like they were recorded in caverns, and the entire album was basically conceived by and recorded by Linkous; I'm not even sure there were any other musicians on the album. I've seen some strange words used to describe the sound, like "psych-folk", but really, it's a pop-rock album, sort of schizophrenic, sort of reminiscent of some of Tobin Sprout's songs for Guided By Voices, but the recording itself has this completely different quality to it. A lot of the album really sounds like context to the parts of the album which we're supposed to listen to most closely, if that makes sense.

It took a long time for the second album to come out, because Linkous managed to almost kill himself along the way. Technically the report is that he was officially dead for two minutes, stemming from some mixture of chemicals/drinks/prescriptions/whatnot. This all happened while I was in college, during a time when all kinds of tastes and interests come and go, where the pantheon of greatness expands beyond any point which makes any sense. Over that time I managed to find crazy 7"s - not that I owned a turntable to play them on - and in general I would say that I was very pumped about Good Morning Spider finally coming out. That Linkous almost died along the way just added to the mystique.

I've long held two critiques of Good Morning Spider, the two things which I think keep the album from being considered one of the pinnacle, greatest albums ever recorded. First, it's simply too long, and it loses steam toward the end. Second, I still really do not so much care for "Sick of Goodbyes", which screams of David Lowery being involved. If if there were just something else there, then the first half would be just about perfect.

Having said that: Good Morning Spider is a masterwork. It's an incredible album in a lot of ways. There's an actual band backing Linkous on much of it (though not all of it), and it provides a lushness to what otherwise seems almost too stark to handle.

The album starts off with a noisy, pissy mess in "Pig", which features one of the greatest pair of lines in rock history:

I want to be a stupid-ass shallow motherfucker now
I want to be a tough-skinned bitch but I don't know how

Then the song ends, and the next song, "Painbirds", is completely the other direction. In some ways it feels even more defiant, like it doesn't want to be treated as the fragile, delicate thing that it is. The combination basically demands that the listener pay attention to what's going on, because the tone, the sound, and the melody can be almost completely misleading. Remember, this is the album recorded in the wake of the man almost dying.

Now, here's the story as I understand it. Capitol wanted to release a single, so they picked the obvious choice - the catchiest song, the biggest rock song on the album. And Linkous was adamantly opposed to this being the single - so much so that he literally destroyed the song by overdubbing it with radio static and turning it into this amazingly fucked up song-within-something-else in the middle of the record. On top of that, he took the original recording and mangled or destroyed it outright, so it couldn't be reissued separately. Capitol wound up going with "Sick of Goodbyes" as the single. Although there was some very strange attempt to salvage "Happy Man" which did get reproduced on some weird promotional EP - and which in and of itself is really quite an amazing recording - the final result would up being the centerpiece of the record, and what I still feel is one of the ten indispensable songs ever recorded.

"Chaos of the Galaxy / Happy Man" manages to be transcendent because the power of the song itself is refunneled into a different medium altogether. I realize this doesn't make any sense, but it's hard to explain why what he did actually works. It's a variation on the idea of trying to tune something in on the radio, and getting static along the way, in that buried in the static seems to be something more cosmic. It's not like the radio band is being scanned, it's like the galaxy itself is being scanned, and in the middle of it is this man desperate to be happy, with that desperation somehow coming off as some sort of representational statement of the galaxy.

Linkous put together a tour, and I managed to see Sparklehorse, with Varnaline opening, in Cleveland, at the Grog Shop. This was one of the ten best concerts I've ever seen. It was the best Varnaline set I think I ever saw, and Sparklehorse was really incredible. Linkous had to work leg braces from his accident - he'd nearly died, and in the aftermath came out somewhat crippled - and he still fronted what proved to be this tight band really just pouring themselves out. He used two microphones - one normal, one distorted - something I've never seen before, and have never actually seen since.

It's A Wonderful Life came out in 2001. There are moments I really like - "Piano Fire" is a duet with PJ Harvey, and you can never go wrong with that. I have to confess that it never really grabbed me, though. It wasn't really a great time for me to be listening to music and making sense out of any of it, maybe. It just sort of got consigned to the shelf, rarely to come off. When the followup, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, finally came out in 2006, I bought it almost dutifully. I'm not even sure I can tell you anything much about it, except that Danger Mouse was somehow involved.

The first two Sparklehorse albums remain important albums in my collection, though, and whatever distance there might have been between my ear and whatever Mark Linkous has done the last few years, it is really a jolt to find out that another important voice in my life saw fit to off himself. Vic and Mark, of course, had a lot in common - they were both Southerners with weird musical sensibilities, Vic being crippled and Mark having been somewhat crippled for quite a while, Vic having appeared on two Sparklehorse records. They actually seem to share a lot with a third musical icon, David Berman. Thankfully, Dave didn't use a gun, so he's still alive.

At times like this I really feel like I got off track at some point. Even when I was at my most depressed, the primal presence of music - and new music for that matter - was this vital, incredibly important aspect of living. It just doesn't seem right to me that I would have lost that. It makes deaths like Mark's and Vic's feel almost like warnings to me. I don't mean that in the overly stark sense it might seem. But I still mean it. I wish I knew what I meant when I say that I mean it.

You asked! Okay, really, you didn't ask. But you asked!

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The Tiger Woods thing is ridiculous. Nobody else seems willing to say why it's ridiculous, though, so I will: because the man is a @#$%&@! golfer. There, I said it.

Jay Mariotti says "the public deserves to hear exactly what happened" on the grounds that "if Woods is going to market his image so aggressively and relentlessly, part of the deal is addressing a negative issue when it surfaces."

Yeah, so... that's not how it works, Jay. The public doesn't "deserve" anything from a celebrity in a situation like this, except to be spared from having to hear about it everywhere they go, as though it's something that matters to them. The public deserves to be told the truth: that this is all meaningless. If Tiger "coming clean" is going to make or break Bubba's decision on whether to buy an Altima or a Regal, that's between Bubba and the voices in his head. If anybody "deserves" anything in that exchange, it's probably Buick, and... I don't give a damn about Buick.

The man is an excellent golfer. Splendid. Some people may actually believe that his seven-iron is a source of white hot excitement. Terrific. Now leave the rest of us alone so we can read more about Charlie Weis, who is the third-most important person in my life right now.

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It's a good thing I'm around, otherwise Canadian pop-punk bands from the '90s would go largely unremembered.

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Here's my suggestion for how to keep college football from being so stupid. Please note that I am well aware of many of the numerous logistical problems with this. I simply think they can all be overcome.

Institute something similar to the Bracket Busters that they use for men's basketball. Instead of having two teams sign a home-and-home contract to play each other in back to back years, teams would sign home-and-home with ESPN or whatever, to play an unspecified opponent. The games would occur on one or two weekends at about the three-quarters point of the season, and the matchups would be announced three or so weeks earlier, based roughly on lining teams up with fairly equivalent BCS ratings profiles.

So, for example.o o This past weekend there was a mostly meaningless Cincinnati-Illinois game. What if that game had been scheduled three weeks earlier, and instead of Illinois, it was Iowa? What if Boise State and TCU could have played in the regular season? Just as a couple of examples?

Yes, there are obvious flaws. You'd wind up with something wretched like a Syracuse - Akron game in the middle of the season or something. But those games happen anyway.

Yes, it would give fans not a lot of time to figure out how to travel to a place which might be a long way away. But this would only happen once every two years. And it's not like this is much different from what happens with half of the bowl games.

You could add some wrinkles to the whole thing if you wanted, to prevent, say, an Alabama-Texas game in the middle of the season when you'd want to save that for the BCS championship. But maybe you could have had an Alabama-Cincinnati game at some point. And maybe by creating more situations where teams in power conferences play each other, then there wouldn't be as much guessing and confusion over whether the SEC is really down and the Pac-10 is really up and so forth.

I am happy to go pitch this to ESPN, the NCAA, the BCS, whomever. We don't even need to call it the Huckelberry Challenge.

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The way I see it, every home needs a good battery tester around. Preferably it would be in a kitchen drawer with other oddities such as grandfather's old lighters.

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I understand that there is a distinction between a person being talented and a person being an enjoyable performer. I understand that there are some technically wonderful singers out there with beautiful voices, and that they would all bore me to tears, while David Berman would make millions of people amble in a slow panic. Really. I get it.

I also realize that some huge stars are legitimately talented and some are not. The example that keeps getting brought up - not by me - is that Christina Aguilera is a much better singer than Britney Spears. Okay, fine. This doesn't mean that Christina is more entertaining than Britney, or vice-versa. It doesn't really mean a whole lot overall, I don't think.

Having said all this... can anybody vouch for Taylor Swift being talented and/or entertaining? I don't mean, would I find her entertaining, because I don't. I'm just fishing for some sort of objective logic that would help me to understand why this scary little woman is some sort of sensation. No matter how hard you pay attention it seems like you only ever hear a maximum of 12 seconds of a song. I assume that she has performed complete songs, but I'm not about to go looking. It takes less effort to post a stupid blog comment about it than it does to hunt down a song and spend the time listening to it when I assume I will find the song morally reprehensible in some way anyway.

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When we were young and went back to school after Thanksgiving break, did the teachers actually try to teach us anything? If so, why?

I had thought I might blog some from this national Green Party meeting in Durham NC, but only about an hour or an hour and a half ago was I actually able to get online on the laptop. The campus-wide network at NCCU hasn't worked in any building I've been on, and so I'm in the computer lab of the dorm in which we're all staying for the weekend. And so, naturally, here, in the computer lab, where I'm making use of an ethernet cable borrowed from one of the computers, here is where the wireless network actually works. It doesn't even work in the foyer 20 feet away.

The cafeteria here is surprisingly good. It's a Sodexho cafeteria, but a lot of the options are actually choice. I was able to concoct a near-vegan burrito out of beans, rice, plantains, kale, and grilled squash. The highlight/surprise was the kale, which I learned was sauteed in sesame oil. This may have been the most important thing I've learned in months.

The meeting has gone well. It has been remarkably low-key. It's poorly attended, as expected, but since we drove the budget way down, we're alright in terms of the finances. I got to get up and channel my "inner Cobb" a couple of times in the plenary session, and that's always a little fun, though I admit it seems kind of strange that I would need to play that role. We're talking about a room full of people who, whatever else anyone might say, are definitely passionate people, and yet there often seems to be the need for some sort of over-the-top energy burst.

Weirder than playing the Cobb role, though, is playing the GQ role. I think Jason and I were the only two people in suits each of these two days. I realize this is not a suit-wearing crowd, but it's still a bit odd to think of myself as the jetsetter in the group. At work, I'm the guy in the operation who usually doesn't wear a tie, and to legions of adoring fans back home, I'm still the guy with a pair of flannels in the closet and no less than three Mike Watt t-shirts.

I can build my energy up when I need to but I feel like when it comes back down, it comes back down pretty hard. Unfortunately my days off are being chopped off into things like this, which are energy drains, instead of vacations which might somehow be revitalizing. In part because I've been so busy, in part because there's always some kind of excuse, in part because I feel such an energy drain that I want to maximize my "work time" at home since I think it'll take me longer to get things done, I haven't made it into the gym in weeks. I've got to reverse that trend starting this week but it just seems so daunting. I haven't biked to work all season, either, even though it doesn't take me any longer to bike than to ride the CTA. It seems like I'm simply obsessed with burning through the books which have piled up around me.

What's kind of bizarre is that even as I'm at this meeting with all of these serious activists, I still kind of feel like there was some kind of activist highpoint, at least surrounding me, about five to six years ago. Part of it must have been that some of the activism was new to me and the freshness was there, but too it must have been that just being around people with energy and enthusiasm while also talking about a whole lot of divergent issues was really uplifting and inspiring. I don't like the current meta-role I have because I'm not going to other things and being that kind of "crossover" activist that is bringing people from other groups in and so forth. Who has the time for something like that anyway? It'll be interesting to see how things develop at the beginning of this petition drive, and then when it wraps up.

Now, since this blog (at www.huckelberry.org) gets crossposted to Facebook, a lot of people who might stumble upon this might have very little idea what some of the things that I'm referring to are. It's just that it's gotten to the point where I'm not really thinking in terms of providing certain basic details about things, because there's such a common part of existence that I don't think to mention them. That probably sounds vague, so let me put it like this. Here we are about to begin petitioning for the 2010 primary on August 4, with seven statewide candidates and a whole slew of other candidates. I'm the Chair of the Illinois Green Party so I'm doing the bulk of the coordination on a lot of this. But mentioning all of that is something I wouldn't ordinarily do, because it would be like prefacing the comment "my boss got mad today at some guy on the phone" with a full-blown explanation of where I work and what I do, and who would do that? I'd have a Facebook status that looks like this:

Phil Huckelberry works at John Hancock Observatory where he is employed as an Analyst. His boss got mad today when somebody called.

instead of a status like this:

Phil Huckelberry some doofus called the office and Daniel turned bright fuschia

If people constantly posted status updates like the first one, everybody would think that they were a little touched in the head. So, you see, we now live in this environment where people who have connections to one another but don't know basic functional realities about each other get tidbits of undirected conversations and so forth, and that necessarily forms their basis for understanding what those people are doing and like etc. It's just all very strange.

I feel like the derivative of a parabolic function: just one continuous tangent line.

On a good morning, a person doesn't need to sit or stand at the El platform for very long. If you're lucky, a minute or two. On average, maybe five minutes. Sometimes, it's ten minutes. Sometimes longer.

When it's longer, then the people around you tend to settle in a little more. If the platform is relatively empty when you get up there, it's more likely you'll be waiting for a few minutes, which is enough time to, perhaps, curl your hair, or brush your teeth, or pluck your eyebrows. Not that I've seen those things happen on the platform. Yet.

Me? I'm the guy with the granola bar. We'll leave it at that.

A lot of the people who come through this particular El platform can be subdivided into some rough categories. There are a lot of Latinos and Latinas; most of the people tend to be fairly young, but certainly not all; etc. And this is still Chicago, so very little seems especially odd or out of the ordinary.

This morning, when I get to the platform, it's fairly sparse. I sit on a bench. With a granola bar. A minute or so later a guy comes my way. I'd guess he's in his early to mid 20s, but that's just a guess. He had long black hair, and while his skin was darker than mine, he didn't seem Latino. He seemed more like an extra from the set of Walker, Texas Ranger, one of those episodes where Walker is one with Native American tradition. But he also looked a little like the guy from Dead Meadow, or from some other band, hard to say which. Other people might not have noticed, but I thought this guy had a very different look from most people I see at the platform, or much anywhere else for that matter. And then he sat down next to me. And, it seemed, we both patiently waited for the train, except that I had a granola bar. And orange juice.

At some point I noticed that he had a piece of bread in his hand, but also somehow against his knee or thigh or something. It looked like it was folded over, like, folded in half. And he also had a book. This wasn't that notable.

Then he brought out the ketchup, and proceeded to squirt the ketchup on the folded piece of bread. He put the ketchup away, and I thought, okay, he's making a sandwich on the platform? Then I noticed he had a loaf of bread in his bag. But I didn't see anything else on the sandwich or in the sandwich. In fact, I only saw one piece of bread.

He fumbled a little with the book, which it doesn't seem like he was reading so much as flipping through. Then he started eating the sandwich, which, best as I could tell, was still just a single folded slice of bread, with a row of ketchup on top.

The book? A People's History of the United States.

Bear in mind that I'm in the middle of reading Ionesco. Two nights ago I read Rhinoceros. Last night I read Exit The King. And then here on the El platform is an anachronistic figure, eating a ketchup sandwich, leafing through Howard Zinn.

At some point, I just got up and walked down the platform. I would have done this anyway since I make an effort to pick the train car that will empty me out in front of the transfer tunnel staircase. But some part of me seemed to be viscerally unable to handle the scene I'd just witnessed, and then I felt almost guilty, not because of any antipathy to the ketchup sandwich, but for thinking to myself, Dude, you look like you just walked off the set of Walker, Texas Ranger.

[As a note, for all four of you actually reading this at huckelberry.org, my apologies for the design shortcomings. Geoff and I are slowly working on it. He's having to figure out how to take something from Drupal 5 and make it work in Drupal 6, or something.]

One of the big stories today was that a Baptist pastor was shot and killed yesterday during a service. As I've remarked to people recently, life lately has somehow involved a perpetual stream of Catholics, the result being that I don't hear much about pastors anymore; I hear about priests, or even vicars, though I think that might be due mostly to Eddie Izzard.

But the story today, combined with meeting a student from North Park last week, and having discussed North Park a couple of other times lately, coalesced into me performing a couple of Google searches. The upshot: I learned that Clifford H. Johnson died this past November.

Pastor Cliff, among a great many things, was the head pastor at Bethesda Covenant Church in Rockford. More personally, he baptized and confirmed me; he presided over the funeral services of my grandfather and grandmother; he married my father and stepmother. So he was an integral component of a number of major events.

After my grandmother died, we didn't go to church very often. I've been to a handful of services over the last 15 years - a Unitarian service that I found absolutely bizarre, a Presbyterian service that seemed fairly normal, a few Catholic services which I wouldn't quite classify as bizarre but which I had a hard time parsing, and of course the infamous Christmas Eve service at the Catholic church in Peoria where the incense had me on the verge of passing out. It just wasn't something I had much occasion to interact with.

I knew some churchgoers in college. Most of my friends weren't. Some were atheists, some were agnostics. Some were sort of passive about their belief status or lack thereof. Others were not so passive. I actually found that a number of my friends thoroughly detested organized religion, and not in some sort of quasi-intellectual way, but in a very deeply personal way. To them it seemed that organized religion, especially Christianity, embodied intolerance, judgmentalism, and a great many other terrible things.

I had no such angry reaction to my experience in the Covenant Church. Quite the contrary: my grandmother, a devout churchgoer, I remember as a saint, and her faith was a bedrock component of the amazing person that she was. Bethesda, for its part, was this very positive place. I never sensed intolerance. Rather, this was a church that went out of its way to reach out to the Jewish community, even bringing in Holocaust survivors. The church welcomed Laotian immigrants. The overall tone never struck me as particularly... preachy. I think Bethesda was a wonderful place. I just don't think it was for me.

While in college and in the years thereafter, the upswing of "conservative Christianity" or "evangelicalism" in the country really took off, and/or I became aware of it in a way I wasn't previously aware of it. And of course, it all frightened me immensely. It still does. Of course, the anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-progressive, reactionary nature of the evangelical movement shared some vague trappings with my experience in the Covenant Church. But it all seemed horribly twisted: like Christianity gone bad. The thing was that I think unlike a lot of people I've known, I actually had a systemic notion of "good Christianity" which could serve as my basis for evaluating the evangelical movement. Others, I think, saw the evangelical movement as the basis for evaluating Christianity, and by extension all of organized religion. Or they just had such bad church experiences of their own that it was easy for evangelicalism to fit those experiences.

Cliff Johnson always struck me as the epitome of what a representative of the church should be. He treated everyone with respect - including children, as my father pointed out tonight. When questions about the nature of religion come around, I think back to Pastor Cliff. As I say above, everywhere I go it seems like there's Catholics all around me, and there's always so many weird discussions that can be had about Catholicism... and I still on some level go back to Pastor Cliff as kind of a stable perspective for thinking about such things.

Even though it's a few months after the fact, I'm sad to learn of his passing. Cliff Johnson was a good and decent man who was very important to my family and who remains for me the conceptualization of what Christianity should be about.

Many of you have heard this story before. Some of you have heard it more than once. But most of you haven't heard it. And yet it will be very familiar to you.

Memorial Day Weekend, 1995. I was home for the summer. Dan and I were in my car. It wasn't really "my car" so much as "one of the family cars", and as such, I can't even remember which of the two cars it was. As it so happened, both of these cars were Mercury Tracers, but they weren't remotely the same car. The older one was white and was a clone of some old Mazda model. The newer one was red and a nicer looking vehicle, but I think it got crappier mileage and actually got scrapped sooner. Two more strikes against the Ford Motor Company, regardless.

Now, as I said, Dan and I were in my car. We were driving to Durand. More precisely, we were driving to Lake Summerset, which is a semi-gated subdivision/community to the west of Durand. There was some sort of graduation party or something for some guy from Durand; I can't even remember the guy's name. Honestly, I have no idea what I was doing there.

Whichever car this was, I don't believe it had a tape deck. Maybe it did. If it did, we weren't using it, because the radio was on. And the radio was tuned to WXRX.

Flash back a few years. About a month after my 16th birthday I had gotten a car: a 1979 Pontiac Phoenix. Dan at some point dubbed it El Coche de Mierda, and for good reason. El Coche de Mierda, being from 1979, had a radio, an AM/FM radio verily, but it of course wasn't a digital radio, and on top of that, the black preset buttons didn't work. And the tuner wasn't that hot either. So I kind of had to choose a single radio station to listen to and stick with it. And what else could I do but choose WXRX? I was 16 freaking years old. I was not going to set the analog tuner radio in my 1979 Pontiac Phoenix to NPR. Nor was I going to set it to anything on the AM dial. Nor was I going to set it to country, or top 40. And I couldn't get the stations from Madison in very well. So the only two feasible choices I had were WKMQ, the oldies station, or WXRX, the classic/modern rock station. And so for me, as for so many other people I knew, WXRX became the effective radio soundtrack of about three to four years of our lives.

Back to Memorial Day Weekend 1995. The X - because that's what WXRX called itself, The X - was doing their Memorial Day Countdown, which involved a countdown of the top 500 songs, whatever that meant. In the past we had no idea. But in 1995, they were telling us up front that the top 500 referred to the 500 most requested songs from the previous year. Fair enough.

Now, The X, when they got to their Top 10 every year, there were always certain staples, songs you pretty much just knew were going to be somewhere in there. Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion". Some Led Zeppelin song, though not necessarily the same one. One year I remember Rush's "Tom Sawyer" in there. And of course, Cheap Trick's "Surrender" was always somewhere in the Top 10. This was Rockford, after all.

So Dan and I were in the car, listening to the Top 10 of the Top 500 in The X's Memorial Day Countdown. I don't remember what else was in the Top 10 that year, though I'm pretty sure "Sweet Emotion" was in there and "Surrender" was in there.

They get to #2. They play "Free Bird".

Alright, whatever. Sure, people will request "Free Bird". Hasn't it been requested at every lame rock show, and even some of the awesome rock shows, that any of us have ever been to? So why wouldn't people call in and ask the radio station to play it?

But if "Free Bird" was as high as #2, and if a lot of the other predictable songs had just been run through... then what could be #1?

Dan turned to me. He asked me if there was any other Lynyrd Skynyrd song that could possibly be #1. I told him, no, there is no other Lynynrd Skynryd song that could possibly be more requested than "Free Bird".

Then they get to #1. What could it possibly be?

Of course: the live version of "Free Bird".

My mother used to think that I had an unwarranted chip on my shoulder against Rockford. I didn't. I had a very warranted chip on my shoulder against Rockford. It had nothing to do with elitism and had everything to do with the creeping fear that Rockford really was the crappiest possible place one could be. Crappier than Springfield. Crappier than Peoria. Crappier than Danville. Maybe even crappier than... Decatur. (But probably not.)

There was a reason why Money Magazine ranked Rockford as the least desirable city to live more than once in the 1980s. News flash: nobody gives a crap about how excellent your water theme park is when people's grandmothers are being jumped in open daylight in grocery store parking lots. I guess things have gotten a little better, though; Gran says there are fewer drug houses on her block than there used to be.

For me, though, it's not the endless list of closed factories, it's not the incessant civil incompetence, it's not the crime, and it's not even Symbol. It's WXRX's 1995 Memorial Day Countdown that irrevocably convinced me that I can never move back to Rockford, and ultimately, I must find a way to surreptitiously free the remainder of my family. I'm still working on it.

Oh, just to be clear on one thing: Cheap Trick still f'n rocks.