The night Barack Obama was elected, my wife and I decided to go to his inauguration.  I had a romantic notion that taking a road trip across the heartland from Texas to Washington, D.C. would be the best way to go. The idea of this trip became fixed in my mind as a necessary pilgrimage to my nation’s capital. I had never seen it.

As I write this, America exists in a fluid present at the crossroads of history and on the precipice of total disaster. Economically, domestically, and internationally we have plates brimming with misery.  As a counterbalance the American people elected the first African-American president.  Everyone that has not already decided to hate Barack Obama has placed all of the world’s troubles at his feet for him to bear on strength of what thus far is little more than potential.

I voted for Barack Obama - it would be dishonest for me to conceal that - but I don’t know that he can save my country, let alone the world.

I love my country but I also readily admit to pessimism concerning its condition. I wonder if my countrymen feel the same way.  That is the most accurate explanation I can produce, and I hope it sufficiently illustrates the origin of my need to drive across the United States in a bitter winter, and to ask people how they feel about America, and to be one of millions on the National Mall on an Inauguration Day during what will be, for good or ill, a turning point in history.

***

“The way I see it, the inefficient people? They’re gonna all be eliminated.”

Trevor turned from me to hug a girl on her way out of the bar and then turned back to me and smiled too widely.  “…and that’s Darwinian, and it’s not cool, and it’s not fun.  But it will happen.”

In Nashville I went to a bar called The Villager. I needed a drink and wanted to take an anecdotal poll from the bartender about the aggregate mood of his clientele. I did not expect to meet Trevor, but he was sitting next to the only empty seat at the bar. He asked me my name as I sat down and ordered a beer.

Trevor was 24 years old. When I mentioned that I was on my way to the inauguration, his eyes lit up.

“I support him so much,” said Trevor.  “My father and I both work in the hospitality industry, and he’s convinced that everything is falling apart and that we can’t recover.”

“What do you think?”

“I take the Millennial look at it – we are very smart and we have computers, so we can take care of business, right?”

His generational self-awareness was an odd dichotomy: a young man, well-read and cognizant of current events, aware of what is expected of people his age and content to deliver no more than that with notes of a detached, disaffected regret.

Trevor told me about the work he does in finance and how, ever since he started eight months ago, all he’s done is cut worker hours and salaries. He tells me he dislikes this because these workers have bills and mortgages to pay.

Trevor explained that he came from advantage, that his parents provided him with an education and a job.  He criticized George Bush, talked with steely indifference about the price of doing business, and got misty-eyed as he told me about the Obama mural he’d spray painted on his apartment wall.
Towards the end of the night, some truth came out. “Despite all my parents did for me, I’ve run up some debt,” he said. “I understood the system so I went ahead and did it and I’ll probably never pay it off.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You keep telling me that you have a great job and you make plenty of money.”

“Oh, I do,” he said. “I have a great job, and for the first six months or so, I paid all my bills and I was miserable. Now I don’t pay them, and my iPhone blows up all day with 800 numbers, creditors trying to collect. I could pay them all, but I don’t.”

A beat, and then: “Because I hate them.”

This was not ‘hate’ the way a child might say he hates something during a tantrum. Trevor’s eyes were flat and flinty when he stopped staring off into space and looked at me again, before he repeated it:

“I hate them. I understand how it works and I understand what they do, and I hate them.”

This was the truth. Maybe Trevor went on like this with everyone that would listen after he’d had a few drinks, or maybe I was the first to hear it. Either way, it was real.

On my way out the door after last call, Steve the bartender asked if I’d gotten a good answer to my question.  I told him I had, but that I was still interested in his take.

“Hopeful but apprehensive. I think that’s the most we can do.”

Once I got back to the hotel, I shook out of my smoky clothes and climbed into bed. I lay awake for a long time and thought about Trevor.  It was not that I felt sorry for him – and I got the impression that he would tell me not to – but I felt sad all the same.

We have all watched over the last few days as Twitter went from being a hot social networking tool to being used by brave Iranians to change the world. With media restrictions in place from the Iranian government, the main source of news coming out of Iran was, especially in the first few days, the tweets of students and protestors and supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

As the protest has grown and the days have worn on, the nature of the intelligence one could glean from certain twitter feeds - #IranElection and #GR88, in particular - changed. In the first few days it was a heavy but seemingly pure stream of raw intelligence, dispatches that contained up to the minute updates on everything from events personally observed by the twitters to rumors to video and pictures of the ongoing clash between protestors and government forces.

In the last 48 hours, the main tagged feeds have become diluted: innocently, by western twitterers who have been captivated and motivated by what they’ve read; and more troublingly, by people who are quite obviously disseminating incorrect, inflammatory, or misleading information. The latter is incredibly problematic, as Twitter is not only being used as a source of information for the outside world. It is also being used by activists in separate parts of the country to communicate information about what is happening where they are. So not only does the misinformation dilute the message and news coming from the Iranian people fighting for freedom, it also is detrimental to their efforts, and could very well have life or death consequences.

That is why I’m starting The Rat List - a collection of Twitter users disseminating incorrect or blatantly propagandistic information. Many of these users have new accounts, have no history of accurate updates, and are not trusted sources. They could be Iranian intelligence agents organizing to thwart the efforts of the activists and put down what is becoming a vibrant and viable uprising. They could also just be assholes who think they are being funny. Either way, I am mostly doing this for my own edification, to record some small part of what is happening in a way that I know something about, by analyzing raw intelligence. If it helps out, I’m glad for that too.

Visit http://ratlist.tumblr.com for updates.

So I’ll stick to my guns,
but from now on it’s war:
I’m armed with the past,
and the will, and a brick
- Frightened Rabbit, Good Arms vs. Bad Arms

Best Line from Neruda That Used To Be a Favorite Until I Forgot It (Tie):

I want to do with you / what spring does with cherry trees.

…and…

The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

Best Description of Me, Worrying About Who / How I Am, by Someone Else

If I didn’t know you, I’d say “Stop being a girl. You’re fine.” But I know you really weigh these things.

It is hot these days. It is the kind of heat that immediately stupefies you, that displaces you from your regularly ordered senses, that makes you wonder where the time went or what that buzzing sound is in your ears. If this heat were sweetness, it would be cloying. If it were fear, we would all be nightmare-paralyzed from the waist down. If it were love, it would be suffocating.

The other day I found myself wanting to write. It had been a few weeks since I had put together anything good, and since I long ago convinced myself that I’m full of stories that people need to hear, I get antsy if I haven’t told any in a while. I at one point started to think that telling stories is my favorite thing to do, but I don’t know if that can be true. I don’t know if I have any favorites.

***

I have never spent much time in libraries. It does not offend me that most of the books in libraries are 1) dull or 2) lies, because plenty of people like to read them. All I get at a library is bored.

***

Is life a collection of wine you don’t drink? Maybe all this time you have been drinking beer the wrong way.

***

When I worked at Starbucks many many years ago, I thought that people were paying for the service and philosophy of our shop along with the coffee, making it worth $4. Now I go to Starbucks and buy the coffee I used to make but I am not sure at all what I am paying for.

***

Adult Swim is no good anymore. I blame Eric Wareheim.

***

Today I read a rather lengthy post on a website about something or other by my good friend Samn. As a salutation at the end, where you might put

Yours truly,
Samn

or

Very sincerely,
Samn

he instead wrote

Thousands of Dildos,
Samn

and it made me laugh for a good three minutes or so.

***

I remember very explicitly holding the money in my hand after selling my drums in Boston.  It was a cold night, and Massachusetts-early-winter-pitch-dark. The guy drove away from our place on Concord Street and I held the money in my hand, feeling the edge of the crisp new bills before I put them in my pocket.  It did not seem like enough. I went inside to pack.

***

Travis, my new friend at the bar in Memphis, Tennessee, is hammered. He is also full of self-loathing. He is stealing my cigarettes and I am beginning to see his point.

Later this same night, I got in a car with a complete stranger at the bar who promised me a ride back to my hotel. It turned out okay but could have been a bad decision. Not sure I learned anything, other than my judgments of character based on bumper stickers is a perfect 1-1.

***

Partial, unsubmitted McSweeny’s list - Inarticulate Descriptions of Ethnic Foods That Would Also Make Good Band Names:

- Vietnam Sandwich

- Seasonal Jew Crackers

- Faloofa, Or Whatever The Hell It Is

- Greek Burrito

***

The more I write, the more I start to think about the act itself. For instance, I am usually driven to distraction if I don’t use a computer to write, but I will go through small patches where I feel more comfortable writing something out longhand. Normally it will be a whole piece that I write with a pen and paper and then once it is done (just one draft) I will type it up and then resume my normal word processing ways. All of the Vignettes were written this way.

In my younger years I would have said that maybe the story needed to be written by hand, which is some goofy bullshit. Now I am content to think there’s just something nice about occasionally writing by hand. It certainly worked for plenty of my betters for thousands of years. I like doing it that way every once in a while because it feels old, and because it feels like I’m saving something. These feelings, which are both true, are also probably bullshit.

***

All I’ve learned from working in politics is that I don’t understand people.  I thought I did - I’ve always been a people person. I can get along with pretty much anyone if they give me a chance and I can tell a mean story or get inside someone’s head before they know it. I thought this meant that I had an understanding of how people work and think,  but it seems like maybe I only understand how to interact with someone to achieve a short-term positive result. My fear isn’t the same as another person’s fear, and what I want couldn’t be more different from what you want.

I don’t regret learning this. Most of my decisions are made in a tersely logical way after a consideration of the costs and benefits. Even if the decision is bad, I have at least worked it out in a way that satisfies some kind of ordered thought process. This is a function of living my life and I in no way regret it, although I admit that I am prone to over-thinking things.

So I am always surprised when I ask someone about what led them to do a disastrous thing and they say “I don’t know.” That’s like missing the parent-teacher conference not because you are too busy or you forgot but because it does not occur to you that your child goes to school.  Life doesn’t exist at arm’s length. It is in your face and either laughing or snarling and you either see it or you don’t, usually by design.  No one is better at lying to you than you, because you are so ready to believe.

***

ATTENTION: You are not cut out for this.

***

How is it I only ever get in trouble when I think I know what’s going on? When I embrace being a dumb fuck about a thing I never break it.

***

Sharks are rad. If someone asked me whether I wanted to be a shark or a horse, the answer would always depend.

There are some things about Berklee that don’t make it into US News and World Report. One is the importance of money: Berklee is very expensive, and while you have to be talented to succeed in the school’s hot-house environment, you have to have dough – or an extensive future-smoking-debt-hole of a financial aid package - to get in.

The other thing about Berklee is that it is truly a microcosm of the music industry. As a student there, you don’t just learn to play your instrument, although you certainly learn that, out of necessity. You also learn how to network. Sometimes this requires sitting with a guy named Raine at lunch because he performed with LL Cool J the night before as part of the Berklee Gospel Choir and now he might Know Someone. Other times you get to hang out with a guy named Edan The Humble Magnificent as he freestyles about bitches ‘n’ twinkies ‘n’ farm-subsidies.

And sometimes you have to pack up both of your roommates – Danny the gay singer-songwriter from a Mormon Army family in Utah who looked and sounded like Elton John; and Jay, the CrackerBaller, the white Tupac / King Diamond expert in the mail-order KOOL baseball jersey who said he was from Detroit but was really from Sterling Heights – and go to the 99 Joints album release party in some gutterflat in Allston. Here you proceed to meet some new people, you see that cellist you think is really hot, and then, somehow, you end up dancing on a kitchen island to “The Big Payback” by James Brown at 3 in the morning, all the hours since midnight a black blur.

This is all hypothetical.

Very early in my first semester, John Scofield came to Berklee to perform with one of the top student quartets and give a speech. I remember that night really well because a) Cami, who was from Austin, was supposed to be my date to the concert and the party afterwards; b) I was wearing a sportcoat for the first time, representing for the Berklee Intelligentsia as not just an instrumental scholarship student, but also as a composition scholarship student, which I thought was even better; and c) I had stolen, briefly, a hat to match my coat from a friend named CJ: a twill ivy cap that had a patch sewn on to the back, one that name-checked a ska band called The Toasters.

The party was going to be in between the Back Bay, where we lived and went to school, and Allston, where plenty of other college students in Boston lived and went to school. It was going to be in an apartment building on Kenmore Square, one mostly populated by Boston University students. The first time I’d seen the building was when I looked up after leaving the Kenmore IHOP late one night to see a couch, perched seven stories up on the un-barricaded balcony of a brownstone. A kid was passed out on the couch, a 40 of Mickey’s near to hand. It may have been a trick of the light or the angle, but it looked like he would fall to his death if he tossed and turned a little too hard.

The night started to go wrong when I saw Cami bopping by with some other dude as I waited outside the Berklee PWC.

“Cami!” I hollered.

“Oh, hey Josh.” She went in for the hug. “What’s up?”

“I’m waiting for you. For our date?”

“Oh, you dumb bastard!” This was a term of endearment from Cami, as were the terms sonofabitch and motherfucker. I’m pretty sure that once, at a party, she called me a huge-dicked Galilean, apropos of nothing and certainly without direct evidence. This is just how Cami was. I hope she hasn’t changed.

“I’m going to a party instead! This is Chetworth!”

I don’t actually remember the guy’s name, but I never saw him again, so Chetworth works just as well. At this time I had very long hair. So did Dennis, the piano / comp major that lived a floor below me and Elton and Tupac Diamond. When we were hot or eating or had some practical reason to do it we would wear our hair in a ponytail. Chetworth was one of those assholes who meant the ponytail, whom you might even refer to as Ponytail in colloquial conversation. Cami told us later that he ‘didn’t like to touch unfamiliar things.’ So he will live forever in this story as Chetworth, the Protodouche.

Back on Massachusetts Avenue, where I was protesting: “Cami, goddammit, we were supposed to go to this thing together, and…”

Cami was already moving on. “I will make it up to you, baby, I swear. I have to give my demo to a guy.”

In most cases this would seem like a brush off, and it is entirely possible that in this case it was. But at Berklee this was a totally acceptable reason for ditching out on or missing almost anything. She kept her promise, too: she made it up to me later by singing a song, just for me.

So I went to the Scofield thing with Felix instead. Felix is a Puerto Rican guy from the Bronx. He introduced me to the Wu-Tang Clan. Felix could be seen stalking Commonwealth Avenue and listening to beats on an old ghetto Walkman tape player at all hours of the day or night, rapping along with Ol’ Dirty Bastard. He was a good friend and a lot of fun to party with, despite (or sometimes specifically because of) his tendency to drop freestyle rhymes into conversation, after which he would carry on like nothing unusual had happened.

An example:

Me: “I don’t know about those omelettes Willy [the Berklee cafe cook] makes.”

Felix: “What’s wrong with them?”

Me: “I dunno, I mean, they are tasty as hell, but he makes them on the same grill where he cooks every-”

Felix: “Willy spits flames from his grill / that’s how you know his shit is for real / I ask him where he come from / he say ‘NEW ORLEANS’ / so then I say he oughta make / RICE AND BEANS / A DO RUN RUN RUN / I DO RUN RUN AWAY FROM THE COPS AIN’T NO MAN STOPPIN’ ME’S FROM POPPIN’ THESE RICE AND BEANS”

Me: “Oh hell, I bet a rice and beans omelette would be fucking awesome.”

Felix: “Say word. I would eat the hell of that.”

Once you got the hang of it, it actually sort of revived the lost art of conversation. And really, wouldn’t Victorian dinners have benefitted from dope rhymes? At least a little?

At the Scofield speech, he told us about how important our generation would be, that we would be the next ones in the streets protesting and standing up to those that would otherwise exert their sinister will on the world. He must be pretty disappointed thus far.

After the event at Berklee we had a slice at Little Stevie’s House of Pizza a few blocks down and then made our way from Boylston over to Commonwealth Avenue. We avoided the T. In the late 90’s, the Green Line was slow as hell in the Back Bay and around Boston University. They’ve since added trains and a new Silver Line with additional busses. The times I’ve been back to Boston, the Green Line has seemed much faster, but I still heard kids complaining about how long it takes to get anywhere.

We joined up with some other pals along the way, Elton / Danny and Tupac / Jay included. The party was your typical arrangement for a Boston college party: amazing building, dimly-lit hallways, too-small apartment with one Party Lane To The Keg, walls coated with revelers. Drinking and shouting ensued largely without incident for about an hour.

And that’s when the Snack Cake Mafia arrived. I wish, lo these many years on, that I had taken control of the PR between my group of friends and the SCM, if for no other reason than to ensure that we saddled them with a better gang name. Pant Weasels. Nipple Blips. The Shark Jets. Those Rock Band Assholes. Anything would have been better than Snack Cake Mafia, a term invented by our friend Debbie, owing to the fact that the small, impish one that seemed to be their leader had a last name that sounded similar to the word ‘biscotti’.

I don’t remember how the feud started, and the details probably wouldn’t make any sense if I did. Whatever it was, I am certain that everyone involved was probably largely undeserving of each other’s ire. But the story also won’t make sense if I frame it that we should all have been friends but weren’t, so here: For the sake of argument, let’s say that my group of friends included a magical unicorn named Charmander. Biscotti killed Charmander, he shot him down in cold blood after suffering some lesser transgression. This is why we hated him and all of his friends.

The SCM took a strategic position, closer to the keg than we were. This means they only had to pass us once on their way in, but that we would have to pass them each time we needed a refill. No one went to get more drinks. We were all quite drunk and so every murmur or sidelong stare became an offense, a slight, leveraged psychic warfare.

I got tired of the stalemate. I wanted to drink more.

“Give me your cups,” I said. “I’m going in.”

Cups were handed over and I deployed to the breach, shuffling through the throng to the front line. As I passed by the big awkward one, a goony dark-headed guy who was bigger than me – Debbie had given them all nicknames after pastries and snacks, but I can’t remember what any of them were – we bumped into each other. It was probably an accident. I had my back up, but my focus at that moment was Delivering Beers, not Justice, so I kept moving.

“Watch out,” Big Awkward said behind me.

I wheeled on him, sloshing beer around. “You watch out for your fucking mouth, shitneck.”

He looked surprised. I turned back around and made the rest of the 20 yards to my friends.

Someone asked, “What happened?” I relayed the story of how he’d stuck his shoulder out and then called me a fag.

“That motherfucker,” said Felix.

“No no,” I said, suddenly the voice of reason. “Let’s not over-react. We’ll take the high road.”

I often took on this role, where I would get over-excited about something and then counsel caution and reasoned thinking to everyone around me after I’d riled them up. It was a convenient role – I can talk one hell of a game and I have always been able to - but it was contrived. I thrive on conflict.

Things were relatively quiet for another 30 minutes or so – as quiet as a party blaring Led Zeppelin’s IV at 700 watts can be – until the SCM gathered up to go once the keg floated. I was totally hammered and Felix was too. Felix had been describing what he would do “to any motherfucker that steps” in great detail when they passed by.

I know that not remembering is a common theme in some of my stories, but I figure it is best to tell you where the holes in my recollection are, lest some Wikipedia article or scholarly paper be written about me later on that says that I made shit up, shit I claimed was true. My stories are true-ish – I wasn’t rolling tape when these things happened, and this is the best recollection I have.

And so I’m not sure who did or said what, but somehow, in the space of 30 seconds, I went from talking with Felix to being held back by him and Tupac / Jay. I screamed “I WILL STAB YOU IN YOUR FUCKING SHITNECK, MOTHERFUCKER” as the SCM phalanxed around Big Awkward, keeping us apart. I threatened to stab him in his shitneck with various things – a pencil, my cock, etc. - and they left and then, shortly after that, we were asked to leave.

A few years later, after leaving Berklee, I saw Big Awkward on MTV. I’d heard that he’d left Berklee not too long before I did and that the SCM had largely disbanded. I knew that I was at Berklee either with or in very close chronological proximity to plenty of famous people, like Paula Cole and Norah Jones. I didn’t know that Big Awkward was on a trajectory to make it, or that he would go on to win Grammys and be a rock star, but he was, and he did, and he is.

Anyways, that’s the story about how I threatened to kill John Mayer.