Coincidence

After the hards rains a-fell last weekend (the night before the 49ers' humiliating defeat), I was in the basement, working out on the elliptical.  Ever since I bought the machine, I've noticed a considerable improvement in my arthritic hip.  Of course the secret with any sort of exercise routine is actually doing it, something the revolutionaries at the local gym should have stopped doing right...about...now.  I don't have to worry about that.  Thank God for OCD.

I've been using the elliptical twice daily, which has made a huge difference, since it harnesses a full range of motion, like running, but without the hard pounding. Anyway, this second run at night before I go to bed has made sleeping and walking easier, less pain, less waking up.  Except for the six times I get up to take a piss because my prostate's probably the size of a pomelo.  Love getting old.

Last weekend, the storm was brutal.  We got these big ass trees up here on the hill and I was waiting for one of them to come crashing down on the house.  The wind and rain relentless, I wouldn't have been surprised if the foundation uprooted and we went spinning into the sky...

So I'm grinding away on the elliptical, flipping through the stations, bouncing back between ESPN and NFL Network, listening to the pundits talk about how Alex Smith has finally arrived and predicting the big game he's gonna have the next day, when I notice one of the basement walls looks like it's sweating.  Not gushing water, or even trickling, but you can clearly see where it's wet, spreading down the concrete. This is not good.  I call my wife to show her, and she's freaking out that it's going to cost a fortune, which gets me all worked up.  Which is not hard to do.  I was actually calm for once, thinking this sort of thing must happen all the time. Concrete is porous; it's gonna crack.  The house was built in 1961.  We spackle some shit on it or whatever and we'll be fine.  By the time she's done with me, she has me half convinced I'm going back to living under the freeway, eating roasted black swan stew.

On Monday, I call our fix-it guy, Mario, to see what we can do about it.  He comes over on his lunch break.  Won't be cheap, he says.  We're looking at close to 10K. Just fucking terrific.

I'm thinking, What the fuck?  I just bought this house and now there might be major structural damage?  Insurance isn't going to cover this.  A full-on gusher, maybe. But not this.  So I'm just going to have to wait until my walls start crumbling? Or shell out ten grand?  Why's this shit always have to happen to me?

Mario says he wants to check under the house, see if the wall is leaking elsewhere (he's guessing it is, hence the steep price tag). We have a crawl space where the hot water heater is, some old paint, a ladder.  I'm cursing under my breath as he crawls up in there.  And sure enough, more water. All along the edges.  We're going to have to reinforce the entire western front.

"You smell that?" Mario asks.

"Smell what?"

"Smells like...gas."

All the drugs I snorted years ago robbed me of (most of) my sense of smell.  I can't smell jack.  Fucking deviated septum.  I spend hours in that basement, never smelled a damn thing.

He asks me to get some Windex, and then he starts spraying around the hot water heater, which was newly installed when we moved in.  He hits one of the valves and it starts bubbling like crazy.  Gas leak.  Even if I hadn't abused cocaine, I never would've thought to spray Windex to find a gas leak.  I'm just not wired that way.

"This is really bad," Mario says, grabbing his wrench.  "Whoever installed this didn't tighten the valve.  If these things are tightened properly, they are designed to never loosen."  He smiles.  "No worries.  I fix."

Mario hopped down.  "That was as bad a gas leak as I've ever seen.  I'm surprised there wasn't an explosion or a fire."

That heater was installed almost a year ago.  Who knows how long it'd been leaking, or the next time I'd have a buddy over who still smokes.  All it would've taken would've been one little spark.

And if it hadn't stormed so hard last weekend, if the concrete hadn't cracked and my walls weren't leaking, I might never have known until it was too late.

*

I don't believe in coincidences.  That Pink Floyd tune synching to the Wizard of Oz scene is some freaky shit, man.  If you've never tried it, you should check it out. Trippy.  Like the track "Money" kicks in right when the movie switches over to color and the streets turn gold.  I don't think Gilmour and Co. sat down and watched WoZ when they were recording Dark Side, but the cohesion is downright eerie.  And I watched that shit stone cold.  I can't explain it.  It's sorta like the opening to Magnolia.  (You can skip to the 2 minute mark.)  A series of events on a string. Like Schrodinger's cat.

So many years have gone by since my old drug life.  I don't feel it any more.  I can remember some of it, a choice detail here or there, but the bone-ache, gut scrap that once haunted my nightmares, I don't feel.  They are nothing but snapshots, a clipped scene culled from an old movie or book I came across a long time ago. Still, I often ask why.  Especially when I start getting misty over all the years I missed. This hurts a lot when I look at my boy and think of my mom.  She would've loved nothing more than to meet Holden.  But she died before I could get my shit together.  I kick myself, wondering why I couldn't have sobered up faster, at least given her a few years with him.  I knew she was dying, and I tried (oh, dear God, how I tried).  But I was too late.  Why did it have to happen the way it did?

I don't know the answer.  And it's OK that I don't.  It's one of the things that tripped me up in the first place, this pressing need for an answer.  It's why I denied God (or whatever you want to call it).  I used logic and the sum of my vast experience and knowledge and tried to force a picture.  And that might've worked if I had 99 out of 100 pieces. But what if I only had 3 of a thousand?  Six hundred and forty seven million? Pretty distorted view.  It's one of the nice parts of getting sober.  There is no burning need to figure it all out, the whys and hows.  Better yet, you learn not to force your will on the world.  Lord knows, I am not an AAer, but I like their bumper stickers. At first I laughed at "Let Go, Let God."  OK.  I still laugh at it.  But it doesn't make it any less true.  God.  The Universe.  Mother Fucking Nature.  The Collective Unconscious.  Whatever It is.  It's like the old joke.  I've learned two things.  1.) There is a God.  And 2.) I ain't Him.

Really, I'm not getting Holy Roller on you, promise.  But there is a relief, especially when you are an obsessively compulsive mutherfucker, when you accept you don't have all the answers.

Or to quote the old MTV ad.  "What do you do when you are 26 (or 41) and realize you're not meant to save the world?"

The Hold Steady

I try not to leave the house because I rarely return, from whatever it is I have gone, saying, "Gee, I am really glad I did that."  I have a far better time staying in my big house on the hill, with my computer, where I am able to write, correspond with fans (http://tinyurl.com/3m6cdvo), and manage my fantasy football teams (fuck you, Peyton Hillis).  But on Sunday, my friend Matt had an extra ticket to the Treasure Island...Music Festival.  Aside from maybe "Barry B." and "Creeping Charlies' Scrapingbooking Project," there might not be a more terrifying phrase in the English language.

There was a time when I loved the fucking things.  In 1990, my buddy Rich and I went to England, where we fought our way to second row, center, for the Knebworth Music Festival.  Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Phil Collins, Elton John, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd...

Seeing Pink Floyd was especially awesome, since a few days earlier, I had hunted down their reclusive former lead singer, Syd Barrett (http://tinyurl.com/4y9o54x), up in Cambridge (#4 Cherry Hinton Lane, Margaret Square.  Don't bother looking for him now.  He's dead).  Although, honestly, the best band that day?  Tears for Fears.  I shit you not.  They were incredible.

That concert was 15 fucking hours.  120,000 people.  How the fuck I was able to stand there, in that swelling sea of stink, and not have to piss sixty times is beyond me.  Of course, I was 19 then and my prostate wasn't the size of a grapefruit.

The most memorable moment of that concert came with the two hippy girls Rich and I met.  Rich and I were just good Christian kids from CT.  We didn't drink.  We weren't terribly adventurous.  This trip was a big deal.  Three months backpacking through Europe.  Oh, the adventures we were about to have... We didn't have any adventures.  We spent a lot of time indoors, deeply entrenched in a hasidic Jewish community, out by Seven Sisters Station, with a (slightly anti-semetic) man named Pat Sweeney (don't bother looking for him, either.  He's dead, too).  Meeting the two hippy girls from California was a striking juxtaposition.  They were backpacking as well, but I don't think they quite followed the same...agenda. They were cute. Blonde, if I remember.  Of course, being hippies, they stunk, ratty hair and all that. But being a cute girl grants a wide berth.  I doubt we tried to pick them up.  It wasn't the hippy part so much (I hadn't yet developed my disdain for all things patchouli); we simply had no game. But we talked.  I don't remember much of what we talked about.  The part that sticks was when Zeppelin played "Going to California," how they started crying.  It sounds terribly cheesy now.  Actually, it was pretty cheesy then.  But there was a certain sweetness to it, too.  So far from home, being so touched by the power of music.

But like I say, that was over 20 years ago.  My friend in Miami, Scott, tells this funny story about trying to go to a music festival in his 30s.  In the parking lot on his way in, he saw some kids doing drugs, and his first thought was to find a cop and say, "Arrest these kids!  These are bad people!"  And he knew then that his music festival days were behind him.

If it's too loud, you're too old.  I'm too old.

But on Sunday, the Hold Steady were playing.  There are four musical acts I will brave any condition to see live these days.  The Gaslight Anthem.  Tom Waits.  The Boss.  And the Hold Steady.

I'd seen the Hold Steady before, once on the Stay Positive tour, and again on the Heaven Is Whenever tour, and both times they were fucking amazing.

The Hold Steady is basically Craig Finn, who is probably the best lyricist going. This is no small compliment.  I take words seriously.  I love the Boss, but even he has a "Glory Days" and "Pink Cadillac" to throw the curve.  I can't think of a single Finn miscue. Check out the opening lines to the chorus to "Stuck between Stations."

         She was a really cool kisser / and she wasn’t all that strict of a Christian.
         She was a damn good dancer / but she wasn’t all that great of a girlfriend.

Fuck, man, there aren't that many lines I'd kill to have written.  But that's one of them.  And, really, I could say that about pretty much all of Finn's lyrics.

They come from Brooklyn, and like the Gaslight Anthem, make no secret about the debt owed to Springsteen.  I suffered through the 80s, clinging hard to the Replacements and the Smiths, and then came the 90s with that fucking grunge and singers who sound like their trying to take a shit.  I've waited a long time for bands like the GA and Hold Steady.  Which is why I see each every chance I get.  Even if it means a musical festival on Treasure Island, which was a pain in the ass to even get to, since they don't allow parking on the island; and now that Burning Man is over http://tinyurl.com/3bnunoy, the island was crawling with the soiled crafting vermin.

But, holy shit, was it worth it.

Before the HS played, Matt and I walked around, ate overpriced wraps, drank a pinot or two, listened to a couple other bands, one from England, whose lead singer danced like Elaine from Seinfeld.

(Speaking of Seinfeld, Craig Finn really does look like he could be George Costanza's long lost younger brother.)

           

*

We squeezed up front.  The Hold Steady (strangely playing without their keyboardist) kicked off with "Constructive Summer," a summer-of-youth rock anthem, which comes out of the breakdown, "I met your savior and knelt at his feet / he took my ten bucks and he went down the street / I tried to believe all the things that you said / but my friends are all dying or already dead" with "Raise a toast to St. Joe Strummer / I think he might've been out only decent teacher."  You really need to hear that shit in context.

One of the things that works in the Hold Steady's favor is just how unlikely a frontman Craig Finn makes.  A mix of Constanza and Elvis Costello, he's not the guy who gets the pretty girl.  Well, maybe he gets her, but only because he's been holding her hair while she throws up in the bathroom after drinking too much on the rebound and she tosses him a mercy handjob.  Finn is everyman.  And his songs are the songs of everyone's youth.  At least those of us who were never quite cool, except for our taste in music, books, and film.  We weren't the quarterbacks, and, yeah, we went to college, but we didn't do well; we fucked up, and we partied and got lost.  This is pretty much the prevailing theme of all the Hold Steady's songs. Killer parties and bad batches, pretty girls you can't save, shitty jobs, and hoping against hope that the summer doesn't end.  Essentially Springsteen 2.0, for a new nostalgia-starved generation.

After nailing "Constructive Summer," the band reeled off, in no particular order, "Magazines," "The Swish," "Your Little Hoodrat Friend," "Hurricane Jesse," "Southtown Girls," "Rock 'n' Roll Problems," and "Chips Ahoy," with the line "She put $900 on the fifth horse in the sixth race..." (Ever since first hearing that song, now every time my brother and I go to the track, we have to put some money on the fifth horse in the sixth race.  It never wins.)

They tore that shit up.  It was as perfect a set as I've ever heard.  Flawless, high octane rock, each song picking up where the other left off, and how they pulled off all these songs, which rely heavily on keys, without a keyboard player, is a testament to just how well these songs are constructed.  A really great song needs only a guitar and a voice, that's it.

In the words of Marty DiBergi, but enough of my yapping.  Here are some clips from the Best Rock Band in America.

*


I met Matt on Treasure Island.  He lives on the south side of the city.  I live in the El Cerrito Hills.  Matt got there early.  The Hold Steady were playing at 8:30, so I got there around 6:30, just as the sun had started to set.  I'd never been to Treasure Island, which offers a beautiful, up-close view of the city from a totally different perspective, its light twinkling colorful, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate shining bright. Because Matt was already inside the festival and was holding my ticket, I had to text him to meet me.  While I was waiting, I saw two hippy girls, clearly not from this country, dressed a little too funky to be American.  I heard them talk. They spoke English but sounded German.  Or maybe Polish.  Young, pretty, taking pictures of each other making goofy poses in front of the water, San Francisco in the background like postcard.  I asked if they would like me to take a picture of them together.  It's good to have mementos from times like that.