Dear Friends,
Today of all days, I’m thinking about how taxes work.
Supposedly, we pay our share and that keeps things going. As we all know, things cost money and people need things. We pay taxes so we can have things.
Simple.
Yet, many of the things we pay taxes to support are also taken for granted and forgotten. We like to get places. It’s nice to have roads. We like parks because they are nice. Some people don’t go to municipal parks because the people they want to pretend don’t exist live there, but wouldn’t it be nice if they did go to a park sometime and see how it adds to their neighborhood, even if it provides a place for someone to sleep.
I’m not sure we (as in, “we the people”) like schools, but our tax dollars pay to help keep them going, too. It’s very frustrating as a teacher to see how little people care about whether or not children learn to think and solve problems. We live in a time where we want our problems delayed so that we never have to deal with them.
We borrow everything. Time, money, fear, illusions, comfort, satisfaction…you name it, and we borrow it. That comes with a tax, too.
Some might call this more of a penalty, the tax that comes from borrowing more than you can afford, but what can any of us, from richest to poorest, really afford when it comes to things that aren’t completely tied to money. Taxes, in a way, are the penalty for living.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the way my brain talks to me. It sounds better to write it like that, I think, than to say, “How I talk to myself,” but it’s all the same thing. I have to pay the taxes owed on all the self-talk I have and haven’t listened to during my life. On some days, it feels like they are overdue and pretty fucking steep, too.
My brain, though, can be an evil motherfucker. Much like yours, I’m guessing, and maybe it is the nature of brains to fuck with us our whole lives. Perhaps brains enjoy it. They probably do. I’m very interested in how things like Buddhism teach us to clear that clutter of constant clusterfucking away from our brains.
I’ve come to realize that my brain really likes to tell me to smoke weed and drink delicious beer. It also likes whiskey, scotch, tequila, rum, cider, and vodka. On the weed side, it likes the whole ritual of weed smoking and the idea of a legal dispensary full of the stuff is overwhelming.
My brain loves this stuff. It tells me to get some beer all the time. It tells me to go to the dispensary or find myself in situations where someone will have weed to smoke. This has been going on for over forty years, for me, with weed, and about 36 when it comes to beer and alcohol.
I’ve been very blessed with the ability to tell that part of my brain to shut the fuck up, but when I give into it, it is always (and yes, I mean always) there in the background. I’m just learning how to tell others about this because for years, I didn’t really share this with anyone.
I didn’t know how.
I got so tired of it in 2023 that I decided that 2024 was going to be different. My body has been telling me that it has to be different. I’ve got things I want to do, goals to accomplish, and using drugs and alcohol, even legal ones, was not helping me.
The voice would lie to me, though, and tell me that because I’ve been able to compartmentalize these things, I have them under “control.” It would say things like, “Look at that guy sleeping in the park. That’s out of control. You are not him.”
One of the things I’ve come to realize, though, while paying these “taxes” on my life so far in 2024 and really focusing on being In tune with these “voices” is that I’ve been fooling myself for a long time. I’ve been ignoring the voices and saying to myself, “I’ll deal with them later” and foolishly thinking, “The way I think is normal.”
First of all, I have no idea how anyone else truly thinks, so what does “normal” mean? Most people that I dearly love have a lot of things going in their head that I’m privy to because I like to listen and help people as much as I can, but I still only truly know what it is like to be me. Either way, though, I’ve concluded that I think the way I do because I have a problem with alcohol and marijuana.
I’m so jealous of people who are like, “Hey, I’m going to Wren House and have a good beer” and then they do it and they don’t think about it every day afterwards until they go somewhere else and have two or three more good beers. I assume other people’s brains allow them to put that stuff out of their head until it comes up again weeks or months or years later.
My brain, though, when I’m drinking, thinks about that stuff all the time. I don’t tell anyone that because, well, I don’t want people to worry. This is why I had to stop.
The good thing is that 3 ½ months in to not drinking, those voices are super quiet. 2 ½ months of not using cannabis has quieted those voices a lot, too. They will probably never go away and who knows, I might listen to them again in the future, but for now and the foreseeable future, I’m staying out of their nonsense.
It’s nice. I feel good. I feel…alive.
I’m lucky, I know. I’m an alcoholic, but I have a lot of will power. I have other voices in my head that say things like, “Easy, tiger” and “Don’t fuck your life up” and “You have people who depend on you.” I choose them a lot and always have, so again, I’m lucky.
I can hang out around people drinking and not “want” to drink. Luckily, I have no sense of smell, so being around weed isn’t a problem, either. Weed is so strong now, too, that a lot of the time when I smoked it in the last year, it was just as unpleasant as it was pleasant.
I guess there is nothing left to say except pay your taxes if you owe them and if you have something coming back to you, appreciate it. I certainly appreciate my “returns” so far this year.
*****
T he random aspect of how music finds us so full of wonder for me. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how I got turned on to the Pixies. It almost seems like they were always there. After deciding to write about a record, sometimes I do a little research to see what I don’t already know about it.
I am constantly surprised at how much I don’t know about a lot of these records, and it is so easy to get sucked down into the wormhole of available information on the internet. One of the real treats is figuring out what I was doing in my own life at the time when these records were being recorded. It really helps put them into a wider perspective.
In December of 1987, I was living with my mother. It was a tenuous arrangement and a topsy-turvy time in my life. I had gotten back to Phoenix in late October, just around Halloween, after my short stint serving our nation in the US Army. This story can be found in the ergonomicmischief.com blogs from May of 2022, I think.
During the month of November, I was living with my friend, Brian, in an apartment in the same complex where I had spent half of my junior and all of my senior year of high school. It didn’t go well. That is a really long story, so I will save it for my memoirs as I haven’t told it yet. I’m working my way up to it.
Anyhow, when things went south between Brian and I (all has been long repaired, by the way), I found myself adrift and my mom eventually let me move back in with her temporarily. During the time the Pixies were recording one of my all-time favorite records, Surfer Rosa, with Steve Albini, I was an 18-year-old boy who was quite rudderless.
One thing I am quite sure of, though, is that I was completely oblivious to the fact that a masterpiece was being made in Boston.
At some point in the next year or so, I became aware of Surfer Rosa. It could have been one of the Hammon boys who introduced us to this fine album. They were always hip to the up-and-coming tunes. Either way, it was like being given access to a whole new room in my house.
1988 was a really pivotal year for me, musically. I got really into the Butthole Surfers, Jane’s Addiction, and Pixies all in the same year. I’m sure there are a couple others that will come to mind, but those three bands consumed a lot of my time at the end of my teens and into my early 20s.
Surfer Rosa also has an unforgettable album cover. As a devout follower of the upper part of the female anatomy in those days (and who am I kidding…still am today), the model on the cover is absolutely stunning. It’s very tastefully done, too. Nothing says class like a pair of fantastic bare breasts on an album cover. Just ask The Dwarves.
Seriously, though, it is a cool record cover, and it is not blatant or, in my opinion, sexist in any way. Once you put the needle on the record, you forget there is a half-naked woman on the cover anyway.
There was something about a band like the Pixies that kind of made them feel like they belonged to us. The songs are raw, gritty, and full of the type of angst that makes a young person thirst for more. They also have this thing when they play live that makes it seem like it’s almost painful for them to make this music…. kind of like it’s something they have to do but it is very, very unpleasant for them.
Pixies sacrifice for us.
From the moment David Lovering starts hitting the drums and Kim Deal begins the low rumble that opens up “Bone Machine,” I am totally in. No matter how many times I listen to Surfer Rosa, I immediately belong to it completely.
Black Francis spits lyrics out like they taste bad, are acidic, and will eat the flesh of anyone willing to listen, except when he is being snarky, yet tender, on later Pixies songs. On Surfer Rosa, though, he’s full of fire and clever witticism that will leave with you either a bad taste in your mouth, a smile on your face, or both.
The first time I saw them play live, Joey Santiago never looked at the audience once as far as I could tell. I was pretty close to the stage, standing on the floor of the Palladium in Hollywood, and he seemed like he wanted to look at his amp or at the ceiling. As far as I’m concerned, though, he can do what he wants. The guy is a completely underrated lead guitarist. Steve Albini made him sound amazing on Surfer Rosa.
Speaking of Albini, Surfer Rosa in general just sounds so damn good. I love listening to this record on a really good stereo or on my earbuds. There are lots of little things going on that you won’t catch while driving in your car (f you have stock speakers like me). “Broken Face” has those great moments where the rhythm guitar starts the chorus and it’s just on the right side for the first few chugs of barre chords. Brilliant.
Like most people who love Pixies, I fell in love with Kim Deal listening to “Gigantic.” Her vocal on the song changes the mood of the record in a beautiful way for one song without making it feel like it’s a different band. When bands can pivot like this on a terrific record, it shows how great they really are, kind of like saying, “Look what else we can do!”
Over the years, I’ve had several favorite songs from Surfer Rosa. There were times when I would have said “Gigantic” without hesitation, but early on, I could have easily said “Where Is My Mind?”. It’s hard to believe that song has almost 900 million hits on Spotify. It boggles the mind.
These days, there are certain lyrics that really resonate with me from Surfer Rosa. “You’re so pretty when you’re unfaithful to me,” for example, was such a hard hitting one for me back in the day. When I got this record, I had a few instances where girls I cared about were not faithful to me. This was karma, too, because I wasn’t so great at that either, but still. Such a powerful lyric by old Charles Thompson (aka Black Francis).
Another one I have always liked was from “Vamos.”
“We’ll keep well bred, we’ll stay well fed/We’ll have our sons they will all be well hung/They’ll come and play, their friends will say/Your daddy’s rich, your mama’s a pretty thing, that maid Maria, she’s really okay.”
I thought he was saying “your mama’s a big ass bitch” for a long time. Listening “Vamos” reminds me that the pacing of Surfer Rosa is great. The album moves and because of its frenetic energy, the ways that Black Francis manipulates the words and phrasing totally works. You have to listen carefully and I’m guessing that’s exactly what he wanted.
I’ll probably always be a sucker for Santiago’s guitar part on “Brick is Red,” too. When I first got this record, It didn’t come with the additional tracks from Come on Pilgram. That was on the CD, so I’ll wait to write about those for another day.
It’s probably about time that I got a back up copy of this on vinyl, to be honest. The OG copy should probably be put away so one day one of the kids can grab about having it in their collection. I know Teresa loves the Pixies. That’s a fine thing to share with your children.
I can, with all confidence, write today that Surfer Rosa will always be one of my favorite records. Even if one of the members commits some heinous crime, I will probably be able to separate the art from the artist. It’s a record that has added a ton to my life over the years and continues to etch a place in my heart.
Most likely, the Pixies could care less about this, but if I ever get the chance to talk to one of them, I will fan out for at least a minute and tell them how much I love it. How could I not?
*****
See you tomorrow.
Gotta love AI. T-T-These doggies are fucking weird.
Five legged dogs used to run wild on the lakes of Michigan. People would come from all around to watch their famous "Nine-legged Judo" tournaments. God would turn off their gravity restrictions, too.
Comentarios