You Have 9 Mutual Friends

Some nights I just want to kill some goddamn time. It doesn't matter what it is that kills it, really. I go through periods of wanting to hang out with people, but I'm obviously not getting up and doing anything about it, so it can't be THAT important to me.

This is why Facebook is so amazingly suited to my personality. Without ever leaving the comfort of my room, I can "interact" with my "friends" and feel connected. I don't see anything wrong with this. It's what I've always wanted. Everything is on my terms. I choose the music, the time, whether or not to wear pants, etc. When I'm done, I don't have to say goodbye to anyone. But it doesn't just work in my favor. We all win.

People that are annoying or boring in real life become interesting, because you're not pre-occupied with the horrible REALNESS they confront you with. I'm not talking about the kind of "real" that makes people seem grounded or honest, but the kind of "real" that makes people want to read cheap paperbacks with dragons on the cover. These are people I can already imagine as bored 40-something parents even though they're 19; they get to be vital participants in the Facebook party, too. It also works well with people who may come across as dynamic in real life (although these people fall into the "annoying" category more often than not), because they're reduced to a small square photo and a few words on a screen. It levels the playing field. We all occupy the same meaningless space in the ether, just zeros and ones.

While walking around campus today, I noticed how hard it would be to approach a random person if I ever DID feel like talking to someone new. Almost everybody has some form of MP3 player these days, and if they're not chugging along to music, they're walking and talking on their cell phones or texting. We all get to immerse ourselves in our own stupid lives, which may or may not be the greatest tragedy of personal technology.

Facebook is now the best way to meet someone. You aren't imposing on their personal bubble by going up and interrupting their music/conversation/social networking. It's a different path to their personality. You're casting your stone into their self-absorbed creation of themselves via Facebook. You're becoming another agent in their active self-worship. And because of that, they share their thoughts and downtown bar photos with you, and you get to "know" this person's construct of themselves. When you think about it, this is way deeper than the usual first date material. It's akin to asking a girl how she defines herself vis a vis how other people perceive her socially constructed identity while waiting for bad Italian food at the Olive Garden.

I'm guilty of playing the Facebook game as much as the next person. I see people at shows, or they see me, and we could talk but we don't. Fast forward a few hours, and there it is:

You Have 1 New Friend Request

I add him/her and maybe post something on their wall, "Like" a comment or two, and if we ever see each other in real life again, we usually CONTINUE to pass up opportunities for face-to-face communication. In the context of a real meeting between two new friends, the subsequent cold shoulder would almost certainly come across as an insult. But not with Facebook. Facebook lets me accumulate friends while shrinking the circle of real people I want to talk to for more than 30 seconds. And these people never get to know anything about me that I don't offer them.

This is amazing! Why wasn't this around when I was in high school? I wasted so much time conversing with someone who'd lent me a pencil the week before or sat next to me on a bus because of this need to fill the silence. To think I actually once tapped a girl on the shoulder to ask her what her name was. Those days are over, my friends. We live in the greatest age for the antisocial, the golden era of the misanthrope. So let's kill time together, alone.

Patriot/Missiles

I love love love listening to AM talk radio. Today, Rush Limbaugh was talking about the "depravity" facing America, and how it can all be traced back to removing God from our lives. He also blames it on people like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, people who seek fame without contributing anything to society (as opposed to other sons and daughters of rich people who seek money without contributing anything to society, he seems to be fine with that). I would counter that people like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian haven't contributed to the decline of the role of God in America as much as they have usurped and filled the void left by the absence of everyone's favorite bearded killer of millions of children a day. We don't need weekly mass to keep the proles in line anymore, we have the Daily Ten.

But the absolute BEST part of his tirade of opinions (talk radio hates facts and numbers, donchaknow) was his argument against global warning. Why doesn't Rush Limbaugh believe in global warming? Because he believes in God. Basically his argument is that if God is all powerful, and humans are insignificant, then there's no way they could destroy an entire planet. And, that's it. That was his argument, before he went on to insult intellectuals and Time magazine. It's good to know we don't have to worry about nuclear weapons anymore. Why should we care if North Korea or Russia or Iraq have nuclear weapons when we know GOD WILL JUST MAGICALLY SAVE US BECAUSE HE LOVES AMERICA?

The whole God argument always boils down to something like this: there must be something more out there. Something bigger than us. A higher power. This comes from the human tendency to believe that we are the highest, most advanced form of life. That's it, game over, sorry ocean life. Humans are the perfect manifestation of the entire universe's existence. Therefore, something must have been responsible for creating such amazing creatures as humans, who kill each other for pieces of paper they attribute conceptual value to. That's where God comes in. We created an all-powerful being to take the credit for creating the greatest, all-powerful force of life on planet Earth. If there's no structured cosmogony, then maybe humans are just another link in the chain.

I desperately hope there's something better out there. Humans are terrible pieces of carbon. I hope we all die out and dinosaurs emerge from the ooze again and find ways to turn our ground up carcasses into fuel for Hummers and private jets for dinosaur movie stars. I hope aliens attack and Will Smith dies instantly in his mansion instead of letting a poor white trash man fly into the center of the alien mothership. There has to be something better out there than me, you, Rush Limbaugh, Paris Hilton, God, money, and talk radio.

This is why it's okay to hate the Beatles.

I'm listening to the breathtakingly forgettable fuzz guitars employed by Tame Impala to transport me back to the carefree, drug-addled era of the 60s that neither I or the band were alive to experience. Things like this annoy the hell out of me. Everything on this recording sounds forced and purposefully enhanced to evoke the hazy wash of songs like "Tomorrow Never Knows." But this is how the Beatles work. Even things they did by accident create whole careers for lesser musicians.

But I also realize that this is what makes certain people love the Beatles, and I typically classify them as "John people." They loved the IDEA of Sgt. Pepper's more than the actual record, and giddily consumed the Yellow Submarine cartoon and all that pseudo-hippie disposable trash culture that the Beatles embodied outside of their music. Ultimately, it resulted in the (accidental?) creation of white popular counterculture. I say "counterculture" because these people seriously believed they were getting a personalized, unique experience that MILLIONS OF OTHER PEOPLE listening to the Beatles somehow missed. And I say "popular" because, c'mon, it's the fucking Beatles. They were bigger than Jesus. Speaking of, Holden Caulfield was definitely what I'd consider a "John person," viewing the world through pathetic, rose-colored glasses with a longing for childhood innocence, but too lazy to actually implement any action on his part to make his world any better. Dropping out of Pencey Prep and sitting in a hotel to promote peace are just about equal on the scale of stupid ways to stick it to the man. I suspect Mark David Chapman never realized this.

Another major gripe I have with "John people" are that they are inevitably also "Bob Dylan people" or (more recently) "Conor Oberst people." These are people who insist that lyrics are ESSENTIAL to enjoying a song, and will often call boring musical pieces with "deep" lyrics amazing, while dismissing a genuinely well-crafted piece of music with vague or simple lyrics as trite. By this rationale, Death Cab For Cutie is better than James Brown, but we all know the phrase squeezed in between the commas of the sentence is incorrect and/or ridiculous. I know, I know, music is all a matter of taste and opinion, but there's also a difference between music and literature, and "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" is not a stellar example of either.

I guess I've always been a "Paul person," even before things like this started to bother me. I never had a favorite Beatle as a kid (again, not alive during the 60's) but my favorite Beatles album when I was 10 still remains my favorite to this day ("A Hard Day's Night"). By all rights, Paul was "the leader" of the band, but that isn't why I respect him. He got shit done and made the trains run on time, and never overtly adopted the rock star persona and cult that John was only too happy to embody. While John was out acting a damn fool with Yoko, it was Paul who wrote a song to cheer up Julian Lennon ("Hey Jude"). When Ringo briefly quit during the recording of the White Album, Paul just manned up and played the drums on "Back in the U.S.S.R." The insane backwards sounding solo on George Harrison's "Taxman?" Again, Paul McCartney.

These are things that probably make a "John person" (or a John Lennon) uncomfortable, and are a contributing factor to why Paul is the least-likable member of the Beatles. Paul didn't play the tortured-artist angle of John, didn't possess the quiet modesty of George, and definitely didn't embody the humble everyman qualities of Ringo. Paul could out-Beatle every member of the Beatles by employing nothing more than sheer musical talent.

A big part of why "John people" enjoy the non-musical aspects (lyrics, rock opera movies, Lady GaGa's career) of popular music is obvious: because they are non-musical people. It lets them enjoy their music without really having to understand it. It's like a friend inviting you in on a cool experience that you couldn't have created on your own. Paul McCartney did not want to be your friend, he'd be bored with you in under a minute. This is why he cultivated weird rivalry/friendships with Brian Wilson and later Michael Jackson. Paul McCartney is the type of genius who knows he is a genius, but does not try to apologize for it or pretend he's a normal person. The rest of us do not like to be reminded of how normal and untalented we are, so we project what we perceive to be our best qualities onto the culture we consume to make up for it. When an artist or musician refuses us the ability to do this, we collectively gnash our teeth for being shut out of the art we so desperately wish we could create.

This is why Inception is so popular: it's a movie that makes normal people feel smart for understanding its concept. It's also why Tame Impala is the perfect soundtrack to your summer spent hunting for cool new music instead of making it.

Glyceriiiiiiiine

In the weeks following the whole Amber debacle, I decided to sidle up to her friend Liz for some comfort. And by that, I mean initiate terrible, boring conversations since we were usually the first and last people on the school bus every day (first in the morning, last in the afternoon). This culminated in one of the weirdest non-relationships I've ever been a part of. She was white, skinny, and cute in the way little kids from frontier times always seem to have that apple-cheeked thing going on, even in black and white photos. I wanted to like her so much physically and emotionally, but mentally, this was a huge challenge.

Her favorite movie was Clueless. She once told me she watched it every weekend, and often wore a shirt that said "Adorably Clueless" on it, with the movie logo prominently featured right around her breasts. You can see how I fell in love with this girl so fast. She really liked Gavin Rossdale, which made her a Bush fan, I guess (I imagine for her these were identical mental processes [not so much an attack on women, but on teenage girl fandom]). So of course, I exploited her love of Bush and applied it toward kissing her.

Now, let me stop briefly and explain my fucked up, stifled, pathetic teenage existence. I was a junior in high school at age 15. All my classmates were about 2 years older than me and significantly more experienced in all realms of teenage life. I had NO CONCEPT of sex in high school. I mean, I had seen porn and whatnot, but the idea of having sex with a real girl from my real life seemed like the most improbable scenario in the world to me. With that type of mental framework, I didn't actively pursue sex when I pursued girls. I pursued HAVING A GIRLFRIEND as the ultimate aim. I was like a Mormon player, trying to hold hands with girls in the back of the bus and strutting to my doorstep after being dropped off.

Liz was a freshman, also 15, and gullible; that "Adorably Clueless" was not ironic in any sense of the word. That shirt really was MADE for her. It was all too easy to impress her with my guitar skills and some suave planning. My parents lived in a cul de sac neighborhood, and at the end of the day, the driver would actually drive to the front of my house (as opposed to the morning, when I'd have to walk about a block to get picked up). This required the bus to make a slow, wide turning maneuver to get out of the cul de sac, which gave me just enough time to spring my plan.

"Check it out, after I get off the bus, put your window down and listen. You're gonna hear something cool."

After stepping off the bus, I opened the garage door where my electric guitar and amp were set up, and proceeded to play the easy chords that comprise the Bush song "Glycerine," which I knew she loved. She gasped and then smiled at me from the window as the bus made its slow turn and drove off. And the rest, as they say, is history. But it wasn't. She had a boyfriend when I told her I liked her, so I was crushed and didn't talk to her for a while. Then, a mutual bus friend (these rides were like an HOUR long, a lot could happen on a given bus ride) informed me that she DID like me, and had broken up with her boyfriend, but thought I hated her because she spurned my initial advance.

After all that got sorted out, we got to the good stuff. The romantic and physical highlight of our relationship (to me, anyway) was a morning bus ride spent curled up in the back seat asleep and waking up to her apple-cheeked face centimeters away from mine. It didn't take much to make me happy. We were both kind of awkward with each other, which I took as a sign that she really liked me. We broke up within two weeks.

Long story short, I'm pretty sure two of my friends had sex with her by the time we graduated.

Part(y of) 3

I met Nicole while leaving a movie theater[1] and was able to get her digits in possibly the nerdiest way imaginable: I told her I would memorize her phone number if she said it exactly once, and would prove it by calling her later that afternoon. On both counts, it was a success, and we talked about the similarities between our respective high schools (architecturally speaking[2]) and the differences in the overall ethnic makeup of the student body (both Porter and Pace had "a lot of chongs," but Pace had more white people).

I was excited to have met a girl that was both good looking and interested in talking about Green Day with me, and we decided to talk the next day. This is the part where things get really fuzzy in my memory. I know we talked a few more times, but at one point I called and her sister or mother said she had just stepped out, but I could call her back later. This had happened on several other occasions, and when I did call back, we'd talk, so it's not like she was avoiding me. But for some reason that I cannot explain, I just gave up. I never called back, she never called me back.

This is actually more of a non-story than anything, but I have repeated a process like this more than once, and it makes me wonder why this happens to me so often. Granted, those were the days before social networking sites made it possible to exchange flirty, innocent-sounding messages with the object of your affection on a minute-by-minute basis, but I can't blame it on the technology. Maybe I would have stopped Tweeting her, or liking her Facebook status updates at some point. I don't know. But the sheer possibility that this girl might actually want to talk to me or eventually kiss me while watching another terrible movie didn't so much scare me as completely depress me. I figured it was all downhill from there. I was an idiot, even at 14.





1. That film was Independence Day. I was going to add "unfortunately" at the beginning of that sentence, but I guess it was fortunate in that I met Nicole because of it. Although, since nothing materialized from this chance encounter, I guess "unfortunately" works just fine.

2. Porter and Pace are identical structures, even down to the little rocks that made up the floors. I wonder if the chongs of Pace ever hung out in the CEILINGS, as ours were wont to do, but I guess they could have accessed them via the bathroom stalls in exactly the same way.

Party of 2

My first girlfriend was Amber, and blonde, and white. We were 15. I was a junior and she was a freshman newly transferred from wherever it is that beautiful white girls run amok before they're shipped off to the next relatives in the chain. She once professed to love me in rhebus form, by scrawling our names on the board in her aunt's classroom with a heart in between. We kissed exactly once, an event that caused me to miss my bus and walk home with a strut in my step for about 15 blocks. She also invited me to her birthday party at a bowling alley, where she then proceeded to ignore me the entire night. The next day, I got the message from her friend that we were broken up. That's a lot for a person to experience in five days.

I saw her about two years ago while visiting my parents for Charro Days, a Brownsville holiday in which kids get one and a half days off of school to partake in parades and watch their parents consume 4 dollar beers at Sombrero Fest. She did not look very good. I don't think she noticed me; I have morphed into one of those people who somehow never get recognized by their high school peers. I immediately had the urge to go up to her and strike up one of those underhanded revenge conversations you only dream about in high school. Basically, an excuse to throw the relative greatness of my life in her face, like a much more bitter version of the country song "Unanswered Prayers."

But it would have done me no good. My years spent touring in a band might seem like a ridiculous waste of time to her, and I know my intellect never really excited her. These are qualities that I LIKE in people, but I can't count on them to convince another person of my relative worth. Even though I won, she will always win. Ultimately, I was the one fretting over initiating a conversation with a girlfriend I had for a week, while she was probably totally content remembering me as some minor detail in her life, if she remembered me at all. After processing this information in my head during the 4 seconds it took me to walk past her, I was content to let bygones be bygones, and sip on my 4 dollar beer.

party of 1

I am terrified of parties. No, let me correct myself; I am terrified of new people who aren't aware of my status as a person whose merit has been pre-determined as a result of my contributions to the local music scene. As a fallback, I have my knowledge of esoteric and inane historical facts to convince them of my intellectual prowess. But that's it. That's my ace in the hole. Neither one is sufficient to impress the average person, but, in my defense, the average person has nothing to impress me, short of being related to someone more interesting or dynamic than they are.

As a result, I enter most social situations at a considerable disadvantage. I can either be "Rob Yoink" or the smart-ass in class who connects Faulkner to the Zombies, but the resulting gap between the two is comparable to the American frontier in the 1800s. Of the few intrepid souls who actually brave the journey into my ridiculous personality, most will die of disease, or get murdered by Indians, or ultimately miss the dock at the end of the Oregon Trail, doomed to eject their floppy disks in disgust at the sheer pointlessness of it all.

This is not a fun life at all. People either kiss your ass or completely ignore you. I haven't figured out which is more demoralizing, but I suspect it's the former, in light of the latter. Is it possible to seriously dislike yourself while still appreciating your utility as a musician/scholar/artist?

to be continued...