"Garbadge Man"

Each night I come home to an answering machine blinking its red message light. It is almost always a telemarketer; sometimes it is my mother. This is life lived without women, the life of a burdened bachelor.

I'm not complaining. It took me the better part of 45 years to figure out that this was the golden path to contentedness. Of course the libidinal need for "companionship" never disappears. But I find that it can be successfully engaged at a theoretical level; actualization or "consummation" is not required.

Tonight I thought I was setting a blistering pace on my four-mile run (what I call the "pig trot"). Looking at the chronometer on my wristwatch when I finished I was surprised to see that I was slower than usual.

As I took the backstretch I was treated to Hole's wailer, "Garbadge Man," off the first album, Pretty on the Inside (1991).

This album is not given the respect it deserves. It was recommended to me by a guy I was sitting with on a snowbound Amtrak train somewhere around Klamath Falls the winter of 1995. There were four of us sitting together, all young men. One guy was a legitimate rastafari. We were very respectful to one another. We must have been stuck on that track in the middle of nowhere surrounded by solid white walls of snow for over eight hours.