April Fools' Day

Today, April Fools', marks one year of commuting three hours every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Never before have I existed on so little sleep. I now squeeze in a 15-minute catnap at lunch to help me get by. When you spend your whole life (nearly a half century) getting eight hours of sleep and then suddenly you shift to getting seven hours (often less), it is rough. My training regimen has also suffered. I now run only on the weekends, not counting the sprinting and jogging I do to and from the train. Gradually, over the span of the year, my conditioning has diminished, and I have gained about ten pounds. It is a situation that if maintained will lead to a continued deterioration until some form of breakdown occurs.

A couple months back I found a damp paperback copy of Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1987) on a sidewalk near my apartment building. I was on my way out for a run. So I stowed it in the bushes for my return. Some drunken youth walking home after a night of debauchery probably dropped it. When I left my wife and New York City to make my way back to the West Coast a quarter-century ago, for about a month I stayed with my friend Niall who lived in Haight-Ashbury. He had a copy of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, parts of which I read and enjoyed. I never read the first essay, "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: A Tale of These Times." I did last night on the train home from work. The essay originally appeared in 1971 and contains the first known reference to Punk. What captivated me though was Bangs' description of worklife (the boldface is my addition):

Why, I recall when I was in high school (oh, I told you -- that was kind of where they put you when they didn't know what to do with you -- when you were too big for the Kiddie Kokoons and too young to go out an' hafta assume what we call Manhood, which involved going at the same time every day to some weird building and doing some totally useless shit for hours on end just so you could get some bread and have everybody respect you) -- when I was in high school, we used to have some mighty snappy patter. For instance, if somebody did something stupid, we used to say, "Whattaya got, shit for brains?"

What I remember about Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung from reading it 25-years ago is Bangs' essay on The Clash. That is why I started reading the book again last night: I'm working my way towards a Hippies vs. Punks post on The Clash.

*****

UPDATE: I meant to include a link to a video that appeared recently on the Gray Lady's web site. The video tells the story of Dr. John Kitchin, a successful neurologist and psychiatrist, who abandons his career in order to skate all day on a San Diego boardwalk; in so doing, he creates a new identity for himself, Slomo. Basically, the video is a literate indictment of the insanity of the rat race. Kitchin, a.k.a., Slomo, articulates a theory how motion, the sensation of acceleration, stimulates calcium deposits in our inner ear that are somehow aligned with the center of the Earth, and all of this arouses pleasure.

The video is worth watching.