The Colt 45 Chronicle #92

The summer before the summer I left the Groves of Academe behind I worked as a laborer at a construction site, an apartment building that was being built in downtown Oakland not far from the public library and Lake Merritt. My friend Greg lined up the job for me.

Greg was the friend of a friend who I got to know mostly through working this construction job in downtown Oakland. His cousin was a drywall contractor based in Seattle who had decided to bid work in the Bay Area because Greg lived in Berkeley. (Greg had lived in Seattle but couldn't take the dark falls and winters; so he had relocated to the Golden State.)

The summer of 1987 was sort of an ideal time for me. My girlfriend, whom I would marry the next summer when we were in our way to New York City for her to attend medical school, had moved out, leaving me to my buddies and my books.

That summer was a steady bacchanal. The San Francisco Giants were playing well. And on the days I wasn't needed at the construction site, and my cousin, who had moved into the apartment with me when my girlfriend had moved out, was off working at the health food store where he was employed, I sat in a large stuffed chair and read Homer's Odyssey or Defoe's Robinson Crusoe or a collection of Frege's writing.

I idolized Greg because he was older than I was, a big guy with a wry sense of humor who was a superb multi-sport athlete; he was also a big drinker. Mostly I think that I looked up to him because he seemed very independent. Unattached to a woman, though the ladies loved him, unencumbered by familial ties, though he worked for his cousin, his lot seemed to me worthy of emulation (since I was ensnared in a long, flawed relationship).

That summer of '87 freedom seemed possible to me. My girlfriend, as I said, had moved out, and, while we were still seeing each other, it was not clear that she would reel me back in (which she would do effortlessly four or five months later after whatever tryst she had been pursuing expired).

In the short letter below, addressed to Greg, I look back drunkenly and longingly on that summer from two years on. For some reason, I choose to focus on the morning ritual of making coffee for us to drink while we make the short drive from Berkeley to downtown Oakland.

Autumn 1989

Greg, goddamn, it's always good to hear from you. You're always up and going forward, and taking no prisoners while you're at it. -- Let me quote: "Go to the job site and do the job. FIRE OUT!" That's it. 'Nuff said.

I'm drunk. I've finished all the malt liquor in the house, but fortunately there's a half-filled fifth of Jack Daniels and I've been dipping into that; at first it was shots, but now I've moved on to ice and a little bit of tap water. I put the ice and the Jack and the tap water in an old salsa jar, and I swirl it around vigorously. It's doing the trick. I've got Neil Young on the turntable. TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT, a great album, one of my all-time favorites, and I'm thinking back to those 6:30 AM truck rides to downtown Oakland in the gloomy bay fog. 

I'd wake up before 6 and start that mud brewing in my Norelco coffeemaker (Norelco. Yes, that's right. The same company that makes electric shavers, but, sure enough, they make a fine coffeemaker). My cousin Colin was asleep in the living room on the futon; I'd stay in the kitchen, at the kitchen table, waiting on the coffee, reading a little Homer and thinking about the gray sunshine of life. 

You'd show up sometime between 6:30 and 7, ringing the buzzer. I'd rush down the stairs, two big peanut-butter-jar glasses full of coffee and half & half in each fist (you dubbed 'em, "tank shells of mud"), and we'd scoot off towards Shattuck Avenue and the freeway and the workday. 

Oh, well, as Dylan says, "The past is gone," or, as Neil says, "What do you mean he had bullet holes in his mirror. He tried to do his best, but he could not." 

-- Give me a burlap Sun and I'll bury the Earth. But let's not stop to investigate the shark's teeth! 

Keep in touch, and don't let the bedbugs bite or the toilet give you any pepper.

In Praise of Marshawn Lynch: Dave Zirin Contrasts Beast Mode with NFL Commissioner Goodell

I have always felt a connection to Marshawn Lynch. It probably has something to do with the fact that we both went to Berkeley. Fortunately, the year or two I was in the habit of watching college football on Saturdays (usually hung over) corresponded to the time when Lynch was running for the Golden Bears. What impressed me about Lynch in those Cal games was his speed, his power -- yes, absolutely -- but more than anything it was his ability to absorb huge hits and keep on going. Remarkable, noteworthy, unusual.

I loathed the Holmgren/Hasselbeck Seahawks. So when Pete Carroll made a trade with Buffalo to bring Lynch to town my opinion of the team did a 180. I was quickly made a believer in the franchise.

Make no mistake. Marshawn Lynch turned the franchise around, helped remake it into something entirely unique. That's why it is nice to see Beast Mode getting the superstar treatment in the run up to Super Bowl Sunday. So powerful is his starshine that it has nearly erased everything else this week -- Tom Brady, Deflategate, Bob Kraft's Patriots, you name it. It has been all Marshawn.

It will be interesting to see if the baleful brainiac Belichik will bite down on the hook and structure his defensive game plan around stopping Lynch. This is what most teams do. And this is the brier patch which Seattle loves to lead opponents; it is how Seattle wins games. With defenses keying on Lynch, Russell Wilson makes the big moves. Russell Wilson might not be your classic drop-back passer, but he is brilliant running an offense where he is not the main attraction.

Speaking of main attraction, Dave Zirin latest piece, Marshawn Lynch and Roger Goodell: Compare and Contrast, is a brilliant exploration of the relative merits to the National Football League offered by its chief executive and one of its star players. I quote it in its entirety.

 Go Seahawks! To Victory!

Marshawn Lynch and Roger Goodell: Compare and Contrast 

Dave Zirin on January 27, 2015 - 8:43 PM ET

Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell have something glaringly obvious in common. They both struggle mightily speaking on camera. That, however, is where the similarities end.

Marshawn Lynch, who thousands of people pay to watch play on Sundays, earned a base salary of $6 million last year.* Roger Goodell, who no fan would put down money to do anything other than perhaps be hooked up to a lie detector, made $44 million.

Marshawn Lynch is financially forced by the league to talk to the media, ideally to mouth the same clichés every other player is hardwired to repeat. He spoke at the Super Bowl Media Day this week and twenty-nine times repeated seven words that speak the truth of a league that demands players to double as corporate pitchmen: “I’m here so I won’t get fined.” If Lynch hadn’t made an appearance, he would have faced a gobsmacking $500,000 fine.

Roger Goodell is under no obligation to talk to the public, even though he oversees a league that has received billions in corporate welfare and whose central office is designated by the federal government as a tax-free nonprofit. As Richard Sherman, Marshawn Lynch’s teammate who has never been uncomfortable in front of a microphone, said, Lynch should not be obligated to speak “any more than the commissioner is obligated to speak.”

Marshawn Lynch has also been fined $20,000 by the NFL for grabbing his crotch, which is Lynch’s customary move when he scores a particularly explosive touchdown. Roger Goodell’s league sells a framed collage that includes the very image of Lynch tugging his testicles for $149.95. While Lynch writes checks, Goodell profits on both ends, while also perhaps grabbing his junk.

Marshawn Lynch, who it’s been theorized by friends has a social anxiety disorder, is mocked mercilessly by the media for his lack of desire to speak to them and his inability to sound like Peyton Manning. Roger Goodell, whose only disorder is inordinate blushing when challenged, receives no such casual barbs. He has actually felt some media heat this year over his years of covering up cases of domestic violence. Yet despite every misstep, he was still praised by on a primetime NFL playoff broadcast by announcers Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth for his “integrity” and making domestic violence “part of the national conversation.” (This is, as I’ve written elsewhere, like praising Goldman Sachs for making corporate greed “part of the national conversation.”)

Richard Sherman put it perfectly in a piece he wrote this week for Sports Illustrated. “Under Goodell the league continues to put players like Marshawn Lynch in a position to be mocked by the media, which seems to get a kick out of seeing people struggle on camera. As teammates we’re angry because we know what certain people do well and we know what they struggle with. Marshawn’s talking to the press is the equivalent of putting a reporter on a football field and telling him to tackle Adrian Peterson.”

Sherman also pointed out exactly why so many players—particularly black players—hold a hostility toward an older contemptuous sports media, writing, “Some of the same people slamming Marshawn for not talking are just as likely to condemn the Browns’ Andrew Hawkins and Johnson Bademosi for protesting police brutality with T-shirts. They want to hear us speak, but only if we’re saying something they want to hear.”

There is one last similarity between both men: they both generate gobs of money for the thirty-one billionaires that run the league. The difference however is that Marshawn Lynch will be thrown on the scrapheap as soon as he no longer has the ability to perform. Roger Goodell continues to be paid long after he has proven in practice that he is a liability to players, their families, and the future of the league. I would love to be able to pull off a “Lucy and Ricky” scenario and for one week, start Roger Goodell at running back for the Seahawks and put Marshawn Lynch in the Commissioner’s chair. Seattle would surely suffer. The league, however, would register an immediate improvement. If nothing else, on game day, we’d all get a whole lotta Skittles.

Third/Sister Lovers

I woke up this morning thinking that my state of mind, dumbstruck and forlorn, is matched by "Kangaroo." "Kangaroo" was a very big deal toward the end of my undergraduate years, as was the entire Third/Sister Lovers album on which it appears. Recorded in 1974 but not released until 1978, Third/Sister Lovers is the confused, amorphous, sophisticated final record of Big Star (though it featured only Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens). It is a perfect record for literate youth about to be disgorged into the broader brutal world. Spaced out, sad, adult but childlike, this is the album more than any other that captures the vibe of young people who have no place to go, no terra firma.

I am reliving this state of mind because I recently saw a girlfriend who I haven't seen in 25 years, a time when Third/Sister Lovers was a very big deal for me. Seeing my friend again brought up a lot emotional sediment. The mind is a physical, organic thing. Things get buried. And when they are unearthed, disruption and disorientation result.

There is No Authority But Yourself

A film worth watching if you have an hour is Alexander Oey's 2006 documentary, There is No Authority But Yourself, a quick introduction to seminal Punk band Crass. It is a simple film constructed mostly of interviews with lead singer Steve Ignorant and drummer Penny Rimbaud who putters around Dial House pulling weeds and cooking dinner. Oey doesn't go much into the background of Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher as art student Hippies, focusing instead on Steve Ignorant's working-class background and his inspiration to embrace Punk after seeing a performance of The Clash one night after work.

When I was an undergraduate, Crass was a huge presence -- its stenciled black-and-white DIY aesthetic was everywhere. Their anarchistic "The system is fucked!" ethos ruled the roost in early 1980s Berkeley. Crass was the gold standard.

Two quick takeaways from There is No Authority But Yourself:

• Steve Ignorant commenting that it was possible to live without money in the 1970s, something he believes impossible in today's world.

• Penny Rimbaud saying that he believes Beatniks, Hippies and Punks are all the same.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #50

My father-in-law, to whom this letter is addressed, and I never had a particularly warm relationship. My wife adored him. He was a Hippie, sort of a Marlboro Man version -- Western, laconic; a painter, who taught art in Southern Oregon first at the college and then later at the community college. He was basically a good guy, just shy and emotionally walled off. Selfish.

The letter below relates, in the first paragraph, an afternoon spent looking for work when I arrived in New York City and my thoughts, strange though they were to relate to one's father-in-law, on the bankruptcy of romantic love.

The second paragraph is a romantic remembrance of the apartment -- referred to here by its street address, 2210 -- I shared with my wife in Berkeley.

Autumn 1988

Pete,

Bought myself a monkey suit the other day, and wore it today, while I did a little slick-hair-&-dandruff jig through Wall Street and then Madison Avenue. Bought myself a beer for lunch at a nearby Irish pub while I was waiting for the next installment on my road to success. Budweiser -- not Harp or Bass -- was my choice; got out my book, a Wycherley play freshly purchased from a rug on the sidewalk (where everything is sold), tossed my head up at the TV and caught a few snippets of American Legion Baseball (ESPN); some lanky teen was lobbing a breaking ball over the plate, and getting banged for doing it. I dropped down for a line or two more of THE COUNTRY WIFE. When, bam! -- It hit me, something very exact: "No," the character Harcourt says, "mistresses are like books. If you pore upon them too much, they doze you and make you unfit for company; but if used discreetly, you are fitter for conversation by 'em." Now, either this is saying that monogamy breeds misogyny, or, the simple one, "Too much of a good thing . . . therefore, moderation." Either way, it affected me, affected me in that if this is truly the case, which I knew exactly at that point it was, Oh, boy, how shitty and really less than ideal romantic, hyper-sexual "perfect relationship" love is. So I thought about this, for the span of a beer mug, basking in the simultaneity of Harcourt's statement and Legionnaire baseball, and then I pulled Ashley's watch out of my pocket and glanced at the time. It was time to go. I entertained the idea of staying where I was and not moving an inch except for motioning to the barkeep to graduate me to a pint of Bass, but I was in the monkey suit, and my conscience bit me. I slid off the stool with my tail between my legs and scampered off to interview letter 'X.'

The one thing about today which I can't turn my back on, monkey suit, noose and all, is that it wasn't Berkeley. No more waxing, ruminating and peregrinating in anticipation of the parting of clouds and sounding of trumpets as the masses spill into the river Jordan, pounding on my apartment door (#11). Too many fantasies and too much life's blood gets lapped up by your own four walls, which doesn't mean that you can't live a "good" life, just not a very satisfying one. (So many fucking dreams don't square up outside of home; that's why we have so many self-mutilators: beer, whiskey, coyote's breath, speed, criminals.) And isn't it odd that out of this Icarian potpourri some get tagged artists, writers, prophets? -- World historic individuals, as Hegel would say.) But Pete, the real reason for this letter is to thank you, for helping us shut down old 2210 in proper fashion. We had a lot good evenings with beer, and a lot of good mornings with coffee. And out of everybody who was in and out of that place, friends and family, I always felt that you came the closest to feeling the appreciation for it that I felt for it. Those last nights with you and Jesse (and maybe this is too backward looking and romantic of me) were the absolute apotheosis of what 2210 always was. And I'm talking here of the yellow light and Navajo walls -- and your paintings -- and the books, and beer in the fridge, and some music playing, and an important conversation on somebody's lips. But for all this, it was time to call it quits.

The Pro Bowl

I begin work each day the same way. I stow my shoulder bag under the desk, take off my coat and then head into the break room to get a cup of water from the cooler and scan the headlines of the Seattle Times that's usually on one of the lunch tables. Today top of the fold there was a color photo of Russell Wilson and a few words announcing his standout performance in yesterday's Pro Bowl. Intrigued I skipped to C section and read the first several paragraphs of Oskar Garcia's AP story. Wilson was 8 of 10 passing for 98 yards and three touchdowns. But what caught my eye was the following quote: "Whether the NFL's all-star game will return next season is a something the league will ponder the next few months after the NFC's 62-35 blowout of the AFC on Sunday." I folded the Sports section back into the center of the paper and returned to my desk.

Walking up to the Douglass Truth Library at lunch I thought about the last Pro Bowl that I remember watching, and that was the 1985 Pro Bowl. And the only reason I remember it is because Mark Gastineau delivered a cheap, vicious hit to Joe Montana and it pissed me off. I and my ex-wife, who was my live-in girlfriend at the time, had returned from the grocery store. It was a beautiful, sunny late January day in Berkeley, and I think I had just turned on the TV when Gastineau, no doubt with cocaine and steroids coursing through his veins, blindsided Montana. And I remember that Montana didn't appreciate it.

On leaving work this evening I stopped off in the break room and grabbed the Sports page and put it in my bag to read when I got home. I wanted to finish the story to see if it was in fact a possibility that the Pro Bowl will be eliminated. Upon arriving home after a brief stop at the Capitol Hill library this is what I found out from Oskar Garcia: "Roger Goodell has said the Pro Bowl won't be played again if play didn't improve this year. Last year, fans in Hawaii booed as linemen were clearly not trying."

Don't worry. The Pro Bowl will be around for a long time.

The question that I have is what happened to the old telecasts of the East versus West AFL All-Star Game? The last one was played in January of 1970, prior to the merger with the NFL, in the Astrodome. Were recordings of these games made? Were they saved? Are they accessible? The NFL probably has them under lock and key (like everything else). Last year I was able to stream old episodes of NFL Game of Week on hulu. Now, no more.

PunisherMAX

Evil is all there is. Evil and the extirpation of evil. Personal injury and an unending feeling of loss propel you. This is the world of Marvel Comics' Frank Castle, The Punisher. He is an archetypal American hero. The lone killer. The outsider. The perfect nihilist. John Wayne's Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.

Last year at this time, the work week following the MLK holiday, we enjoyed the unusual bounty of four days of snow closures at the local. I celebrated this windfall by reading the entire run of PunisherMAX. Written by Jason Aaron with art by Steve Dillon and colors by Matt Hollingsworth, I want to call it a masterpiece.

The Punisher doesn't have super-strength or a healing factor; he's not a mutant or a mystic. Frank Castle is an ex-soldier whose family was gunned by the mob. He is a vigilante and a killer; he brings to mind D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature and the ruminations found there on Deerslayer of the Leatherstocking Tales:

But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

The Punisher's credo is when in doubt subject yourself to more pain. So during the week of heavy snow, despite feeling over-trained and suffering a sore throat, I went out running  four miles in the abandoned, silent, white streets each day except for one.

What really affected me about PunisherMAX is Frank Castle's return to the house he lived in with his family prior to the slaughter of his wife and children; he uses it as a base of operations for his war against the Kingpin. Similarly I find myself forever returning in dream to the apartment in Berkeley I shared with my ex-wife; it's always abandoned and blighted -- sick -- like Frank Castle's old suburban home. Why am I always going back there? Over the years it has become such a familiar pattern that when I find myself there I know I am inhabiting a dream. Is it in The Future of an Illusion that Freud says to be an adult is to be at home with loss?

Frank Castle is a guy without specials powers; a guy without an ounce of levity in his soul; someone who is always injured and exhausted and suffering. Then it dawned on me as I finished the last few issues in the series that what PunisherMAX is about is work. Going to work. Everyday. We got to do it. It's a nasty business that requires a lot of painful compromises. But we got to do it.

Below are three scans from PunisherMAX. The first two are facing pages from PunisherMAX #21. The third is from the last issue in the series, PunisherMAX #22. I selected pages that caught the haunted vibe of his occupation of his old, abandoned house.

My Schopenhauer Epiphany

When I was in school there was a run I did regularly.  I would leave the apartment and head down Fulton Street.  At Leconte Elementary I would start winding my way up to Alta Bates Medical Center, across from which I lived in a house on Regent Street my freshman year.  From there I would head up to Benvenue Avenue, and then back across Ashby and back home.  Google Mapping it now I am encouraged to see that round trip the run is a 5K.  I -- we (when running with friends) -- used to do it in around 20 minutes and change.

On the back end of the run one summer afternoon, on Ellsworth Street between Haste and Channing Way, I had a realization that Arthur Schopenhauer was right.  How exactly he was right, what in his philosophy it was at that moment that I incandescently accepted as truth, I can't say for sure.  I was reading a lot of Schopenhauer and Thomas Hardy that summer, trying to finish a paper for a graduate seminar on adultery in the 19th century novel.  Well, I say I was reading a lot of Schopenhauer.  I was reading snippets of The World as Will and Representation and attempting to read from start to finish Schopenhauer's first book, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.  But mostly I read, and read thoroughly, Bryan Magee's The Philosphy of Schopenhauer.

So while I can't remember the exact content of my Schopenhauer epiphany, over the years I have come to regard it and occasionally retell it as my acceptance of the necessity of the extirpation of the will, or, to put it another way (from Kerouac's Vanity of Duluoz) -- "The wheel of life stops with me."