With only days remaining in 2017, I can say it was a year of extraordinary personal highs and lows.
Things started rough. I had lost one of the best friends of my adult life in mid-November of 2016. If that trauma wasn’t enough, something he shared with me during one of our final visits led to an existential tailspin that haunted me for months after. I essentially skipped the entire Christmas season. I lost both the motivation and interest to write, so I simply stopped. Despite several subtle nudges of encouragement, I didn’t bother with my ridiculous Christmas elf story until someone literally left a stuffed dog and a writing prompt at my front door, and thank God for that because I had no idea how badly I needed it.
January and February have never been my favorite months of year, so trudging through the winter with mountains of doubt and self-loathing, as so many worst-case scenarios about the country were being realized daily, didn’t help. As tightly as I thought I was keeping a lid on everything, signs of concern from people around me kept coming up; I’m a classic introvert so I dismissed them, telling myself I’d survived harder times before and I’d endure this as well. As winter dragged into spring, it was looking like any resolution that might happen would be coming much later than sooner.
One break from the routine I was looking forward to came on April 1st. Green Day was coming to St. Paul. A huge group of my cousins started planning to see them when the concert was first announced, but the tickets vanished before we were able to secure enough for everyone. My cousin John managed to get a block though, and offered me his final unclaimed ticket.
Green Day had always been one of those ubiquitous bands for me, the kind of auditory wallpaper immediately recognized on the radio, even before “American Idiot” became one of the albums I relied on the most to clarify the pain and rage I felt following my sister’s death. Their most recent album, “Revolution Radio,” had come out back in October, and was doing its best to drag me through my ongoing melancholia. I hadn’t seen them live before but they had a reputation for good shows, so I knew it would at least be a distraction from the empty routine of the past several months. I was looking forward to seeing my cousins at least as much as the show, enough to drive two hours out of the Cities just for a few hours more with them that afternoon, and then to spend the night at their house afterward. I needed cousin time.
We got back up to St. Paul in time to have dinner at a Thai place my cousin Sarah and her soon-to-be husband Tyler knew. Our seats in the arena were in the higher altitudes, but gave us a great view of the stage. I don’t remember who the open act was, but after they finished their set my cousin Dennis and I agreed they’d been better than a lot of the other warm-up bands we’d seen before.
When Green Day came on, I was immediately brought into that zone that can happen at a concert when you’re seeing a band you’ve known forever. They played through many of their classics, proving why those songs were classics in the first place. They played some songs I’d always been lukewarm about, revealing more depth and power than I had noticed before. They played through many of my lesser-known favorites, even reminding me of some songs that had been favorites long ago and had since fallen back into the mental archive, with the vitality of live performance bringing back why they had been so important to me.
The singer and guitarist, Billie Joe Armstrong, was on his A game. When we were in the car after the concert, I posted this on Facebook: “After tonight I can write this here without hesitation: As far as front-man live performance goes, Billie Joe Armstrong has reached the same level as Freddie Mercury and Bruce Springsteen.” Coming from me, this is no small amount of praise. He didn’t stalk the stage so much as attack it, belting out each song as if the life and love of all the world hung in the balance, taking control of the anger and frustration that had come to define the times and redirecting it with an angered positivity, refusing to allow for the idea that the current state of society had to stand as it was, not just encouraging the audience to do what they could to make things better, but demanding it. He worked the crowd so effectively it was, without question, the loudest audience I’ve been a part of in my thirty-four years of concert-going.
When they played “Still Breathing,” one of my favorite songs from the newest album, something broke inside of me. The combination of the music, how I had personalized the lyrics in that way people tend to do with favorite songs, and the power of hearing it live was an epiphanal moment. I faced down the issues I’d been struggling with for the previous six months and realized I could be stronger than they were, even as they compounded each other. The possibility that I could take back my life and make it what I wanted began to feel real again as tears filled my eyes and I sang my throat raw. When they played another new favorite, “Forever Now,” near the end of the show, I may have temporarily left my body. By the time the song ended, I felt purged. And cleansed. And ready to move forward again.
Days later, I had turned an idea for a new story into an outline that only continued to grow throughout the spring, and became the first new legitimate manuscript I’ve written in at least five years. During that same spring, I took on something else I’ve avoided my whole life — one of those things that wasn’t big in the grand scheme, but was big for me — and conquered it. Other hurdles came and went as the summer went on, leaving me in a place where the sources of most of my anxieties were conclusively put behind me — some through circumstance, some through my actions.
The coming year promises to be a big one for me, since it will be the year I turn 50. On one hand it’s just another age and not any more significant than any other age, but, like I said earlier, I’m a classic introvert, which means among other things that I spend a lot of time in personal reflection. Because of this, I can see how almost everything that happens to me this year will somehow be filtered through the idea of turning 50.
The surprising thing about this, though? The way I’m facing it. I’m not starting the new year with any sense of low-grade dread, or the ongoing acceptance of an established and occasionally unfulfilling routine. I don’t see any reason to anticipate life taking a turn for the worse, or even going sideways on me. I look at the new calendar I just bought and see the days and months still to come as being open instead of empty.
This year, there’s only optimism.
Still Breathing
Thursday, December 28, 2017
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
Another NaNoWriMo Teaser
Night Ranger was a band that, sadly, history has relegated to the discount bin of 80s music. They were consistent hitmakers and released a series of successful albums, but never established themselves as a band with staying power. They’re still around in some form or other now, touring the casinos of America as a legacy band, usually appearing with collections of other bands in different classic rock packages. They’ll occasionally put out albums of new material, which I usually download out of some sense of leftover band loyalty and a hope that they’ll have two or three great songs buried in the track listing for me to discover. Their songs spoke to both what my high school experience was and what I wished it could have been, but here in the new century they’ve been systematically reduced to being thought of as the band responsible for “Sister Christian.” However, they did give me an accidental moment of musical revenge one time, in a way I had not seen coming and never really enjoyed, because it put me in such a fear of parental consequences.
Back in my American Top 40 days (junior high), before I had any kind of a job, I only made enough money with my allowance to buy the occasional package of Star Wars trading cards and never bought music with any kind of exploratory feel. I pretty much had to know exactly what I’d get from an album before I’d even think about spending the $9.99 it would take. Because of this, I, like so many other kids from my generation, solved the problem by making mix tapes of my favorite songs off the radio. And what better source for finding the best songs of the moment than the weekly broadcast of American Top 40? I’d like to think that I would have put this plan together on my own eventually, but I’ll pass on the credit, once again, to my cousins the Carlsons, who made AT40 mix tapes habitually. In fact, I got my first information about the Birds and the Bees from eighth-or-ninth-grade John Carlson while traveling across South Dakota to the Black Hills. We were riding in the back of a camper-topped pick-up truck and listening to an American Top 40 mix tape he had brought along, and my fourth-or-fifth-grade self had asked what the Donna Summer song “Bad Girls” was about.
Listening to American Top 40 wasn’t just a casual experience for me, but usually a mission. I vigilantly paid attention, trying to delve clues from whatever Casey Kasem was saying about a song or an artist as he led into the next spot on the countdown. I mentally kept track of where my favorite songs were from week to week so I could make a fair prediction about when they might appear in the show, in case I still needed to get a recording of them for my collection. The game was to learn Casey’s speech patterns well enough so you could record as much of the song as possible without having to hear him talk over it, which also meant becoming familiar with the fraction of a second lag time between pressing play on the cassette recorder, knowing the best position for holding the tiny little microphone square up to the even tinier radio speaker, and holding my breath for three minutes straight to make sure there wasn’t any ambient noise added to the song. Most of the time it worked out pretty well. Most of the time.
One night I was hidden away in my bedroom having a fairly successful night of recording. The show was nearly over, and the Top 10 was dramatically counting down to one or two songs that had been back and forth between the number one position for weeks. I had a favorite between the two and I wish I could remember what it was — in all likelihood it was either REO Speedwagon or Hall and Oates, since both bands were nearly permanent residents of the Top 40 back then. Finally Casey cut to the chase, revealed the top song, and, since it had been the one I had been rooting for and I knew it was the one and only time during the entire week I could absolutely know for sure it would be played and I could record it, I pressed play and waited for the song to end as my finger rested on the STOP button with the caution of someone trying to defuse a thermonuclear weapon.
The song was half over when my bedroom door flew open. My dad stood there in the doorway with a big grin on his face and cried out in a comically overenthusiastic voice, “WHAT’S NUMBER ONE??”
My heart stopped.
I calmly pushed the stop button, slowly turned my head to lock eye contact with him and said, in the slowest burn of a voice I had ever dared use with my father before, “I was recording that.”
His eyes opened even wider and he quickly backed out of the room, quietly closing the door behind him as if that was going to make any difference at that point. Later on I heard from my mother that he had sheepishly walked into the kitchen with kind of a smile on his face and said to her, “Boy, if looks could kill.”
So anyway. Years upon years later I was in high school and had moved on from recording off the radio to buying my own vinyl, and Night Ranger, at that time, represented two titles: Their debut album “Dawn Patrol” — featuring the rock radio staple of the time “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me” for the purists out there — and their more successful follow-up “Midnight Madness,” which featured the minor radio hit “You Can Still Rock in America” and the ultimate power ballad of all power ballads, “Sister Christian.”
There was a summer when everything my family did in one way revolved around a community theater production of “The Sound of Music.” Our cousin Sue was playing the lead as Maria, and ended up marrying her leading man Chuck. Erin had a big role in it as one of the Von Trapp children. Jenny had one or two minor roles, just on stage for moments at a time in different costumes, but still a part of the production. Even Dad was involved, playing the role of Baron Elberfeld in one scene, hamming up his one or two lines in what became a signature theatrical voice for him in the years to come as he appeared in a number of other community theater productions.
After the run ended and the summer was over, VHS copies of the play were made for everyone involved, and of course we had one, carefully labeled to make sure nobody accidentally used the tape to record some movie off cable. Several years later my parents hosted a casual dinner party, reuniting some friends involved with the play to watch it together in our basement.
Everything was going great. I was patiently sitting through a recording of a play I had sat through at least five times in person when someone suggested a break when we reached the intermission. Since even back then I was the unofficial tech support go-to in the house, I was asked to stop the tape until everyone was ready to continue. I did, and while everyone was out of the room doing whatever adults did upstairs during a VHS intermission in the mid-1980s, I started flipping through channels to see what else was on to watch while waiting for the crowd to reassemble. MTV would have been one of my go-to networks in high school so I went there first, finding a Night Ranger concert! And they were playing Sister Christian! So yeah, I watched it. Which was only part of the mistake.
As things turned out, I didn’t press stop on the VCR. Which didn’t become evident until everyone was back and I had to press play again, only to discover I had just recorded about five minutes of a Night Ranger concert right over the only VHS copy my family had of the play that three of them had been in. Erin didn’t really care. Jenny had probably been more annoyed by her younger brother pulling another idiot move than anything else, and might have even just labeled it as another of the typical idiot moves of which I was so frighteningly proficient.
Upon discovery, my first reaction, because I was in high school, was to try and think of a way I could finesse my way out of what had happened. That reaction didn’t hold though, because I recognized two truths in that moment: (1) I was unequivocally screwed, because my dad had loved everything about being in that play so much and for me to disgrace that artifact with one of those damned rock videos was tantamount to heresy. Even if it was done accidentally, the damage was done. (2) He was going to discover what happened in front of a room full of people he had invited to his house as guests. There simply was never going to be a better time for me to just come clean about what had happened. It was my only out.
I owned up to it, legitimately contrite. Sue’s now husband Chuck tried to lighten the blow by saying the part I’d recorded over had been boring anyway, which got some laughs and diffused the tension enough to watch the rest, which gave Dad the time to calm down before everyone went home. He was still royally pissed about it, but at least I wasn’t being blamed for anything other than a stupid mistake.
I never saw a connection between these two moments before I sat down to start writing about this, but now I see them as something approaching an almost Karmic parallel. I never would have erased any of the tape intentionally, just as I know Dad hadn’t meant to burst in on my American Top 40 recording session. Neither of us was happy with the end results, but neither of us could blame the other for what had happened.
So, I suppose what I’m saying as a summative statement is this:
Dad, I guess we’re even.
Back in my American Top 40 days (junior high), before I had any kind of a job, I only made enough money with my allowance to buy the occasional package of Star Wars trading cards and never bought music with any kind of exploratory feel. I pretty much had to know exactly what I’d get from an album before I’d even think about spending the $9.99 it would take. Because of this, I, like so many other kids from my generation, solved the problem by making mix tapes of my favorite songs off the radio. And what better source for finding the best songs of the moment than the weekly broadcast of American Top 40? I’d like to think that I would have put this plan together on my own eventually, but I’ll pass on the credit, once again, to my cousins the Carlsons, who made AT40 mix tapes habitually. In fact, I got my first information about the Birds and the Bees from eighth-or-ninth-grade John Carlson while traveling across South Dakota to the Black Hills. We were riding in the back of a camper-topped pick-up truck and listening to an American Top 40 mix tape he had brought along, and my fourth-or-fifth-grade self had asked what the Donna Summer song “Bad Girls” was about.
Listening to American Top 40 wasn’t just a casual experience for me, but usually a mission. I vigilantly paid attention, trying to delve clues from whatever Casey Kasem was saying about a song or an artist as he led into the next spot on the countdown. I mentally kept track of where my favorite songs were from week to week so I could make a fair prediction about when they might appear in the show, in case I still needed to get a recording of them for my collection. The game was to learn Casey’s speech patterns well enough so you could record as much of the song as possible without having to hear him talk over it, which also meant becoming familiar with the fraction of a second lag time between pressing play on the cassette recorder, knowing the best position for holding the tiny little microphone square up to the even tinier radio speaker, and holding my breath for three minutes straight to make sure there wasn’t any ambient noise added to the song. Most of the time it worked out pretty well. Most of the time.
One night I was hidden away in my bedroom having a fairly successful night of recording. The show was nearly over, and the Top 10 was dramatically counting down to one or two songs that had been back and forth between the number one position for weeks. I had a favorite between the two and I wish I could remember what it was — in all likelihood it was either REO Speedwagon or Hall and Oates, since both bands were nearly permanent residents of the Top 40 back then. Finally Casey cut to the chase, revealed the top song, and, since it had been the one I had been rooting for and I knew it was the one and only time during the entire week I could absolutely know for sure it would be played and I could record it, I pressed play and waited for the song to end as my finger rested on the STOP button with the caution of someone trying to defuse a thermonuclear weapon.
The song was half over when my bedroom door flew open. My dad stood there in the doorway with a big grin on his face and cried out in a comically overenthusiastic voice, “WHAT’S NUMBER ONE??”
My heart stopped.
I calmly pushed the stop button, slowly turned my head to lock eye contact with him and said, in the slowest burn of a voice I had ever dared use with my father before, “I was recording that.”
His eyes opened even wider and he quickly backed out of the room, quietly closing the door behind him as if that was going to make any difference at that point. Later on I heard from my mother that he had sheepishly walked into the kitchen with kind of a smile on his face and said to her, “Boy, if looks could kill.”
So anyway. Years upon years later I was in high school and had moved on from recording off the radio to buying my own vinyl, and Night Ranger, at that time, represented two titles: Their debut album “Dawn Patrol” — featuring the rock radio staple of the time “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me” for the purists out there — and their more successful follow-up “Midnight Madness,” which featured the minor radio hit “You Can Still Rock in America” and the ultimate power ballad of all power ballads, “Sister Christian.”
There was a summer when everything my family did in one way revolved around a community theater production of “The Sound of Music.” Our cousin Sue was playing the lead as Maria, and ended up marrying her leading man Chuck. Erin had a big role in it as one of the Von Trapp children. Jenny had one or two minor roles, just on stage for moments at a time in different costumes, but still a part of the production. Even Dad was involved, playing the role of Baron Elberfeld in one scene, hamming up his one or two lines in what became a signature theatrical voice for him in the years to come as he appeared in a number of other community theater productions.
After the run ended and the summer was over, VHS copies of the play were made for everyone involved, and of course we had one, carefully labeled to make sure nobody accidentally used the tape to record some movie off cable. Several years later my parents hosted a casual dinner party, reuniting some friends involved with the play to watch it together in our basement.
Everything was going great. I was patiently sitting through a recording of a play I had sat through at least five times in person when someone suggested a break when we reached the intermission. Since even back then I was the unofficial tech support go-to in the house, I was asked to stop the tape until everyone was ready to continue. I did, and while everyone was out of the room doing whatever adults did upstairs during a VHS intermission in the mid-1980s, I started flipping through channels to see what else was on to watch while waiting for the crowd to reassemble. MTV would have been one of my go-to networks in high school so I went there first, finding a Night Ranger concert! And they were playing Sister Christian! So yeah, I watched it. Which was only part of the mistake.
As things turned out, I didn’t press stop on the VCR. Which didn’t become evident until everyone was back and I had to press play again, only to discover I had just recorded about five minutes of a Night Ranger concert right over the only VHS copy my family had of the play that three of them had been in. Erin didn’t really care. Jenny had probably been more annoyed by her younger brother pulling another idiot move than anything else, and might have even just labeled it as another of the typical idiot moves of which I was so frighteningly proficient.
Upon discovery, my first reaction, because I was in high school, was to try and think of a way I could finesse my way out of what had happened. That reaction didn’t hold though, because I recognized two truths in that moment: (1) I was unequivocally screwed, because my dad had loved everything about being in that play so much and for me to disgrace that artifact with one of those damned rock videos was tantamount to heresy. Even if it was done accidentally, the damage was done. (2) He was going to discover what happened in front of a room full of people he had invited to his house as guests. There simply was never going to be a better time for me to just come clean about what had happened. It was my only out.
I owned up to it, legitimately contrite. Sue’s now husband Chuck tried to lighten the blow by saying the part I’d recorded over had been boring anyway, which got some laughs and diffused the tension enough to watch the rest, which gave Dad the time to calm down before everyone went home. He was still royally pissed about it, but at least I wasn’t being blamed for anything other than a stupid mistake.
I never saw a connection between these two moments before I sat down to start writing about this, but now I see them as something approaching an almost Karmic parallel. I never would have erased any of the tape intentionally, just as I know Dad hadn’t meant to burst in on my American Top 40 recording session. Neither of us was happy with the end results, but neither of us could blame the other for what had happened.
So, I suppose what I’m saying as a summative statement is this:
Dad, I guess we’re even.
Monday, November 13, 2017
A NaNoWriMo 2017 Teaser
(With Apologies to Chuck Klosterman)
I had long hair once. For about three hours.
It could be argued that I had long hair for somewhere in the neighborhood of five to eight years, but that all depends on your perspective. It didn’t seem long at the time, which would have been somewhere between six and twelfth grades; it just seemed normal. It was never exceptionally long, but that’s just how we wore our hair back in the middle of the 1980s, especially if you were someone like me who had the kind of incessantly curly hair that every stylist to ever point a pair of scissors at my head fawned over, despite how much I hated it. I mean, really, DNA? Had it been asking too much for hair that could be stylishly feathered back like freakin’ every other person in my high school wore theirs?
My go-to stylist during these time was Jan, the woman who did the haircutting for my mother, my sisters, and me for probably all of the early life years spent growing up in Elk River. (My father had been pretty decisively bald by his early 30s, so he only needed my mother to dig out a pair of clippers stored in an old ice cream bucket on the bottom shelf of the bathroom closet every month or two to keep him looking respectable). I got the same cut every time which probably led Jan into thinking I was a fairly easy to satisfy customer, which is why we probably got along as well as we did.
One time, in high school, when she asked her standard haircut preface statement of “You want to do anything different this time?” I impulsively mentioned I might like it a tiny bit longer in the back. I kind of liked it when I could see my hair starting to grow down below my ears just before haircut time was due, and thought it might be cool to try that out as a starting point. Maybe it would even compensate for the fact that I literally had no other options of what to do with that curly brown demon that live on my head.
It turned out that Jan and I had two dramatically different ideas of exactly what “a tiny bit longer in the back” looked like. Basically she mulletted me.
I had never heard the term “mullet” used in reference to a haircut at this point in life — truth be told, I didn’t cross paths with that vocabulary term until Billy Ray Cyrus broke through with “Achy Breaky Heart” and I had asked someone exactly what in the hell he had going on with his hair. When Jan spun me around to see the mirror, I tried to contain my shock. It was a very nice and skillfully-crafted curly hair mullet. It made me look like I could have passed for a saxophone player in Tina Turner’s live band, but it was not at all what I had in mind.
Since I wasn’t the best at self-advocating at this age — a skill I probably didn’t really lock down until my mid-forties — I told her it looked fine. I talked myself into thinking that it was really mostly pretty close to what I wanted, but just a little longer. I’d get used to it. Probably. People would be surprised when they saw it, but that’s how it always was with new haircuts. After a day or two, maybe a week on the outside, they’d get used to it as well and it would just become normal. I should have known enough to put all of those rationalizing thoughts aside as soon as I saw my mother’s wide-eyed reaction. To her credit, she didn’t say anything critical, although she was a teacher and it’s entirely possible she was ready to let me move forward with this Me Decade affectation and see what it would be like down inside the hole I was digging for myself.
I honestly don’t remember if either of my sisters ever saw it. I would have to think at least one of them did, but when we got home I probably went straight to my bedroom, put on some music, and did whatever nerdy things I would have been doing back in those days to pass the time until dinner. That’s when my father would get home from work. That’s when the real reckoning would take place.
I walked out to the table feeling much more sheepish than I tried to look. I took my place opposite my father and began the usual dinner rituals like nothing in the world was the least bit different. When he finally looked up and noticed my haircut, he paused what he was doing only long enough to consider the sight in front of him before uttering a single syllable:
“No.”
I tried to tap into the collective cultural knowledge rock and roll had taught me about rebelling against my parents, but only mustered a half-hearted, “What?” in my defense. Half-hearted because (a) I had absolutely expected that reaction, and (b) I was immediately relieved because of it. He may not have known it at the time, but he was giving me the out I didn’t realize I wanted so badly. I wouldn’t ever have to leave the house and risk anyone seeing me like that, but I had been blessed with the rock-and-roll rite of passage of having my father tell me I had to cut my hair because it was too damn long.
It might have been that very moment, or it might have been after dinner was finished, but it was within the half-hour that my mother had out her home hair clippers kit and had me neatly de-mulletted and ready to be seen in public again. I don’t even think I had put up much of a fight. To this day I believe she completely understood precisely how much of an accidental favor I felt my father had done for me.
Never in my too-damned-close to fifty orbits have I ever lived anything that even closely approximated a rock and roll lifestyle. I’ve never smoked. I’ve never taken any drugs stronger than valium, which was prescribed, and all it did was give me a hopefully short-lived reputation for nodding off during staff development sessions. The amount of alcohol I’ve consumed in my life likely wouldn’t match the liquid volume of a case of beer. I’ve been single my whole life, and the number of women I’ve been involved in with serious, honest-to-God relationships could be counted on one hand.
But that’s just the sex and the drugs. I have always lived and breathed the rock and roll.
Not just rock, though. Rock, pop, alternative, metal, power metal, progressive metal, progressive rock, Christian rock, classical, classic rock, holiday music, show tunes, blues, modern blues, adult contemporary, modern bluegrass, electronic, folk, hip-hop, soul, rap, hardcore rap, soundtracks, scores, easy listening, jazz, punk, power punk, noise pop…the ABCs of music.
And of course, ABC stands for Anything But Country. I’m not denying anyone’s right to listen to and/or enjoy country music, whether it’s the old school Grand Ol’ Opry stuff or the thinly-veiled sexual assault glorifying bro-country of the post-millennial age, but it’s just never been a path I’ve explored, or even found all that compelling. Even if I grew up in what was basically farm country, the only people at my school who even listened to country music were the kids who all worked at McDonald’s and seemed to buy matching t-shirts every time Alabama came back to play at the State Fair. So as much as I hate to fall into the category of cliché, anything but country is all too apt of a descriptor for my musical taste.
I collected records like trading cards, then graduated to cassettes, then stepped into the real future with compact discs, which ended up with digital files both downloaded and streamed. It’s kind of astonishing to stop and think of how so much of the favorite music I’ve had in the past fifteen or so years wouldn’t exist as it does now if not for math.
I didn’t have the long hair, or even the cool hair for that matter, but I wore my way through a constantly-evolving collection of concert t-shirts. I easily spent more time in ninth grade reading album liner notes than I did assigned novels. I was never shy about rolling down the windows while driving through the high school parking lot to let the outside world know what album I had jammed into the cassette player of my parents’ snot-green Mitsubishi subcompact. I spent dozens of hours at the St. Cloud record stores mining the discount bins for the next great surprise album that would help me define my college years. After getting my first desktop computer, I tried to teach myself the how to use the database tool in ClarisWorks by creating a comprehensive listing of the albums in my music library, including with notes and ratings.
So I never needed the long hair to prove to anyone I had the musical bona fides. They were in my blood, and they’d been there for generations, lying dormant and waiting for the right push to be sonically activated.
Which didn’t happen until I reached the ripe old age of seven.
I had long hair once. For about three hours.
It could be argued that I had long hair for somewhere in the neighborhood of five to eight years, but that all depends on your perspective. It didn’t seem long at the time, which would have been somewhere between six and twelfth grades; it just seemed normal. It was never exceptionally long, but that’s just how we wore our hair back in the middle of the 1980s, especially if you were someone like me who had the kind of incessantly curly hair that every stylist to ever point a pair of scissors at my head fawned over, despite how much I hated it. I mean, really, DNA? Had it been asking too much for hair that could be stylishly feathered back like freakin’ every other person in my high school wore theirs?
My go-to stylist during these time was Jan, the woman who did the haircutting for my mother, my sisters, and me for probably all of the early life years spent growing up in Elk River. (My father had been pretty decisively bald by his early 30s, so he only needed my mother to dig out a pair of clippers stored in an old ice cream bucket on the bottom shelf of the bathroom closet every month or two to keep him looking respectable). I got the same cut every time which probably led Jan into thinking I was a fairly easy to satisfy customer, which is why we probably got along as well as we did.
One time, in high school, when she asked her standard haircut preface statement of “You want to do anything different this time?” I impulsively mentioned I might like it a tiny bit longer in the back. I kind of liked it when I could see my hair starting to grow down below my ears just before haircut time was due, and thought it might be cool to try that out as a starting point. Maybe it would even compensate for the fact that I literally had no other options of what to do with that curly brown demon that live on my head.
It turned out that Jan and I had two dramatically different ideas of exactly what “a tiny bit longer in the back” looked like. Basically she mulletted me.
I had never heard the term “mullet” used in reference to a haircut at this point in life — truth be told, I didn’t cross paths with that vocabulary term until Billy Ray Cyrus broke through with “Achy Breaky Heart” and I had asked someone exactly what in the hell he had going on with his hair. When Jan spun me around to see the mirror, I tried to contain my shock. It was a very nice and skillfully-crafted curly hair mullet. It made me look like I could have passed for a saxophone player in Tina Turner’s live band, but it was not at all what I had in mind.
Since I wasn’t the best at self-advocating at this age — a skill I probably didn’t really lock down until my mid-forties — I told her it looked fine. I talked myself into thinking that it was really mostly pretty close to what I wanted, but just a little longer. I’d get used to it. Probably. People would be surprised when they saw it, but that’s how it always was with new haircuts. After a day or two, maybe a week on the outside, they’d get used to it as well and it would just become normal. I should have known enough to put all of those rationalizing thoughts aside as soon as I saw my mother’s wide-eyed reaction. To her credit, she didn’t say anything critical, although she was a teacher and it’s entirely possible she was ready to let me move forward with this Me Decade affectation and see what it would be like down inside the hole I was digging for myself.
I honestly don’t remember if either of my sisters ever saw it. I would have to think at least one of them did, but when we got home I probably went straight to my bedroom, put on some music, and did whatever nerdy things I would have been doing back in those days to pass the time until dinner. That’s when my father would get home from work. That’s when the real reckoning would take place.
I walked out to the table feeling much more sheepish than I tried to look. I took my place opposite my father and began the usual dinner rituals like nothing in the world was the least bit different. When he finally looked up and noticed my haircut, he paused what he was doing only long enough to consider the sight in front of him before uttering a single syllable:
“No.”
I tried to tap into the collective cultural knowledge rock and roll had taught me about rebelling against my parents, but only mustered a half-hearted, “What?” in my defense. Half-hearted because (a) I had absolutely expected that reaction, and (b) I was immediately relieved because of it. He may not have known it at the time, but he was giving me the out I didn’t realize I wanted so badly. I wouldn’t ever have to leave the house and risk anyone seeing me like that, but I had been blessed with the rock-and-roll rite of passage of having my father tell me I had to cut my hair because it was too damn long.
It might have been that very moment, or it might have been after dinner was finished, but it was within the half-hour that my mother had out her home hair clippers kit and had me neatly de-mulletted and ready to be seen in public again. I don’t even think I had put up much of a fight. To this day I believe she completely understood precisely how much of an accidental favor I felt my father had done for me.
Never in my too-damned-close to fifty orbits have I ever lived anything that even closely approximated a rock and roll lifestyle. I’ve never smoked. I’ve never taken any drugs stronger than valium, which was prescribed, and all it did was give me a hopefully short-lived reputation for nodding off during staff development sessions. The amount of alcohol I’ve consumed in my life likely wouldn’t match the liquid volume of a case of beer. I’ve been single my whole life, and the number of women I’ve been involved in with serious, honest-to-God relationships could be counted on one hand.
But that’s just the sex and the drugs. I have always lived and breathed the rock and roll.
Not just rock, though. Rock, pop, alternative, metal, power metal, progressive metal, progressive rock, Christian rock, classical, classic rock, holiday music, show tunes, blues, modern blues, adult contemporary, modern bluegrass, electronic, folk, hip-hop, soul, rap, hardcore rap, soundtracks, scores, easy listening, jazz, punk, power punk, noise pop…the ABCs of music.
And of course, ABC stands for Anything But Country. I’m not denying anyone’s right to listen to and/or enjoy country music, whether it’s the old school Grand Ol’ Opry stuff or the thinly-veiled sexual assault glorifying bro-country of the post-millennial age, but it’s just never been a path I’ve explored, or even found all that compelling. Even if I grew up in what was basically farm country, the only people at my school who even listened to country music were the kids who all worked at McDonald’s and seemed to buy matching t-shirts every time Alabama came back to play at the State Fair. So as much as I hate to fall into the category of cliché, anything but country is all too apt of a descriptor for my musical taste.
I collected records like trading cards, then graduated to cassettes, then stepped into the real future with compact discs, which ended up with digital files both downloaded and streamed. It’s kind of astonishing to stop and think of how so much of the favorite music I’ve had in the past fifteen or so years wouldn’t exist as it does now if not for math.
I didn’t have the long hair, or even the cool hair for that matter, but I wore my way through a constantly-evolving collection of concert t-shirts. I easily spent more time in ninth grade reading album liner notes than I did assigned novels. I was never shy about rolling down the windows while driving through the high school parking lot to let the outside world know what album I had jammed into the cassette player of my parents’ snot-green Mitsubishi subcompact. I spent dozens of hours at the St. Cloud record stores mining the discount bins for the next great surprise album that would help me define my college years. After getting my first desktop computer, I tried to teach myself the how to use the database tool in ClarisWorks by creating a comprehensive listing of the albums in my music library, including with notes and ratings.
So I never needed the long hair to prove to anyone I had the musical bona fides. They were in my blood, and they’d been there for generations, lying dormant and waiting for the right push to be sonically activated.
Which didn’t happen until I reached the ripe old age of seven.
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