Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Fire pareidolia is the current conversation. Smoking skulls and charred logs. Add or subtract some wood but just keep it blazing. It mustn't go out for at least two more days.

 I stayed up too late but don't regret it. I lie here in my bunk listening to the birds and think about the endless hummingbird battle, the logs on the crackling fire, the endless discussion. I'm rolling back over and sleeping some more.

 The fire pit hisses in the scattered rain. Dark drops crash against uprooted spruce, As I take respite in the fire away from the frantic talk. An Afghan Whigs album on the turntable struggles  To rise above the bustle and hiss. The river beckons. I must hover.

Sitting on the rock dock, that was hauled here by horses long ago, I try to avoid dangling modifiers, escaped adjectives, the fishy river smell, the dreams of my cabin youth. Dragonflies in a mating dance strafe my upturned face, promising me a contemplative future, the expected narratives of cabin summers, the expectancy that a bald eagle will break my revery.  Cold, iron-stained water covers my toes as I wade into the shallow water, avoiding jagged rocks and crayfish,  heading for deeper pockets, floating between granite obstacles. I submerge my body deep in the cloistered, silent water, on the sandy river bed, imagining the walleyes swimming by my head, and rock bass ignoring my presence. I rest here, sloughing off the cares, finding my own private Bethlehem as Joan Didion might, in the less brackish deep. I hover.

Stung by mosquitoes that are driven by bloodlust I sit in the outhouse of undeniable redoubt Please give me this boon, the living of the senses A sensory world that never fades I lose my voice, amidst the bullfrog croak Greenery and tree root, the slap of tail on water 

Snow on spruce boughs, The second coming of a rabbit Disrupts the morning silence I think of you asleep miles away In clouded memories of fog Here in the snowy north, The temperature dropped to negative 25 Even the birds are silent, But the spruces still contemplate our Tiny backyard, unaware of our plights.

When I was a kid, I played a lot of video games and generally listened to oldies music while I played. A few years later, I became a music junky and started buying CDs, but at that time, radio stations that my peers were not listening to were perfect. I have some constant, nagging (too strong a word) memories. There are specific memories that stand out. One of these took place on a stormy summer night. I was listening to oldies radio and playing Batman: The Video Game , which I had rented from Park Video. I rented so many games over the years, until after high school, when I virtually stopped playing. To be fair, playing the video game is a memory that should not have stuck with me, but it is there, a fragment of more innocent times.  My memory is hazy, and I don't remember any of the songs, but I do remember bits and pieces of the game. Batman could leap from wall to wall, and one of the weapons was a batarang. It was an average sidescroller, but it was not as hard as Battletoa...

I rub my sleepy eyes and clean the last dishes. My week at the cabin is over, and I slowly pack the car. I'll be back in a few days when I will have to say bye for another year. The river is low again, but the grass is green, and the day is cool. More rain is in the forecast. I take a deep breath, lock the door, and move on.

I have only experienced recurring dreams once. When I was a kid, and remembered my dreams with more frequency, and in greater detail, I had a dream that kept coming back for a few weeks. It was very detailed, and in hindsight, I'm not sure if it was exactly the same, but it had many of the same features. I  remember being confused that I kept having it because it never had before. One funny thing about memory is that you believe something happened in a specific way, and it might not have. Remembering a dream is even more challenging because nobody but you remembers it, so you cannot ask them if it really happened that way.  Visually, the dream was striking, memorable, and very strange. It was like I was trapped in a Scooby-Doo episode, except the animation was crisper and more bizarre than the Hanna-Barbera cartoon. There were two witches that looked like they had escaped from The Wizard of Oz that flitted in and out and a sled race that led me back to the beginning of the dr...

Sometimes I wonder why I write since I seem to be running into more roadblocks these days. I put many hours into a project even though it might never reach fruition due to someone else's disinterest or rejection. Worse yet, I might never finish the project because I am tired or do not know how to complete it. The obstacles keep mounting whether they are external, such as committee meetings or more papers to grade, or internal, especially self-doubt and inability to commit to ideas. I seldom have writer's block, but I often lack the commitment to do the hard work of editing or revising.  Writing is a commitment that sometimes feels too much like a compulsion because I often find myself writing when I should be relaxing. I want to write in my free time, but I also want to sleep, watch television, or listen to music. Instead, I try to push through, but my job and other commitments have made it increasingly hard to do so. There are only so many hours in a day is a truism that does ...

When I was in high school, my friends and I used to play pool in my basement. We listened to music and imagined ourselves out of that tiny town, although I do not think any of us had the audacity to picture ourselves as pool sharks, hustling townies for their paychecks. More or less, we imagined ourselves fully grown and living a life that did not include lockers and gym class. The Stray Cats' Built For Speed was one of my favorite albums at the time. I played it countless times during our pool sessions. I vividly remember Brian Setzer's cool vocals rising above the sound of breaks, miscues, and arguments over the kitchen and the granny stick. When I hear the hits, "Rock This Town" and "Stray Cat Strut" on classic rock radio, I always picture that damp basement and group of guys; most of us still hang out from time to time, but I think I'm the only one that regularly spins the Stray Cats. However, my favorite tracks from that album, which were on...

There are days when I feel like I have told the same story to numerous people multiple times because I cannot stop dwelling on it. I have always struggled with letting things go. People tell me that I am too sensitive and that I just need to let things go. I battle with trying to forget the small injustices from twenty years ago, blaming others for being mean to me when they barely remember doing it. I think I tell stories to try to reorder my life and take control of situations that I cannot control. Of course, my inability to stop dwelling does not account for how I start forgetting minor details and adding others after years of telling stories. We all do this because memory is fallible and people like to entertain. The process of understanding what has happened to us throughout the years is hard to comprehend and understand, especially for those of us who have difficulty not dwelling on every detail. We blame others for the minor bumps in the road and we blame ourselves for im...

My memories of the first place I lived are fuzzy. I remember orange carpeting and brown walls in the trailer my parents rented the first three years of my life before we moved into the house on 6th Avenue that they still live in thirty years later. I remember a car my mom drove a few years later when she first got her license a little better. It was a tan sedan, a nondescript Ford or Mercury model with leather seats that smelled vaguely of cigarette smoke and oil, making my young mind think of the piles of dog poop soured by age that sat in the back yard of my parent's home until we got around to cleaning them up. I cannot remember if most of these experiences were truly real. I know that car was because I was around seven years old when my mother finally learned to drive. She had a series of cars that came from my grandfather's Ford dealership. Later she got her own, but my grandpa drove cars from his garage my entire life; they too smelled of cigarette smoke and old oil. ...

As spring turns to summer, I often feel old as I remember all of the summers I have spent lazily reading comics and fiction or watching television when I know that I should be writing. Of course, I also spend time outside, usually bicycling, walking, or swimming. These days, however, I generally feel too warm as the humidity and temperature creep up to a shocking eighty degrees. There were many summers where I spent time fishing or running down the sidewalks of my old neighborhood, tripping over the roots of tired trees that lined the walk. One year a friend and I shamefully rode our bikes into sapling poplar trees, leaving black, oozing marks on their trunks. Last time I checked there was only one of those trees left, still battle scarred and defiant. The tree is thirty feet tall now, but its trunk is gnarled and shrunken from our youthful transgressions. Another time I rode my bicycle into a nearby water-filled ditch to avoid bees that were chasing me. They still stung me, and it...

The snow is piling up outside even though it is April, and I am sitting in my office procrastinating. I think of winters past, that time of year when it gets so very dark out and the creepy, childhood monsters seem to be waiting at your door. I would get off the school bus and run through the short space between the street and my house like I was afraid. The lights were bright in the house and there was spaghetti on the stove. The family would sit down to eat and discuss the events of the day. I played batman video games and listened to oldies radio. Perhaps, I drank some hot chocolate. Now I work and think about that hot chocolate. Tonight when I go home, I hope it won't seem that dark, but I bet the hot chocolate will be just as good.

I've been trying to write more. For the past year, I have mostly been working on my doctoral dissertation on true crime and little else. Every once in a while I work on the ongoing novel or a poem or a short story. I write a daily to-do list that always contains a blog post along with job applications, abstracts, and the perpetual expected pages of revision. I seldom get to it, but I usually finish about half of my list. Today I am working on procrastination by listening to a live Drive-by Truckers set from Charlotte in 2004. It is pretty damn good in short. Maybe I will get around to reviewing it one of these days. In preparation for this post, I looked through my pictures because I hoped that I could blog about some outdoor photos I took. No such luck today. A shortage of funds and time has kept me indoors, slaving away over text I wrote a year ago and sending in abstracts to journals that will undoubtedly reject them. But that is the life. I will be posting some pictures soon ...

"At night, the murmur of traffic sounds just like the wind rushing through the pines up in the Sierra. As white noise goes, it's not bad." -- Timothy Ereneta on living in Oakland Ca., Oatmeal 1, 1992. Place is an important element in shaping lives. The sound of a freight train traveling through night air, the awkward hesitancy of a taxi cab horn in the darkening twilight, a child crying in the corner of the room at recess. All of these instances can shape and define us. The glimmering hope from behind the wall of all too slippery time. Growing up in Northern Wisconsin gave me a particular perspective about place. Shaped by smoke stacks and pine trees, the hum of snowmobiles in the winter months riding past our orange house on 6th avenue, the buzz and creak of bullfrogs of burgeoning summer days, the quiet of the woods and the suggestive sound of cooing mourning doves. All of these altered my thoughts and ideas. I grew up disliking my hometown for all the wrong rea...

The past looms on the back of a record sleeve. Labels, such as, Lookout, Epitaph, even Bomp, cryptically allowing for years of wasted moments. The times that your finger tips traced the edge of an LP or slammed your fist against fragile drywall. You marveled at the pictures on the back of each sleeve, somehow they were more real than your own family members. They spoke through each lyric, each guitar line, each drum fill, each chord change -- so goddamn directly to you. A slipped power pop backbone, a hardcore frustration, a mod moment, a Dischord emo relapse. The emotions bubbled over into a potent stew of remembrance and forget, lost in transition as the records and years slipped quietly away. They were replaced by other records, other ideas. But the intent is the same, a slipping away into the night, a creative outlet or an escape from yourself and the world. The past looms on the back of a record sleeve, as surely as the present looms in the smile lines of your face -- a crow's...

The other day when I was writing the "Track This" for Jawbox's "Cooling Card," something jogged my memory about music magazines I had read in my formative years, particularly those published while I was still in High School. Many, if not most, of them are gone now. They gave way to blogs and online publications. These include zines like Flipside , which covered mainstream and underground bands -- they also had some of my favorite columnists of all time, Punk Planet , which ventured further into Indie rock as it progressed, and MRR , which is still going strong. The magazines that I read often included Alternative Press and Magnet , as well as Ray Gun Publishing's huH which turned me on to a ton of great music because it included a cd with each issue that served as a sampler for what had been released that month, divided by genre. While other magazines did this, huH undoubtedly was more inclusive in the types of bands these cds covered. In fact, these col...

I woke up this morning with the lyrics to Helmet's "Unsung" in my head. At first, I couldn't place it -- images and lyrics are sometimes like a repository for past memories. Listening to a record album can remind you that it once served as a soundtrack for a whole summer, reading a novel can lead to memories of one summer, for example, recalling an afternoon shortly after you turned sixteen, watching an old tv show can dish up old memories of distant relatives you haven't seen for years. Like dreams, sensory experiences often dredge up the past, reminders of forgotten friends or people that were not thought of in a decade, the color of the wallpaper at your grandmother's house, or other small instances lost forever in the memory banks. Song snippets and lyrics are especially prime vehicles of uncommon remembrance, at least for me. Periods of my life are categorized through soundtracks. I sometimes can even tell you what I was listening to during a ...