Moments before my first stroke, the first bad one, I was overcome by the smell of waffles and hot syrup, a real olfactory wallop, that starchy essence of seared batter and the sharp carbon zing of scalded sugar. I was sitting at my desk doing nothing special after the Tuesday morning staff meeting, and, bang, there it was. Waffles. And syrup.

I probably haven’t eaten a waffle in forty years. Fifty. Pancakes, either. I never ate like that. Even as a kid, I was a careful eater. I’d eat a bowl of Wheaties or an apple. My father would make waffles, that was his thing, he had about forty minutes of fatherhood a week in him, and he used it up on Sunday mornings, making waffles. He left us when I was eight. My daughter’s like me, a poached egg would be a big deal. Most days, especially toward the end, after Marjorie and me finally called it quits, I got by on a cup of coffee, black, and a Power Bar. Now, of course, it’s a mouthful of juice from one of these devious single-serving containers the nurse has to peel open for me, and a spoonful or two of creamed wheat.

But that smell of waffles, it was so intense; it was like two poles connected by an electrical current over a vast distance, the air cleared by a powerful crackling charge, and then I was on my knees, wedged sideways between desk and chair, stunned and shivering, seeing so suddenly and clearly all the years that have passed while I haven’t done a thing.

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American Goldfinch

You can’t trust a finch. It’s a songbird. A master of the bait-and-switch. Everything they say is a lie. Always there’s the hidden agenda, the shit they think you don’t know about. If there’s one part of this job that tires me out, it’s the people who come in here thinking they’re smarter than I am. Like I ain’t seen it all. The stop payments. The car in the sister’s name. The guy they know who knows a guy in the prosecutor’s office. Stolen credit cards. A lot of people, they’re better off in a cell. Keeps ‘em out of trouble. I run a mostly cash business. It’s easier that way.

Snowy Egret

Always a flight risk. Anything migratory like this, anything that calls two places home, it just raises questions. Also, a bird like this, there’s temperament to factor in. A high-strung bird is an unpredictable bird. Unpredictable is anathema in my business. Yeah, anathema. Sometimes I get straight arrows in here, guys just walked into their first heap of shit in their lives. Maybe somebody got hurt in a DWI. Or a shady investment went bad. These people, they got cash, they got collateral up the ass, but they got mobility. Worse, they have no knowledge of the system. They’re subject to irrational fear. Like I said, they’re a flight risk. They’re a boom-or-bust proposition. Most of ‘em, if they do flee, they ain’t too hard to find. Life ain’t like the movies. It’s hard for an amateur to hide.

Osprey

Now we’re talking. The osprey. The fish hawk. The eye in the fucking sky. In nature, you got your prey and you got your predator. An osprey won’t eat squirrels or rats or voles. It just eats fish. It’s specialized. It’s half a mile up and it sees the fish in the sea. Nothing is invisible to it. It’s nature’s bounty hunter. I got two people I work with. Two of the best. They’re like night and day. Dmitry is Russian, he’s got the big arms, the tattoos, the voice like a megaphone. He’s so big, he doesn’t have to worry about fights. Nobody wants to get into it with him. He’s armed like a fucking Transformer. One on the hip, one in the boot, that I know about. Smash and grab. Georgy is a Romanian. He looks like an accountant, like any guy off the street. No muss, no fuss. No scene. He’s on you before you know it; he’s in your head. He’s like a cobra. One second you’re on a log, thinking your mousy thoughts, the next second you’re in the cobra’s belly, wondering what the hell happened. Good guys, Dmitry and Georgy. I tell people, don’t bother doing anything dumb. You don’t want any Dmitry and Georgy trouble. Almost always, they listen.

Northern Cardinal

The female cardinal is an enabler of the worst sort. Whenever you see a bright red cardinal in a bush, helping itself to all the best berries, that’s the male cardinal. When you see a male cardinal, look several feet to the left or right and you’ll see a drab, dingy gray bird on a branch. That’s the female. The female isn’t eating. It’s just waiting, because the male will feed it beak-to-beak, when it’s damn good and ready. Cardinals mate for life. The female builds the nest and incubates the eggs. The male cardinal is the shit and it knows it. It’s amazing how nature works. I get guys in here, they don’t have a pot to piss in. They got an arrest record, pages of tiny print like a Racing Form. Never had a job, never will have one. Wake and bake, deal some weed, shake down bitches for money. And they got, like, harems, of these beaten-down chicks, following them around. Nothing to look at, for the most part, but still. Baby mommas and girlfriends. All bickering over one shiftless shitheel like he’s something worth having, with his fucking nasty grill and three outstanding warrants for unpaid child support. Nature works in mysterious ways. It don’t make sense.

Laughing Gull

Because regular gulls aren’t annoying enough. Seriously, they’re a real thing. Laughing Gull. You got your White-Headed Gull, your Black-Backed Gull, and your Laughing Gull. Gulls are rats with wings. They exist at a level where you can’t do anything to help them. When I’m on the beach and I see a kid throw a corn chip in the air, I want to go over there and punch his dad in the face. One corn chip earns you thirty minutes of gull screaming and half a quart of gull shit all over everything. Gulls have no shame. They steal from each other. They steal from family. There’s a whole class of people, can’t even get in my office door. They have nothing. No cash, no credit, no collateral, no hope. Nothing. You can get to the end of things, and there’s nowhere to go but down.

Pine Warbler

Just what it sounds like. A nuisance. Sitting on a branch, always got something to say. Some birds are just like people. They always have a reason. Oh, I had a hearing? I din’t know. That cellphone, I din’t have no more time on it. I ain’t at that address no more. My bitch, she kick me out. We re-schedule, right? I got this new phone, it’s cool, I be on time. Every fucking day, a different reason. They are impervious to sense.  All they got is tweet, tweet, tweet. Look, Paco, you got issued a fucking bench warrant. You know what that means? Oh, my kid, she been sick, we can’t get no medicine. Around and around, it never ends.

Red-Tailed Hawk

Regal as fuck. Top of the food chain. Any species–birds, people, fucking chipmunks–you have your rabble and you have your gold standard. I had a guy, his name was literally that. Hawk. Import/export, had a storefront on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, in the 20s, when you could still do business there. Had his troubles with the authorities, the way you will in that field of endeavor. Little beefs. Counterfeit designer goods. Money laundering. Warehousing stolen goods. Cops were always chipping away at him. I never had a moment’s trouble with him. He paid his bills; he paid ‘em on time. He was where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there. There’s a simple dignity in that. Never spent a night in a cell until they got him for tax evasion. Seven to ten, he died of a stroke six months in. Some birds can’t live in a cage.

Anyway, enough about birds, I got my nut to make, same as anybody.

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Your host, in his unfortunate "Inspector Clouseau Period"

Justice League of Hollywood

By day they ply their exalted trade as thespians on the world stage, embodying the hopes and dreams of their legions of fans. But when the sound stages go dark and the catering packs up, a select few of the Hollywood elite, endowed with otherworldly powers beyond the ken of common folk, take to the night streets of Hollywood and Beverly Hills (or around the world, as location shooting permits), righting wrongs and battling the forces of evil. George Clooney is Synergio, master of the ancient art of strategic personal branding and wielder of the Knowing Smirk. Gwyneth Paltrow is Hype, able to raise or lower the Q rating of any person on earth, using only the super-kinetic powers of her mind. Taylor Kitsch is Unsealio, capable of opening all manner of  balky condiment jars, child-safe prescription containers and molded plastic anti-theft packaging, with only his bare hands. Blake Lively is Beardra, who, with her all-powerful Penumbra of Femininity, is able to provide even the most transparently gay action-movie hunks with plausible heterosexual romantic cover. Together with Zooey Deschanel as Sophistra, Elf Queen of the Elegant #Humblebrag, this alliance of A-list celebrity superstars faces its greatest challenge when an Iranian terrorist splinter cell, financed by the Saudi royal family, attempts to hijack the western world’s stockpiles of Botox and human growth hormone. Will the Justice League of Hollywood triumph? Or will the world’s unrealistic standards of beauty be compromised?

A Race Against Time

See, there’s this guy, he’s a physicist, but way out there on the cosmological fringe, tinkering with theories of special and general relativity, gravitational singularities and such, I won’t get into it except to say it’s totally possible and involves theories of space-time dilation, but anyway, he invents a Time Machine. But the thing is, it turns out that the world’s history is basically hundreds and hundreds of millions of years of not that much, you know? I mean, virtually all of it is inaccessible to the Time Traveler because the atmosphere is mostly CO2, or there’s inland seas or glaciers popping up everywhere. Even if you get a patch of land going, a frigging passing dragonfly is the major event of the week. Human history is a fraction of an eyeblink in time, and even most of that is pretty much empty grass fields of nothing, with occasionally a couple of people sitting on a log, smoking stinky pipes and complaining about the food. It doesn’t take the physicist long to discover that all of human civilization on earth amounts to about 6,000 years, give or take, then a rapid die-off followed by umpteen million years of more seas and glaciers, a handful of inconsequential rodents, then a long, gradually increasing aridity and increase of temperature until the earth is engulfed by the dying sun. So anyway, the physicist eventually moves the Time Machine out to the garage, puts a tarp over it, and takes a tenured job at UC Santa Barbara.

Launch Codes of the Heart

She was just a small-town girl, working as a communications specialist at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. He was an Air Force Lt. Colonel, one of a handful of men entrusted with the keys to unleash Armageddon. And though she had long ago hardened the launch silo of her heart against the tactical first strike of love, her strategic defenses were no match for a hero who surely possessed the launch codes of her heart. But even as their budding romance goes operational and swiftly escalates toward DEFCON3, global hostilities in the Persian Gulf region rise to a fever pitch, US forces are placed on high alert … hmmm? What? Oh, come on, honey, you never heard of Love On An Elevator? I was just thinking … what? I was just … well that’s hardly … okay, okay! Fine! Jesus Fucking Christ, who do I have to blow around here to get five fucking pages of my novel read? Do you know how much these symposium things cost? No, of course you don’t, Mr. Big Cheese Literary Agent with your fucking fancy nametag! No I will not be quiet! This is all a money-making scam anyway! Go ahead! Fine! Call security! See if I care!

Ranger Danger

Someone is feeding the foxes of Grand Island State Park. Once these proud omnivorous mammals of the Canidae family lived according to the age-old laws of tooth and claw. But now every Triscuit, every Cheez-It, every Twizzler makes the fox a little softer, a little tamer, a little less able to fend for itself in the somewhat-mostly-wild confines of Grand Island. Ranger Dale Perkins has seen it all in his years as an officer of the National Park Service. The heedless depredations of hordes of ignorant tourists. The contempt for the natural order of things. The misguided lack of respect for rangers who, in many states, are vested with some provisional powers of law enforcement. But now he’s drawing a line in the estuarial silt. He won’t stand by and do nothing while the fox is robbed of his natural birthright. Ranger Dale, along with his trusted ally Shaniqwa, a summer temp worker assigned to the noon-to-6pm shift at the Field B concession stand, engage in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with the visitors to Grand Island. A battle of wits in which Ranger Dale must rely on his own fox-like cunning to prevail over those who would trample the last frontiers of wilderness and tip the very balance of Nature out of equilibrium.

Be Your Own Thing

What we’re looking to do is expand the Be Your Own Thing phenomenon beyond the parameters of strictly social media and online buzz and establish penetration into other formats. I mean, down the road, we’re looking at couture for young girls, age seven to thirteen, we’re looking at product placement in youth-oriented film and TV. We’ve got a Be Your Own Thing band/TV show awaiting a green light for development at Disney, we’re this close. But for right now, we’re advancing a Stage Two expansion into books and an MMO gaming experience. Obviously, for our purposes, today, we’re here to talk about books. Kids love books, am I right? With our established social media platform, we’ve got the ear of kids, literally millions of them by way of Twitter, Facebook, our network of affiliated Tumblr and Pinterest accounts, plus … the what? The book? Well, it’s a Be Your Own Thing book. With the Be Your Own Thing brand. The story? Oh, the story! Well, we’ll get a writer for that.

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It was a March day in 2002, one of those hard, cold, gusty afternoons that tasted acrid and coppery in your mouth and reminded you that spring—real spring—was still a ways away.

The trip from Edison back to Monmouth County was all ugly highway, Route 287 east into the maze of on- and off-ramps around the Raritan River toll-road exchanges, then south on the Garden State Parkway. The traffic was typically bumper-to-bumper for miles during the afternoon rush, the roadside a war zone of cast-off vehicular junk and a winter’s worth of crusty white snowmelt dust. The back-up at the foot of the Driscoll Bridge, in which all of the southbound 287 traffic flow was forced to merge into a single access lane, was always particularly hellish.

And so this might have been a Wednesday or a Thursday in March, long into the week but not at the finish line, long into the winter but not yet at the end. The five o’clock sun lingering pale and dingy on the horizon, begrudging its warmth. I was working in the advertising department at an electronics retailer called The Wiz that winter, a low-paying job I’d taken the previous March when I was at a loose end. It was a terrible job, but I wouldn’t be suffering in it much longer. The Wiz had declared bankruptcy in December and would be laying me off on March 31st. I was looking forward to taking my scant four weeks severance and leaving. I was in a something of a career funk, you might say.

There were two ways to approach the Driscoll Bridge. You could zoom up the fast lane of 287, then divebomb across three lanes of traffic and try to cut into the bridge queue, triggering a cacophony of outraged horn blaring. Or you could get at the back of the snail’s-pace queue and endure the long wait. Both methods were infuriating and futile. On this day, I was one of the sheep, and it took me half an hour to get from Exit One on 287 to the top of the bridge. That’s where the car in front of me stopped and its hazard lights started winking.

There was no breakdown lane on the bridge, in those days before the most-recent expansion. To partially alleviate the nightmarish daily back-ups, the Parkway Authority had converted the road shoulder to an extra travel lane. So I was stopped dead in that lane, stupidly jammed up on the bumper of the car in front of me, with another car on my rear bumper. Jesus fuck, I thought, what now? I snapped on my left blinker and sized up the traffic in the next lane, looking for an unlikely gap that I wouldn’t be able to utilize anyway until I could reverse several feet.

When I faced forward again, I saw that a middle-aged woman had gotten out of the car. She was wearing a camouflage vest, a shabby, well-worn thing with a polyester outer shell, like a hunter would wear, and a knit cap pulled down tight over her forehead and ears. I say she was middle-aged, but really she could have been any age between thirty-five and fifty-five, it seems to me now. Her hair was short and she walked stooped over, looking down at her scurrying feet, her shoulders up around her ears, so I couldn’t see much of her face.

She walked quickly around the front of her car, some kind of economy sedan, a Dodge maybe or a Saturn in some indistinguishable color, and I thought, She’s going to wait on the little raised margin by the railing. For a cop to come along. The woman stepped up onto the margin and grasped the iron railing in both hands. Then she hopped up so her midsection lay across the top of the rail and swung one leg up and over. She shifted her weight and pulled her other leg over, then turned and stepped off into space. She was gone.

She didn’t cling to the railing and look down. She didn’t pause to take one last look at the sky, the distant horizon, the shitty six lanes of southbound traffic, the world she was leaving. She just turned, released the rail, and took that one step.

I put my own flashers on and got out of my car. I went to the railing and looked down. I know now, from Googling it, that it’s about 135 feet down to the water. It seemed like a long way. The bridge was vibrating under the accumulated weight of a thousand or so idling vehicles; the frigid, dry wind was pressing at my back. The woman was floating, motionless, face down, on the surface of the Raritan River.

This juncture of the Raritan, at the mouth of Raritan Bay, is a desolate place. On the Middlesex County side, there’s a large Hess Oil storage facility, massive round tanks squatting in rows along the shore, and hundreds of shipping containers stacked up on acres of asphalt. On the Monmouth County side, there’s a couple of big abandoned brick factories and a vast expanse of poisonous-looking marshland. The water is a brown fetid soup, with no detectable current.

A guy in a Jeep had pulled out of the adjoining lane and into the now empty space in front of the woman’s car. He got out and joined me at the rail. “She just jumped over the side,” he said.

A woman in a business suit came up to us from the car behind mine. “Oh my God,” she said. “Where did he go? He didn’t just …” She peered over the side, careful to keep her coat off the filthy rail. “Is he moving?”

“She,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

She wasn’t moving. She was just floating, face down.

This was ten years ago this March, long enough ago that none of us, clustered there at the rail, had a cellphone. The traffic was crawling past us, some people leaning on their horns, others looking us over curiously, no one aware, it seemed, that someone had just jumped off the bridge.

So there was nothing to do but hang onto the cold iron rail and look down and wait for a police car or someone with a phone to show up. All that distance below us, the woman bobbed on the water, her arms and legs outstretched as if she were still flying, and I remember thinking at the time that she looked oddly exultant.

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“This isn’t flying. It’s falling with style.”

                                          –Buzz Lightyear

Age 21: Look at you! You’re an adult. Congratulations, you’re on the clock.

Age 22: “I just ousted @TipsyTina69 as mayor of Purple Gator Bar & Grill on @foursquare!”

Age 23: A song/poem/story/painting/playlist you created no longer functions as an acceptable gift for your girlfriend.

Age 24: “This is just a temporary thing, until I figure out what I really want to do with my life.”

Age 25: Missing a day’s work because you went out with your friends and got shitfaced stops being funny.

Age 26: Vacation destinations you can cross off your list: Cancun, Amsterdam, any trip or tour that involves a backpack.

Age 27: Things you can no longer have in your apartment, even in an ironic sense: A futon that you sleep on. Mismatched dishes. A roommate.

Age 28: You will never again walk into a bar and pick up a chick based solely and entirely on how hot you are. Also over: any drink served in a vial, test tube or girl’s navel.

Age 29: That temporary thing you were doing, while keeping your options open? It’s your thing now. The window for a radical career change is closed, unless you’re going to do something weird like become a hospice attendant or a Sea Org Scientologist.

Age 30: The first two items you’ve crossed off your “Essential Qualities in a Perfect Husband” are: A) Has a full head of hair and B) Has a nice car.

Age 31: Dude, put your shirt back on.

Age 32: If it’s not in a frame, don’t put it on the wall.

Age 33: Jesus Christ got out at 33. His timing was impeccable.

Age 34: You’ve lost that “first step.” You’re standing in right field during the company softball game and you see the ball come off the bat and your brain flashes a signal to your feet, That’s off to your left and deep. But nothing happens. Your feet don’t move for one second, two seconds, and then there’s nothing to do but go get the ball where it’s rolling to a stop at the fence.

Age 35: “I’m sorry, sir. The club’s at capacity right now. If you could just … they’re invited guests, sir. If you could just … Sir? Yes, behind the rope. Thank you, sir.”

Age 36: You can stop calling it a “starter home” now. It’s your home.

Age 37: The remaining two items on your “Essential Qualities in a Perfect Husband” list are: P) Has a sense of humor, and Q) Has no criminal record.

Age 38: Does the reunion coordinator of your high school graduating class have your correct address? Really? Why?

Age 39: No one cares about your taste in music.

Age 40: ”I’ve heard that Brad Pitt gets growth hormone therapy. You think that stuff works?”

Age 41: Events at which you are no longer welcome: A) The office happy hour, B) Any bachelor’s party, anywhere, C) Speed dating.

Age 42: It’s not all about how you wear your hat. In fact, take it off. You look like an ass.

Age 43: You’ve now completed the transition from “ladies’ man” to “commitment-phobic” to “confirmed bachelor” to “probably gay.”

Age 44: “Will you please stop calling me Sir?”

Age 45: Professionally speaking, you’re at the top of your game now in terms of knowledge and productivity, which means your company is essentially done with you. In interoffice mail terms, you’re now a Cc: When you slip to Bcc: keep an empty cardboard box near your desk.

Age 46: You’re too old to die tragically young.

Age 47: “You have a blog? Really. Isn’t that funny. You know, I always thought that was a kid thing, like, how do they say it? Tweeting?”

Age 48: Vacations to exotic locales are now much more likely to involve a bus and a tour guide, rather than a Vespa and a picnic basket.

Age 49: Actually, no, your kids won’t find that interesting.

Age 50: Mail’s here! Hey, look, your AARP card arrived. Congratulations, you’re dead.

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1. Sally has 3 apples, Shawna has an organically grown grapefruit, Molly has a new Powerpuff Girls pencil case, and Madison’s dad is in substance abuse rehab for the 3rd time in two years. If we assume that your former best-friend Riley has not invited you to her 12th-birthday party (at which, just, everyone else is invited) and you drop Drama Club in favor of getting high with your boyfriend Jayden for most of high school junior year, calculate the rate of change (z) in the encroachment of despair, given that (x) is an essentially useless $200,000 degree in art history from UPenn and (y) is a long-standing and undiagnosed eating disorder.

2. Arrange the following elements according to atomic weight, from smallest to greatest:

a) Radium
b) Helium
c) The inadvisability of mixing Adderall, Ecstasy, and 2 glasses of chardonnay
d) Fluorine
e) The chances of that asshole Kevin posting that photo of you to Is Anyone Up?
f) Germanium
g) The fact that Leah is fucking the Iranian TA in exchange for an A in this class

3. It can be argued that a narrative tension arises in Pride And Prejudice between Austen’s impulse, on the one hand, to mock social conventions (as when Elizabeth arrives at Netherfield with muddy skirts), and defend them (as in Elizabeth’s stern censure of Lydia for eloping with Wickham). To what extent does the “happy ending,” earned in large part by the restoration of societal convention, conflict with Austen’s underlying message? Or does it even matter, given that everyone knows the senile old farts in the Academy will vote Best Picture every time for any upper-crusty film about aristocrats with Brit accents? Likewise, is your sympathy for Elizabeth undermined by the fact that Keira Knightley (Oscar nom’d as Elizabeth in 2005) is now flashing her boobs in those super-trashy Chanel perfume ads? And what about Keira’s recent split with long-time beau and major hottie Rupert Friend (Mr. Wickham, no less!)? Finally, in a potential reboot of the Pride And Prejudice franchise, who do you see cast as Elizabeth? Super-hot Emma Stone? Or pop diva Katy Perry? Explain your reasoning.

4. It’s been two years since you dropped out of the University of Albany to “get your head straight” and seven months since your dad suspended your AMEX account. But no one does that “whole cap-and-gown slavery dance anymore.” It’s all social media now and building content with viral potential. One fucking laughing-baby-in-a-high-chair video can generate twenty, thirty grand from click-thrus, never mind the edgy, avant-garde shit you’ve been doing with Stefan, who you met delivering Chinese food. No one reads your blog and no one ever will, but that whole “reading text thing” is a dead end anyway. You’re up in the low four-figures in YouTube views for your film “Transverse Conduit 171A” and  you’d be even higher if Google wasn’t a fucking pay-to-play scam.  As for Zoey, well, she’ll be back, and the rent won’t be a problem. Briefly discuss possible motivations for getting out of bed this morning.

5. Draw a simple flow chart that correctly describes the relationship among the following variables:

a) Your 12-month contract position at a popular news site that requires strong journalism skills, comprehensive programming knowledge, and personal scheduling flexibility
b) Your checking account balance of $23.70
c) Alternating feelings of listlessness and fear
d) $85,000 in student loan debt
e) The fact that single women outnumber single men in this city by, like, 200,000, so that every schlubby guy with back hair and bad breath is dating a supermodel, while you’re getting shingles from working eleven hours a day and wearing one of the two decent blouses you can afford

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When I encounter one in fiction, I know that the author is going to try to “reveal” something about a character without doing any of the heavy lifting that real plotting and character development and dialogue require. The more “structured” the dream is, the worse it is.

Dreams are, by definition, exposition. They’re telling, not showing. At the very least, they’re  a narrative crutch for writers who can’t see their way forward in the plot. When a writer clears the stage of real incident and relationship and cause-and-effect, and starts editorializing about a character’s inner life by using brain-chemical shadow play, I’ll start skipping ahead. Tell me what’s really happening, I’ll say, not some free-associational aside functioning as a story-telling convenience.

I bring this up because I’ve been having some absurdly realistic and involved dreams lately. Structured dreams, if you will. Last night, I dreamed about a young North Korean woman escaping her homeland.  She crept out, under cover of darkness, onto a desolate beach and inflated three or four sturdy-looking rubber balls or floats. She put these balls into a net, fashioning a kind of crude craft, and then waded out into the surf with it. And she was at sea for a long time. When she was rescued by a Russian fishing boat, she was covered with sores.

Where was I, during all this? Hold on, I’m getting to that.

My father adopted this North Korean woman; she was a student of some sort and she came to our house to live. My childhood home, that is, of thirty-some years ago. It turned out that the Korean woman was a genius at agriculture. She had devised a series of revolutionary farming methods that greatly increased crop-yield. Within a few days of moving in with us, she installed a lot of irrigation widgets and mirrors and beehives and such in our backyard. Right, mirrors. Anyway, she became very famous. At the end of the dream, a limousine arrived at our house, sent by one of the morning TV news shows–the Today show, maybe–and took the woman away.

I’ve been having dreams like this all week, highly structured dreams complete with everything but title credits and paid-for consumer product placements. What does this particular dream say about me? I’m not sure, because I was hardly in the damned thing. But I know what to blame it on: my decision to stop taking Xanax for a while.

I had a friend years ago, back in the mid ’90s, who I talked to about things. Things that were bothering me or even personal things. Confide might be too strong a word for it, but we talked about things. And around this time, I was having some cataclysmic mental events. Moods that would descend on me and pretty much incapacitate me for hours on end. Many hours. It would be difficult to think clearly or even move about. Feelings of hopelessness and paranoia and being trapped. Devastating episodes. This didn’t happen often. Maybe three or four times in the course of a year. Enough to be noticeable.

I don’t remember what made me bring it up, but when I mentioned this state of affairs in passing to my friend, she didn’t hesitate a moment with her reply. “You have bipolar disorder,” she said. “Pretty severe bipolar disorder.”

I probably rolled my eyes and smirked at this, dismissing it outright, which only caused her to stop in her tracks on the sidewalk. We were on the street in Manhattan, somewhere in midtown.

“You know that, right?” she said. “You have bipolar disorder. I’ve known you for years, and you’re a textbook case. What you’re describing is a panic attack. You should see a doctor. There’s medication you can take that would help you.”

She said all this in a matter-of-fact tone, the way you would say, It sure is great weather we’re having. She was a lot smarter than I was. She knew a lot more about the world than I did. We were both in advertising then, but she’s a lawyer now.

Anyway, I completely ignored her advice. There was no way I had bipolar disorder. There was no way I was suffering from panic attacks. These were things that people in Woody Allen movies suffered from. They were afflictions for people who could afford luxury afflictions. People who could worry about ephemeral things of no consequence to people with real problems.

People who came from where I came from had bad moods. We had weak moments that came as a direct result of not sucking it up and toughing it out. If we felt suddenly bereft and terrified, we probably had it coming and would be well served by manning up for a change.

It would be years before I would mention any of this to a doctor. In the ’90s, I didn’t even have a regular doctor. After I got married, I went to my wife’s doctor. I was one of the very few male patients at a doctor’s office that was called, no lie, Women Helping Women. I’ve been taking Xanax on and off for years now.

I might start in with the Xanax again, I don’t know. Some of these dreams, it’s half a day’s work just sleeping through them.

Related: Reflections In Compressed Time

Related: Sleeping With The Angels

Uploaded to BlipTV by TheAvantRidiculous:

The holidays are upon us again and we’re abuzz with Yuletide spirit here at the EZED. When December rolls around, we like nothing better than sliding a turkey/stuffing/mashed potato TV dinner into the microwave, popping open a 40-oz bottle of Miller High Life, and warming up the old VCR for a long night of nostalgic seasonal classics. Let’s see what’s in the Christmas queue!

Black Christmas (1974)

Whoa, hey, don’t go in the attic, little Cindy-Lou Who! The original “The calls are coming from inside the house!” movie, predating When A Stranger Calls by five years, Black Christmas makes the most of the fact that a sorority house is a pretty lonely place to be on Christmas Eve. There are plenty of evocative shots of departing revelers, abandoned campus greens, and long empty hallways here, as the approach of the holiday is marked by a deeper and deeper silence. And the ringing of the phone. The weird, unhinged quality of the obscene phone calls is what most people remember (grunts, animal shrieks, taunts, and the sound of a little girl crying), but Margot Kidder’s performance, as she drinks herself silly, makes inappropriate remarks, and stumbles around while her few remaining sorority sisters meet gruesome ends, is fun, too. Avoid the recent remake.

The Ice Harvest

Based on Scott Phillips’ terrific crime noir novel, this one stars John Cusack as a mob lawyer who just can’t seem to get out of town on Christmas Eve with the $2 million he’s embezzled from his cold-blooded clients. The delight here is in watching Charlie Arglist (Cusack) drive around and around snowbound Wichita, Kansas, fucking over and being fucked over by his shady companions. The Ice Harvest also includes one of Yuletide cinema’s most wince-inducing scenes: the one in which Arglist buys gifts for his estranged kids ($1.49 shrink-wrapped plastic junk from a 24-hour bodega) in the small hours of Christmas Day, as part of an ill-conceived plan to gain access to his ex-wife’s house. Oh, and another one: Christmas Eve at Wichita’s most dismal titty bar.

Silent Night, Bloody Night

No, not Silent Night, Deadly Night, the crappy ’80s slasher movie. We’re talking Silent Night, Bloody Night here, with all the Andy Warhol Factory regulars. I’d be willing to bet that John Carpenter saw this one when it came out in 1974. Same tale of a sociopath come home to wreak havoc, but on a different holiday. This one wanders a bit through a couple of fairly standard slasher murder scenes until it suddenly raises its game halfway through via several flashback scenes. These scenes, depicting a revolt in an insane asylum, have an otherworldly feel worthy of  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or a Richard Kern underground reel. Featuring Candy Darling, Ondine, Mary Woronov, and (weirdly) John Carradine, Silent Night, Bloody Night is the Christmas slasher movie that Andy Warhol never made.

Less Than Zero

Christmas is in the air in Less Than Zero, but it’s meant to serve a metaphorical purpose. Newly returned home from school for winter break, freshman Ivy Leaguer Clay reunites with Blair and Julian to make the rounds of holiday parties. But Christmas in California (the fake snow, false cheer, garish plastic trees, trucked-in ice sculptures, ersatz plaster icebergs floating in luxury pools) is meant to signify the disconnect between the characters and their emotions, between their aspirations and their grim realities. Bret Easton Ellis is said to hate this adaptation of his novel, which only makes it better in my eyes.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Let’s face it. Santa Claus is essentially an aloof and unknowable figure, living in mysterious seclusion at the North Pole, employing various arcane mystical powers to maintain us under constant surveillance (to distinguish the nice from the naughty) and traverse the globe in a single night. Oh, and he sneaks into our houses at night.  Rare Exports imagines a world in which an American corporation cracks open a mountain in Finland and unleashes the tyrannical, child-devouring fiend Santa Claus. But first you get a plague of elves (emaciated, red-eyed, filthy old men in rags) who go house to house snatching naughty children and dragging them off in burlap bags to Santa’s lair. Ideal for anybody who once found the whole notion of sitting in Santa’s lap to be kind of disquieting.

Eyes Wide Shut

Ho, ho, ho! If your idea of holiday cheer is attending a Christmas Eve orgy with your favorite four-foot-nine-inch-tall, control-freak Scientologist, you’re good to go with Eyes Wide Shut. This movie might have been a creepy masterpiece on the order of A Clockwork Orange, but we’ll never know because Stanley Kubrick died before he could finish it, and then anonymous Warner Bros. hacks made wholesale changes to Kubrick’s rough cut, including digitally altering several scenes.

Santa Claus Conquers The Martians

But only because the Martians are pretty stupid. Angered by the fact that Martian children are obsessed with the Santa Claus they see on their Martian TVs (they get excellent reception with their Martian rabbit-ear TV antennas), the Martians head off to Earth in their spaceship constructed of spray-painted egg cartons and coffee cans on a mission to kidnap Santa. But the Martians’ freeze-rays are no match for Santa’s high-velocity jolliness and soon holiday spirit prevails once more. Especially memorable for the guy in the floppy polar-bear suit and the guy in the cardboard box who’s supposed to be a robot.

The Lion In Winter

Yeah, it’s Christmas. Christmas in 1183 AD, and the throne of England is up for grabs. Plenty of royal court machinations here, none of which I remember too well, as I haven’t seen this movie since it was in regular rotation on HBO, back in the mid-’70s.  I was going to put Ron Howard’s ghastly The Grinch Who Stole Christmas in this slot, but that movie, with its sour, leering, unnerving Jim Carrey performance, is much too depressing for this list.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

Okay, I’m reaching here, but this wartime psychological drama does include a climactic scene on Christmas Eve, plus the familiar Yuletide conventions of honorable suicide, wartime imprisonment, suppressed homoerotic fixations, and David Bowie (not singing with Bing Crosby here).

Bad Santa

“I said, ‘Next!” goddamn it! This is not the DMV!”
Yeah. The one and only.

Related: 15 Songs For The End Of Summer

Related: 8 Things I’ll Be Doing Less Often In My 50s

Oh, and here’s the entire playlist, compiled for your listening pleasure,
now playing @Spotify: http://spoti.fi/rzUNJa

Best Night / The War On Drugs

The genius of The War On Drugs lies in the rural-urban esthetic of taking an earnest, observant, heartland-evocative vocal (provided by bandleader and Bob Dylan fanboy Adam Granduciel) and harnessing it to a precision-machined motorik synthbeat worthy of Trans-Europe Express. It’s been done before, of course, most notably on Grandaddy’s 2000 opus  The Sophtware Slump, but here you really get that wide-open-spaces sensation without the luxury-class travel vibe. “Best Night,” the first track on the record, is the ideal soundtrack for watching the countryside clip by through a bus window, even if the bus is just the shuttle from the Rutgers Athletic Center to High Point Solutions Stadium.

Land Disasters / Blanck Mass

Blanck Mass is the solo side project of Benjamin John Power from Fuck Buttons. This song has been a staple of my evening runs along the Jersey Shore, at Sandy Hook and Island Beach, ever since it appeared in June. Everything on the self-titled debut from Blanck Mass is amazing, but “Land Disasters,” which booms into being at 0:01 in full skyward trajectory and then soars ecstatically upward in vast cathedrals of sound from there, may be the greatest song ever recorded for running along the sea as the sun slips below the horizon.

Broken People / Jane’s Addiction

Long after 10,000 bands have hashed and rehashed JA’s original rock-funk-prog template to death, there’s a specificity to the observations on those first two records (three if you count the live disc from ’87) that keeps them fresh-sounding to this day. It’s in the way the Jane of “Jane Says” feels naked without her wig and keeps her dinner in her pocket. It’s in the off-the-cuff, wool-gathering introspection of the long-unfurling “Summertime Rolls” and in the way Perry Farrell bleats, at the end of “Pigs in Zen,” “I’m in the midst of a tra-a-a-a-auma. Leave a message. I’ll call you back!” The songs on The Great Escape Artist are big as heck; they’re anthemic to an almost U2-like extent, but they’re missing those authentic, closely observed details. They’re hard to get a grip on.  And then all of a sudden, nine tracks into the record, all the stadium-rock ballast drops out and it’s just Perry, painting an intimate portrait of a lost soul in front of a tap-tap-tap bassline and a gentle Dave Navarro guitar figure. “Broken People” sounds as if the Perry Farrell of 1987 had suddenly teleported twenty-five years into the future, and contributed a guest track to The Great Escape Artist. It’s a gorgeous thing. I met Perry once, about fifteen years ago, but I was just trying to get my money back from him.

The Lazy Song / Bruno Mars

Every year, there’s a perfect pop ditty that shows up to announce that the long, long trudge through winter is over and summer-sweet-summer is at hand. This song, an effortlessly loping faux-reggae ode to “doing nothing at all,” from the ridiculously successful Doo-Wops & Hooligans album, was released as a single in May of this year, and might as well have been issued with a stack of red Solo cups and six beer pong balls. Songs of this sort don’t always make their way to my ears, but the “Official Alternate Version” of the video, with Leonard Nimoy misbehaving, ensured its safe passage into heavy rotation on my iPod.

Down By The Water / The Decemberists

There are a whole bunch of popular, undoubtedly talented bands out there that I know nothing about, simply because I disliked their first album. Thus, Radiohead is a mystery to me because Pablo Honey seemed like a copy of a copy of a copy (in the Pixies to Nirvana to Radiohead sense). The Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Same thing (Wire to Sleater-Kinney to YYY) with their debut EP on Touch & Go. Blur’s Leisure sounded like a pallid knock-off of the The Stone Roses debut to me, with too many impenetrable Britishisms. I know that all these early records are not representative of the respective bands’ later work, but that’s not where I came in, and I never really had sufficient motivation to follow up. So I was surprised when “Down By The Water” wormed its way into my brain. I’m not much for arch and fanciful tales of seafarers and gypsies, I don’t like “concept” albums, and I wouldn’t know World of Warcraft from Dungeons & Dragons, so the Decemberists were largely lost on me since I bought Her Majesty The Decemberists in 2003. This song, though, is downright Springsteenian in its stripped-down, earthy heartland romanticism. I can’t say for sure, but I think that’s Peter Buck up front, contributing the “Fall On Me” guitar bit.

Repatriated / Handsome Furs

Speaking of Springsteen, remember two years ago, when every hot band (The Hold Steady, Arcade Fire, Coldplay) had a crush on the Boss? Well, that’s all over. It’s Gary Numan now. Everybody from Sunset Rubdown to the Antlers is cobbling together some variation on Numan’s icy synths, processed vocals, and dystopian worldview for 2011. Some people just dispense with the homage thing entirely, and have Gary Numan sing on their new single, then put him front and center in their video. “Repatriated” starts out with a repeating, “Cars”-worthy synth bloop, wonders “where did the future go,” and then elevates into full futurist Tubeway Army pathos.

Bad As Me / Tom Waits

After twelve years of closet cleaning (Orphans, Glitter and Doom Live), Robert Wilson collaborations (Alice, Blood Money), and one straight-up album (the abrasive, stentorian Real Gone), I’d pretty much tempered my expectations for Waits. How many musicians release anything truly worthwhile after an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? The list includes, well, nobody. But Bad As Me is a revelation, and as good as anything in Waits’ brilliant discography. The songs here are surprisingly wide-ranging in style and substance, encompassing unhinged blues, torch songs, songs with actual “rock” riffs, and a folk song or two that could have fit on Nighthawks At The Diner. He even adds a heretofore unheard voice to his mad gallery of whispers , groans, and shrieks. On the title cut and “Get Lost,” he lets loose with a joyful, hiccupy warble that’s a dead ringer for the voice of Oogie Boogie in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. What’s not to love?

Dive / Tycho

Tycho (producer and noted graphic artist Scott Hansen) is a downtempo IDMer for people who think Boards of Canada are just too damned prolific. Every year or so, the guy releases a single. I’ve been collecting the songs on this record (“Daydream” in 2007, “Adrift” in 2008, “Coastal Brake” in 2009), single by single, for years now. All, including “Dive,” featured here, are peerless examples of hazy, fuzzy, pastoral electronic psychedelia. Unfortunately, Tycho must have printed about 7 copies of the new 10-track LP, because the thing appeared on Amazon for a single day and then was out of stock. Nothing’s easy with this guy.

Holing Out / Yuck

On first listen, your initial impulse is to say, “Hey, this album is hopelessly derivative!” And then you remember that the Breeders’ Last Splash and Swervedriver’s Mezcal Head came out twenty years ago and the kids who are buying Yuck’s eponymous debut have no idea what you’re talking about. So then you just sit back and enjoy this record for its neo-shoegaze, effects-pedal-driven, fuzz-pop self. Now, if Ride would just get back together …

Novacane / Frank Ocean

Neo-soul singer Frank Ocean is obsessively punching the buttons on the 8-track tape player in his ’80s-vintage BMW M3 Series sedan and feeling that ’70s ennui like only someone born in 1987 can. How serious is Ocean’s Laurel-Canyon-1978 jones? On “American Wedding,” he’s just rapping over the top of “Hotel California” for six minutes. Here, on “Novacane,” he’s unleashing his inner David Crosby, getting stoned and lending a sympathetic ear to a porn star he met at a show. Too mellow for ya? Try “Bitch Suck Dick,” by Ocean’s Odd Future compadre Tyler the Creator. This one’s been in heavy rotation on the iPod since the weather got colder. Odd Future linchpin Tyler the Creator is all about cold. After a litany of outrageous misogynistic slurs, Tyler plumbs the very depths of depravity when he sneers, “Fuck global warning, this the Ice Age bitch.” What would Jackson Browne say?

Room 69 / Hotel 74

Hotel 74 is two guys from France that make droning, lulling, atmospheric downtempo dance music that owes a lot to Air. That’s all I know about them. I don’t even know their names. When I Google them, all I get is a few uploaded songs on MySpace and Bandcamp. They reached out to me on my MySpace page, probably because my “friend” list on MySpace is composed entirely of ambient acts from Brian Eno to Blanck Mass. (What? MySpace. You know, like, My Space. Tom Anderson? Your portal to the World Wide Web? Tila Tequila? Oh, never mind.) Anyway, their only LP is 13 tracks, each named after various locations in a hotel (Room 87, Room 40, Elevator, Pool, Penthouse). “Room 69″ is emblematic of the lot, a dense, swirling lunarscape that would sound good on the soundtrack for a 2011 remake of American Gigolo.

Taurus Chorus / Abbe May

Another person I don’t know a whole heck of a lot about, though she does, at least, have a website, and one of her tunes was used on the HBO show Entourage. I first encountered Abbe May via the terrific art photography blog, cafe selavy. “Taurus Chorus” is a testimonial to the musical fact that any combination of raunchy, distorted guitar and ethereal vocal from a winsome Australian chick has “hit” written all over it, even if I’m the only one who hears the track in question.

Even in Dreams / The Pains of Being Pure At Heart

We all knew this was going to happen, but it still takes some getting used to, this wave of nostalgia for the indie-alternative early ’90s. The touchstones for The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart are more toward the pop end of the spectrum. Think Smashing Pumpkins or Disintegration-era Cure, with emphasis on songs about moody introspection and heartbreak. “Even In Dreams” is the soundtrack, not so much for going out to the club, but rather for staying alone in your darkened apartment all weekend when your roommates have left for winter break and you’re mooning over just breaking up with your girlfriend. It’s enough to make you wish you never grew up.

Where Are You / J Mascis

Speaking of growing up. I’ve heard J Mascis has a young son, born in 2007. So it must be time to break out the sensitive acoustic album. The loudest show I ever saw in twenty-some years of dedicated concert-going was a 1991 NYC Ritz show featuring a lineup of Screaming Trees, My Bloody Valentine, and Dinosaur Jr. The volume, particularly during Dino’s slot, was a dense and physical thing, wave after wave of sound that you had to lean into just to remain upright. Awe-inspiring. J’s recent Dinosaur Jr forays have been every bit as pulverizing and solo-heavy as his vintage ’80s stuff, so I’d give him a pass if he wanted to get soft and introspective here. But J doesn’t need a pass, as these acoustic tunes are surprisingly compelling, each a soft little bed for J’s frog-like croak of a voice. “Where Are You” is probably the rockingest of the bunch, and one of only two songs on the record with a bit of electric guitar.

Screech Owl / Implodes

Well, it’s all got to end somewhere, so let’s end it with “Screech Owl,” a dark, brooding, ambient/post-shoegaze wall of noise from Implodes. Implodes are expert at imparting an over-arching sense of menace and impending doom (check out that album cover!) that recalls conspiracy theorists/post-rockers Godspeed! You Black Emperor. Who, I’m told, have regrouped and are touring again. Look at that. Everything old is new again!

Notable 2011 Reissues:

5 LPs / Disco Inferno

I never heard of Disco Inferno, a British avant-rock band that recorded from 1991 to 1996, until very recently. And I bought a LOT of records in the ’90s. At any rate, “Love Stepping Out” was just about the best thing I heard all year. The rest of this reissue is brilliant, too.

Who’s Landing In My Hangar? / Human Switchboard

Here’s a record I never thought I’d get back. My worn 1981 LP copy of Human Switchboard’s first and only release (issued on the Faulty Products label) went out in my late ’80s purge of vinyl in the first heady days of the CD. Big mistake. They were from somewhere in the Midwest. Wiry post-punk in the vein of Television or the Feelies. Reissued and packaged with some spotty outtakes and CBGB live takes. Okay, now who’s gonna reissue Robin Lane and the Chartbusters?

Science Of The Sea, Jurgen Muller

In the early ’80s, a German oceanic science student recorded a bunch of electronic floaty synth squiggles and effects, loosely arranged into song structures, that he hoped to sell as background music to makers of deep-sea documentaries. He pressed about 100 copies of his tunes to vinyl, nothing ever came of it, and he moved on. Thirty years later, Digitalis Recordings found them, and here they are. Because they were intended for commercial use, the effect is more Raymond Scott than Tangerine Dream, but they’re still an excellent backdrop for an excursion to Island Beach.

Related: Songs For Old People To Dance To: Top 15 Tracks of 2010

Related: 15 Songs For The End Of Summer