RSS FEED IDEMS: Sand in the Gears
I know, it's been a while, and between other writing commitments, and the impending sale of a home, and Eli's big number six birthday tomorrow (along with his mother's big 21 birthday), there's just no time this week. I did, however, pen one of those what-I-really-think-about-politics missives that some of you seem to like so much, and it's up over at World on the Web. My favorite quote:
"Every four years a string of professional talkers whose skeletons are sufficiently stuffed into their closets enter the field to do battle, and the ensuing fray looks like a lunchroom slap fight at a MENSA conference."
Does it count as narcissistic, me telling you my favorite quote from, well, me? On the other hand, did any of you doubt that I was narcissistic?
- Winner Take All
I've been watching with one eye the travails of Kelvin Sampson, coach of the Indiana men's basketball team. Sampson has been tripped up by the pharisaical system of NCAA rules, which pays close attention to who pays for a player's meals, but scrutinizes less closely whether the player ever receives an education. In Sampson's case, he transgressed rules about when recruits can be telephoned, and when questioned, the NCAA says he lied about it. What fascinates me is that when he was receiving the National Coach of the Year award at Oklahoma in 2002, his team's graduation rate, averaged over four years, was zero. That's right, you had a greater chance of winning the Oklahoma lottery than securing a college degree under Kelvin Sampson.
Even though its own team's graduation rate stood at a respectable 70 percent, Indiana University saw fit to lure Sampson away from Oklahoma, which had no problem with his mockery of the NCAA's widely touted moniker for players, "student athletes," so long as he was winning games.
Despite luring kids to a school they had no hope to graduate from, when they might have received scholarships as well as degrees from smaller schools, Sampson was awarded one of the NCAA's highest honors for a men's basketball coach. But now that he has made too many calls on consecutive second Tuesdays, he's going to be suspended without pay.
Why not fired? Isn't Indiana University's motto, after all, "Light and Truth?"
Yes, but Sampson's team is, you see, 22-4 this season. So they'll slap him on the wrist, and hope it's good enough penance to satisfy the NCAA. At the very worst, they'll fire him later, but only after the NCAA tournament. No need to get crazy with this whole "consequences" thing, after all. It's not like their motto is "Light, Truth, and Consequences." And as the famous Roman once asked, "What is truth, anyway?" That's the enlightened approach to things in today's modern universities.
I still insist that if the NCAA were serious about its "student-athlete" notion, it would require the team with a lower graduation rate to spot the differential to its opponent in games. This would mean that if Davidson met Memphis in the NCAA tournament, it would start the game with a lead of 67 points. And perhaps alongside the won-loss record posted under a coach's face when he's on television, networks could also start posting his graduation rate.
Maybe then more schools would ask not only, How many points can he score? but also, Is this the best place for him to receive an education? If they're really student-athletes, after all, it seems we ought to be asking the latter.
As for Kelvin Sampson, I wouldn't worry about his job future; there's always a Cincinnati or a UNLV — or an Indiana University, if they can get away with it — willing to place a higher imperative on winning than on integrity. Sampson should have no problem finding employment. Too bad we can't say the same for the kids who have been unfortunate enough to play for him.
Update
Looks like Indiana gave Sampson cash to go away, and several of their players are having a hissy fit. Pat Forde has it right:
"Here's my suggestion: Any player who doesn't make the trip to Northwestern is cut. Kelvin Sampson should not be made a martyr for breaking NCAA rules. College players aren't in charge of personnel decisions. Period.
If need be, grab six walk-ons who would donate an organ to play for the Hoosiers and suit them up. Indiana basketball is bigger than the players who walked out."
So, how many intelligences do you have? Enough, hopefully, to enjoy my piece on Howard Gardner in today's Wall Street Journal.
- A Public Service Announcement
Though not yet an industrial or vacation magnet, we have great hopes for the fine state of Kansas. Newcomers may find themselves perplexed by the local norms and practices of highway driving. Periodically out of the goodness of our own hearts, as well as various court orders and private settlements, the management of this website is obliged to offer a public service announcement. Herewith a guide to highway driving in Kansas:
Kansans drive in the left lane. The right lane is too close to the gravelly shoulder, and remember the fate of those seeds sprinkled on rocky soil? To the left, good Christian, to the left! The full range of speeds are welcome in the saintly left lane, which is to say, anything from five miles over the posted speed limit to twenty miles below. What's that, you say you want to drive six miles over the limit, or perhaps seven?
Dear friend, you are not in New Jersey any more. This is not a NASCAR track, it is the stately highway system of the great state of Kansas, and you would do well to respect our laws. Now pipe down that speed talk and take your place in the long glorious line of gleaming vehicles puttering nobly along the left-hand side.
Just as the humble Disciples harvested grain on the Sabbath, there will be times that you need to avail yourself of the right lane. You will need to exit the highway. But there may be other eager travelers, just like you, wishing to gain access to the highway. People in less civilized communities might consider this a moment of friction, when a car attempting to enter the highway finds another car zipping along in the right lane, square in its path. They might demand that the entering car "yield" to the oncoming traffic.
Not in the fair state of Kansas, friend. What right, after all, does the car in the right lane have to continue at such a great rate of speed, when his poor neighbor needs to avail himself of the road as well? The wide, level plains of Kansas reflect our great democracy of citizens, in that none should be considered greater than another. Therefore, good Christian temporarily in the right lane, it is incumbent upon you to slow down, that your poorer neighbor on the entrance ramp might partake of our glorious highway, and as rapidly as possible bring himself to the speed, no greater or less, of his neighbors.
That's right, highway traveler, we are asking you to brake. Place your right foot on the flat pedal and brake to your heart's content. Brake, that all might share in the great forward progress of mankind!
What's that, you say? The people behind you, all traveling at sixty miles an hour, and perhaps not expecting an abrupt stop to traffic in the middle of a highway? Why, that's what brake lights are for. Even the oldest models have two of them, one for each eye in your rear neighbor's head. Don't trouble yourself about him, because he has brakes of his own, as does the driver behind him. Do your duty and stop for the driver who wants to enter the highway, and all the drivers behind you will be happy to stop as well.
For good measure, the saintly drivers in the left lane may well apply their brakes, too. Many a time I have seen it, a great cloud of witnesses, their brake lights lit like candles in heaven, all welcoming a new entrant to the highway. There is not a friendlier highway etiquette in the entire United States.
Though we all try to do our duty, there are those scofflaws who will choose, by virtue of their unregenerate natures, to pass you on the right. Your duty, good Christian, is to accelerate accordingly. Anything less is undemocratic. Keep with them pace for pace, no matter how fast they go, no matter how red-faced they become, until you draw even with a calm-minded true Kansan in the right lane, and then decrease your speed. This is the Kansas way, it is the fair way, it is the right (which is to say left) way.
On behalf of all Kansas highway drivers, I want to give you, newcomer to our state, a warm and hearty welcome, and kindheartedly admonish you with our unofficial state motto: "What's your hurry?"
From our family to yours, happy travels, and may you arrive no sooner than anyone else.
- A Filled-Up Life
Monday was Caleb's birthday. He is eight years old now. That morning I made breakfast for the family, and then took him to work with me. He did school work at the table in my office, and I did my own work at my computer. He finished first, because he is smarter than me, and a more diligent worker. So he took out a Lego spaceship kit that he got from his great-grandmother, and he put it together. After that, he built a hangar out of office supplies, and then built a paper airplane for me, to keep in the hangar. They're on my desk now, though Caleb is at home, busy being an eight year-old, doing schoolwork and reading everything he can find and getting bigger by the second, so big that soon I won't be able to pick him up and carry him to bed at night.
When we finished working we went to lunch, and then to Target so I could buy him a pencil sharpener he's been wanting. On the way into the store, he walked beside me, and even though my hand was dangling near his arm, he didn't take it the way he used to do when he was a little chattering boy. Now he is a big boy, and he doesn't need to hold my hand so much any more.
They keep getting older, if you're lucky, and so do you. Soon they don't need you to hold their hands or make their sandwiches or say their bedtime prayers with them. Soon you have all the quiet time you ever wanted, hours and days and weeks of it, interspersed with an occasional phone call, if you're lucky. Soon they are grown and they are gone.
I have years and years left with them, and I am sure they will grind me down to dust before the last of them leaves, but sometimes I am sad when I think about an empty house. I am happy too, in a way I didn't expect, because I know one day each of them will have his own house full of youngsters. They will crawl into his bed at all hours, and make messes and fill every room with giggles. He will toil and fear and laugh over each of them just as I have over my own children, and there is nothing better on earth.
I would give them anything, because their happiness is mine, and so I am happy when I think about their houses full of children, because I know that no matter what I do to make them smile now, there is an incomparable joy awaiting them, the joy of their own children. It almost makes it worth letting them go, not that I have a choice, which is probably best, selfish as I am.
That's a lot of philosophizing for an eight-year birthday, more than I did on my 40th. It's warranted, I suppose, because while I am simple and shot through with weakness, they amaze me. They come out so small and defenseless, and before long they are throwing crotch-level tackles and asking impossible questions, and healing wounds I didn't even know were there. We look far and wide for miracles and even rumors of miracles, and forget the miracles among us, the small lives that God is either foolish or hopeful enough to trust us with.
I've had eight years with Stephen Caleb, and five with Timothy Eli, and three with William Isaac, and less than one with Isaiah John, and I've not appreciated the time as I should. Let me appreciate the years to come. Let them be many, a great many, and forgive me for the time I've wasted. Forgive me for overlooking these miracles.
We could fill up a life with thank you and forgive me, couldn't we? I imagine we should say both every day.
- Forgiving Christians
As best I can remember, my first publication was in the high school paper. It was an editorial, of course, and it was funny and mean and wrongheaded. I've put words into the public domain for 23 years since that day. I've been wrong a lot, and I've picked a lot of fights. At times I've stepped into a fight without meaning to. I've provoked angry responses from breathless Democrats and stiff-necked Republicans, student-government busybodies, college administrators, anarchists, fascists, communists, libertarians, union members, people opposed to spanking, gender theorists, feminists, masculinists, Francophiles, Viggo Mortensen fans, Nazis, Klansmen, and cat lovers. Sometimes a productive discussion has ensued, other times, not so much. The detractors who have been most unkind, however, and least susceptible to reason or goodwill, are people who call themselves evangelical Christians.
I've been thinking these past few days about why that is. It's certainly not inherent to Christianity, because I have also received the greatest mercy and love from Christians, starting with my wife and working down to lesser beings. On the other hand, maybe my wife isn't Evangelical. Maybe Evangelical is like Libertarian now, in that the capitalization somehow lends itself to stridency, insular community, and intolerance of dissent. I don't know. I only know that for some reason it sits in my gut and makes my stomach hurt. I read some of the responses to things I have written, things I thought were well-intentioned and fair-minded, and I think: No wonder people reject the church. It's filled with people like that. Then I feel especially bad, because I used to be someone like that myself.
Maybe what saved me from pharisaism is sin itself. Once you've done terrible things, once you realize that Grace extends to all who beg for it, even someone like yourself, it's hard to deny it to someone else. I wonder sometimes if the people so intent on scrutinizing whose toes are over the boundaries of the law have ever peered into their own dark hearts. I wonder if they've given a moment's thought that the warning about being forgiven as we forgive was uttered for them.
I wonder why their opprobrium puts me in a funk and makes me so sad. Surely that's an indication of something wrong in my head. It makes me sad and then I get angry, and I think that I can forgive anyone but a pharisee, which makes no sense at all, to withhold forgiveness for someone's lack of forgiveness. Maybe it's because a pharisee is a bully. In the old days, they would stone you to death. Nowadays they pronounce judgment on your doctrine, having not the slightest sense from whence doctrine emerged, and draw lines separating their true, genuine faith from the rest of us. If they had their druthers, they'd stand at Heaven's gate and make sure no undesirables got in. Maybe that will be their job in Heaven — doorkeepers — only instead of deciding who gets in, they have to humbly receive our tickets and watch us file past, all we sinners and liberals and non-capital-E evangelicals, not to mention Episcopalians and Orthodoxers and Catholics and Democrats and Mexicans.
Assuming they get in at all.
It puts me in mind of Graham Greene's whiskey priest, pondering whether a self-righteous woman will ever make it to Heaven:
"God might forgive cowardice and passion, but was it possible to forgive the habit of piety? . . . salvation could strike like lightning at the evil heart, but the habit of piety excluded everything but the evening prayer and the Guild meeting . . ."
Of course Greene was a Catholic and an adulterer, so what did he know, right? If only one of those sweating, angry, ecclesiastically unbound Evangelical preachers would take on the habit of piety, maybe we'd make some headway. But they're too busy railing about gays and which version of the Bible is the most inspired to be troubled by something so venal, so intractable. Far easier to throw stones at the scapegoats than examine ourselves, I imagine. What bothers me the most is that I am left with this sadness, and this anger, and now this burden to forgive these unforgiving people.
And so I do. I forgive each one of you, not because I am commanded to, because I'm not a good enough Christian to let that suffice. I forgive you because I used to be just like you, and now I am not, and because I am filled with sadness at what you are and what awaits you.
If you're in one of those reflective, melancholy moods that seem to define my existence, at least, you might be interested in my latest post over at the WORLD webzine.
- Wiener Update
It occurred to me that one day in the less-than-distant future, a young lady may decide to conduct an Internet search on the term: "William Isaac Woodlief." Said lady will be, of course, interested in marrying young Isaac, and itching to bear an entire brood of Woodlief babies. The last post might, naturally, give her pause. Being chaste and of good upbringing, she won't know how to, as it were, verify the goods. So in the interest of setting her mind at ease, I'm happy to report that everything is healed up nicely.
- Ouch
So tonight, in between stripping naked and getting into the tub, there was some jumping and general little boy rambunctiousness. I could hear them upstairs, and the thing is, I only needed one more minute for the task I was trying to finish. One more minute, and then I would be up the steps to supervise the bathing. One precious bloody minute.
It's those one-more-minutes that kill you as a parent.
Have you ever seen a bruised penis? I'd never actually seen one before tonight. It's not pretty, let me tell you. Whatever you're imagining, Isaac will tell you that his is worse. Somehow the boy managed to injure his penis, his face, both butt cheeks, and his big toe. In one fall. There were no steps involved. No baseball bats or blocks of concrete. Just a bed, and a push from his brother, and BAM: we're in a home triage situation. One boo-boo bunny to the face. Calendula ointment on the butt cheeks. Arnica cream all over the place. A package of frozen peas on the pee-pee.
I never thought I would have to hold a package of frozen peas on my son's penis. They don't tell you this may be a possibility in parenting class. It's all breathing and learning to count to ten and not freaking out when they get a diaper rash. But penis bruises? Nowhere in the manual.
I have to confess, it shook me up a little. I'm going to have a drink now. Maybe two.
- The Dividing Line
When I was a boy, my mother would sometimes let me fall asleep on her bed while she watched television. I would drift between sleep and wakefulness, my thoughts penetrated by the sound of Johnny Carson's chuckle, or the earnest baritone of a news anchor. One night, when I was maybe ten, I woke to the sound of my mother weeping. The bed shook with her crying, and I was afraid. I pretended to be asleep, but out of the corner of an eye I looked at the television screen. There were men in brown uniforms carrying red flags emblazoned with broken black crosses. Others wore long white sheets. They were marching outside the public library where my grandmother often took me.
I didn't know why they were at the library, though I suspected it wasn't to check out books. I didn't know why my mother was crying, only that she was crying and it scared me. I closed my eyes, and soon she stopped crying, and then I was asleep.
Not long after, my mother wrote a letter to the newspaper, and her letter made the marching men angry. I know because they called our house. Once, I answered the phone before she could get to it. "Hello?" I said. "Just what is your mama's problem with the Klan?" The person on the other end was an angry, stupid-sounding woman. I wondered if she was someone's mother. My mother took the phone and hung it up. Later, I heard her call the sheriff. We stayed inside, and I wondered if the angry men were coming.
They never did, and later, when I was in college, I thought it was silly when my mother would warn me that writing some of the things I wrote was going to get me killed. It was an unfounded worry, because I had neither a large audience nor anything consequential to say. Every age is filled with men willing to murder the carriers of ideas, even when they don't understand them. The words first have to strike at their hearts, however.
I've been listening to Martin Luther King's speeches today, and lamenting that the times of great oration have passed for our country. Words are cheaper now, as are most of the men who utter them. Ideas have been displaced by soundbytes. It's safer to speak that way, I suppose, and the overriding goal of the politician is to win, not to lead. I think people hated King because he spoke unsafely. He illuminated what Solzhenitsyn called the line dividing good and evil, the line that runs through every human heart. That is surely dangerous business.
I wonder where the prophets of this generation are. Where are the ones who will illuminate that line in every heart? It is so much easier to draw lines between people, between a virtuous Us and a nefarious Them, than to say: This is the evil we do, the evil I do. I wonder if no modern-day Martin Luther Kings rise up because our civilization is no longer capable of producing them, or because we no longer deserve them. Or perhaps they are there, crying out in the wilderness, and we all of us — myself included — have our televisions and ipods and internal self-focused monologues turned up too loudly to hear them.
Go check out this clip of a Canadian publisher lambasting an investigator from the Human Rights Commission, sent to determine whether he has committed a thought crime. Courtesy of Megan McArdle from, of course, The Atlantic.
Update
Tim Sandefur offers some closing comments from the same hearing. And here's a link to the publisher's website. I suspect he now needs to worry about being a marked man, and not just by the Canadian government.
- The Future of the American Idea
I love The Atlantic, and I sometimes neglect it, like others I love. Only recently have I waded through the November 2007 issue, which has the heft of a novella, due to the fact that it is the 150th anniversary issue, and has therefore crammed into its early pages a host of short essays by various luminaries on the topic of "The Future of the American Idea."
The editors did a delightful job in places, juxtaposing the mindless Sam Harris, who complains about America's "God-drunk society," with an equally mindless essay from Left Behind author Tim LaHaye, who asserts that "America's founding was based more on biblical principles than any other nation's on earth—and that's the main reason this country has been more blessed by God than any other nation in history."
Apparently they don't study Israel, or the Old Testament, in the Tim LaHaye School of Prophecy. ("Your Biblical Prophecy Headquarters," according to their website.)
There's also the juxtaposition of Judith Martin's defense of manners with Tom Wolfe's meandering celebration of Jefferson's ability to insult British ambassadors. I suppose I fall somewhere between pell-mell and white gloves, but I'm grateful for each pole.
Of the 34 essayists, eleven are university faculty members, and four are from Princeton. Fully half of Princeton's contingent, in the persons of Cornel West and Joyce Carol Oates, is quite possibly unhinged. America represents, to West and Oates (and other essayists), a Taliban-esque prison of racism and brutality. Perhaps anticipating as much, Robert Conquest noted in his essay:
"Today's challenges to the American idea, such as jihadism, are equally driven by lethal certainties. They present what amounts to the anti-American idea. The superficial blemishes to be found in any society are equated with the totally negative cancers in the vital organs of our foes. The idea, and the open society, needs a sense of proportion — not always to be found, even among our own equivalent of an intelligentsia."
After working my way through all of these essays, I found myself drawn back to the guy I used to think of only as "that fast-food journalist," Eric Schlosser, who writes:
"The America that I love bears little relation to the freak show now peddled by Hollywood and the cable-news networks. I've had the privilege of spending time with some of the poorest people in this country and some of the richest, and it's left me feeling that we have far too many of both. The best lives, the happiest and most satisfied ones, seem to be lived somewhere in between. I have no tolerance for anti-Americanism overseas or the complacency here at home. I worry about the extremes and the extremism that have deeply taken root—the anger, the arrogance, the lack of empathy and compassion. The current state of the union brings to mind Thomas Jefferson's famous remark: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
All of this left me thinking about what I'll write for The Atlantic's 200th issue, should they invite me. You'll have to buy it in 2057, of course, but be assured it will likely deal with this reality, that we are a nation besotted with our rights, and fearful of our responsibilities.
- Campaign 2008
I've come a long way from my days as a graduate student, immersed in thoughts and discussions about politics. Now I avoid political discussions like Michael Moore avoids vegetables. I even let my newspaper subscription lapse, so I could have more time to read what matters.
Political news is unavoidable, however, and so I thought I'd get you to evaluate my osmosis. Here's my ill-informed reading of the status of our national presidential marathon, based on what I've gleaned from airport conversations and the occasional glance at Google news headlines:
On the Democratic side of things, Obama isn't such a bad guy, if we can get him to renounce terrorism and stop-fathering crack babies, which you didn't hear from the Hillary camp. Clinton, meanwhile, is being perhaps a little too feminine on the campaign trail, what with the cleavage and the crying, though his wife remains the shrill, cast-iron harpy we've all come to loathe and fear. John Edwards is dragging his poor sick wife across the country in a quest to improve health care. He stands on principle against any hedge fund of which he's not a partner. The rest of the Democratic field is a collection of sissies, malcontents, and nutjobs.
On the Republican side, meanwhile, Giuliani is a polygamist. No wait, that's McCain. Sorry, I meant Fred Thompson. Mitt Romney? No, he's a hard-working, family-oriented husband of one wife who stands for everything that made America great, except that he's in a Satanic cult. The one-time darling of the Libertarians, Ron Paul, used to own slaves. Mike Huckabee, meanwhile, seems to drive Peggy Noonan apoplectic, which is reason enough to recommend him. Someone just needs to stop him from channeling Herbert Hoover. The rest of the Republican field is a collection of conspiracy theorists, isolationists, and psychopaths.
As for policy positions, as best I can tell, the Democrats want to give most of the southwest U.S. to Mexico, and invite Muslim terrorists to publicly behead everyone making more than a million dollars a year, except for Steven Spielberg and George Soros. Republicans, meanwhile, want to kick anyone with a Mexican-sounding name out of the U.S., and conquer the entire Middle East so that Halliburton will have work after it kills all the porpoises while drilling for oil off the U.S. coast, which will soon be just east of Kansas City, as a result of the Bush-Reagan-Hitler global warming conspiracy.
Both parties are convinced that government is exceptionally skilled at doing things they want more of, and entirely incompetent when it comes to things they don't like. Every candidate is a candidate for change, using the failed ideas of the past, to create a brave new world for the children.
Does that about sum it up?
- Deterrent
A couple of nights ago I shot a cat. Lest you animal fetishists send me nasty email, or the anti-feline masochists among you send me packages of veal, I'll note that I didn't use my 9mm, but rather my Daisy Red Ryder underlever cocking BB gun, from ten yards out. You see, I thought he was picking on my cat. You might recall that we have a cat. The Wife would likely assert, were she reading this over my shoulder (which is, incidentally, not an advisable way to blog), that it is my cat.
It used to be that fat neighborhood cats would slink into our garage, beat up our kitten, and eat his food. He's grown a bit, however, and he still has his claws. Recently I found cat fur all over the garage, and assumed he'd beaten up one of those neighbor cats. The worm has turned, I thought. How now, brown cow? And other such exultant internal monologue. But the other night, I heard this curious keening from the garage.
Some of you are chuckling right now. I need you to understand that I never owned a cat as a child. If you read the earlier post about this animal, you will also notice that I used to think he was a she. I sometimes have this problem with humans as well, especially on college campuses. The point is, I am naive when it comes to the ways of the cat. Or I used to be.
So I grabbed my shooting iron, and went out to the garage. The noise was on the other side of the garage door. I opened it, and there in the driveway stood my cat, who is black, facing down another black cat. The problem was that in the lamplight I couldn't tell which cat was mine. I got a bead on one, and waited. They waited too. Then it occurred to me that if I moved toward them, my cat would stay, while the intruding cat would bolt. I took a step forward, my sights trained on what I thought was the intruding cat. She bolted. I shot her in the rump. She snarled and disappeared into some bushes.
At this point, I expected some gratitude from my cat. Instead, he looked at me as if to say, you idiot, and disappeared into the bushes after the first cat.
This was no food-dish raid. It was a booty call. Incidentally, I've since learned that cats like the rough stuff. This would explain that fur all over my garage, as well as my cat's new swagger. He's turned my garage into his playboy lounge. My cat is a player.
I understand at this point that several of you are already typing officious comments about how I need to get him neutered. But I'm hoping we can take him, naughty parts and all, with us when we move to the country at some future date, where he will sire a long line of mouse- and snake-hunting cats. So until then, the neighborhood ladies had best guard themselves.
This may be a moot point, now that I've gone and shot one of his girlfriends in the rump. I have to confess, it ran through my mind that this might not be a bad strategy toward young human ladies of questionable repute who come sniffing around my boys in the coming years. I understand that it is of dubious legality, but it certainly leaves an impression. I'm sure my sons would give me that same you idiot look, but they'd likely thank me for it later, don't you think?
- I Know, It's Only Rock and Roll
Wednesday night I went with some of my uber-trendy, DC blogger friends to the Rock & Roll Hotel to see the 1900's. They have a great act, and those of you who live in real cities should go see them.
Afterward, I got interviewed by somebody from Spin magazine. They even put my picture on their website. Notice that I am the oldest person they interviewed. Then someone asked me the last concert I'd been to. The answer was Rush, in 1995, with my good buddy Bill Chandler. I couldn't hear for three days afterward. Explaining all this to my younger companions made me feel very, very old.
So I went back to my hotel room and went to sleep. In the morning, I showered, and scrubbed at the ostentatious black ink mark on my hand, the stamp I'd gotten at the club. It wouldn't come off. This led to some amusement among the fifty or so young people to whom I had to speak later that morning. Is that a tattoo? Surely he didn't go to a club, did he? Do they allow people his age into clubs?
This, too, made me feel very, very old. I suppose it's good to be humbled in this way. So I'm resolved to go see more indie bands in small, dark clubs.
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