Nice Tits (from MRR #319)

yep, that's a Barbara Kruger.

Kristin and I have ventured to the Black Castle in Inglewood for an epic dose of metal. None of the band names are familiar, but with the wildfires, community college, and missing everybody in the bay, I’m in a dark mood, a metal mood. It’s $15, (yikes!) but the interior is perfectly familiar, a barewalled converted old warehouse space with a slapped together stage and exposed rafters. I feel blissfully at home.

The metal is technical, flashy, and the hair is whipping at a phenomenal speed. It’s not really what I was looking for, not the darkness I wanted, but it’ll do.

The first person to speak to me of the night, that is not Kristin, is a young heavy set dude, with long hessian locks, in a crisply black shirt with a pretty unremarkable and dumb band name on in like Nightskull or Zombie Death, or something like it. But I’m still pleased to maybe make a friend, being new in town can be rough.

Instead of leaning in to say hi, or something equally friendly and expected. He looks me full in the eyes and jockishly says “nice tits,” with a menacing kind of friendliness in his air. Everything in his manner says ‘If your cool you’ll say thank you and wink, if you get upset, you are an uptight bitch.’ It’s an approach that risks nothing and dares you to get upset. One I am too familiar with.

I want to punch him, or at least get a good solid slap across his face. To keep from doing so I lash back with the first snide and cutting enough response I can think of.

In tight but even tones I say, “you too” and mock wink. I haul myself to the other side of the stage before he can respond.

It feels good to have something cold and bitchy but funny to say at just the right moment, but it feels hollow too. I’m reduced to making a joke about his size to defend my self and my sex.

My small victorious high wears off entirely by the time we are leaving. I am wondering if I handled things as well as I could have, when a dude from one of the bands standing outside hollers at us wanting to know if we wanna be their groupies. As we keep walking down the street there is the faint sound of the word “bitches” on the breeze. I sigh.

Sometimes it’s so hard to know what is worth expending energy on, and what is best left unanswered; what fights are worth fighting. It’s something I’ve been thinking about and struggling with more lately.

I remember standing around Nick and Rhi’s kitchen this summer in Brighton after our show, holding a beer in each hand while heather sat on the countertop. We took turns complaining about young dudes saying and singing fucked up shit on tour.

“Ugh, I mean they are teenage dudes I keep expecting them to know better, but they don’t. “

“And they were so stereotypical too. ‘this song is about my ex-girlfriend’ then every other word in the chorus is bitch. We walked out, and were gonna tear them a new one, but it just didn’t seem worth it.”

Nick didn’t agree. He thought it was important to challenge people everytime, call them out. “it’s important” he said with a warm smile, and he was right.

I know it’s important, I do, but most of the time I am just too tired to really deal, too overwhelmed. I roll my eyes, mouth “fuck you,” but ultimately let the offending incidents go by unchecked. I make excuses for people, I invoke cultural relativity and tell myself that I didn’t understand the situation right, that it’s different here in London, or Arkansas, or San Diego, that I can’t really know or judge their cultural climate or intent. I tell myself these things so I don’t have to fight every inch of everyday. So I don’t have to cause conflict, so I don’t have to rock the boat, so I can I just get on living life.

But isn’t that what punk and radical politics is all about? Rocking the boat, challenging all the unbelievable bullshit we see and experience in the world, even in our peers, maybe particularly among our peers.

While that is true, letting things go can be necessary sometimes too. I only have finite energy to battle the forces of thousands of years of gender based bullshit, and it’s not my responsibility to take every sexist asshole I meet and read him the riot act and instruct him how to not be an asshole.

There has to be a balance, a compromise between the two.

I’ve decided to try something new. No more pretending not to hear shit, no more declaring war sporadically. I want to be the kind of person that reasons with people, that lets them know when they say and do fucked up shit, and why I think it’s fucked up.

I don’t have all the energy in the world, but I can do this. I can talk to people, I can try to stay calm, I can reason it out. I can try.

So, to the random metal head in Inglewood: Sorry about the tits thing, you had something coming to you, but making fun of your size was not it. That said, I see you again and you talk that same shit to me you are in for a real long lecture about how saying shit like that makes you an asshole, and why you shouldn’t be one. But be careful, I’m new at this, you make me too mad, I still might just knock you out.

No new PO Box yet, sorry. Save up all those letters and send ‘em at once, drown me in paper.

Omens (from MRR #318)

(photo: glendale news press)

Janelle got me thinking about omens the night before I left.
We were packing boxes in my nearly cleaned out apartment when she explained her subtle art of divining. “So right before a job interview, I went to get coffee and this homeless man whipped it out”
“uh-oh”
“The interview went great! I ended up telling my potential future boss about it. I don’t know how appropriate that was, but he thought it was hilarious. Homeless penis is goodluck”
“I guess we gotta troll around people’s park anytime something crucial comes up”
“then the other day this bird shit on my hand. And I had the worst day ever.”
“that one makes sense. ”
I don’t believe on omens, or signs, or much of anything really, but it was fun to subscribe luck and portent to the random weird things that tend to happen to me and Janelle. A bird shit on my hand once too, and I totally had a terrible day too. Evidence enough for us.
That night I dreamt of crows, hundreds lined up on fences. One cocked its head looking at me and said something I couldn’t hear. They took flight all at once, and I opened my eyes.
I’ve had this unsettled feeling the whole drive down the I-5, my car packed full of belongings. The BBC tells me they there is an out of control wildfire burning in the foothills above Los Angeles. They just evacuated half of the city I’m moving to and the fire is only 5% contained. The governor has declared a state of emergency. I pick up my phone.
“Hey mom, why did no one bother to tell me La Crescenta is on fire?!”
“It’s not on fire, it’s the hills," she answers. "It’s all over the news.”
“I don’t have a tv”
“it’s on the radio too”
“yeah, I know. But why didn’t you call me?”
“it wasn’t serious. There are lots of fires right now. But I thought you knew.”
“Well, what’s going on ? Is there any news?
“aunt carol is evacuated, so is your uncle donny. The fire is coming down the mountain now. But, I think it’ll be okay. they said at the very worst the 210 will be a fire break, it won’t go past the freeway.”
“mom, we’re on the mountain side of the 210”
“well, yeah, but that’s at the worst, they’d never let the fire get this far through the city. Unless the wind picks up, then they can’t… but it won’t honey. Everything will be fine.”
“okay, I’ll just see you when I get in”
“oh, didn’t you get my message?… I’m taking your dad out of here, the smoke is too much for him. Don’t worry so much. Just make sure you get a face mask on as soon as you get here. And stay inside. And keep the phone on you in case they call to evacuate. Love you honey.”
This is bad.
My first glimpse of flames is exiting the freeway. The night sky is clouded by smoke lit orange by towering flames. I continue to drive and the flames continue with me. The familiar range of mountain transformed into seething and angry gods. The mountains like an endless row of erupting hilltops and the trailing orange glow of fire on the mountainside like lava creeping ever closer. It’s easy to feel awe and hysteria mixed in the sight of such unbelievable demonstrations of nature. The desire to go home sweeps over me. But I don’t have a home anymore, I am here to make a new one. Carrying my bags up to the house the smoke is thick, the air is hot and dry, and it’s lightly snowing ash. My nose burns with the smell campfire, and my eyes are watering.
The house is empty, but the oversize TV is blaring the news. A man stands framed against the flaming hills.
“We’ve been lucky so far, but if the winds pick up, I can’t promise the safety of the 10,000 homes now threatened” He looks tired. Face smudged with black ash, eyes red and drooped, but alight with the same anxiety in mine. I need a cup of coffee, or a beer.
The coffee shop is full of pacing nervous people and black smudged firefighters. No less anxiety here.
“Even in a worst case scenario, the fire won’t come down this far. Right?” the girl pouring coffee is smiling, sure of his answer.
He is less sure, and careful with his words, “we hope it won’t come to that miss”
No one wants to make predictions. The fire doubled in size over night, and no one feels sure of anything. I know, intellectually, the fire would be stopped before it raged so far down the hill as my father’s house. But at the moment, anything feels possible. I step outside.
The smoke has settled like fog, and my flimsy mask is not helping very much. I’m looking at the mountain, wondering what I’ve got myself into. Joan had it right when she said that “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” She was speaking of the hot dry winds that rise out of the Mojave and usually spark the autumn fires, but it feels like it can be applied to all of LA’s seasonal phenomena: mudslides, floods, earthquakes, and fires.
“you know, the native Americans used to burn off large sections of this land to make fertile soil… they did. What we’re gonna have is new and abundant growth up in those mountains. And nothing for the Santa Anas to burn this fall. So don’t look so concerned young lady. It’s a natural cycle, a clean slate for the mountain, a fertile renewal.” He is a dapper old man, cane in hand, and white hair parted and smoothed down.
“aren’t you worried about all these houses?”
“oh no, not for mine anyway. I’ve got a box of photos and books to put in the car, and insurance for the rest. I could do without all this smoke though.” I handed him a spare mask my mother had left me while he coughed into a white handkerchief.
“thank you.“
“do you believe in omens?” I said returning my gaze to the mountains.
“no, no I don’t. but if I did, I think fire would be the best kind. A promise of a new beginning, of a world purged of mediocrity.” With that he shuffled off into the smoke fog.
I went home, turned off the news and began to unpack my things.

Thoughts on death, and the perfect burrito (from MRR #314)

photo by Erin Yankee

I was daydreaming about the perfect burrito when the tire blew.

It was at the precise moment I had decided that cilantro was indeed crucial to the ultimate harmony of flavor perfection that the van roared and shuddered violently beneath us.

We later concluded that the loose gravel on the road contributed heavily to why Heather lost control and we tumbled off the road down the embankment. I remember her clear and absurd calm when she said, “here we go!” as the van spun around and tipped over the edge.

That moment of terror and hysteria is a strange kind of memory. It was so loud, the rumbling crunching of the van, I know it was, but my memory of it is somehow one of still and quiet terror, frozen in the moment just before the tumbling began.

We had been deep in a cranky silence before the accident. Five and a half weeks into tour we had settled into a dysfunctional truce, fundamentally still friends, but sick of everything about each other. I don’t remember if we had been fighting really, but I remember the tension in the van. No one was speaking in the long dark stretch of Texas on the way to El Paso. We had all retreated into our respective heads for some much-needed alone time that we could not really have for a few more days.

Eating enough is a perpetual struggle for me on tour, since vegan eats are few and far between on the road I make do with every variety of fried potato. I am always thinking about our next meal, and if it will prominently feature the color green. Sometimes on tour I dream about grilled tempeh and big green salads with California avocados (those Florida imposters are fucking garbage, btw). Once I woke myself up ordering a sandwich out loud. So it’s no surprise that I was thinking about food at that crucial moment.

As the van was falling off the road, I had time to be terrified, to brace my arms in front of my face, call paul’s name and laugh as I thought, “I can’t believe my last real thoughts are going to be about food.”

I was the only one with out a seat belt on so I tumbled a bit more than the rest. When we landed on our side I was scrunched upside down and buried in the loose contents of the van: corn nuts, dirt, socks, sunscreen, a piece of the high-hat stand among other things. Sliding down the embankment with our windows open also threw tons of dirt and shredded truck tires in with us too. When we stopped sliding the dirt cloud in the car made it so I couldn’t tell which way was up, or where anyone was.

There was another moment of absolute still, of anxious terrifying stillness, before we began to call out for each other. Dan’s muffled, “herrre” was spoken into the side of my knee and I found I was sitting upside down on top of him.

We crawled out the passenger side window into the warm clear summer night. We stretched out our limbs patted ourselfs down looking for injuries. Everyone was okay. Dirty and shaken, but fine. My only injuries were a knock on the head and some rug burns on my elbows from tumbling against the car interior.

The couple in the car behind us that had called the ambulence and climbed down to see if we were alright found us hugging and verging on tears.

I touched Paul’s face and told him I loved him as the fluids from the engine seeped out the top of the car and down the hill toward us in a shining black mass.

Some of the most important people in my life were in that van with me, and knowing they were okay, that we could have very easily not been so lucky, that I could have lost any of them was a totally sobering and unrelatably scary thought.

I was shaking for at least an hour.

We caught a ride with the highway patrolman to a small motel in the closest town, and the tow truck driver promised to pick us up to survey the damage early the next morning. After settling our dirty scraped up selves in the motel, we formed a much needed beer expedition.

The gas station mini-mart refused to sell to us because while we were waiting in like with out twelve pack it had passed the legal time to purchase. We explained that we had been in line in time, that we’d flipped our car off the road, but to no avail, the heartless harpy, queen of that particular mini-mart would not budge. So we walked back to our motel. All in need of winding down, all a little trembly and high from our brush with death still.

We took long hot showers, ate candy, and sat near each other on the lumpy beds while watching bad television. We worried about how we would get home if the van was wrecked. The room buzzed with a different kind of tension now: a mix of shock, adrenaline, and a deep satisfaction in being alive.

We made some phone calls to friends to relate our scary tale, and uncertain future. The sweetest response of all was from Will, who immediately offered to come pick us, and all our gear, up if the van was indeed totaled. “Just let me know, and I’ll come get you.”

And though it turned out in the end we were able to drive home after duct taping the side mirrors back on, refilling the engine fluids, and replacing the tires and rims, it was nice to know that we had real friends, people who loved us, and that we loved each other still despite the long and tense time on the road. We drove the crumpled van home, and after it safely conveyed us there it was junked. The shop determining it would cost more than the thing was worth to fix everything we had broken, and that sooner than later it would give up altogether.

It’s so easy to get caught up in petty daily life annoyances and bullshit, It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. But I’d much rather my last thoughts be about friends and love and family, and not how annoyed and hungry I am.

Sometimes when I’m eating a burrito I get this strange overwhelming feeling that there isn’t much time left -- that I should take a step back and enjoy life, and value those around me, because I could go at any moment.

Goodbye Gilman (From MRR #313)

photo by Robbie Wobbles

“I just got egged!”

“What? No way!”

Pat showed me the slimy side of his pants with a disgusted grin. Jon followed him in the door laughing into a tall can of root beer saying, “Yeah, they threw them out of their car at us. They only hit pat though.”

“People still egg people?” I said, eyebrows raised, still staring at the drippy mess of Pat’s pants.

“They egg Pat anyway.”

I scrunched my face up, looking at pat and said, “well at least nobody is trying to kiss you, I’ll take eggs over gross old dude kissings any day”

“who was kissing?”

“ugh, it doesn’t matter. I’m just grossed out and a little mad”

“that makes two of us”

I don’t know why we were smiling, but we were. Arms folded, smiling at each other. Mad, grossed out, and smiling.

This night started bad, then got weirder and worse as it went. Everybody was late, bands cancelled, it rained, only a handful of people turned up to watch the bands, and to top it off two older drunk dudes under the guise of thanking me for the show gave me too familiar hugs and planted bar floor smelling kisses grossly close to my mouth. The first one I chalked up to drunkness, and a slight case of the over friendlies, but the second dude swooping in for the same right after, that was conspired lechery. Add to this a band whose song mentioned going to TJ to catch a donkey show, and you have my idea of a bummer night.

But looking at Pat with his eggy pants and folded arms, it couldn’t be anything but funny. I started giggling hysterically, and I couldn’t stop even to explain why I was laughing.

Gilman is like that. You get shit on, and when you think you ought to be mad, you’re laughing.

1st and 3rd Saturdays: It’s meeting time.

We are sitting around in a loose circle on dirty couches and metal folding chairs. These twice-monthly meetings let us check in with one another since we don’t all come to all the shows. Here we decide everything pertaining to the club from frustratingly small quibbles, to the ideologically large. Anyone who has been to at least one meeting before can vote on any proposals brought up, and anyone can join in discussion. These meetings, though sometimes tedious, were a large part of why I wanted to get more involved with Gilman in the first place. I loved that any issue you had could be brought up to the collective, and that even if you didn’t volunteer at the club you had an equal say in it’s running, because as a punk who went there you had an equal stake in it too.

I remember soon after one of these meeting seeing “It’s your club” printed behind plexi in the entrance and finally getting it. Really getting it. It was my club. I knew suddenly that it was all of ours to take care of. The next weekend I started training to work in the Stoar — that was sometime in 2005.

My palms are sweaty. I don’t usually get nervous talking in front of big groups anymore, particularly here at Gilman. But I have an announcement to make, and one I won’t enjoy making. I have to tell them I’m leaving. That after these years spent volunteering here, I am leaving and I don’t know when I can come back.

I twist up my scarf in my hands and begin “I’m moving at the end of august. And I can’t be head coordinator anymore….” I take a steadying breath, and I tell them that I’m going to LA, and will be gone at least a year. I am trying not to look at anyone.

I know it’s not really such a big deal, that someone else will step up and take the responsibility I’m letting go of. But I can’t help but be worried. A big part of my life the last few years has been just that, worrying over and tending to things that needed to be done at the club.

For the first time it occurs to me that maybe I’m less worried about how the club will do without me than how I’ll do without the club. As much as I’ve tried to do in the last few years, I know I’ve gained more than I’ve ever given.

I used to be a pretty plucky fighter, ready to punch someone out if they deserved it, but I’ve seen again and again that almost all fights start over nothing and come to nothing. Over and over I’ve seen fights erupt over stupid misunderstandings or drunken aggression and end in blood pouring down faces and flashing red and blue lights. Now my only respect is for those who can speedily prevent fights, or break them up. I’ve also cleaned enough split lips, broken noses, split eyebrows to know that y’all need to learn to keep your heads down (or your arms up).

I’ve gone to a lot of shows I never would have gone to and am better for it. Seeing bands that I would have always thought to poppy or sweet for my taste, and liking them despite myself. Which is how I ended up with a Defiance Ohio record, and Kimya Dawson stuck in my head. I found that across scene divides everybody is just as nice, and just as punk.

I used to have to drink at least a 40 or a couple 32’s in order to comfortably enjoy a show. Yeah, social anxiety is rough. But, after so many shows spent sober, and delightfully able to remember what bands sounded like, I don’t think I’ll ever feel the need to link how much fun I’m having at a show to how wasted I am again.

I used to think every punk band was playing for the love of music, but I’ve had to see some pretty pathetically money driven displays that have opened my eyes to the fact that a lot of punk bands are just as greedy and obsessed with getting their “due” as any other genre. Instead of being disillusioned I am instead more appreciative of the bands that are generous, and really are doing it for the love of it. Bands who give money away to other bands, who don’t have or want booking agents, who don’t have tantrums over the band order, and who say thank you and mean it — they have a very special place in my heart. How your band acts in the world has equal bearing as how much you rip, so be nice.

More important than any of this I’ve learned to trust myself as capable. The other volunteers of Gilman have trusted me to be in charge of decisions and their trust has given me confidence to make those decisions, to take the lead in emergencies, and to know without a doubt what I am capable of (it’s a lot more than I thought). In turn I’ve learned to encourage others to see what that are capable of, to push them to do what they’re not sure they can, and enjoy their success as much as my own.

Gilman’s appeal, it’s amazingness, is the very simple fact that it is entrusted to us (all of us) to make of it what we will. Even if you live a thousand miles from the Berkeley, I guarantee there is something that that you can do that will mean the same to you as Gilman has meant to me. You can work unselfishly for the betterment of your (punk/whatever) community, share power and decision making with others, and respect the needs and opinions of those around you. If you resolve to build or maintain something good in your community, I promise you will get 100 times back what you give. And it will be impossibly hard to leave if you ever have to. 


The meeting is over and it’s time to get started on the night’s show. Bands are loading gear in through the side door, I’ve got to go get the worker list and a clipboard to get started on staffing the show. I notice Pat standing in the doorway still has a yellowy string of egg on his pants.

The War (from MRR #312)

On her first Christmas back home from Iraq, I helped my mother roll out dough for piecrusts. She was showing me how to roll it out nice and even when my stepdad popped the cork off a champagne bottle. She froze like a small deer: tense with wide terrified eyes. She dropped the pin and put her hands to her face like an embarrassed child. I put my arms up in a panic to comfort her. So quick I didn’t have time to process it, she yanked me into the pantry and shut the door.

I pulled the dangling string and lit up the tiny food closet. Surrounded by oatmeal boxes and cooking oil, and every kind of canned vegetable imaginable, my mother stood crying.

She looked up at me meekly, her face flushed wet, as she said, "Is my make-up okay?"

I took a napkin from its bulk box container and patted away her smeared mascara.

"Good as new," I said, touching her cheek with my palm, starting to choke up a little myself.

“I could stand to feel this way as long as I didn’t have to do it in front of everybody. It’s so embarrassing.” She muttered as she leaned forward into my shoulder. I held her and stroked her hair the way she used to hold me when I was I child.

"We can stay in here as long as you need to momma.” My voice broke at the end and I looked around for something to distract myself with as I kept stoking her hair.

“I mean, look at all this food! We could camp in here for weeks if you wanted… Crap, we forgot to bring a can opener though. You think anyone would notice if I reached out and got one out of the drawer?"

She rumbled a little, chuckling into my shoulder. She leaned back and used her apron to wipe the last tears away.

“We’d better go out there before anyone notices,” she said as he smoothed her hair.

“No one expects this to be easy for you,” because no one knew what to expect at all.

My mother is a small woman, with quick eyes and delicate wrists. Only the faintest ring of her southern accent remains in her small soft voice. She likes show her military ID to people and giggle when their mouths drop open in disbelief. I wonder with them. How did this little soft spoken woman, one who never used to raise her voice or swear, how did she end up a Lt. Colonel in the Army? How did she end up a medic in the middle of a war?

She’s defensive if I ask her outright. She says, “I knew what I was getting into, I knew there was a possibility things would end up like this. I went in with my eyes open, I want you to know that.” I do, I know she made a choice, that she knew there were risks. But I still can’t piece together what combination of events and sentiments brought us both here.

Her first real love and fiancée died in Vietnam. She only speaks of it in her faraway voice as if he were a dream. “He was dark and tall. I loved him and he died.” She carried it with her, through two subsequent marriages as a waitress and a single mother of two boys. She struggled, scraped up enough to put herself through nursing school. Met married and divorced my much older father. And at the end found herself in her forties with three children, and no security --nothing to steady herself with.

She wanted to finish college, but couldn’t find a way to pay for it. She lived in a rented house she couldn’t afford, and let my brothers grow a crop of weed in the garage to help make ends meet. I was eleven, and I could tell my mother was falling to pieces inch by inch. In this moment chance and need and predisposition collided when she joined the army as a nurse, and an officer. She said she dreamed of saving the lives of other people's loved ones so that they might be spared her pain, so that they might not have their futures ripped from them.

Now, having been through war, my mother has dreams of a burning woman she can't put out. She wakes up sobbing, and buries her face in the soft sheets of her queen-sized bed in her king-sized track home in the middle of quiet California farmland. The woman she dreams of was a real woman, a patient burned in a bombing, who though full of morphine screamed for hours until she died. A woman she could not save, whose pain she could not lessen.

Sometimes she wakes up at night to her own screams. Other times she can’t sleep at all because of the burning tingling that shoots up her legs and arms from her last series of anti anthrax shots. The VA doctors think it will get a little better over time, but the neuropathy caused by the drugs will probably be with her all her life. Sometimes she’ll wake up sleep walking looking for her rifle that was by her bedside in Iraq. She says she has this sense in her dream that if she finds it she’ll feel safe again, that only then she can really sleep.

When she first came back it was hard to talk politics with her. She was quick to jump to defending the war, to insist that it would be too much if all these people were dying for nothing. When she's feeling defensive you can almost hear the war drums rise in her voice. Borrowed words, and sweeping sentiments used as armor. It was too much then to even consider that everything she had witnessed had been for nothing, had been a big sprawling mistake.

When she first came back she was also prone to hilarious angry outbursts. We were in the mall trying to find some shoes she felt comfortable wearing after a year in boots. There was a woman ahead of us in line berating the sales clerk and pitching a fit that they didn’t have the color sandals she wanted. My mother turned a bright crimson before she yelled, “What the fuck is wrong with you? Be glad they have shoes here! Fuck, some people don’t even have feet!” I gently pulled her backward out of the store as the pale shocked faces of the customers stared at us. The offending woman said, “I’ll take the red ones” in a very small voice and I burst out laughing.

She also took to saying really grumbling old man things like: “war is fucking hell. All these people don’t know how fucked up the world really is. They get to stay here and shop and pretend nobody is dying. Fucking assholes.” Sometimes I can’t believe how much more alike we are now. We can relate in ways I never thought we would. We both hate war and warmongers. We both can’t stand the self-entitled decadence that is life in the US. We both despair that we can’t see a way out, and that these wars rage on. She used to be so optimistic, so cheerful, full of hallmark sayings, and faith in the world. Now that most of that is gone, I miss who my mother was, but enjoy the closeness our mutual despair has brought us. It might be the only pinprick of light in all of this.

After a months and months of painful adjustment, she has come into a little bit of peace. She works for a VA Hospital doing outreach to homeless vets. She says it helps her as much as them to have someone to relate to.

She has come to believe that the wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan are unjustified, and the people that have died, did in fact die for nothing. But this has only strengthened her conviction that she has a duty to go and help as many people as she can make it through.

She was deployed again last week, first to a base here in the states, then, back again to Iraq or Afghanistan. Back to sewing young men and women back together again. And I’m preparing to help pull her back together again when she gets home.

Crustier than the next dude (from MRR #310)

photo via macwagen on flickr

            Last summer Burt got ringworm and scabies at the same time.

           When he told me I just laughed at the absurd punkness of it. I’ve never had scabies, but I feel like it’s one of those supremely punk problems. Like on tour when we rolled into town and find the house we were playing emptied of furniture.

           “We burned the couches last night”

            “Whoa, why?”

            “Scabies.”

            We all nodded our heads solemnly. Unconsciously beginning to scratch our arms, or rubbing the edge of one shoe against the other leg. We hugged our friends, but carefully, remembering every time our skin met their skin, trying not to think about it… but thinking of it all the same.

            Then we drank around the blackened remnants of the bonfire, and later sleep fitfully in the bare rooms with grime outlines where the couches used to be.

            Every tour it was a different house, but the rituals were the same.

            I’ve had and heard about my fair share of tour ailments, both illness and injury, but none so sadly out of control and preventable as Burt’s.

Burt is not the cleanliest of dudes. His once white shirts are the color of smog, and his previously black clothes have all turned a sickly olive or a rich reddened brown. But in general he takes care of himself. His is not a self-destructive neglect, but a general aversion to clothes washing or owning enough clothes to have to decide what to wear.  I like to call him a house crusty, or apartment hobo.

Even being as grimy a dude as I know him to be, it still seemed crazily impossible to get both ringworm and scabies at the same time. I made him walk me through it, step by itchy step.

            In his estimation the problems began before he ever left on tour.

            “Getting ready to leave. I had so much to do. I wasn’t showering. I wore the same underpants for a week and a half. I’m sure that was a bit of a factor.”

            He didn’t worry about the itching at first. Like I explained, he’s a generally grimy dude, so he’s used to some itching.

            “Everybody itches. It didn’t seem like a big deal. But it got worse. I woke up at night and couldn’t go back to sleep. I’d just scratch and scratch”

            It was two weeks of constant itching before he couldn’t take it anymore. The turning point came when it made it’s way onto his “junk.”

He’d woken up at 5am and tried showering to help ease the itching. But it didn’t work. He called around to find a free clinic, but no one could see him. So, he had the band take him to the emergency room.

            “I said, ‘it itches’ and she had me drop trou. She glanced me over and said. ‘You probably just have jock itch.” (Aka. Ringworm. Aka Tinea Cruris. Aka punk itch)

            ‘She prescribed pills and ointment and told me to wash thoroughly twice a day. So, I had to try to shower twice a day at weird punk houses, and sadly the next string of houses we stayed at only had tubs. I spent a lot of awkward time crouched over in these tubs washing my groin. It fucking sucked, but we did get to make a lot of ‘there’s a fungus among us’ jokes.”

            The additional thing Burt had to do to get rid of the itching for good? Boil his underpants. Which seemed easy enough to arrange since they were staying with good friends. But when Burt asked if he could do some panty boiling on their stove the answer was an unequivocal “No way!”

            He grimed through another night in his ringworm underpants, and the next day, in the next city, he decided to go for it and boil them while his hosts were away at work.

            “I only had a small pot, so I had to boil all my underpants and a couple shirts in batches. My clothes hadn’t been washed in… well, ranging from two weeks to a year. I didn’t add more water between batches so the water got all low and black. I singed some of the clothes a little bit”

            No one came home from work to find Burt making dirt soup and burning his clothes on their stove. He got it done, and presumably killed the fungi living there.

            Two weeks later and he had finished the anti-ringworm regimen. During that time he had gathered a vast array of anti-ringworm accessories: special soap, a loofah, tea tree oil, and some boxers. But he was still itching. Bad. Some of the redness had gone away, and it seemed to have retreated, but it was not getting less itchy. Luckily, they had a few days off in his hometown so he could see a doctor he knew and get things sorted out properly

            “I went in and said ‘hello sir, I’m having a problem with my penis.’  He examines me and says ‘let’s just think about this.’ We spent a while comparing my junk to pictures and realized it looked just like scabies. We deduced I had killed the ringworm, but had let the scabies take over.

            Burt was given a cream to apply over his whole body, and leave on overnight. Unlike the old days of being forced to use the harsh foul smelling Lindane, he was prescribed a mild scentless cream called premethrine. He was warned that even with the treatment done he would itch for another month, but he would no longer be contagious.

            “I want to clear up some misapprehensions it seems most people have about scabies. It’s not that bad, and it’s harder to pass on than everyone seems to think. According to my doctor you have to ‘share clothes or naked hug someone’ to pass it. I spent eight weeks in a hot van with my band, and no one else got it.

            “I’ve changed my habits a little. I mean, we all want to be crustier than the next dude, but I change and wash my underwear more often now. I’m also more likely to go to the doctor now; these are the kinds of things that I always struggled to take care of with a home remedy. I’m all about home remedies, but I think this is a situation where you want to have ‘the man’ give you a chemical.

            For home remedies Burt says the tea tree oil helped alleviate some of the symptoms, but it didn’t come close to any kind of cure.

            “Couple tips for those with scabies: hot showers are no good! It encourages them to thrive. As for killing them on your clothes, boiling works… but you should iron them too to be extra sure. And crusty dudes particularly – change your underpants dude, please.”

            Both Ringworm and scabies are things the punks seem particularly prone to. We live and tour in filth, shower less frequently, wear tight pants, and tend to wait for our ailments to cross the last possible line before we seek treatment.

            The kicker? Right before Burt left on tour, he told a friend about his slight itchiness. They said. “dude you probably have ringworm, take care of that shit before it gets out of hand.”

            Dear the punks: Listen to your friends, change your underpants, quit putting off taking care of shit you are hoping will just go away but know won’t, and please take care of yourself so next summer I won’t show up to your empty house wondering if I should risk hugging you.

            It is now perfectly safe to naked hug Burt, but for at least a few people who read this-the following will be true: he boiled his ringworm scabies underpants on your stove, in your only pot. 

 

The Dickies - Banana Splits

The "Banana Splits" single came out in 1979, and somebody thought it wise to throw some money at these crazies and let them make a video.

Rumor has these dudes all met because they had the same speed dealer. surprised? no, didn't think so.

1977 in San Fernando Valley, what else to do but get high and start a punk band right?

more factual info on the Dickies