High on the list of my favorite all-time songs is Jungleland, that soaring rock n’ roll epic about swaggering guys who have something to prove cavorting with barefoot girls who recline on the hoods of cars right before a knife is raised high into the shadows of a stark night and everything changes forever. It’s a pure masterpiece of writing, one that ignores typical conventions and instead surges forward with the haunting rhythm of a saxophone, some blaring and unrelenting guitars, and one of the single most beautiful measures of melody ever tinkled on a piano. Perhaps even more than anything I’ve read by T.S. Eliot – or anything I ever pretended to read, like Beowulf –Jungleland captures the loss of control and the spinning of the self and the disquieting way that literally anything can happen once the sun goes down.

The song’s lyrics are astounding. They’re poignant and profound in their construction and visceral in their effect. The words sketch a portrait of a life most of us will never experience; then they … Continue reading →

I took off my gloves once on a blustery cold January day and handed them to a homeless woman who was standing beneath an icicle-encrusted tree. I bought a student a prom dress last year and lent her my own jewelry after gently explaining that it’s very hard for anyone to pull off enormous pink rhinestone earrings. I talked a friend off a ledge one night when she mistakenly believed her boyfriend was cheating on her. I play the peacekeeper in my family so often that I’m pretty sure I should earn a salary or at least get dental benefits.

I say all this so you will know I’m not the cruelest person clomping about this large planet. I say all this because I am about to dive in (self-awareness first) and react with scalding sarcasm and a sh*t-ton of profanity at the sight of Kim Richards needlessly appearing again on my television screen. I say all this because there’s nobody in my real life – even that one guy – who I hate more … Continue reading →

Remember that scene in Poltergeist when the technician whose job it was to photograph the gazillions of ghosts living and thriving inside the little blonde girl’s closet decided to go into the kitchen late at night to cook himself a steak? Remember how that steak became infested with ravenous maggots that burst forth from the center of the slab of red meat and the way your pre-teen stomach began to topple and turn as you watched that thing crawl across the white Formica countertop? Can you also recall what happened next, when the guy went into the bathroom and began pulling the skin off his face in gigantic hunks of blood and tendons until all we saw was a grotesque vision of bone and hollowed-out eye sockets and the sink below him was filled with heaping shreds of plasma-covered muscle? Yeah, I’d rather watch that scene every single night on a loop and use the sound effects from the sequence as I walk down the aisle on my wedding day than ever f*cking hear the … Continue reading →