So by not owning a TV, apparently I am missing out on a hella full-tilt brown-acid meltdown involving various members of the Republican Party who’ve been running for president this year. From what I’ve gleaned by watching clips online, there’s this one guy named Willard, who used to be an empty suit who fronted for a band of rapacious venture-capital coyotes called Bain Predatorial. He looks a mite brittle, like that prick blueblood dad whose browbeaten kid is on the opposing team at your eight-year-daughter’s suburban soccer game, that entitled guy who’s constantly getting in the faces of the refs so that his kid’s team can eke out a win by repeatedly penalizing your kid’s team. You know, that guy about whom you cannot stop obsessing over the idea of ritually disemboweling with a rusty old beer opener. His nickname is “Mitt,” which is Biff’n'Muffy short for “Mittens,” and he is utterly without the subgenius concept of “slack.” He has no slack. None. Zero.

Mittens Romney’s biggest problem, in a field of competitors who are desperately trying to out-Jesus each other, is that his particular religion, while it makes claims that it’s “uniquely Christian,” is considered to be some sort of apostate say-tanic cult by the hyper-drooling, Jeebus-wanking fanatics that make up the majority of today’s GOP. Sure, Mormons wear special undergarments if they’ve qualified for their temple recommend card, and in their temples they baptize dead people, including your relatives, and probably mine, too, by proxy into their church, and their doctrine of eternal progression runs at least a teensy bit contrary to the Christian concept of salvation by grace, but when you think about the stuff that the more over-the-top branches of evangelical Christians believe, which is about one Amanita muscaria cap short of a full-on UFO abduction by day-glo Merrie Melodies cartoon characters who ebb and flow in exquisite Busby Berkeley-choreographed formations, I’d think your average Latter-day Saint is pretty darned reasonable by comparison. My major quibble is that the LDS mothership in Salt Lake City bankrolled a “Don’t let the gays and lesbians get married” initiative in my home state of California, then bused a bunch of “volunteers” to my state to push for its passage. Not cool, Mittens and other Mormons. Not cool.

Fortunately for Romney, his competition is hilariously unelectable. Consider one Isaac Newton “Newtler” Gingrich, who has been described as what looks like viscous lumps of mashed potatoes poured into a suit, then topped by a rotting Jack O’Lantern that was thrown away by the neighborhood serial killer/child molester, who’d tried and failed to carve the pumpkin to look like Pedobear to draw the kids within striking range, but instead it ended up looking like some hallucinatory Aztec approximation of a Hieronymous Bosch angel of death. Gingrich tries to sound affable, and smart, and even reasonable, but his patronizing and bullying natures usually come out when he’s challenged, whereupon he behaves like a cross between a cornered wolverine, or more accurately a honey badger chomping on a week-dead cobra, and a petulant toddler dragged kicking and screaming past the candy aisle in a Walmart. But don’t you want to “do” his third wife, Callista? That spray-on newscaster helmet hair! That kabuki makeup! Imagine her in banana-yellow silk lingerie, her head and neck dripping with jewels from Tiffany, crouched on all fours on a cheap flea-market rug resembling the U.S. Constitution, cooing the 70-page John Galt address from Atlas Shrugged as you, uh, gosh darn it, I’ll shut up now before I get myself into real trouble. But I already am.

So, well … uh … Ron Paul, on the other hand, looks like Mayberry deputy sheriff Barney Fife, if ol’ Barney’d sold his soul to the devil and then got tricked by Baron Samedi into spending the rest of his earthly days stealing nuts from squirrels. The one caveat is that Barney the nut stealer was given the gift of charisma by Auld Scratch as a consolation prize for his bedebbilments, so that he would appeal to anyone thick enough to have made it all the way through The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged without laughing derisively or throwing those literary masterworks into the shredder, instead acquiring a fanatical devotion to Paul and his ideas. (And you Pauline apostles, especially you pot-smoking ones, I wrote the above just to piss you off. I fully expect you to fill my inbox with angry letters defending your hero. Do not disappoint me.)

Oozing out of the Lone Star State, Rick Perry pretty much dumb-shat himself into oblivion with an on-camera derp-derp-derp moment that was breathtaking in its stupidity. So he’s back at the old family hermitage in Cabeza del Negro, Tejas, pondering whether or not to attempt a Gee Dubya-swaggering comeback in one of the Southern primaries, riding up, ahem, bareback on some hawse from the family ranch, firing a couple of nickel-plated Colt 45s at any lib’ruhl media clowns who might be lurking about. I say go for it, governor. Wear the ass-less chaps the lads in Austin say they’ve seen you sporting in local watering holes while you’re at it. You know them Babtists don’t care if you’re one of them hoe-moe-sekshuls as long as you ain’t one of them Utah Mormon devil worshippers, because you of course love the real Jesus.

There’s another dick in the race, I mean another dick named Dick, because there are a big bag of dicks running as Republicans this year: Rick Santorum, however, is somewhat of a surprise. I guess if you stick around for long enough, somebody will ask you to dance. In this case, it’s a half-bright lawyer from the Keystone State who got elected to the Senate, and managed to lose the next election by, what, 40 points? This guy is that hammerhead on a high school debating team who, when he isn’t comparing gay bedroom behavior to “man on dog” bestiality, or Mormon polygamy, keeps whipping out his toolbox of logical fallacies to pummel every opposing viewpoint like a drunken chef tenderizing some calamari, to where everyone else is snickering and betting on what completely idiotic spew the sweater vest-wrapped bonehead will say next. And I won’t even mention how he’s enriched himself with wingnut welfare from private healthcare companies, or that thing with the stillborn baby that squicks me out so badly I can’t even make a joke about it, not even one involving cheesesteak preparation.

Hey, speaking of food, let’s look at the others. Pizza Guy flamed out, which is too bad. I thought that with that smoking campaign manager, Herman Cain was almost fixing to get ready to ratchet up the surrealism to way past where it already is. Maybe bust out some fine music at his campaign appearances, like the extended mix of “Candy Licker” by Marvin Sease, or maybe “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-A-Lot, while the big-butt dancers from Bobby Rush’s blues revue come parading out onstage to shake major can at befuddled reporters and Republicans. Maybe unveil a big Baphomet logo when he discounts the price of his nine-nine-nine extry-sausage combo to six-six-six. Meanwhile, the trouble with one sexually harassed female crawling out of the past is that, pretty soon, they’re crawling out of the woodwork like cockroaches after a pyrethrum cleanout in the kitchen of a greasy spoon. What to do, what to do? Don’t be a pussy: Own it! “Shucks, yes, American voter. I have been known to be a victim of my lustful urges. But I am deeply sorry, and I have confessed to my God, and Jesus, and my preacher, and my loving and faithful and understanding wife, so I have been cleansed by the blood of the Lamb the Redeemer, and I am ready to like be your president and stuff.” That’s how you handle that shit.

Michele Bachmann dropped out, too. She’s bag-o-nuts crazy, of course, but nevertheless I’m disappointed, because her husband the pray-the-gheh-aweigh “doctor,” whose loafers are reputed to be even lighter than Liberace’s, would have done a fine job redecorating the White House. But she’s no longer a factor. Boo hoo. And who else is left? Jon Huntsman? He’s still in the race? Oh, he’s all right. His daughters are kinda dorky for making those videos, but they’re kind of hot. Maybe Huntsman will do well in New Hampshire tomorrow. But he’s the same religion as Romney, which unfortunately does not “test well” with certain dominionist Christian types.

And where is Sarah Palin? Why, God, why?

It’s bedtime. I could write more snarky stuff about these clowns, but I think I’ll go buy a TV instead. –Jackson Griffith

I’m sitting here in a cafe typing into my laptop right now. The impermanence of life is weighing heavily on my mind, and has been for a while. The holidays are over. One person I knew, a man who helped me out a lot, simply by living an example and by exuding serenity when I got to a crisis point over 19 years ago and had to abandon one way of life for another, died over the holidays. Another person I’ve known just about as long, who was around when I was wrestled by life into surrender, is reportedly on her deathbed as I write this. My daughter, 23 and beautifully independent, left for Thailand right after Christmas on a one-way ticket. I sincerely hope there’s a god, or maybe some benevolent spirits, who will watch over her and keep her safe.

Me? I’m not a loser. I make a lot of mistakes. Lately, the task of making amends has been coming up, partially because of where I am in a certain spiritual-growth process, and partially because, well, I’m sick and tired of making the same mistakes over and over, and I’m tired of doing stupid things that hurt people I care about, and I want to stop and I want to set things right. I’ve got one in particular that’s at the top of the stack, an old friend I badmouthed on Facebook, and maybe somewhere else I can’t remember because I was in a fugue state of being a butthole. I’ve tried to make amends several times, with no response any time. Please don’t laugh.

Many of my resentments seem to grow out of my frustration to be heard as a songwriter and musician. I get frustrated, then bitterly resentful, and then that negative state I’m in, along with the damage I’ve caused, turns people against me. What I really need to do is let go of any desire to play music — not give up, but just let go. I did that for my nonexistent love life, which is still nonexistent, but at least I’m not torturing myself anymore whenever a beautiful woman crosses my path, or worse, a beautiful woman who at one time professed love for me. It doesn’t mean I have to stop playing music or singing or writing songs; it just means I have no expectations that anyone other than me will give much of a hoot.

This morning I woke up to a pretty cool dream. It was long and byzantine, probably fueled by the anodyne Tom Ka Gai soup I ate the night before to ward off this horrible fluey-coldy thing that hit me on New Year’s Eve, and all I remember was the end. I descended with a small group of people, familiar to me but I can’t recall their names, into a cave that led to another world inside the Earth, kind of like Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, which I’d enjoyed in comic-book form (Classics Illustrated) until I stupidly took it with me on a Boy Scout 50-mile hike and the Scoutmaster caught me reading it behind a tree and he made me burn it and a couple of other childhood comic favorites, me weeping like a pussyboy at losing some things I loved dearly, in front of all the other Boy Scouts.

Anyway, this group and I descended into this other world, which was verdant and primitive, like the plants were at an earlier stage of evolution. There were these younger boys, like my sons, and at one point one of them told me how cool it might be if we could fly. “What’s holding you back?” I answered him. “It’s easy. Watch.” Then I got a running start, but my arms out like plane wings and took off. I was zooming around this inner dome world, rising and diving and doing barrel rolls, and I saw that they followed. The sky was pink and orange with clouds, and the landscape was lush and green, like hilly jungles that went on for miles. At one point, I flew over what looked like some kind of modern defense installation, or maybe a nuclear power plant or a UFO, all gleaming chrome in the bright light. My mind couldn’t make sense of what it was doing in the corner of this domed jungle world of my dreams.

And then, we all landed, and it was time to leave. There was a woman sitting in a lounge chair on a deck, and she was a composite of my first girlfriend Jo and my daughter’s mom Lynne and a couple other women I’ve loved. She looked up from the newspaper she was reading, and as I walked by she rose up and planted a big kiss on my lips. “It’s so good to have you back, Bri,” she said, calling me by a shortened version of the middle name I’d gone by in my younger years. “It’s so nice to see you acting like your old self again.” I’m not sure what she meant. I mean, I kinda have an inkling, but I’m really not so sure.

Then again, there is a lot I do not know, and probably never will. –Jackson Griffith

There was a couple seated in between them and me, so I only could gander snippets of their conversation; something about “you look hawt,” directed toward the blonde, and a rather loud passage wherein Mr. Ladies Man was arguing over his cell phone with what sounded like a cab dispatcher about the price of getting from Tres Hermanas to the Mercantile Saloon, an easy five-and-a-half block jaunt by foot in athletic shoes, made slightly more difficult in counterfeit Louboutins. I kept trying to take pictures of them, because they were such a funny sight, but I am the world’s worst photographer. When I left, Fauxhawk and the blonde were decamped outside with their champagne and cigarrettes: “You look sooo hawtt,” he told her again, “but Gina just looks sooooo trashy tonight.”

Later, I made it over to the Fox & Goose in time for D.J. Larry Rodriguez’s big soiree, which must have been pretty fun. Except that Sir Nose D’Voidofunk hit me with some kind of anti-bop entropy gun, so I got rhythm about as well as Mitt Romney, which is to say, not at all. Everybody was dancing, and had not committed to Larry that I would pull the string at midnight that would release the balloons, I might have bailed. I mean, I could not dance, I could not feel it; what I was feeling instead was crummy, increasingly crummy.

Once I got home, I didn’t leave until this morning. On New Year’s Day, I felt like that Detroit Lions fan who ran in front of a bus, except that I lived through it. At least I think I did. Maybe not. I just proned out in bed, slept, woke up, read, and dreamed of buying a toaster. That’s what my life has been missing, I thought: The ability to make toast on demand. So today, finally, I scraped myself off the mattress and into the shower, and then made it across town to pay rent and go to Target to shop for, you guessed it, a toaster.

I hate stores. I hate shopping. I hate other people in stores who push massive shopping carts down aisles and expect me to stop concentrating on various makes of toasters so I can flatten myself against the shelves to make it easy for their obese juggernauts to pass me by. I hate getting in line behind some couple whose teenage daughter is still running around the store grabbing stuff to buy, only to sprint up to the checkout and dump it on the counter ahead of my solitary toaster, solitary because I didn’t feel good enough to buy more stuff. Meanwhile, everyone else who made smarter picks for lines to get into have bought their swag and moved out the doors. Especially I hate shopping when I don’t feel good. Still, I ain’t about to pepper spray anybody.

Right now, I feel like a catbox left to fester. I’m doing laundry. But I did make amends with the guy I’d maligned, described in my last post here, by apologizing, saying I was sorry, telling him I’m really working on not practicing any more of that dickish behavior, which is rooted in my own insecurities that the world has passed me by, and I asked him if there was anything I could do to make it right. There is one other person I offended a while back, a big shot in the local music scene, to whom I’ve sent three separate messages apologizing for my behavior, but he’s choosing to ignore me and my entreaties, or not acknowledge them. Which is something I have no control over. If he doesn’t want to accept my amends, that’s his choice.

I just have to stop shooting myself in the foot. And I gotta start feeling better, too. –Jackson Griffith

But no. Instead of doing one of a hundred other things, like sit in meditative silence, or call that platonic galpal back who wanted to meet for a meal tonight, I had to do a stupid. I got an Facebook invite to a show at a local coffee room, and I clicked on the page for that show and typed a message about wanting to come, but I’m boycotting any shows by the person at the top of the ticket until he lets me play on one of his shows. The top of the ticket guy immediately wrote back: “That’ll never happen.” Fine, I wrote back. At least you’re finally communicating with me, instead of giving me a passive-aggressive cold shoulder every time I stupidly abase myself to you for asking to play on one of your shows. Then he said something like “Butthurt singer-songwriters aren’t my style.”

Now, I’m not sure that butthurt is the correct word; I think that in my case the word “frustrated” is closer to the mark. Hey, maybe I come across as butthurt, or unnecessarily entitled, to people, and I’m just a poor self-observer. But not being named Cayce, or Criswell, or Kreskin, or Mesmer, I have no idea unless you tell me, preferably before I make an annoying idiot out of myself. Psychic I am not, contrary to what those astrologers tell me about my Pisces Moon-Mercury combo in the sixth house trining my Neptune in the second or something like that.

Yes, I have a lot of songs that I want to play for people. I thought that this certain DIY straightedge punk legend and onetime local cafe owner might be open to my little ambition, perhaps. I figured wrong, of course, but I kept persisting even though I wasn’t getting any kind of straight answer. Perhaps I was, but it was telegraphed in that unspoken way that non-Asperger types communicate, and I was too cluelessly autistic to pick up the signals. Story of my life, there, really.

I could go off at this point and rip the guy a new sphincter with my precision-sharpened critic’s scalpel, but I won’t. I respect the guy’s work and like a lot of his songs, really, and in the past, we’ve enjoyed reasonably warm conversation to the point where I thought I could consider him a friend. I admire his tenacity to keep going even when the world is throwing him the middle finger, and I think he’s got a great work ethic. In fact, I’d spoken to his wife at one point about asking him to help me sequence a set’s worth of my songs, which is a service I would pay money to have done, and she seemed to voice that it might be a decent idea. Perhaps I misperceived. Anyway, I ran it past him, and got that cold shoulder, and didn’t press forward with that idea anymore. Asking for help in a way that I actually receive it doesn’t seem to be one of my strong suits, which is one reason I don’t seem to have many musician pals helping me to flesh out my songs.

My only caveat is that this person and his cohorts seem overly chummy and exclusionary, at least toward me. Perhaps they think that I, my music, or maybe both, “suck,” or aren’t up to their lofty standards, but they never got around to telling me to my face until now. Which is okay; I’ve spent large parts of my life casting what few pearls I have before swine, and I’m just getting around to stopping that behavior, or at least reining it in. The funny thing is, this person has rattled off many column inches in one of his blogs bitching about the local music scene, and to me, he and his little treehouse of friends are as much of the problem as anyone he rails about, and the idea of him calling anyone else “butthurt” is more than slightly risible.

But I’d rather not focus anymore on something I can’t control, which is what he or anyone else thinks about me. I’m more interested in getting at the root of the problem, which is why people react to me the way they do. It’s kinda like my dad used to tell me: “If you’re walking around town and all you keep running into is assholes, come home and look in the mirror.” And I really want to figure out why people perceive me as too “butthurt” to want to work with me, so I can address those negative qualities or try to get help working through them. I’m sincere about this; I don’t want to die and then have somebody say, wow, he wrote some pretty good tunes; too bad he’s not around to play them now.

So at some point, I’d really rather move past that which is holding me back. I’d like for people to want to play music with me, rather than talk behind my back about what a jerk they think I am, or laugh at me for trying. I’m not getting any younger, but mostly I’m getting incrementally wiser. I want to use the time I have left to communicate with others, and I really would like the privilege and opportunity to play my songs to people. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. But I’ll have to approach people who feel warmly toward me, rather than people who secretly harbor animosity toward me.

So maybe next time, I’ll do the smart thing and shut up before I make any more enemies. –Jackson Griffith

I’m not going to post any Christmassy stuff, just because I’m not really a Christmassy guy. Didn’t get a whole lot of party invitations this holiday season, probably because I’ve been such a hermit. Hermitage is good, though. I can noodle around on the guitar and read books and go eat dinner by myself and walk around the neighborhood, and nobody gives me a hard time about it. Hell, most of the time I have such a difficult time making conversation with people that it’s kind of a relief being alone. I prefer to communicate with people via my fingers, as in typing or writing. My mouth, not so good, at least until I can work up the nerve to see a dentist.

I hope you aren’t getting the vibe that I’m wallowing in self-pity here, because I’m most decidedly not. My life is generally pretty good. Yeah, the holidays suck, especially when your family is fractured and you haven’t had anyone gaze at you lovingly and call you sweetie in a long time. But usually I can get through any rough patches or raw emotional moments, or days, by holding the realization that things change, and then they change again, and then they keep changing.

So here it is, almost Christmas. I’m kinda planning on working on this crazy song cycle I started, but I’m pretty open to whatever comes surging down the pike. Got some nice plans for tomorrow, and gonna fold my laundry today.

Like now, really. Till next time. –Jackson Griffith

I might have drived/driven/drove, but that would mean I’d have to give up my parking slot in the apartment complex first-come-first-serve lot, and I’d have to park on the street because the lot is full, and that’s because a lot of chumps from neighboring buildings are parking there, and our manager has other things more pressing than telling these nincompoops to vamoose or get towed, so it’s a sucky situation and I have a lingering resentment that makes me race home after work just so I can grab one of the slots before one of the other resident tools gets in first, like this one balding goatee’d troll in a VW GTI who grabs the front slot, I swear he lurks and watches until someone leaves and then he runs out and gets in his car and whips it into the empty space, so I have a stupid resentment about all that. Stupid, stupid resentment.

Anyway, I walked.

So then I got a table, which is nice because the usual crowd of college kids is on hiatus. Ordered a salad and a root beer. Tuned into the two couples at the next table because they were talking loud about nothing in particular, found myself getting judgmental, realized that all my judgments were in my head, so I went back to typing. Found a really dumb Croatian blond-wig band for your enjoyment. Ate a salad: The bleu cheese is surprisingly catboxesque, but not in a bad way; it’s just pungent in the way your dog’s breath is when he kisses you after snouting his way through the Fresh Step in search of kitty-sourced Tootsie Rolls.

And now they’re gone. This place stops serving beer around 10, even though it’s open until 11. Those kids wanted to drink. Doesn’t make sense, they complained. I told them I thought it might be because when the coffeehouse, a fixture in this part of town since before I arrived in the mid-1980s, got new owners, who were more foodie-inclined, they went for a beer and wine license and got a lot of pushback from the neighbors, many of whom are old hippies who bought victorians and other old houses when they were run-down piles in the 1970s, and they kicked in a lot of time, love and money into bringing them up to suff, and they they grew older and grumpier and turned into old-city preservationists. Nothing wrong with that, but you can’t stay fixed in a time when you packed your bong and cracked an Anchor Steam and blissed out to the willowy strains of your favorite Crosby, Stills & Nash record, because those days are long since passed, and this is a young person’s town now.

Which I actually like, even though I’m older now, too. It’s a really crummy place to be single, though, because most of the women in this ‘hood are closer to my daughter’s age, and I prefer women who are much closer to my own age, which is, um, like, well, I was born in the first year Chevrolet offered a V8 engine in its Bel Air model. Not to hard to figure out. Which is to say that it’s after 10, and I’d better start ambling back to my tiny apartment and hope the neighbor across the way isn’t having ring-shout sexytime. If I’m awake, I just improvise my own porno soundtrack via some ninth chords and R&B vamps on my guitar. But waking up from a dead sleep to hear some random woman having a theatrical orgasm can lead to some pretty jinky dreams, like animals getting tortured and things like that.

Cranked the heat before I left. I know my bed’s yummily toasty now. G’night! –Jackson Griffith

I figure that might make for an interesting narrative thread through American history, or pop culture and American history and other stuff. I’ve already written about half of the first three songs, the first one on Aaron Burr,” titled “How We Will Be Remembered”; the second, as yet untitled, on Samuel Adams; the third, on brothers Thomas Pinckney and Charles Cotesworth Pinkney, both of whom ran unsuccessfully for vice-president. That one doesn’t have a title, either. Partially written means that I have full melodic and chord structures, and some words. Next up, after that, is Rufus King, and then I’ll have to look at my list for what comes after that. I think it’s some Norwegian-sounding guy.

I figure that if I’m lucky, I can write the final 14 or more songs in February, in time for February is Album Writing Month. Working backward from Sarah Palin, the major-party candidates are John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Jack Kemp, Dan Quayle, Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale, Bob Dole, Sargent Shriver, Thomas Eagleton, Edmund Muskie, William Miller and the guy who I wanted to write a song about that inspired this project, Henry Cabot Lodge. Oh, and before him, C. Estes Kefauver, who had a high school named after him in a National Lampoon high-school yearbook parody. I forget who’s before that, except that I think the losing candidate in 1920 was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Unlike the three guys who gave me the idea by doing a project on presidents, I don’t expect anything to come from this. But if I can get my act together, you can expect some pretty decent songs. I’ll be launching a new blog and posting rough mp3 versions sometime after the first of the year.

Wish me luck? –Jackson Griffith

This weekend I was going through stuff. I had to retrieve something out of my storage space for somebody, and I started pulling old items out, with the idea of systematically going through everything I have left from my past life and either cataloging and shelving it, or getting rid of it or, in a few cases, returning it to its rightful owner. I want to consolidate down to a smaller space, and then to no space at all. So, I’ve got some things to go through this week.

One thing I found on my counter at home, which I got last year as a Christmas party white elephant gift from a documentary filmmaker and judge who shall remain nameless, is a voodoo doll. Specifically an “ex-wife voodoo doll.” I received it right at the time that my love life went south, and 2011 has been a complete washout from me. Not even a kiss, or even mild flirtation.

Now, I don’t know if getting rid of this thing will change my life at all, but I’m feeling to do this in the least harmful way possible. I thought about leaving it on a certain doorstep at a house on a corner at Freeport Boulevard in Land Park, but decided that this guy’s wife and daughter don’t need to be dragged into it. I thought about looking up a certain lawyer in Placerville and sending it to his house, but decided to pass on that, too.

You see, I don’t harbor any ill will for my ex-wife, or her special friends. That was then, in another lifetime. So this filmmaker giving me that gift last year, telling me, “When I saw this in the el-cheapo store, I thought of you,” was less than appropriate. I’m the wrong guy for that sort of gift. I may be fascinated by hoodoo and other forms of magic from a cultural point of view, but as a person who embraces Buddhist thought, I can’t practice it, because it involves exerting power over others and, ultimately, harming them.

So, I think I have just the place for it. –Jackson Griffith

To backtrack to my sojourn to Safeway, I can’t believe how many of the tabloids in the racks at the checkout counter either featured a Kardashian family member as the cover subject, or else the Kardashians were listed on the cover as one of the stories inside. Yeah, I know. Tabloids. But has everyone lost their minds? I know I go round and round on this, but let’s review:

Thoroughly unexceptional hanger-on in Paris Hilton’s entourage breaks out with a leaked sex tape that porno enthusiasts describe in terms of what a phenomenally lousy lay she must be, if what’s on the tape is anywhere near true. Nevertheless, thoroughly unexceptional hanger-on in Paris Hilton’s entourage parlays that putatively crummy sex tape into a show, produced by Merv Griffin-wannabe Ryan Seacrest, an alien life-form who hosts a foisting mechanism called American Idol that has all but completely ruined anything artful left in popular music, which airs on another network controlled by encrusted dingleberries cast off by a decompensating fuehrer in a bunker far, far away.

The Kardashian show, or now, more accurately, infestation of shows, airs on the E! Network, a horrendous cable-TV septic tank that is owned by Comcast, a huge corporation that is cable television and internet service provider, and now owns the majority of NBC Universal, a film studio and television network. The show inexplicably catches on, and like a raccoon who’s just gotten fed, the thoroughly unexceptional hanger-on in Paris Hilton’s entourage crawls back to the house the next morning with her entire raccoon family, who all get either featured in Seacrest-produced shows or else they get their own breakout shows.

All of a sudden, this family of thoroughly unexceptional raccoons are stars, or what passes for them in our pre-apocalyptic society. They are everywhere. The thoroughly unexceptional hanger-on in Paris Hilton’s entourage changes over time, via the marvels of plastic surgery, to an olive-skinned cross between a Barbie doll and the Venus of Willendorf, and there are accounts that her most noteworthy feature, her enlarged gluteus maximus, is surgically altered. Acolytes, who view the thoroughly unexceptional hanger-on in Paris Hilton’s entourage as the fulfillment of a prophecy by Sir Mix-A-Lot 20 years earlier, are not shaken by these developments.

Then the thoroughly unexceptional hanger-on in Paris Hilton’s entourage round-heels her way through a number of melanin-enhanced professional athletes, and she ultimately settles on an oaf of a boy-man who’s skill in the kitchen centers around his ability to braise raccoon meat in a Dutch oven, and the thoroughly unexceptional hanger-on in Paris Hilton’s entourage and the oafish boy-man Dutch oven chef marry in a ceremony that is touted by the very, very stupid as some sort of American royal wedding. It lasts all of 72 days.

I’m really not sure about you, but I know I’ve had enough. I don’t want to see any more of them when I go to the store, and any supermarket chain that can set up a 100-percent Kardashian-free checkout line, or two, will earn my business. I don’t watch their show, and I do no business with Comcast, because that company has done so much to push this infestation of raccoons on the public, and I don’t want to subsidize it by getting overcharged on my cable bill. Since Comcast has acquired General Electric’s old interest in NBC Universal, the thoroughly unexceptional hanger-on in Paris Hilton’s entourage and her family of fellow raccoons have been turning up on shows on NBC, particularly that lantern-jawed Doritos pitchman who hosts the once decent show once hosted much better by Jack Paar and Johnny Carson.

I think my clothes are dry. I will shut up now. –Jackson Griffith

There are other things I’d rather be doing during the week than laundry. Not that I hate doing laundry; I’ve developed a bit of an obsession, that’s become a routine, and I tend to be a person of routines. Call it my Asperger geekiness: I often will eat the same thing at the same restaurants, and drive the same routes, and cook the same stuff at home over and over, and I have to force myself to make other choices.

Although it doesn’t really matter what I do, really. I mean, I’ve got no one really vying for my time, so I can get up and do what I want, and not have to plan it out, or argue better this than that, and I don’t have to answer to anybody. Not even a cat, or even a girlfriend. Wife? Forget it. I’ve pretty much figured out that this flying solo is my lot in life at this juncture, and I really can’t see things changing out of the blue, so what I can do is take good care of myself and enjoy life, one present moment at a time.

Lately, a lot of my present moments have been filled with this obsession I have to become a better guitarist. So I hunker down in my tiny apartment with books of tablature, translating the arcane symbols on the page into music via my fingers, the left-hand ones on the guitar fretboard, and the right-hand ones dangling over the sound hole, plucking the strings. Or trying to make music. It’s slow work, really, and the improvements seem glacial.

It’s taken me months to get even a few of Taylor’s songs down, because the arrangements are so deliciously intricate. I can do halting and tentative versions of “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” and “You Can Close Your Eyes,” and I’ve got about 12 of the 15 pages of tablature memorized for the first guitar (there’s a second guitar part, too) on his cover version of Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend.” I’ll probably work to get those three as “mastered” as I can before I move on to other songs. I have some Beatles and Jobim and Joplin and Bach books I want to work out of, too.

Which is good that I’m such a loner. If I had a social life at all, I’d never learn these difficult tunes. It use to be that I wanted to play music because I thought that might be a keen way to meet women, but now I just do it because I’m in love with the process itself, and there aren’t any women to be found. I also write a lot of songs, some of which I think are pretty good, but the only way I will get people to listen is to be able to play them really well. And I am hoping that some of what I’m learning from sweet baby James will start turning up in my own repertoire as well.

So there’s your update. Hope you’re having a swell week. I am. –Jackson Griffith