My Life in Mix Tapes: A Musical and Political Memoir in Titles (Part 1)

NSP Meditations , , , ,

I made my first mix tape in 1984 at the age of 20. Many others from that era made mix tapes as well, but gave up the habit long ago for all the obvious reasons. I made my last one a few years ago, when I still had a truck with a cassette player.

All 500 or so are safely stored in a large tote in a basement. I’ve thought about leaving them to someone, but who would want them?

Some year ago, at the prompting of a friend who saw all the mix tapes displayed and read their often profane titles, I arranged them in chronological order on my living room floor. The task took a couple of hours. Then I read all the titles aloud, stepped back, and beheld this odd personal archive. It suddenly occurred to me that I was staring at a highly eccentric form of musical and political memoir and quite possibly, a historical artifact with unique cultural value.

A little while later, I began to notice other people’s mix tapes for sale at garage sales and thrift stores and I couldn’t believe anyone would so callously abandon their youth like this. I almost felt a historical duty to adopt these orphans and create some novel museum with them, but I never did.

It was during this time that my friend Nancy emailed me and asked if I wanted her collection of mix tapes. She had a new baby and wanted to get rid of a lot of old, useless stuff. I was appalled and berated her, demanding she box up the tapes and save them for her kid. I told her to imagine her daughter as a teenager, listening to the tapes on some ancient cassette player. (Guardians of the Galaxy ripped this idea off from me.)

For some parents, their music collections become the only way their children ever get to know them or at least think they were once cool. Why in the world would you ever throw the greatest soundtracks of your youth away? You may never listen to them again, but certainly your kid or nephew will. Do you throw away your the books of your youth, or pass them on to your kid? In the end, Nancy promised she would safeguard her collection.

With all this in mind, I’d like to present My Top 25 titles for mix tapes. It was a very hard task of culling, I assure you. Some had dates when they were made. I also added a few notes of explanation for the source of some titles.

These are in no particular chronological, but I remember making every single one of them and can tell you where I was living at the time.

Newt Gingrich Can Eat My Shit (1-95)
Sand in Her Cleavage
Whiskey Sour and Red Hair Girl Dreaming (2-89)
Make Me a Man of God Mr. Devil Rock Fucker
Turkish Afternoon Delight.
Eyes Like Wet Currants (3-94) (Quote from Chekhov)
Kenny G Fuck You
Castrate Donald Rumsfeld (6-03)
From the Morbid Compost (Quote from some French poet, possibly Rimbaud)
I Drink a Liquor Never Brewed (’99) (Quote from Emily Dickinson)
Bring Me Ken Starr’s Gonads (12-98)
The Howard Cosell Memorial Party Tape
Escape the Sexual Gulag (1-04)
To Live like Thoreau, Except for the Women (Quote from Jack Kerouac)
Urge and Urge and Urge (10-03) (Quote from Walt Whitman)
Rock N’ Roll Pagans with Old Crow Nightmares
Satan’s Favorite Band (The Stones, of course)
Vodka, Love and Glory (Quote from Jack Kerouac)
A Peasant Back to the Dung Pile (11-00) (I think a quote from Russian literature or H.L. Mencken )
Jesus Loves Scotch (2-92)
Ocean Air and Gin (’03) (Quote from Malcom Lowery)
Got Tight on Absinthe Last Night and Did Knife Tricks (Quote from Hemingway)
A Drunken Gnat In a Pub Urinal (Quote from a French poet)
A Waco in My Soul (’99)
Bob Packwood

When the Weird Turn Pro

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , ,

Going on 48 straight hours. When the rain gets weird, the weird turn pro. Now is the time to turn pro.

Eight to 12 inches forecast for this stretch. It will flood here and there, maybe everywhere.

I always notice how hard rain on the Oregon Coast erodes the infrastructure: roads, bridges, dykes, culvert, fields, houses, etc. What we build to rely on seems so flimsy compared to hard rain. I also notice how people come to rely on each for a different kind of help after relentless, overpowering rain.

My rain book is out there. Someone is reading it as I write this.

Not too long ago, someone dear to me, called up late at night, (it was raining) and read passages about us from the rain book. I could not detect the tenor in the reader’s voice. She was drunk, however.

The post office hasn’t opened yet. Someone couldn’t make it through.

The summer forest fire season in the area is officially over. Oh how the conservative politicians loathe that! They want more forest fires to torch federal land so they can blame cougars for the torching. When conservative politics come face-to-face with commonsense ecology, the former places ideology over those things as concrete in fact as gravity. It is something to behold to hear a politician blame cougars for forest fires and sea lions for the decline of fake salmon.

These men and women are immune to the great notion of reflecting upon what rain can mean.

Rain brought the internet and cable television down! Rejoice in the absence! Local teachers might have to teach!

I pick up a Western set in the desert with cunning Apaches while the rain six guns the roof.

Driving In Sunday Rain

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , , ,

Down, down, south, south. Highway 101 on a Sunday morning. A three-hour trip begins in rain, substantial rain, falling straight from the sky. No wind to move it like walls.

I’ve got local radio on. Obscure stations coming in and out, playing equally obscure songs such as something by Maria Muldar I’ve never heard before. Just who was Maria Muldar and why is she singing to me on February on the Oregon Coast?

I dig her voice a lot. It’s got rain in it, which of course strikes me as irony because her biggest hit is about a midnight oasis in a desert.

I see a young woman wearing a small back pack, walking in the shoulder, taking on the phone. I see a young man carrying an enormous black umbrella. I see a woman walking a husky. Shaky-looking men ride shaky-looking bicycles. The men and the bicycles are heavily laden with their stuff of transient life.

Drive on. Watch. Listen to the radio and think about rain, and my recent reunion in rain with a friend.

This feels like it could be a five inch day on the Oregon Coast.

Through a clearcut that seems to last forever, one of the most brutal I’ve ever seen. Murder. Mud. Stumps. Slash piles. Slides. Death. Deconstruction. How can this be legal? Driving through this ecocide darkens the soul.

Water running over the roadways. Puddles. Ponds. Lakes. Police lights. I slow down. I see a wreck on the highway, well, a actually off the highway. A driver apparently splashed through a lake, lost control, flew into the air, and landed in a flooded field. I look for a body and don’t see one.

Big trucks tailgate. Who are these men?

Concentration wears me out. I need a respite from rain. I detour to a tavern I’ve always want to visit. I pull up and go inside. It’s 9:47 in the morning and the joint is open. I order coffee and meet the owner of 42 years, working the Sunday morning shift. We talk. It takes all of 30 seconds to realize I’ve just walked into one the greatest Oregon Tavern Age stories of all time. I take notes. I’ll write it up later. I’ll add it to the book about Oregon Tavern Age life that never seems to end, but how can it when you visit a tavern in a deluge at 9:47 a.m. on a Sunday in February, and a great story greets you like a nice welcoming pat on the back?

The coffee jolts me to life and I drive away, taking my time, noticing rain, wondering if I’ll make it home before a culvert plugs with beaverwood and 101 becomes impassable.

I drive and drive. The creeks flow brown and swollen. The rivers run think with wood. Rocks tumble down from the cliffs. Radio disappears. Into the heart of record rain, but it’s not dark.

Oregon Tavern Age: Scenes

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age , , , , ,

Three Spot, Turkey’s resident OTA cat and chief mouser, emerged from behind the bar and stood in front of the door. He’d just lapped up a saucer of Hamm’s and nibbled some road kill chili and wanted out to go accost the turkeys and hummingbirds. When he herds the turkeys across the bridge or tries to paw the hummingbirds in flight, it really fires up the regulars. It’s better than NASCAR on TV.

I got up to let him out. I opened the door. He wouldn’t budge. I sat down. He returned to his saucer and meowed. The son of a bitch wanted more Hamm’s! I bought him one, cracked it open, and poured some in the saucer. He lapped up the lager and bolted for the door. I got up and let him out. Then we all waited.

The talk at Turkey’s turned to whales, specifically dead ones that wash up on the local beaches, and the legality of harvesting parts of the whales, for say crafting, witchcraft or musical instruments. Whale talk was madly leaping about, and I heard someone down the bar say that a couple of regulars had once cut the penis off a dead whale and brought it into Turkey’s for display! What? I turned toward the general direction of where that story came from and then everyone clammed up. Very hush hush. I didn’t press it. I knew it was true and didn’t need any more details for confirmation.

Gary told me another Osprey story. He was dating some woman and she had invited a tree hugger friend over for supper at Gary’s house. An Osprey dropped a lamprey eel on the lawn. It was still alive! Gary wanted to grill it up right then and there but the tree hugger insisted he put the lamprey in a bucket of water and dump it back in the ocean. Gary complied.

Overheard at the Sea Star Lounge on Free Pool Sunday: “Ancient Egypt. That’s where Bigfoot got sly. They were stealing our women, interbreeding, and we had to strike back.”

A quasi Bigfoot believers club meets regularly at the Sea Star and its members often regale me with stories of their eyewitness accounts and arguments of science that prove the creature’s existence. One of the members said that when he was a youth living in Bigfoot country in Washington, he saw one run down a slope while hunting with his father near Mt St Helens. He also said he had an Native American friend in high school whose mother grew up in a remote area inhabited by a family of Bigfoot. The human family would leave offerings of fresh vegetables so the creatures wouldn’t trample the garden. The woman said the Bigfoot woman had “pendulous breasts.”

Dead Man’s Razor

NSP Meditations

I started shaving with a dead man’s disposable razor, and it took all of five seconds, a cut, a nick and a scrape, to toss the razor into the trash, and reach for my trusty brand.

How could anyone shave with such a cheap razor as the dead man used?

I was thinking this while shaving in an unheated cinderblock restroom and it was 35 degrees outside and perhaps colder inside. I could see my breath while shaving, a first in my life. But our poor boys at Valley Forge had it much, much worse.

The dead man wouldn’t leave my mind. I’d used his razor, I’d worn his Pendleton jacket, I’d cooked with his spices, I’d prepped meals with his knives, I’d eaten his mustard and relish, I’d fried up ling cod in his frying pan on an outdoor fire. I’m considering using his coconut body lotion for…something.

Who was he? Is there any sort of cosmic transference between items left behind by the unknown deceased and passed onto new owners?

Certainly not on this shave! But that Mexican paprika I’m going through now, well, that seems like a different story.

A Peregrine Shits!

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , ,

After off and on hail for ten days, I walked the beach on a sunny Sunday morning. The waves were big, green and white. Out to sea, a tiny shrimper and crabber worked their trade.

I had the beach to myself.

A huge driftlog twisted in the dunes caught my attention. I approached it.

As I came closer, I saw a bird perched on the log, staring at the ocean. It had a strange blue and white color combination that was unfamiliar to me at the ocean. I moved in for a better look.

The bird turned its head toward me and something registered: this might be a peregrine falcon! I am no bird man when it comes to identification, but I had seen a peregrine years ago on the wildlife refuge where I served as caretaker. I knew it was a peregrine because I researched it.

That sighting, however, was a falcon in flight, not on a driftlog.

I was now less than 20 feet away.

The peregrine turned its head away, took a shit that splattered the log, lifted off, flew out toward the ocean, and then headed south down the beach.

When I saw the bird in flight, I confirmed its falcon status.

What joy!

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