CHARLIE WATTS/JIM BOUTON/MORE MANNY

This Charlie Watts death is kind of a big one. For me it's like Aretha, Prince, or Bowie. I remember when I was 8, they had a video for the song 'Start Me Up.' I was only 8 but I knew there was something sexual going on. They had disgusting tight white jeans. I remember the drummer laughing at everyone the whole time. I loved this. 

A thousand years later my friends Gabe and Tom (who is a drummer) were over and we were listening to 'Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!' 'Midnight Rambler' was playing and Tom said "When you get sick of Keith and Mick you can always just listen to Charlie." I have done that. He is totally right. Charlie barely ever hits the crash in the song 'Let It Loose.' I fucking love this guy. At one point on the album above Mick Jagger says to the crowd, "Charlie's good tonight, isn't he?" Cool. 

There was a baseball writer/book called 'Ball Four' that exposed the use of greenies by baseball players. This guy was castigated for writing this book and tarnishing the sanctity of baseball. That is horseshit. Jim Bouton was on a terrible team, they had played like 20 games and had not won one. Not even a single one. In the 9th inning before they went out for the last at bats the manager would say, "Go out there and get this over with, then we'll go to the clubhouse and we'll pound those Budweisers."

I bought this book for my father like 10 years ago. He didn't know a single thing about the internet. When I bought the book I bought it directly from Jim Bouton, I emailed him and everything. I asked him to write my father a note in the front. I had Jim write: 'Happy Birthday you fucking dinosaur.' My father was turning like 73 or something. He totally wrote it. My father was astonished that the author had personally written him a note, that whole idea was beyond him. Awesome awesome awesome. 

When the Red Sox got Manny Ramirez I called my father and we talked about it. Then I called my sister and talked to her about it. Then I called my father and talked to him about it. When I hung up my girlfriend at the time said, " I just heard you have the same exact conversation 3 times."

COPYEDITOR WARS/SHOGDIT CANYON

I used to write for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. One time I was there to see to my editor. I was a freelance writer for them. When the guy behind the desk let my editor know I was there he said into the loudspeaker, "Mike McGakky to see Tommy." I remember thinking no one has ever mispronounced McGuirk that badly. It was literally the worst pronunciation I'd ever heard. Also, because I was raised Catholic, whenever I mentioned "God" and they didn't capitalize it I would complain. Basically I wrote an article about the new Beck album and mentioned both "God" and "Satan" at different times. One of my friends wrote me an email saying, "Dude, they did not capitalize 'God' but they capitalized 'Satan'?" I was mortified. 

I totally mentioned all this to the copy editors at The Guardian. They did not reply and I assumed they thought I was insane. But I had to get them back for doing this to me. There was a band here in SF that I had wanted to write about called Total Shutdown. I wrote about them and mentioned that one of their biggest influences was a band from New Hampshire called Anal Cunt. I assumed the copy editors would hate it but they had to let me loose, swear-wise. I mentioned Anal Cunt 11 times in the article. The thing is, Anal Cunt was actually a really good band, they were from the same New Hampshire scene that produced GG Allin and Lisa Suckdog so mentioning them with the free jazz stylings of Total Shutdown made sense. This article, -- through no knowledge of my own -- came out on the fucking singer's birthday. The last line of it I wrote, "Their album is the best thing made available to the public, ever." You should know the record had 2 grooves. One of the grooves played the album, the other groove played the first Beatles record. Fucking funny. I totally had only heard it once and thought they put out a record of Beatles recordings. 

I was at my friend's wedding in a fucking ghost town 4 hours north of SF. It was pretty cool. The church at the wedding looked like the one in Kill Bill. When I had gotten my room I walked around the place to check it out. There was an area with tons of little rocks on the road, like a dirt road and all sorts of trailers. There was a sign on a tree that said, "Welcome to Shogdit Canyon". I thought they had taken the name Shogdit from a Native American tribe that had named the area. I thought it was cool so I walked up the dirt road to the Shogdit canyon. When I got up there there was dog shit everywhere and I realized I had been totally fooled by the sign. 

OLD PEOPLE

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 When I was a kid I totally didn't like/understand old people, mainly my grandparents. I had been forced into the Boy Scouts and when we went to nursing homes it fucking stank like pee. That bummed me out. My mother's mother had this illness also. She hung herself when my mother was 13. Her husband married another woman who I grew up with as my grandmother. She was named Janet and she was legally blind. On top of that she had a fucking hair lip so there was no understanding anything she said. My father's mother, during The Depression gave birth to twins and then had my father and had a second set of twins 9 months later. So in 3 years she had 5 kids during The Depression. Like kind of intense. She was married to this guy that I didn't know. My father's father.

When I was 5 or 7 around there, this homeless guy with a broken arm like a cast on his arm moved into our house for a couple weeks. He and my father drank together all the time until one night my father threw him out and I never saw him again. Years later at some wake I learned he was our grandfather. Isn't that wild? I totally thought he was some homeless guy. I also made a joke at the wake about adoption and I found out later that one of our cousins had been adopted. You would think they would have told us that. 

So I hate old people. I can't help it. 

I forgot to mention my grandmother on my father's side, an Irish woman Nelly had an Irish brogue and nobody could understand her on the phone at all. I dreaded any time she called. The only thing we all said that we understood her saying was, "Stop saying 'What'" The other great thing about Nelly is that when my godfather was a teenager, this is one of her kids, he was in the kitchen eating candy he throws the wrapper in the trash and she goes, "I just emptied that."