I know there's an answer

When life takes a turn for the jinky, I like to turn to musical comfort food to help surf through the weirdness.

So this morning, when I hopped on my bicycle to ride from my home in Arden Arcade (a suburb in Sacramento County, northeast of downtown and just west of Carmichael) across Business 80 and through North Sacramento, over whatever they named the drainage ditch that parallels the old Western Pacific tracks, "Steelhead Creek" or something like that, and down West El Camino over Interstate 5 to the Starbucks at Gateway Oaks, then down Gateway Oaks to the office, I cued up an old favorite, perhaps my favorite album of all time, the Beach Boys' 1966 masterpiece Pet Sounds.

With an opener like "Wouldn't It Be Nice," with its upbeat notion of flowering love's promise, it occurred to me that I might be rubbing a little salt in my wounds. But not really. The album's trajectory runs from promise to fulfillment to disillusionment, and anyway I kinda decided that, rather than wallow in country 'n' western bitterness or the done me wrong blues, I'd try to reawaken that dessicated romantic sense in me, even if it hurt a bit at first.

Pet Sounds is an old, dear friend. I remember looking at it in a rack at the Bigg & Littel department store on Waterloo Road in like 1966 as a sensitive 11-year-old, and deciding to spend my money on a Beach Boys greatest hits package instead. By the time I started paying attention to rock journalists, who uniformly showered it with glowing superlatives, Capitol had discontinued the album, and it had disappeared from stores.

So my introduction with it was after the Beach Boys signed with Warner/Reprise, and their new label packaged Pet Sounds (in mono, the way Brian Wilson recorded it) as a twofer with Carl and the Passions/So Tough, which came out in 1972, if I recall correctly. The new album had one great song, "Marcella," and some other stuff that wasn't so hot, but Pet Sounds hit me like a ton of bricks. I guess I was ready for it at the ripe old age of 17.

I'd never heard anything like it, really. I mean, some of the Beach Boys' songs that preceded it, like side two of Today, with "Please Let Me Wonder," "She Knows Me Too Well" and others, hinted at Brian's new, soulful direction, but the stuff on "Pet Sounds," from heartbreakingly heavenly love songs like "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)," "God Only Knows" and "Caroline, No," to more existential statements like "I Know There's an Answer" and "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" (a self-pity anthem for the awkwardly shy teen if ever there was one), and even the two instrumentals ("Let's Go Away for Awhile," the b-side of the single "Good Vibrations," and the title track), were coming from a different world, one that touched an emotional body I didn't know I had.

The arrangements were always imaginative, even if a couple of them got a little clunky in places. And Mike Love's reedy nasal whine has never been one of my favorite voices in popular music (give me Brian or Carl Wilson any day over Love), got grating at times, like "That's Not Me." But the home runs were out of the park, like the bridge and coda in "God Only Knows," or the arching heavenward melody on the line "I'm glad I went, now I'm that much ore sure that we're ready" in "That's Not Me." Aah, bliss.

What I love most about Brian Wilson's songwriting is that his melodic sense isn't mechanical; his melodies come from that same raiment of divinity that I hear in Bach's music, that sense of eternal springtime unfolding. Wilson's melodies move through the air like a flock of birds taking unexpected sweeps and dives in the light of sunrise, if that makes any sense. It does to me.

I listened to Pet Sounds again on the ride home. The beauty of it is that Brian's Wilson's 1966 masterpiece is awakening something in me that has seemed dead for quite a while, that sense of the possibilities of love. And that's not a bad thing, right?

You fucking bitch

A while back, I had to watch videos of a bunch of old Sam Kinison performances. Call it part of my job duties. His shtick had gotten pretty boilerplate when these videos were taped, which were toward the end of his career in 1992 when he died in a wreck outside of Needles, California, after a truck smacked his Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. (Which was a particularly appropriate vehicular choice for Kinison, and five bucks sez Sammy Hagar drove one too, a T-top even.)

Around the close of a typical Kinison gig, the Pentecostal preacher-turned-comedian would canvas the audience to find some poor sap with the absolute worst "fucked over by an evil woman" story. Once he had a winner, he'd get the phone number of the woman who had fucked the poor sap over, and he would call the number, get the woman on the line in front of hundreds of people, and join in with the poor sap in a verbal beatdown: "You fucking bitch! You evil cunt! You fucking suck! You fucking stinky whore, how can you live with yourself? You bitch! Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!! Fuuuuuck yewwww!" You get the idea.

It's probably a good thing that a) Sam's long gone, b) and so he's not around to do a show that I attended in the past year or so, because, c) I'd be a sure bet to be that sap up onstage, and d) my soon-to-be-ex-wife (hereafter to be referred to as "S2BXW") would be the one getting a really nasty phone call from Sam.

But, you know, as far as carrying around that kind of baggage, fuck it. Anger, and especially recycled anger, or resentment, are toxic, corrosive emotions. And I'd rather recognize that S2BXW and I have, ahem, radically different ideas of what constitutes appropriate behavior in a marriage, and leave it at that and move on. Which seems easy most of the time, having made a decision to finally end this sham marriage. And most of the time I'm feeling reasonably sanguine about the whole thing. Still, a few of those jinky feelings heralding an impending emotional storm come bubbling up into waking consciousness, and a few of those storms still blow through occasionally (and how's that for a fucked up mixed metaphor?). But they do seem to pass fairly quickly, after mercifully brief intervals of discomfort laced with twinges of raw fear.

Anyway, hey: I know this site gets virtually zero readers, but phantom eyeballers, y'know what might cleanse my kundalini-energy palate and help me slide into a groovy new interface with my forthcoming single life? Yep, a couple of days and nights of delicious, unhinged sportfucking. Now, I'm not talking about undying love, ladies. Just a little short-term animalistic lust to help a brotha erase some very bad memories. You dig?

Mm-hmm. That's the ticket. (Or maybe not.)

It's a brand new day so let a man come in and do the Popcorn

James Brown is dead, and I guess so's my marriage. Nuff said there. Which means I'm most likely going to have: a) more time on my hands, b) more relationship denouement angst to channel into posts, and, c) um, I dunno. Anyway, this probably means that you the non-reader (Hi, pimply faced former junior-high hall monotor in the basement at the En Ess Ay!) will have more great stuff to not read.

Mark Trail is pretty good in the Bee today, although I'm getting a little tired of the Lucky the Beaver storyline, even though Jack Elrod's unintentional jokes are pretty good. The Molly the Bear storyline, which included mildly retarded cubnappers "Shake and Jake" (aka wingnut suburb 'n' western duo Montgomery Gentry) was much better. And "Molly the Bear" would make a great name for an emo band.

Sunday morning thoughts

Hanging out with the dog on a Sunday morning, drinking some coffee, making some notes ... what could be better? The house is quiet, wifey (or, more accurately, soon-to-be-ex-wifey) has been off with some putatively well-heeled college professor from Monterey (or is he the inventor of Google Maps, or the owner of a gold mine, or a secret government agent, I dunno, the story keeps changing) who's probably real interested in her "narrative," or what some cynics might label "line of bullshit," for the past 24 hours, and I'm over the emotional storms that hit me yesterday when I got home and my teenaged stepkids informed me that Mom's new sugar daddy came into the house and seemed like a bit of a know-it-all and controlling dick, at least according to my 15-year-old stepdaughter, and then they took off. And when I pulled out the cell phone bill from last month, the account for her number was bursting with phone calls to and from several numbers in Monterey. D'oh. How could I be such a dumb fuck?

Anyway, fuck all that. As soon as I can sort through this reeking pile of shit called my marriage, I should be back in the single life, which may seem pretty weird, at least at first. Girls, if you want to spend time with me, please show me a recent psychiatric exam, so I can see you're not Bipolar or have Narcissistic Personality Disorder or anything like that (just kidding, although this pretty much indicates I won't be hooking up with Courtney Love anytime soon).

Last night I went to Old I and saw three bands (Deluxe, then the Bennys, then Parlor Dames). When I got there, most of the women in the audience appeared, ahem, to be playing for what they call "that other team." Later on, some fairly cute women showed up, but by then I had a backache that wouldn't quit (note to self: do yoga), and then Jerry Perry and I were commiserating on how we were probably twice as old as most of the women in the room. Guess I'll be cultivating an interest in "smooth jazz" if I start getting really horny. Or something.

Ah, fuck it. I'm just gonna walk around midtown listening to John Coltrane on the iPod like I did yesterday.

Oh, and note to Heckasac Beckler: I tried CW Little's House of Chicken & Waffles last night. Dunno what to think of that joint. Time to go back to Pho King 3, methinx, where a bowl of pho and a Thai iced coffee is like ten bucks. Sweet!