TomFlannery.com

It’s all a bit surreal, this.

The President of the United States refusing to accept the results of an election that even his own personal news outlet admits was fair and transparent. He ran what might have been the dumbest campaign in American history, never missing a chance to drive down his own totals. Instructing his cult to not vote by mail. They complied, of course. Insulting various sections of the country that it turned out he sorely needed (“bad things happen in Philadelphia”). Mocking those who are taking a pandemic seriously, which is the same as spitting on the graves of some 220,000 dead, and counting. And all we’re getting now as evidence of fraud is a tweet saying he won by “A LOT”, (those are his capital letters, not mine. I want to make that clear) and a bizarre press conference held outside a Philadelphia landscaping company wedged between a dildo shop and a crematorium. It’s really not worth trying to satirize Trumpworld, because nothing you come up with can possibly hang with the real thing. When “get Rudy on the phone” is your PR strategy, fresh off the guy priming himself in a hotel room with a supposed under-age girl, the writing is on the wall. Not only did you not drain the swamp, you are now pissing in it.

Saturday was a good day though. Gorgeous weather. And then the news finally came. Pennsylvania was finally called, and our 20 electoral votes put Biden over. He was now the President-elect. Spontaneous celebrations broke out, literally, all over the world. Manhattan came alive in a way it hasn’t since this pandemic started, horns honking and masked crowds gathering in jubilation. An impromptu party broke out outside of Biden’s childhood home in Scranton. The White House, now surrounded by a wall that would be the envy of Mexico, was also ringed with happy voters, gathering to serenade Trump out of town. Massive amounts of shade were thrown from London and France and Canada, everybody exhaling that America didn’t lose its mind twice in a row. Biden and Kamala Harris addressed the nation in the evening, and they used complete sentences and empathetic rhetoric and everything. At first it seemed jarring…..what was going on? And then it clicked. Finally. Adults.

The President, who still hasn’t quite mastered Optics 101, wasn’t home at the time. He thought it more Presidential to golf at one of his clubs, at tax payer’s expense, and then rage-tweet about how unfair it was that the legal votes went to him and the illegal ones went the the other guy. He said all along he was only going to accept the results if he won, so nobody was expecting anything approaching class. Still, the level of scumbagery can still shock. We’re a nation where things like this simply do not happen. You can whine and be douchey when you lose, but eventually you act like a fucking grown-up and start to transition your ass out. This isn’t North Korea. Or China. Or Moscow. Go start planning your Presidential library. Or, in Trump’s case…..a sharpie coloring room.

There’s still so much to do. Georgia run-offs will determine control of the Senate. Rancid bootlicking filth like McConnell and Lindsey Graham are still out there (we rigged the election but let them win?), traitors both. As I type this the future of Obamacare is once again in question. The Supreme Court will decide, a court that now includes Trump’s hand-picked haters. The results could be catastrophic for millions. And he would quite willingly do this for spite alone. He doesn’t care about me. He doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t care about anybody. And once again the entire Republican party is mute, still somehow in thrall to a vicious thug.

Right now it’s less like installing a successor and more like overthrowing a dictator. And the “fuck your feelings get over it snowflakes, you lost” crowd are suddenly incredibly butt-hurt, and in droves have taken their social media ball to a place that promises no fact checking and unlimited hate speech. It’s quite adorable. I suspect the FBI will be watching them closely in the upcoming days…..as right now Parler seems like something straight out of a Timothy McVeigh wet dream.

Keep on keeping on. The arc of justice. Our better angels. All of that.

And this just in….Philadelphia is organizing a run from the Four Seasons Hotel to the Four Seasons Landscaping company and calling it the “Fraud Street Run”, which makes me even more proud to be from Pennsylvania. And an American.

In a bit..

–tf

It’s all over. Finally. Our long national nightmare is over. He won’t concede, and he’ll rant and rave and break whatever he can break on the way out, but that’s just the hubris of a failed reality-TV star. It’s over, and we’re finally going to be rid of this pestilence. I’m pretty sure the entire crime family will howl into the Twitter-wind for years to come, but I expect people to give less and less of a shit, and the media to slowly grow weary of his rantings when the ratings finally tank….and all that will be left are the libraries filled with books trying to figure out how it was allowed to happen in the first place. And, if there is any justice left in the world, a hefty dose of state prison sentences.

I woke to the news of Georgia, and I felt like I was floating. All that John Lewis inspired “good trouble”, and all the hard work of the soon-to-be legendary Stacy Abrams, who worked tirelessly to register 800k voters across the state affected by voter suppression. The slow drip-drip of the results coming in had to be driving Dear Leader crazy….and then he gets slammed over the head with Kornacki at the board showing Pennsylvania slipping away at the same time. The President was quick to pounce on Twitter, and of course spelled it “Philadelpiha”. I’m not sure there’s enough Adderall in the White House dispensary to focus the man’s mind anymore. Last night’s terrifying rant was still in our minds (and noses), and if he’s that batshit with the cameras running, the thought of him screeching through the White House halls like Nixon cranked on bathtub meth brought a huge smile to my face. I adore democracy because when it works it pisses off, and on, fascists.

So let me think. I wonder if your goons threatening to kidnap the Governor of Michigan was a good idea? I wonder if trashing John McCain while he was alive, and when he was dead, helped you out in Arizona? I wonder if all them snide remarks about “bad things happening in Philadelphia” helped your vote count there? Did instructing your cult not to vote via the mail help you out? You lost not just because you’re reprehensible, but because you’re a fucking moron. Hoisted by your own Petard. Not sure your followers are the Shakespeare type but there’s always google, eh Bubba?

So many folks I know were willing this to happen. Time has stood still over the last few days…everything put on hold. What’s at stake is too numerous to count. For women. For LGBTQ. For immigrants. For black and brown people. All who have been treated with almost casual cruelty over the last 4 years. And yes, there are some of us out here well aware of our white privilege, but still willing to go to the mattresses over the lashes inflicted on the backs of others. It’s called empathy, and whatever shortcomings Joe Biden may have, a lack of that does not appear to be one of them.

Whenever my youngest daughter is out of touch for a few hours, she’s been checking in by asking “did Democracy die while I was away?” so it’ll be nice to not have to check with Steve Kornacki before getting back to her.

My facebook feed is usually filled with Trump trolls, but other than the usual suspects ranting about Sharpies, they seem to have retreated to a war room somewhere, plotting their next moves. Perhaps more flags flying from their pick-up trucks, or brushing up on their constitutional law degrees. Nobody said it was easy living in an alternative universe. Right now it’s the 8th round in Zaire and they’re all George Foreman. SAD!

I’m not sure what’s left to be said at this point. Probably every word in the dictionary has already been tossed at this election, and it’s still hard to fathom how nearly 70 million Americans voted for a rancid narcissistic racist with the morals of a diseased toad. Ignorance came close to burning the entire thing to the ground, so it’s gonna be a while before everything they shattered can be put back together again. It’ll be a while before an education system that spectacularly failed so many people can be fixed and we can once again travel the world without getting snickered at. Getting rid of Betsy Devos is certainly a start though, just saying.

Baby steps bubba….

Keep moving on…

In a bit..

–tf

While watching the results not come in over the last 2 nights I’ve been re-reading Bruce Catton’s “A Stillness at Appomattox”, which seems kinda appropriate. The last, phantasmagorically violent year of the war, in which Americans stood toe to toe and crushed each other’s skulls with rifle butts or burned alive on forest floors or were hit by so many bullets that their bodies sometimes fell apart, bleeding each other until there seemingly wan’t enough ground in Virginia to soak it all up anymore. And then that lone rider cutting through the exhausted lines, with a white flag, and Lee and Grant meeting in that small farmhouse, the former dressed in his best uniform, the latter staining the carpet with the mud splattered from his trousers and boots. The terms offered were simple. Lay down your arms and go home. What food the Union army had was shared with the men who had been killing them since 1861. And from then on, grammatically it became “the United States IS” instead of “the United States ARE”. And despite fucking things up over and over again ever since, we’ve always sorta managed to just about hold it together, resisting the urge to once again fire on the Fort Sumter du jour and kick-start things all over again.

Sometimes you need a little perspective. Or maybe a history lesson.

Take a deep breath. We shall overcome.

In a bit..

–tf

Today’s the day Bubba.

The stupidity of a nation is put to the test….with a few things at stake. Minor stuff. The potential death of hundreds of thousands of people of course, along with the destruction of whatever democracy is supposed to be (I lost the plot years ago, I must admit). Through the vagaries of the electoral college it has been decreed that Pennsylvania is now the key to it all. This doesn’t exactly give me the feels, as this place is filled with enough mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers to start a new sports league and fill its stadiums with fans. But there are plenty of calm, rational, decent folk too, the kind that don’t wave flags from the back of pick-up trucks or have bald eagle profile pics on Facebook.

So there’s still a chance that we won’t send the nation careening over the cliff and into the valley of banana-republics. Fingers crossed and all that. Stock up on booze for tonight, ’cause you’re gonna need it.

If your side are the ones trying to stop people from voting, and then trying to stop valid ballots from being counted, you might be a fucking fascist.

I feel the need to jot these thoughts down as the day progresses, so I have something to refer to in the future (if indeed we have one) when I’m asked “what was it like when, as Jim Morrison predicted, the whole shithouse went up in flames….?”

I woke up to text messages from Trump loving friends complaining of polling places having issues, but only in “heavily Repbublican areas”, so the narrative is starting early. Dastardly ANTIFA is gonna steal it from the Godly people so we can kill more babies, take their guns, and spend their 401ks on Ipods for illegal immigrants. It’s gonna be a long day.

Just went for a virtual 2 mile walk with my daughter, who is in Harrisburg. Both of us are having a wee bit of an existential crisis over our state being the last beacon of a flickering democracy. We traded war stories of the goober-trolls on our respective Facebook feeds, and every time I looked up from the FaceTime screen a Trump flag was waving from somebody’s porch. I’m happy to say that Harrisburg is much less racist than NEPA (not a single Trump sign in her entire large apartment complex), but I can’t say that once cancels out the other. What NEPA lacks in numbers we more than make up for with staggering ignorance.

Per usual my walk makes me feel better, but gives me way too much time to contemplate dread. There’s always a trade-off brother. Ain’t nothing easy.

I was about to turn on Fox News to see how the Politburo was managing expectations thus far, but I wasn’t in the mood to hear them call it for Trump before lunchtime. So inquiring minds will have to wait.

I just saw a Facebook post from a former prominent NEPA Republican politician just released from prison after serving 11 years for extortion, bribery, and racketeering. It was a long harangue more than suggesting that only American-hating liberals would chose to not vote for, you guessed it….and it just made me incredibly sad that Trump’s cult of personality extends even to prison cells. All the usual talking points, evil godless commies and socialists being driven out of the temple by Dear Leader, a “pro-life” God-chosen super-hero who wraps himself in the flag every night after saying his prayers and drinking his milk. All the words were spelled correctly, which was a refreshing change, but this type of hero worship, coming from somebody who already paid his debt for committing the types of crimes Trump and his fellow mobsters revel in daily, before even biting into their breakfast burritos, is enough to send folks running for the benzos. I just don’t understand it. Sociologists will be busy for a century trying to explain away this level of cultist devotion.

But then again, it’s kinda the most NEPA thing ever.

I’m going to sign off now because my depression is deepening by the hour. Tonight I will sit like a zombie in front of my TV, throwing beer cans at the screen and listening to breathless reports of skulduggery and deep-state shenanigans, and await the moment we all know is coming, when the President of the US stands up and refuses to accept the results of a free election. He’ll sow as much chaos as possible, the goal being the Bush v Gore scenario. If this thing gets tossed into the lap of the lapdogs of the Supreme Court, does anybody really doubt the outcome? This is precisely what the Handmaiden was rammed through for. If you thought it was Roe v Wade, well you’re about as dumb as….well…..about as dumb as I already suspected.

Nothing to see here, eh?

In a bit..

–tf

In a few more days our long national nightmare will be over. Or it will continue for another 4 years. Polls say Biden is gonna win, but they said the same thing about Hilary, and that didn’t work out too well. Trump supporters are impervious to lots of things, facts among them, so he hasn’t lost a single supporter in 4 years that I’m aware of, despite shitting on them every chance he gets. (saying he can shoot them with impunity? Check. Leaving them out in the cold until they need to be treated for hypothermia? Check. Saying if the election wasn’t so close he’d never lower himself to be in their state? Check. Telling women he’s “sending their husbands back to work”? Check.) Winning the popular vote is irrelevant, as we know. It’s all about turnout at this point. Early indicators point to it being huge, but they said that in 2016 too. They always say that. Finally, this is gonna be the election that’s gonna get young people off their ass…blah blah blah….and then the numbers come in and once again we find that 45% of registered voters didn’t cast a ballot, and most first-time registered voters stayed home and played video games.. Most likely it’s gonna be 50/50, back and forth all night long…….and Trump and his minions are gonna muddy the waters with cries of mail-in voter fraud et al……and raise a Cyborg-army of lawyers to drag this thing out. If it comes to it, he can call on his Supreme Court, newly buttressed with his very own handmaiden, to rule in his favor. He’s been pissing on Democracy for 4 years, expecting him to stop and walk away quietly is absurd. If you think he’s wild and rabid now, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The only thing keeping this guy out of jail is the cover of the Presidency. Bush v Gore in 2000 is gonna look like the good ‘ol days of a finely oiled republic in comparison to this shit show.

I’m hearing tales of folks who requested mail-in ballots not receiving them. Of folks mailing them in and not receiving a confirmation that they’ve been counted. Folks being turned away from early voting. In-person voting places being changed at the last minute. Piles of mail backed up at post offices. Blatant voter suppression. The shenanigans have already begun. They intend to steal this one fair and square bubba. They don’t care who knows it. They are a mob of soulless criminals, and the only way for this nation to heal itself is to throw them all over the side for chum.

Covid numbers are roaring back. Cases are higher than they were in March, and a steady 30,000 a month are dying. (Did this stop the White House from listing “ending the Covid pandemic” as one of their “accomplishments”? It did not.) ICUs are being slammed again, and the Dear Leader-inspired anti-mask death cult is, if anything, growing more vocal as cases rise, sound logic not exactly being their strong suit. We are by far the dumbest nation on earth, and getting dumber by the day. We reject science. We reject history by not knowing it. We’re frightfully susceptible to the most outrageous forms of propaganda. We were conned by a reality-TV star. How do you think that’s gonna play in the future editions of history books? At least the Romans were invaded by Barbarians. This one’s an inside job. Born and bred right here in the USA. Betsy Devos, who has the IQ of tree bark, and who despises public education, is in charge of public education in this nation, which should tell you all you need to know, but the ones who really need to know this are marching around with Tiki-torches and confederate flags, screaming about Black Lives Matter….so in fairness to them they’be been distracted.

We survived Nixon. He slithered out of the White House like a scalded dog, but only after his own party had had enough. Today? There is no republican party anymore. What you have is a pack of rancid cowards, terrified of being given a derogatory nickname and made fun of on Twitter, traitors all. It’s like Trump has a pee-pee tape that features all of them. The ones who do speak out always seem to do so after they’ve left office. The GOP has been melted down, and a cult of personality has risen, a statue of an orange man with the world’s worst comb-over, hovering over their respective shoulders. Demanding fealty, but not using that word because it’s too advanced.

Nobody in Washington is going to do the right thing. That ship sailed 4 years ago, and immediately slammed into an global-warming-inspired iceberg (“it’s fake! full speed ahead!”) , and has been at the bottom of the ocean ever since. We have to do it. And it has to be in overwhelming numbers. He needs to be humiliated. Like Nixon. Only then do we have a fighting chance.

In a bit..

–tf

Another black man killed by police…..this time in Philadelphia. Protests erupted. 30 officers were injured. Looting ensued. It just goes on and on. The man’s name was Walter Wallace. He struggled with mental illness. He was waving a knife, and his mother was attempting to diffuse the situation. She tried to shield him from police, screaming to them that he was her son before he broke away from her. Neighbors watched in horror, screaming “don’t shoot…we know him…..don’t shoot”, and one captured it all on video. Shots were fired. I don’t know how many. Five? Ten? Police marked the scene with 13 yellow evidence flags. They loaded him into the back of a cruiser, and he died. Walter Wallace was 27 years old.

I don’t know where we go from here. Nothing changes. Sides are being drawn as I type this…..the same for and against. The knuckle-dragging racists are already spewing bile, and the opportunistic knuckleheads are using this as an excuse to break some windows and steal some shoes. Too many of the folks in the middle are silent. They grieve internally. They cry alone. They’re embarrassed. Humiliated. But perhaps too intimidated to stand up. Or just numb. It’s pretty clear that if All Lives Matter, we’d reach some type of consensus on the mentally ill being gunned down in broad daylight like rabid dogs in front of their Mothers. Of course all lives don’t matter, because “all” would automatically encompass Walter Wallace. Unless your problem with the BLM movement is precisely what we think it is.

We’re brazen hypocrites. We’re still racist. The ones who matter are the ones who have, and the ones that don’t matter are the ones who have not. Our nation is leaderless, and our moral compass cracked like a dropped Iphone.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a cop in a dangerous city anymore than I know what it’s like to be a young black man. In any city. All I can do is see what you see. A man is suffering from a “mental health crisis”. The police were called, and presumably this information was passed along to them. This wasn’t some violent thug. This was somebody sick. Somebody who needed help. He was menacing. terrifying even, but the cops maintained a respectful distance, backing up. He never got closer than perhaps 10 feet. Danger? Yes. Imminent danger? Didn’t look like it to me. Do tasers work? Did they have one? If not, why? Are they trained to shoot to kill, or to shoot to wound? Are they trained to handle mental illness? The mayor. The police commissioner. Both said the shooting raises “questions”. It’s getting harder and harder to defend this type of thing. It’s the definition of insanity.

If this had been a white guy wearing a suit and tie in Conshohocken, would he be dead now? If you say yes I know you’re lying, and you know you’re lying too. Cops might have talked the guy into the back of the car and brought him to McDonalds.

America appears to be irretrievably broken. Stained with our original sin. We don’t know our own history, so there’s no way for us to learn from it. We forget things as fresh and raw as Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas and George Floyd and Breona Taylor because there is always a fresh outrage to take their place. Soon, Walter Wallace will be yet another Wikipedia entry. The cameras will move on to the next city. It’s like being lost in the woods, and walking all night to find the road, only to recognize you’re back in the same place you started. How many nights can we survive out there? As it’s quite possible we’re about to re-elect a white supremacist, the question is taking on extra importance lately.

All of this deflects attention away from our Supreme Court having been hijacked by ideologues. A crazed Taliban-esque woman just received a lifetime appointment to fuck with you with zero oversight, rammed through the confirmation process in a partisan blood-bath so brazenly hypocritical Mitch McConnell has since broken out into some sort of freakish full body rash. All of this was celebrated sans-masks at an unseemly pep-rally last night at the White House, more mockery piled onto the court’s supposed independence.

This Sunday the clocks get turned back, which is entirely appropriate. How about 100 years?

The world breathlessly awaits President Trump’s tweet about Walter Wallace, sure it will inspire calm and empathy for all involved.

Just kidding. They just hope he doesn’t get all Adderalled-up and use the N-word.

The “very fine people” are always white. Ever notice that?

Where do we go from here?

Well….the truth is marching on. Inexorably slow. But it still marches. Eventually we will become more enlightened. Or die trying. That’s the race right now in 2020.

In a bit..

–tf

Has there ever been a more suitable time for introspection?

We’re all disconnected. The nights are longer. The days bump into each other. Chaos is everywhere. People lashing out because they are scared, or stupid, or both. A bad combination, that. Sleep is the only refuge at times, and when that doesn’t come…..well…..it makes for some interesting nights. We crawl into our own heads, and over the last 8 months some interesting stuff has burrowed in there. So we sit up late at night, all of us in danger of becoming Elvis shooting the TV. One more day down. Another one is coming. And still, the tunnel is dark.

I usually find myself reading (deep into an Elvis bio now, that dude was crazy y’all….) or on YouTube…..trolling for something. It’s like one of those book stores with no shelves, and everything in boxes on the floor. You never know what’s in there. Last night I found myself watching a 2002 TV special on the Badlees….one of my favorite bands. Their guitarist and primary songwriter was Bret Alexander, and he and I have become friends. We’ve made music together, and watching the band at their peak reminded me again how lucky I’ve been to make his acquaintance. A seriously talented dude….and a good one too.

(commercial…….I highly recommend their 1999 release “Amazing Grace”….a crazy good collection of crazy different stuff that the band tossed off from their studio-basement while in the midst of being screwed by a major label that had no idea what to do with them. ain’t the music biz grand?)

This was randomly followed (as in it just popped up) by a fantastic interview of Mark Knopfler by AC/DC lead singer Brian Johnson, from a web series called “Life on the Road”. When I think of Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits I generally don’t think of AC/DC…..but these 2 guys both grew up near Northumberland in the UK (“like the Spanish City to me, when we were kids…“…both men charmingly recalled time spent there as lads) ….and their mutual admiration is heartwarming. It seems a genuine friendship, and I kept thinking that only music can do this. They laughed and sang together and for the entire 40 minutes of the episode I forgot how shitty things were outside my front door. I did not expect my evening to consist of Monday Night Football, the Badlees, Mark Knopfler, and Brian Johnson.

But yet here we are.

It was late…..the insomnia had a hold of me, and I just started wandering. There is wonderful stuff out there. Look for it. Ignore the shit. You’ve already waded through that all day anyway. This is your time, and if you can’t sleep, crack a beer and look for something that smiles back at you.

My daughter is attending law school and living in Harrisburg. Over the last week we started virtually walking together at lunch time. Via Facetime…..her on her path and me on mine. Her at her pace and me at mine. We share the sights and sounds and discuss the issues of the day, and it’s the best therapy in the world and we’ve pledged to keep doing it until whenever, and right now I can’t imagine when whenever will be. When you think about it, FaceTime really is some serious Jetson’s shit…..we take it for granted but we really shouldn’t because it’s wild. We’re walking together, feeling connected, seeing each other, and the views we each have, hearing each other’s breaths, and I know it ain’t as good as being there but it’ll do in a pinch and if we didn’t have it my long nights would probably be even longer. So Steve Jobs may have been a super douche-bag but he gets a pass from me for giving me the ability able to look into my kid’s eyes from hours away.

I’m trying to look at the bright side. Shit always rolls downhill…..so eventually it has to reach the bottom. We just didn’t realize how big and steep the hill was. That’s kinda 2020. Some big ass mountain mudsliding all over us.

Now’s the time Bubba. Eventually we’re gonna be freed up to gather again, without fear. So we should decide now how we’re gonna handle ourselves going forward. Are we gonna be the same ol’ shitheads, or are we gonna act like Mark Knopfler and Brian Johnson, bro-hugging and singing along to each other, finding all that common ground that’s buried beneath the preconcieved notions.

It’s quite possible that the best friend you’ll ever have in this world is someone you’ve not met yet. That’s a pretty cool thought, eh?

In a bit..

–tf

What’s gonna happen to live music?

How long can folks hold on?

Winter is coming. Venues are still shut down. Some permanently. No concerts. No festivals. Bars at half capacity, or less, are struggling to pay the mortgage and their people….so they can’t afford the bands anymore. The virus hasn’t abated at all. It’s still killing people. Most Americans take it seriously, but the ones who don’t can still overwhelm the majority. That’s the way these things work. All it takes is one person pissing in the pool. All or nothing. In 7 months we’ve gotten exactly nowhere. Our new national strategy seems to be to pretend that it doesn’t exist, but living in that sort of dreamscape is not gonna trigger a Springsteen tour in 2021. The entire live music industry is close to collapse. And since the streaming services came along and devoured all the royalty income (Peter Frampton testified in Washington to being paid $1700 for 55 MILLION streams of “Baby I Love Your Way”), roadwork became the only way for professional musicians to pay the rent. Warhorses like David Crosby have been painfully honest about all this. He’s in fear of losing his house. And it’s not just the musicians. All the support personnel that make the thing go round. The roadies. The drivers. The promoters. The venue employees. There’s no relief on the horizon. The CDC is calling for a long, dark, cold winter. And, per usual, our Government offers nothing.

The crushing irony in all this, of course, is that we all need music more than ever.

It’s kept me going the last 7 months. Making it (new record here). Listening to it. Everything. For absolutely no reason whatsoever I was cranking AC/DC’s “Rock or Bust” (perhaps the most uncomplicated song ever written) last night while watching a baseball game. I spent the day at work cruising through the Van Halen catalog, and even managed to get through Van Halen III, out of respect to King Edward. On my nightly walk I took The Tragically Hip and a few George Jones songs along. As I type this I’ve got The Smithereen’s “Top of the Pops” blasting in my earbuds. Sometimes music is the only thing you can count on. We take it for granted, but it never holds that against us.

The impromptu live streams on social media gave me some hope back at the start of all this. For a brief moment, I thought I saw the future. You could just sit there on your couch, flip your phone around, hit the “live” button, and beam yourself around the world. Solicit donations……watch real-time comments come in. It wasn’t the same as having somebody knock their beer over onto your guitar in a bar, but it would do in a pinch. The little guys started this……the indie folks. It was a nice way to stay engaged, and make a few bucks…..until behemoths like Garth Brooks jumped on the bandwagon and started doing it and that pretty much killed the novelty stone dead (Well that and the buffering). The folks still doing it now look like hostages being forced to read from a prepared statement (donations have slowed to a trickle)…..and if I see one more person who doesn’t know how to stream themselves live without looking left-handed I’m gonna lose my marbles.

But still, here we are. Where do we go from here?

“Someday girl / I don’t know when / we’re gonna get to that place / where we really want to go..”

That place is gonna be filled with music. And people packed shoulder to shoulder, hugging and singing and smiling and laughing and lifting their glass and buying rounds and there’s gonna be no lies and no fear and we’re gonna walk (and dance) in the sun, because tramps like us were not born to watch live music on our fucking Iphones.

Ok, I’m not really sure where that came from but whatever. You get my point.

Do what you can. Support your favorite artists. BUY their music instead of streaming it. Bandcamp is a great alternative.

Pat Dinizio was the lead singer and songwriter of the Smithereens, one of the most underrated bands of my lifetime. One of my songwriting heroes. He passed away 3 years ago. On Monday, what would have been his 65th birthday, his 10 room farmhouse in Scotch Plains, New Jersey was torn down to make way for some hipster bullshit (petitions to save the house were blown off), and that sorta started me on this rant today, because it summed up the way we treat those who fill our ears with soul.

We all need to do better.

In a bit..

–tf

We just had one of those majestic fall weekends, when the temperatures hover near 70 and the sky is ocean blue and the foliage is at its peak, bursting with wild colors, every mile a new painting. You didn’t even need a destination. Just had to point your car towards the mountains and try to keep your eyes on the road. The summers may be too hot and the winters too cold, but in between are times like these, which can make NEPA worthwhile. I cannot imagine a colorless October anymore than I can imagine a music-less one. Windows open, the stereo a little louder than usual. The fall is its own soundtrack. Monday morning we all awoke to a cold, dreary rain, which somehow made the weekend that much better.

Pandemically speaking, things are still a mess. We went from no sports to complete sports overload….the Stanley Cup leading into the NBA finals competing with the MLB playoffs competing with an NFL season with a schedule being made up on the fly to deal with all the positive Covid cases. Saturday college football, especially in the South, all of a sudden is featuring tens of thousands of un-masked un-socially-distanced fans, which could lead to a health catastrophe (but not before the money is counted, which is apparently all that matters). And, bizarrely, the Masters golf tournament will be held a week or so before Thanksgiving, so there’s more chance of seeing frost than azaleas. Positive Covid cases are once again at the same level they were in March, when things were shut down. They are trending upward. Over 1000 die every day. The difference is that less and less people seem to give a fiddler’s fart. My life is filled with countless dunces wearing masks under their nose, apparently convinced that they too are filled with Trump’s tiger blood (and have access to his government health care). There’s no stimulus in sight, so here’s hoping you haven’t spent that $1200 you received 5 months ago. The upcoming election promises nothing but more chaos, sending us even further down the banana republic highway. It really was nice to have this weekend. A little respite before the shithouse starts to burn down again.

Today the news cycle is dominated by the pointless hearings for Trump Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, a spooky self-hating religious zealot set to take the seat of the feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsberg, which is the most FU-this-is-2020 thing ever. Flocks of women dressed in “Handmaid Tale” costumes have gathered to protest the nomination. Barrett will crash through doors RBG opened for her, only to ensure that she slams them shut behind her…..assuming her husband allows it, of course. Set your clocks back 100 years.

And it’s “Columbus Day”…..the day federal employees get to sleep in thanks to the genocidal machinations of a guy who used indigenous people as dog food. #MAGA! Kinda like Cambodia having “Pol Pot Day”….which would be a better analogy if any of the “grrrrr Columbus grrrr” folks knew who Pol Pot was. The struggle is real when you’re trying to be clever these days, yo.

So I turn to music, as I usually do. Stevie Nicks dropped her first new song in years today, and it’s marvelous. A 4 minute piano-driven dreamscape called “Show Them the Way”. Amanda Shires and her husband Jason Isbell released the powerful “The Problem”, a song depicting a couple having an honest conversation about abortion. Strong women are getting stronger, which gives me hope in the days of a relic like Amy Coney Barrett.

(and this just in…..a Dolly Parton documentary recently dropped on Netflix…the south should tear down the Robert E Lee statues and replace them with Dolly….”of course black lives matter! Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!”)

I was thinking of the great stuff released during this pandemic, and remembered that Pearl Jam released a burner in March called “Gigaton”……and as I type this I have “Never Destination” on repeat. I still prefer the boys when they kick out the jams. Drive-By Truckers have released two full length records this year…..as these road warriors didn’t have the luxury of sitting back and living off non-existent royalties. They need to work, and if they can’t gig, releasing new music is their only option. I have no idea how long bands like this can sustain themselves in a world of closed venues. Live music may be dead. I’ve blasted Bob Mould’s latest called “Blue Hearts” so many times, and wonder if Sir Bob will ever have the chance to tear through a set with such power that paint chips fall from the ceiling rafters, like he did in 2015. The Metropolitan Opera House announced that it won’t re-open for another year, at least. By that time it may be too late to re-open at all. Broadway will remain dark until at least the summer of 2021. If ever.

Don’t take anything for granted. Anything. Reach out and support those you can. Hang together.

Wear a fucking mask.

And take sides. Silence only helps the oppressor, never the oppressed.

In a bit..

–tf

In 1979 I was in 8th grade. It’s almost impossible to imagine now what Van Halen did to 8th grade boys back then. We were all musical virgins, and then we weren’t. And they didn’t ask permission either. Our ears were held back against our will, and were ravaged. I remember hearing “Dance the Night Away” from Van Halen II on an 8-track machine in a car and thinking “thank you sir may I have another…” And then “Somebody Get Me a Doctor” came on and the guy driving the car suddenly gunned it to what had to be 100 mph, and I thought “well this is appropriate….”

Everybody wanted to hang with Roth, but dudes wanted to BE Eddie. The coolest dude on the planet. Handsome as the devil, with that iconic hair and that crazy guitar. If you counted up all the time 13 year-olds mimed to “Eruption” in front of their bedroom mirrors, it might add up to decades. If you could turn a bomber pilot’s descent to their target into an opera, this is what it would sound like.

Every kid who ever picked up an electric guitar after this wanted to play “Eruption”, which caused a mass exodus of guitar teachers who couldn’t teach it to them. (And then the smart-asses started showing up with acoustics and saying…..”okay, can you teach me “Spanish Fly” instead?”)

He just made sounds that nobody ever made before. Just made them up on the spot. His earth-altering solo on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” was one take, and he never got a dime for it, because he couldn’t be bothered to ask.

Everybody tried to copy him. Everybody sounded like shit trying to copy him. Eddie told a great story about being in a record store when “Beat It” came on and kids scoffed saying the guitar player was trying to sound like Eddie Van Halen and Eddie tapping them on the shoulder and saying “it was me!”

“That incredible virtuosity combined with that beautiful smile allows me to forgive him for letting David Lee Roth stand in front of him.”

–Pete Townshend

So yea, there was that. Perhaps the greatest guitarist who ever lived might have surrounded himself with guys a little….er….deeper than Roth or Hagar, but you can’t argue with success. Both iterations of the band sold a gabillion records. And no matter who was screeching out front, you knew it was a Van Halen record. Because of Eddie.

(I’m a Roth-era guy myself, but you always remember your first. No disrespect to Sammy. But whenever I start to get all uppity about “Eddie deserved better than these knuckleheads” I just put on “And the Cradle Will Rock” and when Roth deadpans “have you seen junior’s grades?” I instantly change my mind and feel like the two were a match made in rock and roll heaven. I don’t feel that way when Hagar sings about aliens. So suck it PT.)

Who knows what was going on with Eddie? All kinds of crazy stories. Drinking. Drugging. Smoking. Guitar picks on the tongue and electro-magnetic fields. Losing his teeth. Then the cancer diagnosis. Removed a third of his cancerous tongue. There were Salinger-esque stories of him creating music every day…..and sticking it in a drawer. Then more rumors. The band was coming back. With Hagar. No, with Roth. With the guy from Extreme? With BOTH Roth and Hagar. After a while we were all punch drunk, so when Eddie announced that he had bounced bassist Michael Anthony from the band and replaced him with his own son, everybody just sorta shrugged and said “of course he did”. A few more money-grabbing tours….featuring some musical train-wrecks caught on YouTube, a mediocre new album that sorely missed the touch Anthony brought to the band with his background vocals, and then it just sorta petered out.

In short, it hasn’t always been graceful.

Nobody had really been thinking much about Eddie Van Halen these days.

And then the news came. Like it usually does these days. Social media. First one post. Then another. Then my feed was filled. He was gone. As if 2020 hasn’t sucked a big enough bag of dicks already.

It immediately brought me back to 8th grade. It was our soundtrack. It cut through all the teen-angst and bad hair and acne like a power-saw…..”have you seen junior’s GRADES?….” and then Eddie was off on another sonic bender and for 3 minutes at a time all was right with a world kids would never understand.

Fuck cancer. Fuck 2020. All hail King Edward I.

In a bit..

–tf