War Games at the Beach

You never walk the same beach twice. The earth shifts its position in relation to the sun, the tide comes in and out, vessels blight the horizon, creatures frolic in the surf, humans gawk on the shore, and the ocean coughs up its detritus on the beach.

This was certainly true last night when I walked along the stretch of sand in front of the Hotel Del in Coronado. Helicopters flew overhead, patrol craft zipped along the horizon, and a bunch of sailors wearing helmets and life jackets did drills on the beach with inflatable rafts. Guests at the hotel who’d come to take in the sea air had their sunsets spoiled by war exercises.

San Diego is a military town and when you wander out to Coronado, you’re all but surrounded by military bases, one of which I used to call home.

While I was out in New York and Virginia last week, I watched a lot of news and most of it was focused on the war in Ukraine and the worsening situation for civilians stuck in cities while Russian troops shell them with long-range guns.

I went back to Virginia to spend some time going through my mother’s things. The news on the television screen provided a curious echo as I sifted through the letters my mother exchanged with my father while he was in Vietnam, his watch log from when he served aboard the USS Taconic, photos of my father in his dress uniform.

In fact, my father did his swift boat training in Coronado. Shortly after they were married, my parents lived in an apartment in Imperial Beach. The plan was for my mom to stay in California while my father was overseas but when she became pregnant with me, she moved back to New York, where I was born.

Life is full of echoes these days.

My mom held on to things. She had a hard time throwing stuff away. She kept cards she’d received from friends and family members. A glossy flyer from a Nina Simone concert. Receipts from paying off a debt she incurred while she was in nursing school. After her mother died and her father was ill, she took over the household finances and for reasons we’ll never know she held on to statements from the bartenders union, which I didn’t even know was a thing.  

She kept clippings from the moon landing and the front page of the paper on the day I was born (war news from Vietnam). School photos from across the years for all four of us kids. Programs from Irish dance competitions. Many of the items were things I’d never seen before, including one mother’s day project that stopped me in my tracks.

It was a booklet I made when I was very young. I was in grade school. Maybe seven or eight years old. Nine at the most. The booklet was made up of mimeographed pages with questions about my mom that I dutifully filled in. Her best qualities. What would a special day look like. Things like that. We had to design and draw the cover. Mine featured a Broadway stage with spotlights shining down on a pair of figures with canes who served as the show’s emcees.

The characters on the stage are little more than stick figures but the canes are a giveaway that they are old, which tells me I was channeling Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show, which I loved.

These old curmudgeons sat in the box above the stage and spewed sarcastic remarks about the show in progress, a kind of metafictional commentary that was both a throwback to vaudeville and thoroughly modern. With Statler and Waldorf in the house, you were never able to forget that you were watching a staged production. In other words, it was a show about a show.

My characters were introducing a production called Marvelous Moms but are interrupted by voices offstage

“Quiet on the set!”

“This is the set!”

“Oh.”

This Muppet Show gag isn’t what caught my attention. Check out this remarkably long question:

“Select one of the occupations that you would like to have when you grow up and tell what you would have to do to become prepared for this occupation.”

That’s a pretty long-winded way to say “What do you want to be when you grow up?” but whatever. Here’s my response:

“I would like to be a author and write stories and get paid for it so I am writing my own story book now.”

What’s strange about this revelation is I don’t remember wanting to be a writer when I was a kid, especially this young. I always loved books and had a great passion for reading but I don’t remember being so forthright about my desire to be a writer.

It kind of makes me sad actually. I was a pretty good student. Not exceptional in any way, but I received decent grades—until I got to high school. That’s when I started my long slide toward the bottom of the barrel and I barely graduated.

This pattern repeated itself in the Navy. I tested well during recruit training but after I was sent to the fleet I got in a lot of trouble and barely managed to make it through my enlistment without getting kicked out.  

So when I went to college, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and didn’t think I belonged there. I’d been called a fuck-up so often and for so long that I guess I internalized it. When my English comp teacher praised my writing, I was genuinely surprised. For the longest time I assumed it was because I was writing about my experiences in the navy, which was more interesting than what my classmates were writing about.

Eventually I came to believe that writing was something I was good at and latched on to it like a swimmer in the open ocean clinging to a life preserver. Everyone needs to believe they’re good at something.

Still, it’s kind of mind-blowing to discover that I put this message out into the universe when I was a little kid. I love that I was kind of a smart ass about it. The second part of the question asks what I was doing to achieve this goal and I basically responded by saying, “I’m doing it now, aren’t I?”

It didn’t go all that well for the sailors in the inflatable raft. After hitting the beach they were forced to lie down in the shallows and keep the raft aloft with their feet. After a while they set off in their rafts again. The first raft made it through the surf and paddled out to sea, but the second raft capsized, and tossed all the sailors into the drink. After struggling around in the surf for a bit, they got the raft righted and on their second attempt they made it over the crashing waves just as a jet came screaming across the sky.

It didn’t look like fun and it certainly wasn’t a game.

Corporate Rock Sucks Updates

I’ve got lots of book events coming together. In addition to events in San Diego and LA I announced over the weekend, I’ll be doing an event at Powell’s Books in Portland with my friend Joshua Mohr on Thursday, April 14. If you’re in Portland I’d love to see you!

I also mentioned last week I’ll be participating in the LA Times Festival of Books. The schedule hasn’t been revealed yet but today they announced the participants. On Sunday, April 24, I’ll be on a panel called Arts & Culture: Punk Rock Lives! with Dan Ozzi, author of Sellout, and Gina Schock of the Go-Gos. Registration for this event doesn’t open until April 7, but be sure to put it on your calendar because it will fill up.

It's challenging to write installments of PssSST! when I’m away from my record collection but I’ll have a doozie for you next week.

Miscellaneous Mayhem

While I was in New York I picked up a copy of Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries. I started reading it on the Highline in Chelsea, not far from where he was living when he passed away. The book is based on diaries he kept as a basketball-playing, heroin-addicted, street-hustling high school kid. (He used to turn tricks at 53rd and 3rd, which probably rings a bell.) But it was clearly edited after the fact and while it reads like diary entries there are moments when it’s obvious a wiser, older, and more experienced persona is peeking. I wanted to know the circumstances of the how the book came to be published and found this fascinating interview that for some reason was never published until fairly recently.

On the plane ride home I watched The Nowhere Inn, a rock doc unlike any I’ve seen. It purports to be about St. Vincent whose work I wasn’t familiar with. It’s written by vocalist Annie Clark in collaboration with Carrie Brownstein, who also plays the director of the documentary. I’m hesitant to call it a mocumentary. Rather, it’s an absurd reflection on what it means to make art in the spotlight’s glare. If that sounds pretentious the Carter and Brownstein mine this territory for plenty of laughs.

Thanks for reading. Have you preordered Corporate Rock Sucks yet. Here’s a giant link for you…