Speed Men

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

My breaking point is 40 hours. If I stay awake anything past 40, then its really fucking ugly. As an insomniac, I can stay awake for 24 hours without blinking. I often joke that I was born on a different planet that had 30 hour days instead of 24, which is why I have trouble going to sleep at a normal time. I had stints due to work (or work-related travel) in Vegas or during serious benders on Phish tour in which I stayed up for 2 days in a row. I think I only surpassed the 50-hour mark a couple of times. That's such a dark and terrifying place that I hope you never get to experience the physiological changes that occurs due to sleep deprivation.

You need sleep to keep you sane. If you don't get enough rest, then your mind runs rampant and you turn into a hysterical zombie. That's why meth is such a nasty drug. It's not the actual effects that will do you in, rather it's the prolonged effects of sleep deprivation that drives you insane and makes you do stupid shit like take apart your toaster to see if GE is spying on you, or decide to dig a hole to China in your neighbor's backyard.

If you watch Mad Men, then you know about last night's episode titled The Crash. By the way, if you're looking for funny recaps Mad Med, head over to Grantland and read Molly Lambert. She consistently nails it week after week.

If you haven't watched last night's The Crash episode yet, or not caught up yet with this season, then you probably should not read the rest of this post because it may contain some spoilers. Consider this a charity disclaimer. But then again, I really don't give a fuck about your viewing habits. I have a small window to write and I'm going to crank this out while the episode of the themes from The Crash are still fresh in my mind.

Speed. It's a crazy drug. The hippies saw the horrors of speed, which is where the tagline "Speed kills" originated in San Francisco. Marijuana and mushrooms are natural gifts from the gods, but speed is manufactured by the Man in sinister labss. The Germans invented speed. The Japanese perfected it. Soldiers during WWII (on both sides) were crocked to the tits on speed. The military dubbed them "Go" pills. In the wake of the Cold War, the Air Force perfected a new pill that would allow bomber and fighter pilots to fly 24-hour missions over the Arctic Circle and stay alert during the opening moments of WW3 with the Russians.

If you have a prescription to Adderall today, then you should thank the U.S. military for their willingness to create a magic pill that gives you the right amount of pep in your step and helps you concentrate, but with built in landing gear so you don't crash. Hard.

That's the inherent problem with speed. What goes up, must come down. When you crash from speed, it's not pretty. It's fucking ugly. But somehow, Big Pharma tweaked and tested and figured out the perfect mixture of a series of amphetamine salts in Adderall that will give you a prolonged buzz, but it won't absolutely tear out your innards while you're coming down.

Cocaine is like getting shot of a cannon. But the euphoria lasts maybe five minutes, or ten minutes max. That's why my favorite drug joke is this...

Q. When is the best time to do a line of cocaine?
A. Right after you did a line of cocaine.

The problem with cocaine is that it doesn't last long. Do a line, get gacked, then ten minutes later, you're rushing back into the bathroom to do another line.

What I liked about Adderall was that it felt more like cocaine and less like speed, except that you never came down. Once you got up in the atmosphere, you stayed there for several hours. Soaring. Flying high. It was truly a wonder drug. Cocaine high in pill form.

My married friends (particularly middle-aged moms) often hit me up for Adderall. It's easy to function with little to no sleep in your 20s. It's a struggle in your 30s. It's impossible in your 40s.

Back in the 1960s, "Mother's Little Helper" was a barbiturate or downer that helped get them through suburban malaise.  But today's postmodern soccer moms need a little extra ooooomph. Raising a family in the 21st Century requires an abundance of energy, so anything that helps get your ass in gear on sluggish days is a godsend.

I dabbled in Adderall, but I don't touch the stuff anymore. I think if I wrote better on Addys, then I'd be crushing those fuckers up and snorting them nonstop. As is, Addys gave me tunnel vision and hindered the creative process. Nothing can ever top a hit off the old peace pipe for the supreme writing buzz, but Adderall is something that is... 1) more suited for editing, or 2) a miracle drug for "all nighters."

My friends and I often joked that the 2010 World Series of Poker (WSOP) was really the World Series of Speed (WSOS). I had access to an Adderall prescription and several of my friends (both reporters and poker pros) regularly took the drug. For a 24/7 city like Las Vegas, a drug like Adderall is a necessity. It allows you to keep going and going and going and going and going.

In early 2005, I played poker at an underground club in NYC. At the time, a friend of mine was a grad student and she would not stop hyping up the joys of playing poker on Adderall. She used to take it to help study, but supposedly it was an immense booster at the poker tables because it helped her stay awake and allowed her to read players better. After I moved to Las Vegas and took a job in the poker industry, I quickly found out that cocaine and meth were old world drugs and that synthetics and pharmaceuticals were the new rage. The new generation of poker players were being funneled through the online poker realm. Most of those players were college-aged, so they were already familiar with the effects of Adderall for helping cram during exams.

In some ways, Adderall and other variants were dubbed smart drugs by Big Pharma. I always wondered if Adderall should be banned at poker tournaments because it is a performance-enhancing drug. The NFL put Adderall on the list of banned substances because it is a derivative of amphetamines. But I also know that if poker tournaments started drug-testing its participants, then no one would show up to play. You can only drink so much Red Bull or Starbucks to stay awake.

When I first got into the poker biz, I relied on my chronic insomnia to get me through tough stretches. As an insomniac, I was used to staying up late and being perpetually tired. Plus, when you're passionate about something, nothing can hold you back. The ability to write (well) while tired, coupled with the pure love of the game, carried me for the first few years in Vegas. But as soon as I became a jaded vet and middle-age crept in, I found myself struggling to tap into my internal energy reserves. I was surrounded by emotional vampires. I was running on empty and used up the last of the vapors. I was dunzo.

That's when I turned to Adderall during the summer of 2010. It was "my little secret how I got ahead." Well, not really. Everyone was doing it. I have an uncanny ability to look someone in the eyes and know precisely what drug their on. Just wander into any poker room and Vegas and you can easily spot the stoners from the kids cooking on Adderall. They have the same glossy gaze in their vacant eyes like cocaine-eyed starlets.

I did not cover the 2012 WSOP. I skipped it for the first time in seven years. The reasons are too numerous for me to discuss in this pithy post, but one of the contributing factors was age. When I got into poker, I had just turned 30. A decade whizzed by and I was approaching 40. It's impossible to work 16-18 hour days, seven days a week, for seven weeks straight without some sort of pharmaceutical enhancements. If I am unable to perform the job as a reporter without the assistance of high-grade Big Pharma speed, then I should not be doing the job in the first place.

I never understood why athletes took steroids until the summer of 2010. I finally got it. I felt like Eddie Harris from Major League. He was an aging veteran pitcher who needed to doctor the baseball in order to get outs and stay in "The Show." When he was younger, he could blow fastballs by his opponents. As an aging veteran with his arm barely attached to the rest of his worn-down body, he needed to do whatever it took to stay on the field and compete.

I had a job to do. I was getting paid big bucks to cover the WSOP on the Tao of Poker. I opted for a shortcut. I barely survived the 2010 WSOP, and wrote a couple of great pieces along the way (e.g. Most Likely You'll Go Durrrr's Way (And I'll Go Mine) and the Odium of Hellmuthstein), but when it was all over, I felt as though I cheated. I didn't have the same satisfaction that I had from previous summers.

I felt miserable.

I felt like a fraud (more so than usual).

I felt like a cheating whore.

I finally knew what it felt like to be Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa the year they chased Roger Maris' record. Be careful what you wish for, because if you take shortcuts to get there, you'll be haunted with the demoralizing truth that you needed an extra turbo-boost.

Sure, I'm being hard on myself about an Adderall prescription. I wasn't taking it to write better, rather, I was taking it to stay awake and be able to work 18-hour days, go home write, then come back and repeat the process. Many reporters took Adderall (and other derivatives) that summer. Thousands of poker players did too. I'm sure so did the poker dealers. And anyone else who had to hump late-night shifts. Heck, plenty of people have to take happy pills every single day in order to avoid clinical depression. Does that mean they're cheating too and their work is tainted as well?

I stopped taking Adderall in 2011, and for the most part, the 2011 WSOP was a sober series. I was stubborn and wanted to rely on my natural abilities. But, I might have popped it a couple of times -- as a last resort -- which was something I was cool with. In small doses (like once or twice over a 2 month stretch), Adderall can be a helpful wonder drug. If you abuse it, it will hallow out your soul and you'll end up a chatterbox speed freak with a million stupid ideas.

So I skipped the 2012 WSOP because I felt as though if I was physically unable to perform the job, then I shouldn't be doing it. I feel similar about the 2013 WSOP. If/when I return sometime in the future, my goal is to be able to maximize a peak performance but without the assistance of Big Pharma.

Which brings me back to last night's episode of Mad Men. In The Crash, the ad firm -- SCDPGCC -- is pulling an all-nighter over a weekend in order to prepare a new ad campaign for Chevy. The company got paid mega-bucks to deliver ideas, so they had to dance like a monkey. In order to keep the creative juices flowing, one of the partners called up his "witch" doctor. He was one of the many Upper East Side physicians who prescribed the rich and famous a concoction that was essentially B-12 and high-grade speed. The Beatles sung about those types of nefarious doctors with their song Doctor Robert. Aretha Franklin sang its merits with Dr. Feelgood.

Shit, feeling down in the dumps? Just call Dr. Feelgood.

In 2013, I have no idea how many kids are being prescribed speed for their ADHD. I have no idea how many college students and  how many professionals are being written prescriptions. All I know is that Big Pharma is raking in billions in profits on legalized speed. Starbucks and Red Bull are raking in dough as well because their products keep people a wake.

My greatest societal fear in a horrible natural disaster. The looting or losing electricity doesn't concern me as much as the tipping point when people drugged up on happy pills and fried to the tits on Adderall inevitably run out of their meds and then they crash hard and go berserk. That's when you'll really see the zombie apocalypse and people eating each other faces... when all the pharmies wear off.

Speed kills. That's no fucking joke.

Hey Jude by Wilson Pickett and Duane Allman

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Lefsetz pointed me to a fucking great min-documentary (those wizards at the BBC will do a doc on almost anything; they were VICE decades before most VICE reporters were even born) about the history of Southern Rock.


It wasn't so much an overview as it was a biography of the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Both 1970s bands cut their teeth in the Southern club circuit for several years honing their skills. The musicians in both bands were complete outlaws. The music industry saw them as drunken rednecks, while racist and narrow-minded Southerners dismissed them as long-haired hippies. That's why those bands really knew how to belt out the blues. They lived that anguish and turmoil, but put their own modern rock-n-roll twist onto things.

Duane Allman is the greatest guitarist I've ever heard. No exceptions. Duane is like Clapton and Trey and Miles Davis all rolled into one skinny redneck. But Duane died young. Too young. We never really got to hear what he could really do because he died in a motorcycle crash in Macon, GA. Duane Allman was 27. Urban legend suggested he was killed by a peach truck, hence the cover of Eat of Peach. One thing is for sure... Duane died in a wreck with his motorcycle and some sort of truck. A year later, the Allmans' bass player died in a horrific motorcycle accident, which happened four blocks from where Duane died.

And you know the tragedy that befell Lynyrd Skynyrd. 1977 Plane crash. It took off from Greenville, SC en route to Baton Rogue. Half of the band died in a tragic plane crash in the swamps of Mississippi, which is how the music world lost the barefoot troubadour Ronnie Van Zant.

The doc is good. Definitely worth a watch. It tells the stories about two epic southern rock bands, plus the two devastating tragedies encompassed both bands. The Allman Brothers carried on without Duane. They had no choice. As Greg Allman said, if they didn't keep playing, they'd all end up jail or dead or dealing drugs.

For non-fans of Duane Allman, his guitar work is most known on Eric Clapton's Layla. He's one of the dueling guitars you hear during the sick instrumental. Duane originally sat in with Clapton while Clapton recorded an album in Miami. That's how talented Duane was... everyone wanted to hire him to play slide guitar on their own albums. Duane was channeling the ghosts of the Delta blues and trying to play Coltrane-like scales using his guitar. He was true alchemist, willing to mix in everything and anything.

Probably my most favorite Duane riff is at the end of a cover of Hey Jude by Wilson Pickett. Duane's solo is barely a minute long and you have to wait until the end of the song to hear it, but there's more soul and gravitas in that quick burst than there is in all the soulless music ever created in the 21st century.

Around the Horn: Worlds Colliding, Greenberg, and Gen-X Radio

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Painting by Shannon Finley

It was a long week for me. I started a new work project and was bogged down with a ton of other stuff. I managed to crank out a couple of decent things about the radio and Greenberg. Here's what you missed...

Cutting Room Floor - I will be appearing in a documentary about the poker boom called Bet Fold Raise, however, one of my scenes was cut. Check it out.

Late Night With My Pickled Brain - Here is some more late-night disjointed poetry. I offered it up to musician friends as potential lyrics.

No Soap Radio - As a child of the 1970s, I grew up listening to the radio. That experience shaped my entire life and became a solid foundation for my passion about music.

Whiskey and Ice Cream - I have an affinity for Noah Baumbach films, particularly Greenberg, because he's a grumpy New Yorker who lives in L.A., but doesn't drive.

High on the Job - What would you do if you're a marijuana reporter and eat too many pot brownies? This is a funny animation.

Here's my most recent columns for Bluff Magazine...

Donking Off Penny Lane, Eagle Poker, and Life in the Fast Lane - My two worlds collide -- music and poker. I wrote about the poker scene from Almost Famous and the origins of the Eagles' song Life in the fast Lane.

Dr. Jerry and Mr. Lucky - I wrote about the death of Jerry Buss. The Lakers' owner was also a regular high-stakes poker player.

Don't forget about my weekly column for Ocelot Sports about the Yankees titled... The Bronx Bums Report.

High on the Job

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

I stumbled across this... High on the Job... a funny animation about a reporter who was assigned to cover the budding marijuana industry in California.


H/T Criminal Wisdom

Whiskey and Ice Cream

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

"I have to stop watching this movie," Nicky screamed. "Why am I watching Greenberg when I fucking live it? I am the Florence character. All I do is drive your grumpy ass around L.A. and run errands like fetching you whiskey and ice cream sandwiches."

For the record, I like ice cream sandwiches but I don't drink whiskey anymore. To quote that Widespread Panic song, "Whiskey makes my eyes look mean."

I have Irish blood pumping through my veins, well, at least 50% of it. The last thing I'm going to do is get loaded on liquid plutonium every night and hope I don't set off a nuclear implosion with my fiery temper.  Whiskey escalates it; marijuana sedates it.

Booze and cocaine destroyed some of my favorite writers. I actively avoid both because I still cherish life and have a couple of more things I have to write before I die, which I won't be able to do if I crawl inside a bottle or collapse my nostrils by snorting Bolivian marching powder.

The older I get, the more I adhere to the main key to life by Johnny Hughes (former rock-n-roll manager, gambler, and author): "You only need one girl, one vice, and one drug. Anything more than one is instant trouble."

Now, that's some deep shit from a true wise man that has lived the hard live on the road. It's not an easy life, but most of the time we fuck stuff up because we make things more complicated than they really are. If you're not getting suffocated by your own neurosis, then you'll drown in your own self-loathing.

Director Noah Baumbach (Squid and the Whale and Greenberg) and I have a lot in common, mostly because we grew up roughly the same era in NYC. Yet, we also had a totally different experience because he had bohemian/intellectual parents supporting his pursuit of the arts. I only went to Wall Street because 1) I like to gamble, and 2) it would get my family off my back. I fell into that role at two different times. And in both instances, one day I woke up and realized I was living in someone else's movie. I was living someone else's idealized life. It wasn't mine. One day you're numb to everything and the next you're sitting on a subway wondering why you are wearing someone else's clothes.

Every once in a while, you get to break out of that song you're imprisoned in, or bust out of that glossy Hollywood film where you were only a mere actor (and you're dreaded parents the cantankerous director and duplicitous producer). The most exhilarating moments in life occur when you improvise and go off the script. It drives purists berserk, but it's what makes life worth living.

Breaking out of someone else's narrative isn't easy. Literature, art, film, music is filled with the heartache surrounding that disconnect. Walking away from someone else's scripted life is painful. Miserable. But once you go your own way... the relief is immense and the freedom is intoxicating.... until all of those lofty and fleeting feelings pass, you're still wrought with anxiety and fearful of the future. But heck, at least it's your choice and you're not filling the roles of one-dimensional characters that you're parental units and society wanted to thrust you in. That's why they (they = parents, teachers, society et al) make rebellion as insufferable as possible. Blazing a new path is a lonely pursuit as an individual. But as a group and collective, a rebellious pursuit can bring the system to its knees. That's the real reason why the government outlawed LSD. They originally thought dosing the public would turn the masses into sheeple, but instead it enlightened the masses and turned them against the machine.

The kids today are rebelling, but it's not like what happened in the 60s with massive protests and flower power. Today's revolution is happening on the internet. Millennials refuse to pay for anything. They indirectly have crashed Hollywood and the recording industry and the publishing industry. It wasn't a noble pursuit like their hippie parents who wanted the throw a monkey wrench into the gears of capitalism. Rather, these e-kids are simply too pampered coddled,and entitled, and that acute selfishness has fueled the current revolution, which has brought major institutions to their knees. The paradigm has shifted so quick and so fast that the white-bred dinosaurs got caught with their pants down. The old guard can no longer control the new guard, so now they'll rush to those used car salesmen in DC and beg them to shut down the internet, or reform the internet, or do something to keep those meddling kids from fucking up their rackets.

Sorry for the tangent. Back to Greenberg.

If you haven't seen it (trailer is here), it's on HBO a lot these days Greenberg is about a morose New Yorker who doesn't drive and he moves to L.A. for six weeks to house sit for his uber-rich brother. He fails to reconnect with a group of friends he knew in his 20s. And to complicate matters, he screws up a relationship with his brother's assistant. All the while, he doesn't drive and feels like an alien visiting another planet.

Several scenes from Greenberg hit home. They hit home too hard for Nicky, which is why she couldn't keep watching it. Sure, I'm an exaggerated version of Greenberg, but there are moments he says things that I've actually said, or thought. The best dialogue is not some smarmy Sorkin dialogue, or a witty repartee by Mamet, but it's the matter of fact lines that match the internal chatter running inside my head. That's why I dig Noah Baumbach so much because he's able to write simple lines that are embedded with complex internal issues. So whenever Greenberg talks, it's sort of like hearing myself think out loud.

No wonder Nicky was freaked out.

The other day I woke up and realized I was Greenberg from Greenberg. This scene from the film is the perfect way to describe me in Los Angeles... a lonely march uphill.

Everyone at some point, most men my age wake up in the Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime. "You may ask yourself, 'how did I get here?'"

It's at that precise point you question the cliche of a life you're living. Most of the time, you accept that's what your role is. "Same as it ever was." If you don't, well then you're ensconced in a mid-life crisis. I never had a mid-life crisis, because I have weekly existential skirmishes with myself, so all of that angst doesn't build up and result in a destructive Vesuvius-like explosion. I liken my weekly bouts with existentialism like that scene in Fight Club when Ed Norton is beating the shit out of himself. That's me. Whaling away on my own dense skull. I lived so hard and fast in my 20s that I never thought I'd make it to 30, and frankly, I didn't care. And then in my 30s, I caught a big break and finally had a shot to do something as a writer, and that's all I focused on was not fucking up that opportunity. But along the way, I lost sight of everything I originally set out to do.

Last year, I woke up one morning in San Francisco, and I was in a Talking Heads song with a beautiful wife in a beautiful house, wondering how the fuck did I get there and cognizant that 40 is just around the corner?

I first enjoyed Greenberg as a dark comedy because it was about a New Yorker who lived in L.A. and didn't drive anywhere. I mean, that's totally my next novel. But the more I watch the film, the more I begin to understand how the film is a neat parallel for my relationship with Los Angeles. One of the opening parts of the film is Florence driving in her car, and you get to see L.A. like everyone else sees it... from inside a car. The first dialogue is a skiddish Florence asking if she could merge into a lane. That's so fucking L.A. that I missed it the first time I saw the flick. For me, that's the quintessential L.A. experience because I'm sitting in the passenger seat while Nicky drives around. The bulk of my L.A. experience that opening scene. Trapped inside an insular bubble as daily life whizzes by.

It's days like today when I miss riding the Muni in San Francisco, which smelled like cheap old-lady perfume, urine, BO, weed, and Chinese herbs.

No Soap Radio

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

My fellow jaded and pharmaceutically-enhanced members of Generation X know about how radio was the shit back in the day before MTV burst in like a mafia hitman and unloaded two taps to the back of radio's head.

The post-war apartment building where I grew up in the Bronx was not wired for cable. At the time in the early 1980s, cable was literally a box the size of a cigar box with an on and off switch. When it the box was "on" you got either HBO (Home Box Office) or Sportschannel. My cousins in New Jersey had something called "Showtime", which showed first-run movies like Jaws or Apocalypse Now. I essentially grew up on 6 TV channels -- 3 majors networks, 2 locals, and PBS.

Yes. Six.

CBS. NBC. ABC. WOR. PIX. PBS.

That's it.

Sometimes, we were able to pick up Long Island's PBS station, but it was often fuzzy and the same programming as NYC's PBS. I was limited to six stations, but you know what? I didn't mind much. I didn't know any better. This was the start of the 1980s. Things were looking up. The Islamic fundamentalists finally released the hostages in Iran, and a bunch of snot-nosed college punks beat the unbeatable and mighty Soviet Union hockey team.

Despite brief glimmers of hope, times were tough. Gotham was in decay. NYC was broke. I also had to walk to school barefoot in the snow and had to fight off baseball-bat wielding gang members with painted faces and make-shift Yankees uniforms.

Okay. Neither the snow or gang thugs are true, but when I saw The Warriors as a kid, I was freaked out that the rival gangs roamed the subways stations at night.

So, we had 6 TV stations and I had memorized the TV Guide. I only had a handful of Atari games, so my entertainment options were limited. I read a ton of books. But mostly when I think about the halcyon days of my childhood, I think about playing sports in the schoolyard (hoops and stickball... yes, my brother and I played a lot of stickball and another game indigenous to NYC called "Stoop") and riding my bicycle throughout the neighborhood (without a helmet). Yes, when nothing was on TV, we went outside to play.

My only real cultural outlet was the radio. Back in the late 70s and early 80s, the radio was the pulse of the outside world. But then again, radio was no better and in the process of becoming corporatized, but at least there was something to connect a kid from the Bronx to the outside world. The DJs were arbiters of taste. If I heard a song on Z-100, then it must have been cool.

Like many kids growing up in the 80s, I did not have too many options but to cherry pick musical tastes from the radio. I was the oldest so I didn't have older siblings to pass along their musical tastes (like Cameron Crowe's sister in Almost Famous giving him her albums when she fled to San Francisco). My parents weren't hippies. My father was much older than my mother and he was straight out of Mad Men. Although my parents lived through the 1960s, they had the mentality of the  1950s and never embraced the 1960s. My mom was the daughter of immigrants, so she had an incredibly sheltered life. My father was too square for counterculture and let the ever-changing nebulous world of the 1960s pass him by while he crawled inside a liquor bottle for the next several decades. I guess one of the reasons I like Mad Men so much is that I'm trying to figure out what my parents were like before they met and before I was born.

My father never listened to music. The only music-related moment happened one night he was drunk and driving us home from a WWF Monday Night Wrestling match at MSG and Lionel Richie's song All Night Long came on the radio and he started to sing along in drunken gibberish while speeding on the West Side Highway. It was scary at the time, but a funny story to tell today.

My mom (and my aunt, who lived around the corner from us) had an extensive record collection, but it was mostly early Beatles and calypso music like Harry Belafante and uber-mellow shit like Helen Reddy. She had a handful of Motown records, but she primary listened to the Golden Oldies radio station, which played a ton of Motown.

When I think about the radio, I have three early memories that are as clear as when I experienced them as a young child.

1. My mother playing Motown on the Oldies station.

2. Listening to Yankees games on the radio with the "The Scooter" (a.k.a Phil Rizzuto) giving the play-by-play.

3. My father shaving with a radio playing in the bathroom. I always woke up hearing 1010 WINS in the background. Their tagline has been imprinted into my memory banks: "If you give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world."

My earliest musical memories is Motown on the radio. That's not a bad primer and foundation to have as a musical base all things considered. Of course, the rest of my music education was up to me. Without cable and access to MTV, I relied on the few music-themed shows on TV like American Bandstand, Soul Train, and Friday Night Videos. In order to catch live performances, I had to stay up late and catch bands on Saturday Night Live. The first time I saw The Clash? They were the music guest when Ron Howard hosted SNL in 1982 (I think).

I relied on the radio and my high shcool classmates to turn me onto music. I started out high school listening to Top 40 stations in NYC (primarily Z-100) and then slowly moved over to classic rock (K-Rock and NEW) and faint-signaled college radio (either Fordham or Columbia) by the time I graduated high school. My musical interests changed dramatically when I went to high school in Manhattan and met kids with excellent taste in music. Once again, I cherry picked from the bands they adored. I bought cheap cassettes in Chinatown and I gave blanks to friends, who made me copies of their favorite albums. This was at a time when I was introduced to mix tapes. Eventually, I started visiting Tower Records in the Village and near Lincoln Center. I probably wasted weeks in both stores looking around mesmerized at the vast musical archives broken up into different genres. Friends were very good at stealing tapes. Me? I was too chicken-shit, but I the only thing I ever shoplifted from Tower Records was Greatest Hits by The Cars.

Eventually, I learned that Top 40 radio was set-up to sell ad space and that songs were played usually to boost record sales. I still listened to sports and the occasional blacked-out Yankees game on the radio. Plus, I enjoyed the wackos who called into WFAN during the infancy of the all-sports radio station.

As I slowly accumulated more and more albums and built up a music collection, I listened to the radio less and less. The only exception was King Biscuit Flower Hour on Sunday nights at Midnight and they played excerpts from live Grateful Dead concerts. I started to get into The Grateful Dead when I was 16. I had caught my first show at MSG when I was 15 and got hooked. The first CD I ever purchased was Skeletons in the Closet, which essentially was a melange of greatest hits that every classic rock station in America frequently played like Sugar Magnolia, Truckin', Uncle John's Band, One More Saturday Night, and my favorite Dead song... Casey Jones. I used to piss off the neighbors by cranking up Skeletons.

I moved to Atlanta for college. The radio down there sucked. Too many country stations. But luckily, my new batch of friends turned me onto a whole new universe of music. But that's a story for another time.

Late Night With My Pickled Brain

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Low hum.
Whirling micro fans.
Silver shovels, bronze spray tans.
Gold dust women out-running the shadows.
Soothing rain completes me.

Zagging and zigging and zugging.
Through easy traffic.
Passing truckers loaded with loads of trinkets.
Made by the tiny hands of exploited Chinese children.
Jobs that union men once did before they became dinosaurs.

Scorched Earth and empty orange groves.
Dry sea. Wet air. Upside down flock of seagulls.
Mudslides. Discarded empties.
Corroded car batteries. Splintery benches.
Governor doesn't know where he slept last night.

Loaded dice. Sleight of hand.
Hijacking dreams when people sleep.
Inserting intrepid memories.
Biting my lip in my sleep.
Traveling in crowded buses, but in someone else's dream.

These things are not easy to explain when understanding is even harder.
It's that... it's just... it's not easy.
Art is art.
Until it becomes self indulgent tripe.
Tripe, if seasoned and prepared properly, can become a gourmet dish.

We have selective memory as a community.
We have myopia as a country.
And even then, we can't trust ourselves.
Can you look in the mirror and not throw a stone?
The house of cards will collapse on Humpty Dumpty.

Revisionist memories have staged a coup inside our head.
Erasing and deleting.
Eliminating the awkward and smudging out the miserable.
Extinguishing thought terrorists.
Squishing them like doomed ants.

Spin. Propaganda. Hyperbole.
History is written by the winners.
Like a fascist state.
Ordering the ministry of education to re-write history books.
Future generations will only learn about half-truths.

And never know who flatters the prince the most.
We stare at clocks four seconds too slow.
Mixing cocktails with toxic spirits.
Chafed encounters.
Drenched. Absorbed. Saturated.

Bon Jovi's frazzled 80's hair is the cultural equivalent to elephant diarrhea.
The excess of the "me" decade makes everything else seem underhanded.
The haves own everything.
The have-nots barely have $14 in their checking account.
We stopped cultivating culture.

Evasive phone messages.
Senseless guilt.
Despicable focus.
Reading books you shouldn't be reading.
Silently judging the supercilious culture.

I knew a rich girl who had no clue about the external world.
When she was 10, she ate gourmet cheese sandwiches.
She ask her maids what was it like to ride the subways.
Now she's getting married in Santa Fe.
I pretended the post office lost the invite.

Hatred shouldn't exist.
Yet it thrives in a petri dish the size of Los Angeles.
Try to understand the evolution of a sitcom plot.
Examine the impressive scholarly arguments.
Declare your profound ambivalence.

Addicts cannot contain themselves.
Roaming the slums for a 24-hour product.
Humanize the experience.
Sad and feral.
The flicker of the TV in the darkness makes me feel less alone.

Cat ladies die on couches.
Urine soaked carpets beneath their feet.
The pungent aroma of ammonia.
The famished cats fed on her toes.
Then they ate each other.

Illogical infantile pleasures.
Be wary of excessive pleasures.
Dangerous daydreams.
We are only vehicles.
But when you're brain stops, that's it.

Close your eyes.
It all continues.
The distilled thoughts.
The muted memories.
Everything.

Raids with masks.
The bad guys always wore masks and black hats.
Lack of participation in the ponzi scheme makes them suspicious.
The thinkers will be marginalized.
Unless they buy into the snazzy commercials pitching fancy red cars.

The moon's gravity is 1/6th of Earth.
Astronauts and their movements were handicapped.
Slaves to their own bulky space suits.
Do you dream in outer space?
And what do cosmonauts' farts smell like?