Author: MacPhoenix

So once or twice a month, I’ll stop at the local Chinese food place. It’s in a great location. I order my food, walk down to the bank, maybe stop in the drug store or supermarket, and then drop back in on the Chinese food place to pick up my hot, steaming order of Egg Foo Yung. For those poor souls, uneducated in the ways of truly disgusting Chinese dishes, Egg Foo Yung is three 3-egg omelettes, cooked in a wok, and served in a dense brown sauce. If I give you a hard time about your Big Mac consumption, feel free to parry with the Chinese omelette. Egg Foo Yung is like cigarettes: I know it is gonna kill me, it’s a disgusting habit, and if you don’t know why I do it, I can’t even talk to you about it. At least, I don’t throw the un-inhaled portion out into the road whilst driving.

Anyway, the greatest thing about stopping for Chinese is the little side shows. During the winter, as I crossed the parking lot, I noticed a strong odor of burnt wood. It was so strong that, as I entered the Chinese food place, I could smell the wafts of smoke emanating from my jacket. It attached to me that quickly. I commented on it, saying that I didn’t start the fire. Ha, ha. As my order was cooking, the staff in the restaurant was becoming visibly nervous over the smell, until we all saw fire trucks come streaming into the parking lot. Within minutes there were, and I am not exaggerating, a dozen fire trucks in the lot. But there was no fire to put out. The pizza place next door has a wood burning oven, and, apparently, they forgot how to open the flue. There had to be sixty firemen there, easily, all just told to go back home.

Last time I was ordering Chinese, a kid on a bike, probably about 16 or so, accosted me as I walked out of the supermarket, asking me to buy him some cigarettes. What a disgusting habit, I thought. No, that’s not what I really thought. What I really thought was, hey! how come he knows I’m old enough to buy cigarettes? And that got me thinking, as it always does, about being a kid and thinking that 30-year olds were so adult, so mature, and had to have it all together by then. Yeah. But I never did ask one to buy me cigarettes or booze. The kid might have gotten lucky with me if he asked for beer, but only if he asked for the right beer.

I’m a beer-elitist. And this was proven to me on that very same excursion for my Chinese fix. There was an old, bummy looking guy, skinny, coupla teeth, pushing a cart on the sidewalk filled with things hidden by black, plastic bags. Now this strip mall does have a supermarket in it, so I wasn’t going by the cart alone to convince myself that the gentleman in question was a bum. He also carried with him a beer can in a paper bag. That was a topper. But, initially, I gave him kudos for his choice of beer. The can was very long, no 12 ouncer, and was black. In my naive elitism, I thought the guy was drinking a Guinness. It isn’t a very practical thing to do, since, I was thinking to myself, the Guinness can is meant to be poured into a glass. The new glass bottle Guinness, they say, can be drunk from the bottle, but I’d still pour it into a glass, being the beer elitist and all.

And then, I thought about the absurdity of my thoughts, very meta. He’s not drinking a Guinness, you dweeb. A Guinness is about $2.50 a can. It’s gotta be MGD or some such. Idiot, I sighed to myself.
We met up in the Chinese restaurant, my beer-swilling friend and me. He was talking to the cashier about his two daughters coming up from Florida, and that his mom was doing well in the nursing home. I still don’t know what to make of that, except that North Babylon has some chatty hobos.

Then, after I picked up my food and made my way back to my car, I got a message, a message from God’s messenger. You see, “The end is near. You, me, everyone you love, every star, every animal is going to die.” That’s it, folks. Wrap it up; nothing more to see here. The photocopied paper clung to my windshield, and all the rest of us who were just so lucky to park there at that time so we could be saved. Sneaky bastard. I was walking back and forth through that parking lot for the past 15 minutes, and I never even saw her.

I’m pretty sure it was a woman who wrote out the treatise on the second-coming of Christ, because of the handwriting, very curly. She didn’t necessarily hand them out, for sure, but I don’t think she’d want to do anything half-assed for the Lord. She seems to have the perennial problem of mixing up “your” and “you’re,” but she did pretty good otherwise. I don’t really want to make fun of this person, but I did get a kick out of this line, which was written lengthwise up the margin of the page: “God loves you, shouldn’t you love him? YES!” Oh, those pesky ambiguous negatives. Yes, I shouldn’t love him? No, I should not love him? No, I should love him? Oh, YES, I should love him. Okay. Got it. Now, I can see this “saving” a Christian who has gotten lost from the flock, and for that we all rejoice, but does it really work on someone who, let’s say, is a confirmed atheist who has written several pieces of Internet propaganda on the silliness of the Christian persecution complex? But, then again, how many of them did she expect to come across in a parking lot picking up Chinese food?

In the beginning of the summer of 1991, as I played a session of Call of Chthulu, the game master, a bartender at the restaurant where I worked, played a particular CD softly in the background. There was something familiar about the music, but it was a bit low to make out. The melodies stuck with me, subconsciously, for the next week, until, at the next game session, when he played the CD again, I asked him what we were listening to. He handed me the case, a bright red image forever since burned in my memory. He told me a story of how his friend was a rep for Sony Music, and this was a band that Sony was very excited about. His copy was a prerelease, and sure enough there was bold type on the back of the CD about how this copy was not for sale and other legalese.

The music, the deep baritone vocals, the sheer power of it all, was apparent at low volume in the background of a role-playing game. He played the CD twice that day, and the song “Evenflow” found its way into my humming and whistling repertoire while at work the next week. It was a great album. I couldn’t wait to buy it when it came out. What a funny name for a band, I thought, Pearl Jam. It would be cool if they caught on, though.

A cusp in music existed at that time. Pearl Jam’s Ten was just a small part of it. (Okay, commercially, it was a huge part of it.) But the album was a wonderful example of what would be called Grunge, and what would dominate the radio and MTV for the next couple of years. It was a happy time for me, audio-wise. Hearing the album, then, I knew something was changing within the music world. The album had longevity written all over it. It happens rarely—the instant classic in everyone’s music collection.

Boy bands, Britney, and Beyoncé have dominated the past eight years of music, much to the detriment of sanity, taste, and record sales. NüMetal becomes the next incarnation of 80s hair band. Despite the lust for the exalted position of “the next big thing” in rock and roll, the stuff is tired as soon as it comes out. Friends used to debate me against the punk-cred of Green Day, but no one now seriously thinks that Avril Lavigne could be punk even if you lit her head on fire and used her to light fireworks.

In 2001, the best selling album was a soundtrack built around songs that were popular 70 years ago. Last year, the best albums were re-releases from previous years. One of these, White Blood Cells, by the White Stripes, originally released the year before, gave me some hope for the state of music to come. It’s a great album. This band would go far, I thought, and they did indeed get some radio airplay and video rotation on MTV2. But the end of 2002 produced a disquieting silence from Jack White, and an odd backlash against the rise of this talented duo. Why would the White Stripes not take advantage of the success of their rising star? Why would they not promote the shit out of themselves and make an even bigger wave?

I needn’t have worried. Elephant, their latest, is the seminal album of this decade. This is the one that we will all have in our music collections, and remember the first time we heard it. I, for one, was in Katherine’s new car, and we were heading to dinner at the Curry Club. I popped in the CD into the player, and by the third song, my head swam with memories from 12 years before—a change in the air, a harbinger of good music to come, an amazing achievement for a humble rock album.