The Awkward World

…and one of the first steps is to tell everyone that you’re doing it so when week 2 gets here and you want to quit, you’ll stick with it because you don’t want everyone to think you’re a loser. And I’ll be honest – it just started, and I’m already starting to sweat it.

National Novel Writing Month, more commonly known as NaNoWriMo, is something I’ve been making excuses not to do for several years now. The past few years I’ve instead undertaken something called the Salon Challenge, which is explained here. NaNoWriMo, conversely, is all about quantity, not quality, so the Salon Challenge isn’t really in the same spirit, and hell, I’m unemployed and 24 in Chicago, and what else do I have to do with my time than write 50,000 words of drivel in 30 days?

Anyway, I’m going to try to do this thing right. No cheating or writing 50,000 words of TDW or anything – I’m going to write a whole first draft of a brand new novel, from conception to finish, in 30 days. By nature, this is a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, stream-of-consciousness exercise, so I can’t really give you an outline of what I’m working on since I myself don’t know. I tried to start with an open-ended concept, something that I can get 175 pages worth of play out of: famous evangelical Bill Glass discovers that death is impermanent for him (though it can have some pretty weird side effects), so he forms a team of globe-hopping, high-flying, space-blasting adventurers who set out to fix all the world’s problems. Fun!

So what this means for you, dear reader, is that I can’t really predict what will happen to Awkward World during the coming month. Either I will write myself blue on the NaNoWriMo story and have no desire to even think about music reviewing, or else I’ll so desperately need a break, need to write something, anything else, and reviewing music will be my only respite. Who knows. But I’m planning for the former, which is a bummer because I just got a ton of new music for my birthday (or spent my birthday money on it), and there’s a lot I want to say. So, until (or if) I get a chance for real reviews, here are the highlights:

-Sainthood by Tegan & Sara is one of the best records this year.

-Backspacer by Pearl Jam is really good also.

-You can skip the new Swell Season and Monsters of Folk.

-The new Mike Doughty and Ben Gibbard/Jay Farrar efforts are worth hearing, but there’s nothing really groundbreaking.

-Nickie and I went to a Gaslight Anthem concert at the Double Door last week. The openers were Murder By Death and the Loved Ones, and it was awesome. Haven’t been to a real punk show in a while. And Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio was there too, just hanging out. Wow!

Okay, gotta go. Making cupcakes. See ya in a month.

PS – If you want to join me and 120,000 others in National Novel Writing Month, you can get all the info you need here. And if you want to keep up with what I’m writing, well you can see that right here.

Red State Blues
An essay

It took moving to Chicago to understand North Carolina, or at least the anti-intellectual movement among the Southern Baptists and old rebels in Stanly County. Things I didn’t want to understand, maybe, but there’s at least a certain logic to the racism and stubbornness that I hadn’t seen before, and the thin line between bravery and foolishness. Back in Stanly County, the little white triangle which brought me up, the word “rebel” gets tossed around a lot, and these days I can see what they’re aiming at: wear your greasy Levis and trucker hat in Chicago, your frayed wife-beater and stretched tattoos, wave that Dixie flag, and yeah, I guess you are a rebel. I don’t own any of that stuff, but I went vintage shopping in Wicker Park today, wearing my grey Land’s End sweater over a polo, my Dockers slacks and black wool overcoat, and I couldn’t help from thumbing through the racks of ironic cowboy wear. Snakeskin boots. Yellow leather with fringe. Where I come from, that ain’t ironic. I haven’t felt ironic in a while.

It goes back to when I first moved here and unwittingly became the ambassador of southern culture to my new Chicago friends. I made them sweet tea and usually had a case of Cheerwine on hand. I told them all about the crazy racial politics in the Stanly County public schools — we get a day off every March for Martin Luther King/Robert E. Lee Day, the South Stanly Rebels were finally forced to change their mascot to the Fire Ants, then back to the Rebels, then finally to the Rowdy Rebel Bulls, and they call the women’s teams the Rowdy Lady Rebel Bulls — and as a case study, it was generally agreed that I came out pretty well despite my upbringing. Eventually I stumbled across some other North state exiles, and we bandy names about like Bojangle’s and Cook-Out like currency, little islands of affiliation amid the great big primitive sea. In North Carolina, we don’t much joke about MLK/Robert E. Lee Day and the rebels of any shape or constitution, because some of those rebels incite a lot more damage than jokes. If you talk too much about the South Stanly mascot wars, you eventually have to talk about Carlos Roberson getting dragged behind Ed and Mike Prosser’s pick up till he came apart, and it was the cross-burners at the courthouse that gave us Robert E. Lee Day, so it’s not so funny underneath.
It was the underneath parts that drove me and some folks of like mind away from the South and to here. I live on the north side of Chicago in a Swedish neighborhood, about half an hour on the Red Line from downtown. The violence is west of me and south of me, and the papers here are too expensive to buy, and I’m mostly ignorant of city politics because I don’t claim Chicago yet. I like it just fine, but I could leave it tomorrow and I don’t think I’d be cooing to some new friends in some new city about how I can’t believe they changed the Sear’s Tower to the Willis Tower, or berating them for putting ketchup on their hot dogs. Illinois is a big blue state, and we’ve got Obama here, and Oprah, if that’s your thing. And after campaigning my little heart out in South Carolina for Obama in the Democratic primary back in ‘07, now that he’s in office, I’m starting to waver. I used to want to be a preacher, but I’m not so sure about god anymore, and I only half miss it. I miss the half where the responsibility for my life lay with someone else, but the justification, the afterlife, the leap of faith itself… I’m peeling off the layers of irony and finding a harder man to fool.

Like Nick Hornby and Steve Almond and far cooler people before me, I can’t help but define myself through music. I won’t get into it much now, except to say that I’ve been devouring the back catalogue of the Drive-By Truckers these last few months. Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, Jason Isbell, the triple electric guitar attack. They’ve got their own section at Reckless Records called “INSURGENT COUNTRY,” and they understand the complexity of the lives of poor white men below the Mason-Dixon better than anything I’ve ever heard or read. For good or for bad, the DBT are defiant, rebels by nature. On their new b-sides collection, there’s a cover of “Rebels” they recorded for an episode of “King of the Hill.” It wasn’t until I heard their take on Tom Petty’s old standard that it clicked for me:

“Even before my fathers’ fathers
They called us all rebels,
As they burned down our cornfields
And left our cities leveled.
Well, I still feel the eyes
Of them blue-bellied devils
When I’m walking around
Through the concrete and metal.”

There is so much anger in the South. We have such an inborn need to prove ourselves righteous by fighting something, anything, that our whole identity is based on opposition. Hence the stereotypical Southern obsession with the Civil War; by god, it was the last time we took a stand. It was the last time we were taken seriously, the last time we almost won. We’re a joke to the rest of the country now — beer-bellied trailer park trash, meth addicts, wife-beaters, jingoistic, neo-conservative, short-tempered saps. For a comparison, look at inner-city gangs — if you tell somebody their whole life and their parents’ whole life that they’re criminals, they’re going to be criminals. I think black urban communities of the west and northeast have more in common with the fens of Alabama than either population would like to admit, and their music reflects that. How many times have you heard someone say they listen to every type of music except rap and country? In their purest forms, those two genres are populist anthems, impossible to truly understand unless you’ve lived the life.
I feel that Dixie insurgency too, even if I focus it differently. If I didn’t have it in my veins, that reactionary curse, I don’t think I would be able to understand the Drive-By Truckers, or Old Crow Medicine Show, or Lucero, or the old cowboy songs my dad used to sing. For christsake, I grew up on a chicken farm. You can see the house where my dad was born through the oaks behind my parents’ house, and none of my cousins, none of my aunts or uncles ever left the county for more than a year or two. All that racism, that sexism, the homophobia, the nasty politics, the belligerent ignorance, it all comes out of a desire to just be left alone. That goddamned flag, that red and blue Confederate thing that has chased me all my life, that Southern Cross I hate more than anything — it’s the flag for another country. For some of them, yeah, it’s about hating niggers. But I think more of them fly it out of wishful thinking, out of nostalgia for a world that never existed. It’s the same men in their forties who can never let go of their high school football days, the pass they almost caught, the shoulder they almost didn’t tear. There’s another world for them under the rebel flag, another country they can idealize, where they’d be richer and happier, where their own interpretation of the word of god would go unchallenged.
Hell, I’ve wanted to secede for years. The younger and middle-aged southerners have been fooled into believing the holy hypocrisy of the neo-conservative agenda, but the old hardliners are still real conservatives. I like these guys. These are guys who truly, deep in their wrinkled hearts, hate the fuck out of the United States of America. They hate the bureaucracy, hate the courts and Congress, really hate the President no matter which party’s in power. They hate anything remotely socialist, from public schools to income tax to Welfare to hospitals. They hate the war in the Middle East and the ideological war between the right and left, raging in their backyards. They hate the church and the sheriff. They hate the niggers and the Mexicans, the fags and the whores, and they most certainly hate you and me. I’m talking about the Fred Phelpses of the world, the Gary Birdsongs, if you know who that is. They’re pieces of shit, but at least they’re pieces of shit with consistent worldviews. They’re pieces of shit who believe in an unregulated free market, an unfiltered gospel, an eye for an eye. They’re not going to vote Democrat or Republican — they’re not going to vote at all. I’ve never seen a subjective sense of justice so developed as I see in these old men. The rest of the southerners, the hillbillies and rednecks, the shitkickers and townies, they’ll rebel against whatever they can — homos, liberals, books, deodorant. They’re against everything. The old timers are for something, and even though I disagree with what that something is, I respect them.

I consider myself a rebel. I hate the government, the Democrats and the Republicans. Capitalism doesn’t work, but neither does socialism — both are too easily corrupted by the greed of the upper class. I distrust the poor. I hate big business. I hate the church, the mainstream media, and law enforcement. I hate anyone or anything that tells anyone what to think. I hate the war. I do not support the troops. I don’t give a damn about justice — if there’s a heaven, Hitler and Hussein are most certainly there — because I believe in human forgiveness, if not godly forgiveness. I don’t have a temper, but I am full of criticism. America is a shitty place, even if it is one of the least shitty places currently available. I have my own ideas for utopia, but don’t we all? And if it had a flag, I suppose I’d fly it. There is so much that I love. I could never kill, and I don’t think I could even intentionally hurt, not even in self-defense. I believe in a unified scene, but I don’t think it’ll happen in my lifetime. What I hate more than anything are the false divisions imposed upon people — countries, races, gender identities, social classes, red and blue, left and right. I don’t hate George Bush, despite disagreeing with every single decision he’s ever made. I still tentatively like Obama, but if he doesn’t give us some public health care he’s going to be on my shit list. Everybody deserves a lot of second chances, because everybody is doing the best they can. I guess I’m something of a positive nihilist rebel. I like Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution — every government, every corporation, every religion, anything that gains too much power will ultimately become corrupt, and anything that no longer serves the interest of the people is due for an ass-kicking.
So what do I do with all my big social ideals? How do I start the permanent revolution turning? Like almost all of my red state brothers and sisters in North Carolina, my blue state friends here in Chicago, my positive nihilists across the scene, I don’t do shit. I write an essay and put it on a blog. I’m a coward, of course, and my desire to see real change in the world is not quite as strong as my desire to avoid confrontation and be as comfortable as I can for as long as I can. That’s why I left. In the end, if you’re not Gandhi or Mandela, or Phelps or Birdsong, or Hitler or bin Laden, then you’re just talk. You might as well just fly the flag, for all the difference it makes. I fear violence, but I suspect that it is the character of this world that nothing can get better without the violent exsanguination of the old and corrupt. I’m not that guy. I’m just the guy who writes about it. So to the readers, to the dogs or whoever, I encourage you to take up arms, violently, and rebel, not against injustice but for your subjective utopia, no matter how malevolent or doomed that world may be. Take up arms or, as I have, accept the compromise blues as the price of inertia.

Drive-By Truckers – The Righteous Path

Drive-By Truckers – Rebels

Drive-By Truckers – The Day John Henry Died

Drive-By Truckers – The Boys from Alabama