: lower black pain.

We’ve lost a lot of stuff in the couch and I’m wondering if it’s gone forever.

We can’t just shake the couch and get the stuff out, it’s in a null space, a realm between what is and what isn’t. I put my hand in there as far as I could, enduring mysterious scratches from what I pray are mysterious crumbs of some sort, and wished for the very first time that if I had a superpower it would not be flight, but that stretchy thing that Reed Richards was afflicted with in the Fantastic Four.

I don’t know what we’ve lost in there; we found the remote but the spare set of keys hasn’t shown up anywhere.

My wife’s supposition is that there’s just too much stuff to keep track of; we live with books, art supplies, musical instruments, cooking implements, sewing paraphernalia, robots, and tools. Marie Kondo would just pass right out in our apartment.

She has a world famous home organizational method; you discard everything in your home that does not spark joy. She’s written four books on organizing, which have sold over 4 million copies. That’s a lot of paper. I bet during at least one miraculous home transformation she had to chuck one of her own books in the bin. And she has an online store where she sells even more stuff – seemingly counter intuitive to her overall brand mission.

We seasonally purge and sort and thin, but then we want to make a custom guitar pedal or glow in the dark slime or it’s Halloween again and we need elven horns so we require Worbla or solder or strontium aluminate powder. We’re mad scientists. Our space is a physical distillation of lives lived in awe of and service to the arts (some of you must have five or so books stacked up next your beds right now? #nojudgement).

So we try to keep track of things, but in an effort to put in more… actual effort, I sought some section of our home that would benefit from a more focused filtering process.

I started with my Netflix™ queue.At first it was easy; all the things I had already seen; Gone. Then, everything the critics said I was supposed to watch but I didn’t really want to, and then titles with people I liked but, y’know, the movie really sucked.  I went through HBO Max™, Hulu™, and Amazon™ Prime™ the same way, and got rid of about 2/3 of the lists, and was super proud until I counted up how much space that all took up in the apartment.

So I turned to my email INBOX. That little red number was up in the thousands, but I viciously went after anything that didn’t spark joy in me, unsubscribing like a champion, until I realized how many bills and news bulletins are entirely necessary but I don’t necessarily enjoy. I did get rid of some of the political alerts, because, well, I still have thousands. How alerted do I need to be?

Practically, of course this wasn’t enough, so at this point that I got serious. Real and significant change was in order. I tackled my t-shirt drawer.

Two determining factors: subject and condition. Subject is far more important than condition, because my original CBGB’s shirt bought at the club when it was still open can definitely have a few holes in it. It can be mostly holes (like the proudest net of a New England fisherman) before I’ll ever throw that away.

Some shirts were memories of concerts attended, some of stories I loved and admired (I have like seven Ravenclaw shirts (#goblueravens!), some I would never wear but were significant objects – gifts from friends that have passed on, or places that no longer exist.

Plus, I found this Becky Lynch WrestleMania 35 shirt that I just put on.

Did I get a lot of joy sparks? Sure; these objects represent memories, that’s their value; I cherish them as a token of an experience. I realized that these shirts signify stories that I can tell, but they can’t. ‘Cause they’re shirts. These physical objects will outlive the memories, because memories are perishable, they’re not items or objects, they’ll go when I do, and I’m just bones and meat. The plate always outlasts the food. But we just can’t throw away all the memories that don’t make us happy; we’d be psychopaths, north without south, yin yang and all that.

The meaning of all our objects will someday be lost in SpaceTime’s couch, but today, this apartment holds more that what’s inside it; it’s a cave of both potential and legend, filled with physical stuff full of emotional heft. The Oscar Meyer Wienermobile whistle? My grandmother used to have one to signal my grandfather to come back to the camper from fishing for lunch. Could she have purchased a more legitimate device? Yes, she could, but then I wouldn’t have this on my bookshelf. Also, it wasn’t nearly loud enough, so she always had to add a werewolf-like “Yooo-hoooo!”, rendering the poor thing moot anyway.

My most prized piece of body trunk coverage is a Captain America bicycle shirt, obtained directly from a MARVEL storage closet almost 20 years ago. I wear it every Fourth of July to signify the dream that is the United States, which stands above wherever we are, to signify the best of what we all can become. It still looks good after two decades… I only have to kind of straighten up my back and, y’know, inhale with intention. It’s kind of a family tradition. I mean, Zoe knows I wear it every single year, so she always helps me look for it, because I can never seem to find it for some reason. I mean, the annual sight of me in a twenty year old skin tight red, white, and blue star-spangled spandex jersey? That sparks joy, right? Right?

Uh oh.

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There used to be located in the heart of Manhattan’s SOHO an irrationally fancy food store named Dean and Deluca, a great place to invest a significant amount of what should be your children’s inheritance on an apple and a pouch of French lentils.

Lines were long for coffee and nibbles in the morning, and then again right about that time in the afternoon when folks south of Houston convinced themselves that they deserved something very nice to eat for lunch.

So one day that was me. I. Whatever. Actually we, because my nine month old was with me in a stroller. Honestly, this was a very fancy crowd, but there were so many fun things to see here, so I faced the stroller forward and picked up an unaffordable lemonade, narrating the experience through the little fabric sunroof as we passed brightly colored marzipan and endless jars of imported plum tomato paste.

We were waiting to checkout, and I was humbly taking baby compliments from the women behind me in line when we heard, “Stop it.” from the woman right in front of us.

“Stop it!”

So here in New York there’s a three step process for this sort of instance of irrational yelling: first, we check for white earbuds.  If the ears are clear of technology, we follow the gaze. This is a precise measurement, there’s always a lot of people around, and they could be yelling at that person right next to you, in which case you need to quickly yet politely step away from them. If it’s not the person next to you, but indeed, it’s YOU, then you disregard the people around you politely stepping away and begin to either ignore or emphatically engage the talker.

So. No earbuds. Not looking at me. Ok. She seemed to be looking at… her own feet.

Well, hey, my dogs have barked after a long day in the Big Apple. Absolutely. I can understand –

“Stop judging me!”

Wow, my feet are pretty easy going for appendages, maybe hers are more complex.

And then she looked straight at me.

“That baby’s judging me. Stop judging me, baby!”

Now I’m concerned. (I know, “NOW you’re concerned?”)  The shift in her tone was very specific - addressing me, she was emphatic, pointing out a fact; but she was clearly combative to the baby.

So I immediately turned the carriage around, and, well…the most honest way to describe the look on the baby’s face was… ruthlessly quizzical.

The baby was definitely judging that lady.

Now my tone changes, because this woman is no longer irrational. Her assertion is entirely correct.

I panic. I turn to the women behind me. They are both covering smiles, pretending they’re scratching their noses.

I go for logic.

“Oh, she hasn’t eaten. You know how it gets.” The “hangry” defense, one of the most uniformly human experiences; surely it’s gonna connect because we’re all buying food, right? It’s lunchtime!

“That baby was judging me.” she reasserts, and the check-out clerk calls to her, then calls again.  She backs away towards the counter, keeping her eyes square on me the entire time, while I smile like I’m welcoming her to Fantasy Island.

The women in line behind me, from behind their hands, said,

“You handled that pretty well.”

“Well I really… I mean, I didn’t know.. I mean the baby does look kind of intense.”

Which was true, both eyes still purposefully narrowed.

“Maybe it’s gas?” I said.  It wasn’t gas.

“No” said the second woman behind me, ”It probably is that woman. Babies know things.”

Up until that time, I believed that innocence was inexperience. I assumed, for example, that babies were unable to throw that high a level of shade because they had yet to attend a high school reunion cocktail party. But there it was. Now an apparently unshakable belief that an infant has to power to deeply and personally condemn you says a great deal about the believer and their general philosophy on life.

There are, in my opinion, three life philosophies:

Doom - no matter what you do, it’s all gonna go pretty badlyKarma - it all depends on what you do& Salvation - no matter what you do, things are gonna be just fine.

You can believe all of these, but only one at a time.

In childhood, if we’re very lucky, we have a period of time when all the stories we are told end with “and they all lived happily ever after”, which inspires our confidence. Salvation.

Doom is the cautionary tale, all those fables where something crappy happens to a fox then they say ”and the moral is…” Be afraid, be careful, be - oops, you’re dead anyway. Sorry.

But the philosophy that what you do does matter, that balance is a ubiquitous science of temporal consequence where every personal action, seen or unseen, will come to bear, is to some the most terrifying of these options. Karma.

I personally feel that karma is very comforting; “the love you take equal to the love you make” and all that, but what Hitchcock-level crime do you have to commit to feel the eyes of justice burning you from a face whose mouth holds a little rubber giraffe? Murder??? Unpaid Parking Tickets? Did you cheat at whist?  Point being, you don’t believe a baby’s judging you unless you believe that you are guilty of something. The Tell Tale Heart, in a checkout line, wearing a disposable diaper. Karma.

To the point of the woman behind me, I probably should have responded to “That baby’s judging me.” with “What have you done?”, but, nyaa, it was probably just gas. [It wasn’t gas.]

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It’s the uniform that commands respect; a beacon to all who pass that this individual has made a selfless decision to regard others above themselves, committing to a life of service and community support.

That’s why nuns are cool. I was actually gonna write about nuns this week, but I’ve instead I decided to write about “the world at large”, tackling some of this madness surrounding us: people at each other’s throats, an international game of whatever it’s called when a bully pushes you hard on the shoulder and says “What?”.

I think no matter what side you’re on, and there seem to be about 20 sides, everyone feels like we don’t recognize ourselves, or one another.

Ah.

I was about to say, “When I was a kid” , but I should be more insightful than comparing present to past. Though I do remember my first school principal, from when I was about three and a half to maybe ten?  It was just after the swingin’ ’60’s, Tupperware still seemed like “the future”,

Two weeks before the school year started my mom, who was a teacher, quit her teaching job and got another one that was 45 minutes away in order to be close to this new school she wanted to put me in that my pediatrician had recommended a couple of weeks before. It was a big sacrifice, but there were great teachers, and the principal was this woman who radiated patience and compassion; you could ask her anything, and she had this philosophy that “everyone is the best at something, even if that thing is just being you, you’re the best at it, you have to find out what you’re the best at, there’s no need to be jealous of anybody because we’re all the best at something.” C’mon, as a kid this was amazing… we each knew who we were but we were all together, we felt like Avengers. Or, at least the X-Men. She was great. Her name was Sister Janet Helen.

Aw man, see, now I’m talking about nuns. It was a French Parochial Catholic school. I’m not French, or Catholic or, a girl ‘cause I guess this was the first year they let boys in, but… sorry veered off course, a little bit.

Excuse me.

The world’s messed up, that’s where I was, right? That’s where we all are. We’ve got to rise above it, like…aw man…sorry… just got this image in my head when I said that and I, well it’s kind of embarrassing but the first person I ever saw fly was not a superhero but…  Sally Field. She was in this tv show when I was a baby called…”The Flying Nun”. Yes, it sounds like I made it up but… Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Nun

She was a nun, and she could fly, not under her own power but because of her hat, her cornette, and the incredible wind that blew through this mountain convent she lived in. Her only superpower was really optimism and kindness. Wow, that was before I even went to school. That’s weird, hadn’t thought of that.

Anyway the world’s messed up. But is it really? Or is it people? People are messed up, and not everybody, ok we’re all a little messed up but we can all agree on all 20 sides that some people are way more messed up than other people. Look, we all agree. There.

What does it take for a soul to heal? For anger and aggression not to be passed down, but dissipate? To fall out of the bloodline? We live between love and fear, neither of them concrete or tangible, yet the most solid concepts of every culture. What moves us to love who we are, rather than run from ourselves, or harm others?

(I wish “nuns” was the answer here. That would make this really work.)

The last time I spoke to a nun was the end of senior year of college: I had maybe 250 pages to write for seven classes in about a week and there she was, right outside the pizza place, probably in her twenties. I convinced her of the authenticity of my grade school background and asked super politely if she’d donate some good energy towards my general cause. She gave a little blessing right there on the corner of Elm and York. And I graduated. Honorably, if not with any particular honors.

Ok, now that I’ve said that out loud, I am not sure she wasn’t an actress, as I didn’t see nuns for four years in New Haven and never at the pizza place. Good catch. I wish nuns did walk around, just, have a beat. Can you imagine a city where you could flag down a nun if you had a crisis of faith? “Tommy’s feeling existential! Somebody call a nun !”

Ok, the reason I was going to write about nuns this week originates from a casual conversation about the films we’ve seen the most times.  I realized the movie I watched most before Star Wars came out was a Rosalind Russell film called “Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows!”, a madcap tale of an all girls Catholic school taking a road trip across the country and the inevitable hilarity that ensues: this was the only film my grade school had a 16mm print of, and every year we had some kind of assembly to watch it.

So every year I watched actresses portray nuns, surrounded by actual nuns. So I guess it was perfect to meet that nice lady outside the pizza shop; she exhibited what was necessary for me to be less afraid and more at peace. Patience, compassion, optimism, and kindness. 

The world is large, people are messed up, but sweeping change seems impossible without individuals unafraid to be brave, targets for bullies but together, more than a match for them. If it’s oxymoronic for love to have an army, it should at least have secret agents.

So if she was an actress, she was great. She did the job. She radiated faith. Wherever she is, I thank her.

She was an absolute credit to the uniform.

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I still have an original iPod. There’s one in the Museum of Modern Art. It the first thing I have that they have also, a thing I remember buying that’s now officially history, which makes me feel like I should be in the display, holding it. The idea of carrying a jukebox in your pocket is still amazing to me, but I hold vinyl albums in high respect. Playing a few of them, all the way through, is a summer tradition, going back to grade school vacations where I actually had time to do such a thing.

Even then, it was the rare hot afternoon I could spend on the couch, staring at the ceiling, listening and singing along with the hi-fi emanations from the gigantic piece of furniture we called “a record player”.  There weren’t any cassettes yet, so only here did I have the power to hear music I wanted to hear any time I wanted to hear it; outside the house was just radio. Even at restaurants with jukeboxes you had to take turns.

I humbly present an “album” of a few of those summer records, the ones I end up listening to every year.

Just imagine this is all written in ten point type on a flimsy paper folder about a foot square.

Track One: Kenny Loggins Alive (1980)

Live albums were big in the summer (there are many on this list); I don’t know how I decided to buy this one, but in 1980 I walked out of a Musicland with it in a bright plastic sack made of absolutely non-degradable material and played it religiously. A few weeks ago I was walking through Whole Foods, this testament to blue-eyed soul blasting in my AirPods, when I realized the very tall employee with the locked hair wrapped in kente cloth who’s never liked me since that incident near the sparkling water last winter (which was totally not my fault) had been listening to me singing along with the “Cinderella Kid” break from “I’m Alright” (y’know, the theme song to “Caddyshack”) and was giving me a look that could only be interpreted as “Martin Luther King is crying right now.”

Track Two: The Commodores LIVE! (1977)

Here’s what I knew about Lionel Richie; there had been a lot of changes in his life; he’d been up real high where he didn’t think he needed anybody, and then again he’d been down real low…so he no longer valued material things and thought he should settle down with someone who was apparently too far away. Love songs are weird when you’re 10. I mean, you get the intensity but not quite the point. Anyway, this album has a song called “ZOOM” on it, which should have made Lionel a kachillion more dollars during lockdown, but somehow didn’t catch on.

Track Three: Barry Manilow LIVE (1977)

You can easily spot the difference between this and the Commodores album if you note that there’s no exclamation point after the word LIVE in Barry’s title. Also, everything. My mother loved Barry Manilow for his key modulation, heightening the emotion at the end of his songs, so we bought this and played it on a loop for a year. I remember imagining someday getting a job as one of his backup singers. Again, 10 years old. Also, I didn’t know who Frank Zappa was yet.

Track Four: Return of the Son of Shut Up and Play Your Guitar (1981) and Track Five: Tinseltown Rebellion (1981) both by Frank Zappa

Are you lucky enough to have a rough idea of where You started? That first time or so you felt like the You that you recognize? Welcome to my You. The Kansas City rock station played a syndicated novelty radio show on Sunday nights from a DJ named Dr. Demento: that show alone could have been responsible for a majority of my personality, but its true power was introducing me to Frank, a Keystone Influence. My mother was very dubious until she saw him conducting his band with a baton, live on an MTV Halloween concert, and that was the detail that got him through. And, y’know, most of the lyrics went by really, really fast. That also helped.

Track Six: Matching Tie and Handkerchief (1973) by Monty Python’s Flying Circus

Of course I didn’t buy this record in 1973, but I had it by 1981, because I’d memorized it and was performing it in the backyard. Much like Frank Zappa, Monty Python was allowed because of a detail: it was a show on PBS. My mother did and does not suffer fools, but the fact that I was laughing at sketches about the Norman Conquest (which, ok, I admit I looked up our World Book Encyclopedias) did not escape her. As a high school sophomore I staged the Cheese Shop and Word Association sketches for a befuddled crowd of midwestern parents and grandparents, including my own.

Track Seven: Let’s Get Small (1979) by Steve Martin.

This album was a problem because my mother thought that Steve Martin was celebrating ignorance – which at our house could get you excommunicated. My explanation that his onstage character was an ironic commentary on the classic cheesy nightclub performer didn’t help my case much, because she’d never actually seen a nightclub performer. I invoked Jerry Lewis’ “The Nutty Professor” villain Buddy Guy (because we’d both seen that movie) as a template for the discussion and yes, I did talk like that when I was a kid.

Track Eight: Rhapsody In Blue / An American In Paris - Leonard Bernstein, The New York Philharmonic and the Columbia Symphony (1959) by George Gershwin

Another Keystone, and my favorite recording of this work. I guess the fact that I was listening from a couch twelve hundred miles (and what ended up being ten years) away from Manhattan made it kind of a soundtrack to a fairytale. I try to remember that feeling every time I’m stuck on a crowded subway.

Track Nine: Tubby The Tuba (1963) narrated by Annette Funicello by George Kleinsinger

Before children see images of political leaders on high balconies acknowledging thousands of admirers they see videos of musicians on impossibly wide stages seemingly controlling hundreds of thousands of people, their influence both awesome and entirely undeniable.

So. Annette Funicello.

There is no frame of reference under which she’d be identified as a rock star, yet of all the sound recordings I have ever come across it is this one that I have found to be the most powerful, a simple message of talent over bigotry. A tuba is mercilessly mocked by his orchestra and not allowed to carry a melody, but after an interaction with a singing bullfrog gives him a little self-confidence, the tuba’s subsequent impromptu solo performance is celebrated by a famous conductor, then instantly imitated by all the instruments that previously made his life a living hell.

A tale stronger than the irony of the times it was created in, this record has always inspired me to believe in the validity of my own musical composition. Of all Ms. Funicello’s works, including her specifically beach based entertainments, this work is the summer staple that I most look forward to enjoying every year. I would love to say that I would be as generous as Tubby in that situation, but shortly after that performance I probably would have joined up with Duke Ellington. I mean, damn.

©2022 Jd Michaels / The CabsEverywhere Creative Production House

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There are a lot of Star Trek shows now. For those of you who were “cool” in high school, Star Trek is the “beam me up” one, not the lightsabers one. Anyhow, the original, the one with Spock and Captain Kirk, still my favorite. The best music, the simplest stories, all about the future, written way in the past but entirely relevant, even now, in the actual future.

Ok, well, I’m a nerd (which was a good candy, I wonder if they still make that?). I was absolutely NOT cool in high school… I was “different”. And I just figured out why, and while it doesn’t really have a lot to do with Star Trek, that’s where the story starts.

This week, in my quest to make sure my daughter doesn’t miss anything that she might be able to use later, I sat her down in front of an original Star Trek episode that’s kind of an interstellar Lord of the Flies thing. Ok, she was only watching it with me because the noodles were cooking for lunch, and of course she’s seen Star Trek before.

So when the away team beamed down to the strange planet looking for whoever sent the distress signal, she said, “I’m the yellow one.”

“Well you definitely don’t want to be a red one!” I said.

See, she was referring to the Enterprise crew and their uniform colors (which I used to think were arranged by rank, but now I think it might be department). Anyway, all the hands-on folks wear red, and famously on away missions it is they who every creature, plant, and energy blob find most immediately delicious. “So”, I asked her, “you’d be Captain Kirk?”

“No no no…” she said, “But I’m a yellow one.” And then she stopped talking.

Because she didn’t want to be Captain Kirk, she wanted to be Captain Her.  And that’s kind of what I did when I was a kid.

In 5th grade I remember my best friend coming over to my house to play. This was kind of a deal, because he lived in a huge house in a really nice neighborhood, but his dad (who was super progressive) drove him to the ghetto (or, well, ghetto-lite, really) for a play date. We had sandwiches and watched cartoons and ran around the house making up games, but the one I remember best was “Starsky and Hutch”, our take on the popular ‘70’s police show which answered the unnecessary question, “What if Hall and Oates were cops?”

“Ok,” my friend said, “You’re Starsky.”

Everybody wanted to be Hutch. I mean, Starsky owned the car, which was this amazing Gran Torino that he never walked around, but kind of jump-slid across the hood of to get to the other side. But still.

“Why do I have to be Starsky?”

“Because you’ve got dark hair!” my friend explained. And this was true: his golden locks matched the cornfield colored mop on Hutch’s head, while my upsettingly non-spherical Afro approximated most closely the curls of his counterpart.

Now before anybody thinks this was profiling in any way, you have to understand that this show did have an African American star, but his name was “Huggy Bear”, and he wasn’t a bear. So the Starsky thing was a kindness.

But that was the last game when I pretended to be other people; instead I started being me in their worlds. I was Spider-Man’s friend, Chewbacca’s veterinarian (who was also a Jedi), or the kid whose amazing new powers caught the attention of the Bionic Woman (who asked me to help her trap Bigfoot again).

But even in fantasy worlds, there was only so far I could go. The world was restrictive in a way that felt like science, so even in make believe I didn’t make the jump my daughter did. When I thought about being in Star Trek, I imagined the years of study and training it would take to get through the Academy, then how long it would take me in officer school to get my own commission. I was 12, and my fantasy life already had student loans in it.

My daughter chose yellow not because she wanted to pretend to be a leader but because she’s been working at being one, every day, in real life, since she was little. Little-er.  She chose yellow because in a world of Avengers, detectives, or Pegacorns she always brings herself, because that’s cool enough. She has no illusions about ever fitting in, so she’s not trying to be the same, and that’s what makes her different. Which I think, she might have gotten, from her parents. Of which, y’know, I’m one of.

No matter how complicated the real world gets, it is in no way limiting her imagination. That’s a good thing, right? Honestly, I’m trying to be more like her.

I showed her Starsky and Hutch once and told her that story and asked which one she would like to be.  “I don’t want to be either of them,” she told me. Then, after watching a little bit more,

“…but I definitely want that car.”

©2022 Jd Michaels / CabsEverywhere Productions

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Grocery stores only sell groceries now. You might find shampoo, or toothpaste, and maybe some really expensive batteries, but mostly it’s just food now. When I was a kid, grocery stores used to sell anticipation.

Here’s how it worked; one otherwise normal day you’d walk in and find a huge display of something entirely ungroceryish, which was being offered for nearly no money. Luxury plastic tumblers, or the first three volumes of a deluxe encyclopedia, or oversized full color prints from the Great Masters. And who wouldn’t spend .49 cents to add the inspiration from the greatest of Michelangelo’s works to the frozen spinach and corn flakes in their cart?

These items followed the oldest rules of street hustle capitalism; the first taste was free, get you hooked. Sure, volumes A through D were only 49 cents, but from there on out you’d need to drop a cool 2.50 to be able to look up an eagle. So we dutifully came back, not quite extra cash in hand, building our library or gallery or full entertainment complement, week by week. And besides the alphabet with the encyclopedias, we didn’t really know what was coming next all the time.

This is how I have the album “The World’s Most Beautiful Music”, celebrating the classical works most beloved around the world according to a panel of people at the Columbia Record company in the 1970’s who were not at all experts or statisticians. My mother would not spend a penny on extraneous items, yet these seemed educational. Was there an easier way to get a 12 x 18 print from Cezanne and Miro? Not in 1976.

The best part was the waiting. We got groceries on Thursdays, because Friday and Saturday the stores were too packed, and I think the displays went up maybe on Wednesday, because when we got there it was like Christmas Morning, all freshly stocked and shiny. We would look at the new artist and together rate their work according to our personal tastes, then throw it in the cart as if we were doing them a favor by bringing them home. Encyclopedias were easier; there wasn’t really any letter of the alphabet we could do without, so I got to follow my mom around the store and open the book early, looking up giraffes or kangaroos or ring tailed monkeys.

Now: there are subscription boxes, which rarely tell you exactly what’s inside before you get it, ‘cause that’s part of the surprise, but it’s the same simple pleasure – a gift without holiday justification that you sort of expect, a scheduled unknown every 60 to 90 days. The main product? In both cases? Anticipation: only because we don’t know the exact date the box full of the stuff we don’t know what it is will show up. It’s fun to think about it and wonder and then it happens.

Anticipation is now called “supply chain issues”, only because to anticipate requires a certain amount of mystery – as the only thing that’s absolutely no fun to wait for, is the inevitable. Death. Taxes. That super super hot day every summer when you don’t want to move. You know it’s going to happen, but you’re not looking forward to it. Anticipation is a casserole of “will it?” and “when is it?”; that event that hopefully the weather will hold out for, or that far off vacation that has a million things ahead of it that need to be done.

So on these grocery store visits as a kid, I knew there’d be something there but I had no clue as to what it was going to be. Super Exciting. Remember, I lived in Kansas. Although, to be fair, weather in Kansas City? Lots of anticipation… it could warm you, cool you, or try to destroy you utterly, hot or cold.

Now: there’s Amazon. Items are ordered, and we no longer anticipate their arrival, we expect them to show up. There’s a short but very important road between those two for me. Expectations are what parents hold for children: they are based on careful research and projection coupled with analysis to predict a general supposition of a potential outcome that you’d better achieve if you want that new bicycle. An expectation is a formula, it’s a recipe, you expect this thing to happen because it’s logical, it’s science, right? Anticipation is the die well cast but not yet landed, its the plan well writ but not yet fully realized. I mean, would you want to be on a plane where the pilot explained before take off that they anticipated landing eventually rather than expected to land in 4 hours? One is a plan, the other, a wish.

There was a quirky folky rock song that Carly Simon sold to a ketchup company for a commercial in the ‘70’s about anticipation that I can still sing from memory. Well, at least the commercial part, the verse is about love or something – I don’t know, I was 10 back then, ketchup was more important that love. In my head though, I can still see the ketchup barely moving while fully inverted, defying all physics in its supposed premium quality thickness, while in the background the earthy acoustic authenticity of Carly’s voice sang out the perfect word for the situation. Anticipation.

I remember joining a fan club and sending them a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope. I remember writing a letter and sending it in the mail and waiting for a letter back. I remember thinking about how great strawberry season was gonna be. I remember watching Empire Strikes Back and wondering how I was gonna survive the next three years. Waiting did not destroy me, or ruin my life – in fact it added to it as my imagination filled the gap between desire and delivery. Sometimes it was the journey toward fulfillment, not the actual destination, that was the most fun. And most of this stuff wasn’t expensive or anything, yet it still held the highest of valuations, that it was absolutely worth waiting for.

One of our greatest American pundits once posited that “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Constantly getting fills our field of vision completely, but waiting opens up the edges, and sometimes a little bit of the middle, and lets us dream for a bit. I can’t wait to have that feeling again.

Well, yeah, I can.

©2022 Jd Michaels / CabsEverywhere Productions

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I like sunshine. I like most weather, except for the “WINTRY MIX”, that’s winter when it’s drunk; wet slush falling and somehow it’s dark grey even before it even hits the street. But even on the worst days, I know that sunshine exists somewhere, scientifically. And metaphorically, I’ll boldly add.

I remember in grade school there was a girl in my class that used to call out when my mom came to pick me up; she would yell out “Your sunshine’s here!” And it was, kinda, there was gonna be dinner and talking and maybe even The Love Boat. No, I think that came on Saturdays. Even if the day was really crappy (on a grade school level) I was gonna get to go home and maybe read a comic book. Y’know, when my homework was done.

In the book “Fight Club”, the main character talks about buying furniture, and how once you have that perfect couch you just tick it off the list of things you’re supposed to have.

As a young adult, I began to think of peace of mind like that. Once I paid off my student loans and had a little nest egg and maybe a place to live with under 50 payments left of it I would be happy, y’know, like a tall actress wearing only a white Oxford shirt taking her piping hot freshly ground cup of coffee out the sliding glass door to look at the sun rising over the ocean. Is that too specific? Does that reveal a lot about me? Or happy like a cat lying on it’s back with all of its feet in the air. If you don’t have a cat like that, you really need to get one. Or happy like “Summertime Rolls” by Jane’s Addiction, headphones on, lying on the floor, afternoon sun on your face. Happy, all the time. Cause I would have that happy thing taken care of.

But happiness is not a one time acquisition. We need it everyday.

Ok, I understand that if we say that we need something everyday, and it’s functional, then it’s a necessity.

But if we say we need something everyday and it’s pleasurable - then, you know: addicted.

But nobody’s addicted to water. We should think of happiness like water. You need, like 40 oz a day. Honestly, clears up your skin.

Think how the mental health of this nation would improve if we decided that we all required a daily dose of happiness. The phrase “I deserve to be happy everyday” would be heard by more than therapists or rooms full of GOOP products. It would be much more healthy for you than a candy bar, or one of those giant afternoon coffees seven times the size of a human bladder.

I think there’s a certain amount of happiness that belongs to each of us. It isn’t always fancy; I mean my summer happy place is the freezer room in COSTCO, a massive 40 foot by 40 foot concrete box with a plastic drape door containing mostly bags as big as an adult’s head filled with asparagus, strawberries, lettuce and other produce. It is not ice cold, but cold enough to negate the most blazing of summer days instantly- and any humidity in the air is absolutely negated at the door. I usually walk around slowly pretending to consider the need for three quarts of green beans, or 10 cups of blueberries… my pace is a slow stroll through a tranquility garden of affordable produce, whereas just outside is the frenetic mayhem of 1100 people with giant metal carts in a slow motion capitalist version of MAD MAX.

Although I don’t visit that room everyday, I do think about it every time I pass in front of the air conditioner, which sometimes is just enough to make me smile.

We never really say that we “deserve” a breath, or a heartbeat, or water, or use the facilities if I may be so delicate.

Those are necessities. And so is peace of mind.

You deserve a smile. Patience. A minute to get yourself together. We deserve a break today (I am demonstrably old enough to require several breaks a day now.  Sometimes even a nap.). You deserve someone you like calling you a word you like, like, sweetheart or darling. Or sugar.

And no matter what’s going on in the skies above you, even if it’s not happening right now, you deserve beautiful weather, every day, Sunshine.

Thanks for your time.

©2022 Jd Michaels / CabsEverywhere Productions

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I am not a mouse, and even if I was, I would either be one of those cute mice in nature specials that cleverly avoid snakes and hawks or a world famous French chef. You can do that, if you’re a mouse. I saw a documentary about it.

Some people hate mice, the same way Indiana Jones hates snakes. Maybe they may have had a bad mouse experience, once. But when I was about six years old there was a movie that came out about mice that I absolutely wasn’t allowed to see because it was a horror movie, but I was fascinated by because its theme song was a love ballad sung by Michael Jackson. 

The movie and song were called “Ben”. I saw Michael Jackson sing the song on a tv show where he explained that it was supposed to be about a mouse. The year before, Isaac Hayes had won the Academy Award for best song for Shaft (another movie I wasn’t allowed to see) which was the third win for any African American and the first in that category for the Oscars. So when this song was also nominated, and was a number one pop hit, it really did represent this whole new world of possibilities. 

I probably didn’t even see the tv commercials for the movie. Thus, I completely missed the whole ‘disenfranchised youth seeking revenge against his oppressors by using his preternatural affinity with the local rat population of Los Angeles to create a rodent army’ thing. 

Much later a very edited version of the film played on the “ABC Saturday Night Movie”; and my Mom and I did watch that. I was really kind of surprised that it didn’t have anything at all to do with black people, but under her breath my mother said that it absolutely did.

————

Rats and mice (different animals, by the way) are both as smart as dogs; recognize their own names, stuff like that. And contrary to B-movie lore, they normally do not attack en masse… the main fear is always that rats will “spread disease” by not washing their little paws between meals and walking on the dirty dirty floor. 

My mom was actually bit by a rat once. On the face. So she’s not really fond of them. As a kid our apartment did have some mice, and occasionally we’d put out some mouse traps, but I was still taught to respect them (with certain geographical boundaries) as they were living on the planet same as I. Me. I. I’ll look that up. We knew that there were more mice than people in the world, but once our little apartment was relatively free of everything that wasn’t a person or pet, we didn’t venture to destroy every mouse everywhere, ‘cause that would be crazy.

I did not own nature, and had to acquiesce to the fact that there are places in the world that belong to mice. We just don’t live there. But we can’t begrudge them a freedom of their own moustitude and yes I have veered into the metaphorical with a thud both subtle and resonant. 

————

Even though I am not a mouse, I always understand that people may have had a bad experience coloring their initial opinion of me… c’mon, we’ve all met somebody that jump-scared us because they adversely reminded us of somebody else (that unfortunately always seemed to happen on dates). I also understand if people don’t want me in their homes, metaphorically or literally. Hey, home = castle. 

But my mom’s under breath comment about “Ben” wasn’t that “some individuals in society are seen as mice”, but (and hold on the the railing for this one) it was more about the shift of focus from a rat being an individual living thing to a not so subtle group reclassification of rats using a single word which, to her, held a very deadly delineation. 

Vermin.

Rats and mice live in the wild (or as Michelin rated chefs in Paris), vermin are trying to get into your house, and take your food, etc, etc, I’m sure you can fill all that in, we’ll continue.

My mother, in her lifetime, had been labeled as such, with no avenue open for redefinition.

To quote: “People perceived as despicable and as causing problems for the rest of society.”  Oxford English Dictionary.

This one word defined her clearly as an “other”,  justified the nullification of her status as an individual human being, and instantly defended the necessity of a war against this nameless horde.

Though not a great work of art, “Ben” did demonstrate that while one outsider can be a friend, a mass of outsiders would never be allowed to exist, as vermin are things you don’t like in places you don’t want them to be.

But you can’t just get rid of what you don’t like. I mean, I’ve become increasingly opposed to this little ring of pudge around my belly and I just bought some moderately priced giant rubber bands to work on it, we’ll see how all that goes, but that’s clearly a change about myself, in my own house.  

In the outside world, I focus more on balance; I do what I can, where I can, for the people I can do if for, my goal being to offset some of the negative, but not to eradicate it. Idiots and evil is are gonna be out there, all the time, and do I feel like some people want to eradicate ME? Yeah. Yeah, I do. 

But I believe that if we engage the world with compassion, directly affecting even one person, if I keep doing that, I can widen a net connected to the best parts of us. Help balance out the garbage in the world, for everybody, for all the living things on the planet. That’s my intention.

And if you do that right, it may actually “cause problems for the rest of society” depending on what society is where you are, but that isn’t what despicable means. Bugs Bunny didn’t take that crap. 

I don’t know what animal does that. Goes from person to person trying to make things better. Maybe a bee? I don’t think I’m a bee either.

————

I do associate myself with a couple of animals; the unicorn (which, ok, is fictional, let’s agree to agree), and the raven. I have a raven tattoo. I am not unappreciative of the fact that a collection of ravens is called an unkindness, or of the more truly threatening description of a group of crows.  I kinda like it, it’s not bad to have a power animal. But it’s not the mouse for me. You just won’t find me pulling a thorn from a lion’s paw or even happily nibbling on cheese since I’m lactose intolerant, which is really a pity because I happen to make a fantastic creme brûlée.  A bientot.

…thanks for your time.

©2022 Jd Michaels / CabsEverywhere Productions

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Password is my favorite game, and my second favorite game show. It’s a word association guessing game; you give a one word hint to somebody and then they try to guess the word you’re looking at. Normally you get to put a little spin on the clue, change your voice, raise your eyebrows. Here, let me try it with you… ok… the clue is SUMMER.

Ok, one of you said ”LOVIN’!’” and I know who you are, and I knew you were gonna say that. Maybe CAMP. Or SQUASH, though that’s a pretty deep cut. Definitely not SCHOOL, yuck, that’s just dark poetry.

If you just thought of the word “VACATION”, then, well played. That’s just what I was thinking.

When I think of summer, I remember summer vacation, this template I carry around in my head, a decades old definition of a luxurious three month long Mesopotamia between school years, a sweet sweet escape from, well, everything.  Time did not work the same way during summer vacation (neither did calories as I remember). I read books and played guitar and looked at clouds in the daytime and stars at night. I remember being really relaxed. I almost wish I didn’t, because relaxation now is like a dairy-free gluten-free version of that.

During summer vacation was the only time I was able to watch game shows, of course. Free from both the routine of school and its drama, I could sit peacefully with a several bowlfuls of cereal and enjoy the intrigue of guessing the price of a waffle iron within 7 dollars, thus preventing that little Price is Right mountain climber from falling off his cardboard cutout.

My mother allowed me exactly one week of this spa-like behavior before my landscaping duties began. Our front yard was a 20 foot high 45 degree hill which seemed to require mowing as much as a grown man requires shaving. Every year I engineered a new way to use the lawn mower to get the job done: the mower only flipped over on me once, when I decided to muscle the situation and go at it from side to side, and the sudden ferocious gnashing maniacal maelstrom of cross whirling blades flashing malevolently in the hot sun like an angry overturned monster crab scared me sufficiently to use more brains than brawn after that; ropes and a pulley from the top, then enthusiastic running starts from the bottom wearing soccer spikes.

There wasn’t a whole lot to be scared of in the summer. Most of my friends were at least worried about sunburns, but, y’know, lucky me. My mom, a gifted and talented teacher, and a gifted and talented teacher, had just about the same vacations as I did, so the living was actually pretty easy. Once I could drive, which in Kansas City back then was at 15, I always had a summer job and more grown up concerns, like getting to work on time, took over. But mostly summer, at least for kids, was a vacation from worrying about things.

——————

Worry has apparently used all its vacation time; summer just isn’t that long anymore. As a fresh new small business owner, I’m launching a post-COVID Gainful Employment Tour (maybe I could sell t-shirts for extra money), trying to build a family business that my daughter can decide not to take over someday.  Consequently, our current vacation budget allows us to daydream of lands as far away as Coney Island. It’s 5 miles that way, actually.

And sadly this summer began with a wave of incredibly serious events: unbridled extremism, tragic legislation, and not-so-random disasters. And I started a humor column in the grimmest two week period of the year. My wife pointed this out. “Do you think I should wait?” I asked her, and she responded, “When’s it gonna be less grim?”. A little ray of darkness, that one, but she’s right. Times have always been grim, just not broadcast as well.

Sitting in front of that tv as a kid, I was isolated by lower technology, armed only with my daily bowls of Apple Jacks and maybe Walter Cronkite. And now there’s high speed internet connecting my reality directly and immediately to others, and I am honored to be part of this wider world, including individuals I’ll never meet, places I may never visit. I’m proud to share responsibility for this greater community, stand up and speak out for positive change, but to do that takes energy, and I don’t really have any. We really do need a vacation.

People living in the country might head to their nearest city for an adventure. City people can go to the country to unwind. Big City people go to other countries to explore. But now we’re all Digital Citizens of the World, so where are we supposed to go for vacation? How do you get away when you live everywhere?

Our vacation will be focus-based this year,  living seven and a half weeks in a sun drenched reality of semi-forced optimism. As crazy as it sounds right now, we’re staying home. I’m taking time to make music, my daughter’s painting a series of large watercolors, and my wife is working on her novel. Then we’re gonna share ‘em with each other. It sounds kind of crazy, but it’s not the craziest thing I’ve heard.

Glad you asked: the craziest thing I ever heard was from a guy I worked with years ago who seemed to spend his vacations only in extremely stressful situations. He’d go camping for two weeks with just one backpack in a jungle, or he’d explore an extremely congested city abroad where the streets were filled with as many animals as vehicles, and then he’d come back and tell us how awful it was, maybe show us a few photographs he had taken (unless his camera was stolen).

I finally asked him why he chose these places, and he said it was a theory of his father’s;

take a vacation in the most difficult place possible, so when you arrive back at your six by six beige cubicle you bring what no gift shop could sell you. Gratitude.

…then he’d put up his postcards, take the remainder of his penicillin, and enjoy where he was, on a 50 week vacation from the rest of the world.

Crazy? Maybe a little out there, but I do agree that even the best vacations send us home with a new sense of wonder and appreciation for where we are, strengthens our sense of proportion, the same way a truly magnificent sunset can make us feel infinitesimal yet mighty at the same time. So our vacation this summer will be to spend time appreciating harmony, color, and emotion, watch some sunsets, and journey as far as $100 of gas will currently take us. So, y’know, Coney Island.

I’m not looking to escape the world. I love it, I live here.I just need to, whaddya call…you know…

RELAX. That’s the word.

©2022 Jd Michaels / CabsEverywhere Productions

…thanks for your time.

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I think I’m getting old. Er. Well, we’re always getting older, but my inner self is starting to feel more vintage than classic, reflected most strongly when either bending down to pick up something or when trying to keep all the musicians with the word Baby in their names straight (the Grammys were really confusing, although I do know all the names of every member of BTS).

I guess I don’t really look vintage. The most you could say is that my mirror currently displays what I’m gonna call a 'subtle weariness’, which is a pretty fair reflection of my current inner state. I think that’s lucky because as we get older, inner and outer realities are often at odds. Expectation battles reality, lofty goals evade real progress, confidence is bested by a sudden clear reflection in the automatic glass door at Whole Foods. While technology accelerates the world around us, inside our heads we accumulate more memories every day, anchoring us. This wearies me (subtlety). I think the best I could hope for is to turn out anything like my grandfather.

My mom was always Mom and Dad, but my grandpa (lawyer, County Commissioner, one of the first black District Court Judges in the nation (first in Kansas) represented Men to me.  Wise, patient, direct, straightforward. Kind, but unquestionably powerful. He passed when I was in college, but I did get one last opportunity to spend a day with him during spring break. He had spent the last few weeks in my mother’s old room (guess it was closer to the stairs);  he really wasn’t used to sitting down for so long, but he didn’t really have enough energy to get up. Mom told me he was a little bored.

So I basically brought him a circus. Tons of photographs from New Haven, comic books, a 4-track recorder with a microphone, an alto sax, textbooks from classes I was taking (with post-its marking passages I thought he’d like) and the coolest thing that I actually owned at the time –  a CD. He had never seen one before. They had only been around for a couple of years.

“…and this is music?” he asked me, afternoon sunlight reflecting those crazy rainbows all over the bedroom walls.

“Yep, as much as both sides of an album!” Cause, y’know, that was really impressive.

I popped it into my bright yellow SONY DiscMan (the “shock resistant”one) and handed him headphones. It was either the Beatles or ZZ Top because those were the only two I had.

He listened for a while, then opened the player and looked at the disc again and said, “Y’know, when I was young you couldn’t hold music. You could hear it, since almost everybody had a piano, and they played music, but you couldn’t take it with you. I remember when I heard my first radio it was like magic - I stood outside the neighbor’s window and just listened, but even that you couldn’t capture.”

He turned it over and over. There were more rainbows.

He said it was a while until he saw his first phonograph (of course, no one he know could afford one), but that he used to, as a young man, sneak out of his house at night and head over to Vine St. and listen to Count Basie play. Blew my mind, because my grandfather had given me my very first record, which was a 45 of Count Basie’s orchestra playing “April in Paris” (I begin all my live shows with it).

I knew he loved jazz, but we had never really talked about it. He had married a musician, my grandmother, who played piano and organ; but it was almost a decade later that I would accidentally discover her original concerto manuscript in the bottom drawer of the buffet in the living room underneath the formal linens, which I digitally scored and burned CD’s of for her 80th birthday party. He would have really loved that.

And now, here was me, by the bed, musician as I was, firing up the 4-track recorder and building a simple tune that was going to have a sax solo, but my reed was split so I just sang a sax-ish solo on top, making the entire thing sound like a love ballad from a space opera staged in Marrakech. But Grandpa listened very patiently, kindly, and at the end, he said “Hot dog!”, which was a very high level of family praise.

That piece of music is in the ballet I’m currently finishing. I composed most of it about 22 years ago, but in the ballet (and this is kind of a hard turn) it’s a scene with a father and a little girl, she’s standing on his feet, waltzing in the kitchen. Not at all connected to my grandfather or that day. Inside my head, it’s the soundtrack of a memory, outside it’s kind of a premonition, two authentic and equal identities. To me, there’s a harmony there.

Maybe this is true for all of us. We can hold our histories yet constantly evolve, like Pokemon, the energy in the gap between these realities sparking us to become not just one thing, but new things all the time.

Grandpa requested that I sing at his memorial service, a tune by Irving Berlin titled “The Song Is Over, But The Melody Lingers On”, a metaphor of life as music, impossible to hold. My grandfather created harmony, held a steady cadence, always learned something new, and steadily bypassed fears of whatever came next. That is the sort of man I would like to be.

Y’know, when I’m older.

1. Marrakech: © 19862. The World and Me - 3rd Movement - Love © 2001 / 2022 composed and performed by Jd Michaels and inspired by Judge Cordell D. Meeks, Sr.

©2022 Jd Michaels / CabsEverywhere Productions

…thanks for your time.

©2022 Jd Michaels / CabsEverywhere Productions

Get full access to :lowerblackpain at lowerblackpain.substack.com/subscribe