The Head of Chuck Bukowski and other news

Another epidemic, another week in the life. If there is anything the 2020 covid-19 pandemic and "shelter in place" order has taught me, it's that I'm grateful that I have a family that can stand spending every freaking day together for weeks at a time. Tina has been furloughed from her job but has been very busy around the house, helping with lesson plans for he kid's homeschooling as well as cooking, doing laundry and watching Outlander on Netflix. Louis and Henry are both doing schoolwork, cleaning their rooms and doing chores, fighting and watching a lot of tv - as much as they can get away with. Sometimes, the kids get up at 5:59 am to watch Parks and Rec or some whack anime crap in the early hours before mom and dad get up and ruin the whole scene by watching Rick Steves or Antiques Roadshow. We've been cooking a ton of food and mostly it's been really delicious. Tonight we had tacos. I feel weird that the entire economy is failing and many working people are broke with no income - what the fuck! The whole reason we have a government is to have people deciding allocation of resources and enacting laws to keep things fair - we need fair unemployment for everybody, stat. The money all trickles back up to Amazon anyway - we need to keep Jeff Bezos rich and powerful so he can save society with his vast resources. I'm sure it's on his to-do list.
I like that my friends at Mustard Relics and Dan Jones and Mr. Random have all been blogging and creating on the multi-platform internet tool matrix. I've been Marco Polo'ing with Dan as a way to stay in touch. It's a new little platform to me but it's kind of fun to leave short video chats that the recipient can watch at their leisure. Technology is just a tool, it's all mystic strands in the matrix, man.

The Head of Chuck Bukowski is a song I first started working on back in 1994. I had heard on the news that Charles Bukowski was dead, and they actually ran some interview footage of Chuck in his later years. He was strangely sober, cordial and nice in the interview they ran. He always looked a lot like my dad. Like a lot of pretentious white kids who almost went to college, I've always had a fascination with Bukowski and his gritty underworld of cretins and sad-sack misfit characters. The first two verses I wrote back in 1994 and then shelved the whole song until now. I always liked the snakey riff, it's something that runs through my head all the time while I'm bopping around life.

 Thanks for sheltering in place, and thanks for cooking at home and eating vegetables. Stay well!
-Ed in captivity

Comfortably Numb 2021

2020 is am interesting time to be alive. Western society, USA and the rest of the world have been seriously under stress for decades leading up to now, but now is a collision of multiple trajectories that we've all been cruising on for a long time.
I joked last time about the corona virus and covid-19; now the whole world is under temporary lock down to slow down the spread of the virus and hopefully not overtax our existing hospital system.
++++++++++++++++++++++++zds`````````````````````` ( the cat wrote that part)
Now, in Washington and Oregon. we've all been on semi quarantine for a week. Restaurants and bars shuttered until late April. My band's mini tour with Dan Jones and the Squids postponed, all events cancelled. Middle aged me is depressed that my victory lap tour was destined to be cancelled due to a killer virus. Bummer, dude!
I feel lucky I got to see a few great concerts in February before the shit down of society. John Cameron Mitchell at Revolution music hall was fantastic. I really dug his stories and his spot-on New York stage band, Tits of Clay. He came out in full Hedwig regalia along with his amazing back up singer, Amber Martin. I'm not sure of the guitarist's name, but he was really fantastic. I like the band Eyelids too that came up and did a couple of Lou Reed songs with JCM.  "Waves of Fear," I could here the droning bass line while I was walking back from the bathroom and I knew in n instant what song it was. Fucking cathartic version, thanks guys. "I found a reason" by the Velvet Underground sounded blissful and had nice overlapping vocals, a beautiful sound.
Robin Hitchcock is of course one of my heroes and this time we got to see him at the old Church, a cool Portland venue that is in an ... old church. We ran into a few friends on the way in - we saw Chris Dorr, a pal from Eugene in the 90s and then as we were sitting down, we happened to be sitting next to my very good friend Guy Tyler, a fabulous musician I played with also in the late 90s in the band Velocirapture 2000, or V2K. We had a nice chat and then Robin came on and played "Astronomy Domine" on the piano and we all shut up and enjoyed his set. It felt just about as disjointed as the world is at this juncture. I've seen Robin before and he is often funny but this time the mood seemed slightly down. He played several cuts from Element of Light and Eye, both great collections of songs and his partner Emma Swift came up and sang with him for several songs. Sadly they covered some Beatles songs that seemed to drain the life out of the place but then he finished strong with some of his own best tunes fuck, I don't remember now, but it was meaningful and good. I love that guy but he ain't perfect and he ain't the best piano player in the world but his voice and eternal whimsical weirdo conversation is one of the God voices in my head.
Goddamn this virus has me a bit down as I am sure everyone else is feeling queasy and scared about our collective uncertain future. I called my mom and she is doing okay. All my siblings and offspring are all getting though all right but I worry for many other folks on the margins who might but out of work by this bar/restaurant shutdown - that's a fuckton of people, out of work and expected to still pay bills and survive. Thanks a lot capitalism. Not the perfect system but that's what we've got to work with.
I worked up this song Got No Feeling that used to be a Trouble Cuts jam that fell by the wayside. I've had it knocking around my head for a few weeks now and it jiust surmises my mood during this trying time of death, uncertainty and mistrust of the government, authority and all other kinds of bullshit that prevent us from being our pure, true selves. Got No Feeling. 
 

All New Death Virus 2020

There has been plenty of hype regarding the novel coronavirus that causes covid-19 in all the local and national news. I work in the food distribution industry and we’ve been feeling the effects of a panicked population buying absolutely everything in every grocery store in our region. It’s similar to when a snowstorm hits Portland or Seattle – all stores will post record sales for the day and clear their vendors out of every single product and then the vendors are left scrambling to replenish the inventory, which usually comes from far away and takes half a week to get here. At this point, customers are over-stocked in their pantries and then sales will be in a slump, so the net effect on bottom-line dollars for stores is nil, but nil with a good dose of panic-scramble built in. I heard another sales rep in the office talking with a customer about Jared Diamond’s Collapse book, wherein he writes about how our food distribution system would likely fail in the event of a prolonged disaster since we all depend on a fragile chain of hand-offs, from the point of production (Mexico, Peru, Argentina, California, Texas) consolidated at multiple pickup points, moved by truckers (who may or may not quit at anytime and go to any other company that offers more $$) and then finally it’s all dependent on oil and gas to fuel the whole operation. If any one of those links goes down… there will be delays. If your consolidation warehouse in L.A. accidentally loses your pallet of ginger, turmeric and cherimoya, you’re SOL. Cucumbers, celery, cauliflower – these all sound like mundane vegetables, but are among the most volatile produce commodities, ‘cuz they’re staples and sometimes, farms run out of their crop sooner than planned. Can you imagine planning in Septmber for how much cauliflower, cucumbers and celery you'll need in March? No one really knows, ever.  You can’t put those things in cold storage a month ahead of time like apples, potatoes, onions and yams. Cucumbers might be $16 wholesale last week but they’re $59 this week. Customers almost don’t care, at least not in the Northwest, ‘cuz they don’t even look at the price most times – they need cauliflower for that recipe, whoops, it’s $5.99 right now, still need it. Imagine if beer was $8.99 one week and $15.99 the next – there might be riots.

I guess the moral of the story is that sickness, panic and chaos is good for business. Never mind the human toll. Steinbeck’s East of Eden touches on this, when the character Cal goes into business with Will Hamilton and they have a farmer plant acres and acres of beans in the year leading up to World War I, anticipating the food shortages since war is imminent. The financiers also lock in a low price of 2.5 cents per lb to the farmer – at the time, it sounds like a better-than-market price, but as this thread in the story plays out, we find out that they export the beans at 12 cents per lb to Britain after the War starts, making a killing. Do you wonder if there are people making similar wagers during our time of uncertainty in the early 21^st century? I wonder what bets they are placing.

I’m one of the privileged – my pantry is stocked, we have enough vitamin C, elderberry and zinc lozenges and could probably feed the family on rice, beans and canned tomatoes for a few weeks if not a month. Beyond that, we’d be forced to fish the local waters and scavenge dandelion greens while we wait for our yard garden to grown some food. I hope it doesn’t come to that.

I made this happy little song last night: Deth Virus