The business

Do you wanna be in the business? (The business)
The ups and downs with the hoes (The business)
Always gettin' fronted on at shows (The business)
People gotta stick their nose (In the business)
-A Tribe Called Quest

How succinctly A Tribe Called Quest describes my line of work. Well, maybe the hoes are a bit of a stretch. And I haven't been fronted on yet. But yes, thank you, I do want to be in "the business." The journalism business, that is.

The first two weeks are easy. Nothing's going on, I cram my page with filler and AP wire stories about the St. Louis Blues and the Missouri Tigers.

I work late (until 8 or 9). But I don't have to come in until 10. Or 11. Or 12. Whatever. I wear jeans to work 3 out of 5 days. I listen to co-workers, mostly women, talk about men and shopping for toys for their children. Then they poke fun at me for being the only guy around. I laugh along with them. Yes, the business is easy, so far.

***

Except now that basketball season starts. I cover 10 high schools to varying degrees. The big high school gets an automatic bid and onto my "SportsTime" page. They play in a large league with eight other big high schools. Four of them are from the metropolis of Springfield. Then there's Joplin (a good two hours, basically the Oklahoma border), Lebanon (pronounced "LEH-banin"), Rolla (RAWL-a), Camdenton, West Plains.

The Springfield media turns its nose up at those other hillbilly teams from the rest of the Ozarks. Which is ironic, because the St. Louis and Kansas City media does the same to the Springfield teams. I only have to cover them when my team plays one of them. Which give me an excuse to go to "Stick It In Your Ear" record store/ head shop every once and a while.

***

The other schools I cover are small. Really small. Like 100-300 students. They're all at least 10 miles from homebase, in small communities nestled in the Ozarks. They don't have football teams, so they like their basketball. And baseball. Fall baseball, in fact, is a Missouri-sanctioned sport.

But how do I get there? Because I still have trouble driving on Ozark highways at night. They're all two lanes back here, save I-44, and the prospect of going 55 on a winding two-lane highway with no light of any kind from Waynesville to, say, Crocker (11 miles away) sort of frightens me.

Who knows what kind of turn is going to come out of nowhere and trip me up? Sometimes there will be four "s" turns in a span of 5 miles. One wrong flick of the steering wheel and I'm colliding with sedimentary rock.

Even the interstate winds much more than normal interstates should. On the way to Rolla there's this community called Devil's Elbow, which is little more than a service station and a shack. Named such because of its place on a particular harrowing turn on the Big Piney River, the engineers who constructed the highway apparently didn't realize that it's a bit more dangerous for automobiles to go 75 miles an hour on the same type of turn.

Huck and Jim might have been able to do it on a raft, but a lumbering semi-truck? Not so much.

"Looking for the right kind of live free or die..."

"Switching it over to AM
Searching for a truer sound
Can't recall the call letters
Steel guitar and settle down
Catching an all-night station somewhere in Louisiana
It sounds like 1963, but for now it sounds like heaven"
-Son Volt

I listened to the Son Volt album Trace about 5 times during my Missouri sojourn. They're from Saint Louis, so I thought it appropriate. Saturday was the best travel day, through Southern Oklahoma (which kindly reminds travelers about once every twenty miles, "DO NOT DRIVE INTO SMOKE") and the entire north-south length of Texas. By "best" I mean I was able to find the best radio stations, since the scenery itself is kind of drab.

Seriously. When I left Tulsa, there were three Big Twelve football games going on. Somehow Tulsa is placed just so perfectly that I was able to get the radio feed for all six teams that happened to be playing at that time (Kansas, Nebraska, Baylor, Oklahoma, Texas Tech, Kansas State). I liked the Kansas station the best, because a) they didn't have Southern accents and b) it wasn't the flagship station I was hearing but rather an obscure country station from Pittsburg, Kansas and advertised many things from the Pittsburg area that would normally have little interest to me. Like furniture and jewelry, Pittsburg style. Somehow, though, I was fascinated by all of it.

But this happened at noon. Selecting a radio station at noon is a straightforward affair: you hit seek and you have a very strong signal for a decent amount of stations, especially in a city.

At night, though, it becomes mysterious. One can pick up strange radio stations playing strange things from literally any part of the Western Hemisphere. Most of the stations you want to listen to don't come in very strongly so you'll hear two or three voices talking at the same time, unintelligibly, over music. You'll hear Spanish and French or sometimes, at least in Houston, nebulous Asian languages. You'll hear Coast to Coast AM. Coming from millions of different cities.

The light lingers for a bit longer in Texas. It's a pale blue in October, and it stays lit for a pretty long time until at some point everything clicks and it's pitch black. Sometimes there will be an Exxon on the side of the road giving some light, but usually it's just you, the road, and the lights from other cars behind you, which can be deceiving in the mirror.

I found myself radio-hopping from Dallas to Houston. The Longhorns game, to which I had been intently listening (did I mention how I think college football is second only to baseball in "best sport to listen to on the radio"? No? Well, I did now...) had ended and the sky was that pale blue and I tried listening to music but nothing seemed appropriate. So I attempted to find various sporting events, maybe a Rockets game or a Houton Cougers game. No cigar. No Houston stations to be found, actually. All were garbled with static and faint hints of music.

Somehow, though, I managed to hear this: "...and you're listening to the voice of the Chicago Blackhawks, WGN Radio 720!" Fuckin' hell, that's far. They were playing the Red Wings. I listened until it faded, and then found some Cajun guy talking about LSU football, a Colorado Buffs game, Notre Dame, Grande Ole Opry radio, a Spanish soccer game, and what I think was a Canadiens game in French. And a long infomercial for this hot tea made from cocoa that's supposed to be the best drink ever.

It almost makes me want to never listen to music in the car again.

(PS, I got and took the Missouri job, I'll be moving in about three weeks...)

First Impressions of Mizzou-Rah

Missouri is a nice Midwestern state. Er, fuck, no, it's a Great Plains state. Huh? It's Southern? Goddamn!

*****

I stayed with my aunt and uncle in Tulsa last night. He'd been through Waynesville before. Used to live in St. Louis.

"It's a nice drive," he told me. "Scenic. Not too hard...although, the only thing they seem to have there are fireworks, liquor stores, and porno shops."

And oddly-placed signs. Like:

"Vasectomy removal, the best in Mizzou!"

or, to signify the Mickey D's for truckers:

"MCSTOP!"

Don't forget the millions of seemingly endless signs for Branson tucked behind that patch of Ozark plateau. Branson even has its own 24-hour radio station with paid programming and only paid programming.

****

This Waynesville place is a bit strange, too. All the roads wind like mountain roads should, only the Ozarks, according to Wikipedia, aren't actually mountains. I drove around for a while to get a feel for the town. It's smaller than Hillsdale, but feels like part of civilization because it's right off the Interstate.

Except when you turn the wrong way the "mountain" roads wind around for 15 minutes and you end up at the entrance to a military base.

But I dig. At least I do now. Hopefully they'll show me around more tomorrow.

****

But I still haven't determined if Missouri is a Midwestern state. I want to say yes. Springfield, only about 90 miles away, is as wonderfully small and-post industrial as any Midwestern city should be, graffiti-ed buildings and abandoned factories downtown and all. It could be Gary except there are about 21,000 normal, not scared (or scary looking) college kids walking around. They have a Cardinals' farm team and a record shop named "Stick It In Your Ear!" Rolla is much the same, but about 3/4ths the size and 60 miles the other way.

This should be the Midwest, I think to myself, but then I look out the window and see the fuckin' Ozarks, rocks jutting out of hills and weird red plants growing on them. I also hear townsfolk speaking in slight accents...an Arkansas drawl with a bit of nasal action. Real bizarre.

****

Interview tomorrow...not exactly sure what to expect. Or where the place is. So no pressure or anything, huh?

The Cafe

"On some nights, New York is as hot as Bangkok. The whole continent seems to have moved from its place and slid near the equator..."

-Saul Bellow, The Victim

I'm not in New York, I'm in Houston, so it isn't as much of a stretch to imagine Houston as some foreign oasis like Bangkok or Tangier or Algiers. You know, somewhere foreign but not too foreign. The types of places where it wouldn't be uncommon to see people in turbans and fesses sipping coffee with French or American businessmen.

There's this cafe in Houston that I can go to where I feel like I'm in a foreign country. A place where (thankfully) they don't actually know my name, but they know my face. Even if they did know my name, they speak more naturally in foreign languages (Spanish...Mediterranean at the very least).

It's in this old building that, from the outside, looks like a Mediterranean villa covered with ivy. High bushes surround it, so it's hard to see the people sitting on the other side. You enter the ivy maze, sit down on the side of the building, kind of like a little enclave in an alleyway, and can't see the street outside.

The cars might as well not be there, and I might as well be sitting elsewhere, in some other country somewhere (as if Texas isn't almost one already).

Top Ten Songs I Use If My Life Was A Series Of Movie-style Montages

I love a good movie montage. In fact, few things about movies make me happier than a well-edited montage with good music in the background (one favorite that comes to mind is the Margot montage in The Royal Tenenbaums. Maybe montages are cliche or kind of lame, but I love them. And if my life were a movie (or, at the very least, a series of montages), then it would have a pretty kickass soundtrack.

Usually montages are a good way at speeding along the time and setting of a movie and telling the story in a quick and (usually) painless way. So most of the so-called montages that I have created on the spot do this. This isn't a collection of background music during an extended and important scene (I might do that one sometime soon).

And I should note that once I get past the college portion of this it's all made up. I mean, most of it didn't happen as I would chronicle it in the movie. My life would be kind of boring if I did a memory-for-memory movie. And really fucking long.

In some sort of chronological order:

The event: Me growing up.
The song: The Kinks - "Do You Remember Walter?"
Why: It'd be like the intro credits of the movie, because I have a hard time thinking this far back. My childhood was really boring. So it will be mostly scenes of me doing kid things and playing with Ninja Turtles and playing basketball on my kiddie hoop. That sort of thing. There's not much else you can do with that than "whimsical." I had to pick an oldie because that's the only real music I was conscious of at that point. The Kinks it is then.

My actual life (the movie) would probably start here, in high school:

The event: Me discovering indie music (for better or for worse). Lots of shots of me at record stores, leafing through vinyl and CDs, with shots of those bands and album covers interspersed on the screen. Maybe a few of me sitting in my room with headphones.
The song: Pavement - "Stereo"
Why: I still remember the instance. I was hanging out with my friend Geoff and we were looking at the internet and we stumbled across Pitchfork. We were both already kind of starting to get into better music, him more than I (at the time I believe my favorite bands were Nirvana, the Foo Fighters, the Beatles, and Bad Religion or something. Not bad, but could be better). He had seen Pitchfork before, and apparently he had already heard about Pavement. He played me some and then gave me his burned copy of Brighten the Corners. And that was that. So if anyone ever wants to know why I'm such an ass about some of these things, I blame Geoff.

The event: Going downtown for the first time and taking it all in.
The song: The Beatles - "Got To Get You Into My Life"
Why: I'm not sure this actually happened, per-say. I mean, there was never one instance of me going on a subway by myself for the first time and exploring the city. That's probably mostly because Detroit doesn't have subways. Either way, I always think that "GTGYIML" is the perfect "going and exploring on a summer day" type song. I I mean, I've done that in Detroit before. So fuck you guys.

The event: The sports montage. I never actually was on my high school baseball team, but this is a hypothetical "what-if-I-was-and-what-if-we-won-state?" sort of thing. (If you couldn't tell, this movie has no real plot).
The song: The Count Five - "Psychotic Reaction"
Why: I like sports montages. I have no idea why. One of my favorites is in "Little Big League" where it shows the Twins (as managed by a 12 year old kid) suddenly clicking together and making a bunch of sweet plays to the tune of "Move to Japan" by the Band. There's another equally good one in there to the tune of "Runaround Sue." I wanted a montage that felt like that. So this could be good.

The event: College. Lots of scenes of fun college things. Minus a lot of the partying, which will be the next scene.
The song: The Strokes - "Reptilia"
Why: I made a list freshman year that was "Top Ten Songs I Listened to Freshman Year of College." I can't find it anymore but I'm pretty sure this was number one. Even if it wasn't, any Strokes song would do. I listened to a lot of them freshman year. I don't as much any more, but when I do it's always enjoyable.

The event: Getting really drunk for the first time. I could incorporate all the vices in there: first cigarette, first drugs. And then chronicling a lot of (probably ill-advised) scenes of partying. And then just me taking swigs of Old Crow while I write papers alone in my room. (This scene could concievably be before the previous Strokes scene.)
The song: It would begin with Uncle Tupelo - "I Got Drunk" and then fade into Modest Mouse - "Polar Opposites."
Why: The first song might seem like the title is too obvious, but damn, is it appropriate: "I got druuunk / And I fell down!" It just highlights the "don't give a fuck" attitude you sometimes get when you drink a lot. The Modest Mouse is there for when it becomes a problem ("I'm tryin' / To drink away the part of the day that I cannot sleep away"). I think we all feel like this sometimes.

The event: The relationship.
The song: Wilco - "Kamera"
Why: A perfect "everything is awesome" song. It's just so damn happy. Lots of cliche relationship scenes. But then...

The event: The breakup / girl getting back together with the old boyfriend / girl breaking up with him again / girl trying to keep flirting with you but still saying she doesn't want a relationship
The song: Local H - "No Problem"
Why: "I've always been an easy in / And easy out the door again / I know it's only because you're down / That you'd ever want to come around / Just a little secret in a little town / You had me but it's over now / You'll get my attention again somehow / It's no problem." That's why.

The event: Roadtrippin'
The song: Bob Dylan - "Nashville Skyline Rag / "To Be Along With You"
Why: Well, not depressed anymore (the movie works that out in the actual dialog - girl and I are cool now), single again, and once again carefree. So I take a roadtrip with friends (not necessarily any one road trip that happened...but incorporating parts of roadtrips that I've had). This is a good roadtrip song. Or at least I usually pop in Nashville Skyline when I'm roadtripping.

The event: The movie's final scene. I'm not sure where it will be yet. Probably somewhere where we finish our roadtrip.
The song: The Replacements - "I Will Dare"
Why: This is the one that isn't actually a real event (yet). But the idea is we finish the roadtrip and we're somewhere neat, some random place, and we go somewhere where I meet a beautiful, cool woman. Maybe going from a record store to getting coffee to being at a minor league baseball stadium with said woman and friends. Roll credits. As the song starts.

(Fuck you. It's my life and my movie.)