I know this doesn’t make any sense, but today is the 29th of February. Now we all know February only has 28 days. so today is ... Hhhmmmm... a freebie perhaps. We are in a time warp.
I am watching the Oscars. [ps---Sophia Coppolla.... I love you, even though I was slightly bored during your movie....] I like the Oscars much more than the Grammy's. they are much more dignified and decent. More intelligent, more sincere. Which is funny because they are all supposedly actors. But somehow they just come off so much more sincere. The music business has really turned into something kind of gaudy and cheesy and disgusting. Repugnant in a way. not a lot of dignity, even when they try. every year I get invited to attend the Grammy's and every year so far I have decided not to go. partly because I have never been nominated for one and so I just am too filled with jealousy and resentment for not being nominated so I figure I'll just boycott them till I get one myself... funny but you know I mean that's true to a certain degree. I mean we all take what we do quite seriously and are huge fans of our own work. So... you know I'm just telling it as I feel it, but that's only part of it... to me the biggest challenge has always been talking myself into taking part in something so like I said gaudy and cheesy and silly and all that. it all seems so clichéd and tarted up. it is hard to see art in the Grammy's, compared to say the Oscars, where for one night they leave the bullshit behind and really focus on the art of their industry. The Grammy's still come off like a bunch of high school kids trying to act cool. For me that's always been hard. The whole acting cool thing. I've tried. But I've just never been good at it. and that may be one of the reasons why I've never been nominated for a Grammy or even been too popular of an artist over the last ten years. a lot of what goes into the music business just isn't me. I love music. more than anything. I think every one knows that. and I love making music more than anything else in the world. I think that's probably pretty obvious as well. but what I don't like about the industry is the circus act side of it. so when I think of going to the Grammy's it makes me feel queasy. Like I have to throw up. it wasn't always that way. on the underground you can find DVDs of all the old Grammy award shows from the sixties and seventies and eighties. Those shows weren't always that way. I don't think the biz was that way yet. there was still a lot of amazing things going on. Artists had relationships with record labels for longer than two years. the industry fostered great art, where as now some great art sneaks through every now and then—I think we’re seeing that with linkin park and John mayor and Norah Jones and Dave grohl and so many others---but at this point the business is trying so hard just to hang on , just fighting for its own survival, that the only thing it is fostering is whatever finds a way to make money. so today's stars are tomorrows guest vjs on VH1 and next years where are they now episodes. Its like no one has the chance to develop as an artist anymore. Watching the Grammy awards one can see that. you can see that in all the glitz and gloss and fancy bullshit sets and all the lip-synching divas with fake tits and guys with fur coats and sunglasses in a hot dark theatre. its a lot of bullshit. so if you’re thing is just trying to make great music, trying to make great art in your own way, and that's your passion... then yeah even the idea of the Grammy's can make you feel a bit nauseous....  let alone going. so who knows maybe one day, but my true goal is to make great music, one great album. something like the wall or abbey road or born to run or achtung baby. I mean, that's the real goal. Or even more than that.... to make a better album... something totally different and earth shattering, and innovative and out there. something we've never heard before. people don't usually get Grammy's for that. but I think that's alright. It all depends on where your passion is.

But I digress, because that's not what I intended on writing about as I opened this most trusted of all companions. Watching all the people who died from Hollywood this year. really astounding. Its like huge numbers now of that older generation are passing on the last few years. it makes me very sad and very nostalgic. Buddy hacket and Buddy ebson and Charles Bronson and Gregory Hines and Donald O’Conner and art Carney and Ann miller and Gregory peck and Michael kamen and Katherin Hepburn and bob hope. All these people are fucking gone now. You just can’t believe it because we grew up with them; they are legends. They are part of us. 

What strikes me again is how soon we forget. And how in one instant in time/space someone exists and in the next, they are gone from here. they do not exist anymore. We are here. I am here. you are here. but they are not. And we can only talk about them now. “Ahhh remember so and so... she was great.” This is the beginning of getting old. When we were little, do you remember how people who were older than we were would say “remember so and so...” or “wasn't that so and so.... he was brilliant....” but we were so young that we didn't know anyone that we could reminisce about. we couldn’t remember anyone. And I distinctly remember feeling as a child that if I didn't know about them or remember them then they probably weren't too important. Everyone we knew, and we knew so few people, were all still alive. Anyone who was dead was some old person that we didn't care about... the whole world was so new and fresh... and everyone around us was old. but its different now. people are dead now that we cared a great deal about. and people are dying around us everyday. And now God fucking forbid that we notice this, but there are people all around us who are younger than we are.... it’s a fucking horrible thing. I still can’t shake it actually. when older people used to tell us that time flies and that it seems like just yesterday when they were in school or whatever, we tend to look at them like oh yeah whatever old man.. but they were telling the truth after all. it does fly by. And before you know it, you're still walking around thinking you're in high school but then someone reminds you that high school was ten or twenty years ago. and its like you got hit in the stomach. you're like no fucking way man. For fucks sake we’re still in high school aren't we? Isn't this just a school play or something? how fucking old are we? And when did it happen?

I am scared now. For the first time in my life I am starting to realize my own vincibility. Starting to realize that I'm not going to last forever. Madelynne always used to tell me that my problem was that I thought I was invincible. If everyone dropped one hit I would drop ten. Always the daredevil. Jumping off of buildings and staying awake for days at a time till I dropped; smoking packs of cigarettes a day. just an insane life there when we were kids. And she used to tell me, ‘Fishy one day you are going to die from this and its because you don't realize that you can die. You just think you're superhuman or something. and the rest of us are going to suffer from your ignorance... is that what you want?’ I couldn’t understand what she was saying... I just couldn’t at that time. I didn't understand her. I guess I did feel invincible. I just never saw that there was or could be an end in sight. Life seemed so fucking large. And so looooooonnnnnngggggg. So I just lived it large and wildly. Its not like I stopped living that way because I started seeing what Maddie was talking about, because that wasn't the reason. I stopped living that way because I was getting tired of feeling so sick and tired and confused all the time. it didn't happen over night but I just started noticing that I wanted to be someone else. and now being just about as clean and sober and straight edge as a rock singer has any right to be, even in this state of clear-headedness I am starting to realize that this is going to end someday. I'm looking at Clint eastwood in the audience and I'm thinking fuck there he is but for how much longer? One day in the next few years he's going to be one of those names and faces that flashes up on the screen that has passed on. And every year each of us gets closer to that. to being part of the dead rather than part of the living.

And this is where it gets crazy scary, when you take it to this next level, which is what my mind was doing as I was brushing my teeth a few minutes ago. in a nutshell, what is so bothersome is that the people up there on the screen that we are seeing who have died this year... these are the Julia Roberts and the Billy crystals and the brad Pitts and the Sean penns of generations passed. I mean, that's the fucking clincher you see. Its not that we’re going to miss Charles Bronson so much.... I mean us, our generation, the X’ers. Because he wasn't that big of a deal to us. Or art Carney for that matter either. But you see these guys didn't always look like that. they weren't always old men to a bunch of young cool hip people. at one time they were young cool hip people like Owen Wilson or Ben stiller are to us now. but its not going to stay like this forever. one day we are going to watch them get old as we get old and one by one we are all going to die. And that my friends is the most fucked up thing we can think about. we are mortal. If this year means anything to me, it is the year that I discovered death. It is the year that I discovered the concept of my own mortality.

Even when I watched my grandparents die, it was like there was this tape in the back of me head playing ‘these people are old. They are dying. That's what happens to old people...’ but I never once ever thought that that had anything to with me or my friends or my generation. It all seemed too far away, too remote, too impossible to imagine. But I can feel it now. I can see it. and I don't like it. I hate it. I hate to say it, but everything seems like its happening right here on earth. We just have no fucking idea what's going on if anything on the other side of all of this. the idea of us moving on from here and leaving all of this behind and us just being a memory to everyone who is left.... its not a nice thought.

As I get older I understand more and more the necessity of these ideas we have developed over the years like God and reincarnation and heaven. When we are younger we can afford the luxury of atheism and nihilism and existentialism. We can celebrate them and revel in them and postulate endless theories about them over one too many cigarettes and endless bottles of wine. But as we get older, the need for there to be a God or a heaven—certainly not a hell, never a hell---or at least reincarnation, becomes more and more important. No wonder people get more religious as they get older. I always used to think those people were just old farts who were losing their cool and their brain cells, but now I realize that it isn't that really as much as its just that they're losing their fucking lifeblood and they are starting to realize it. the idea of consciousness lasting beyond the life of our mortal bodies can become a fucking obsession once we realize we aren't going to keep our mortal bodies forever.

And no wonder people start feeling the old biological clock ticking. This need to procreate. Just to try to extend our own life through the lives of others... well I'm starting to understand it now. no wonder woody Allen married his own daughter. I mean, what better way to challenge the call of your own mortality than to marry your own fucking daughter. And then if she has a baby and he marries that baby when she gets old enough then it would be like he's marrying his grand daughter... and then of course he would be free to hang out with a much younger crowd. its sick, but it makes sense. The man is smart.

I guess what it all comes down to now after all of this rambling, is what are we going to do about it? I mean lets just say that once we reach this point where we’re looking ourselves in the mirror and were standing there staring back at our own reflection and were realizing that were never going to be a kid again and were never going to be in high school again and were never going to be in college again with our hair down to our asses and thinking its funny that we haven’t taken a shower in over a week and were never going to find ourselves flying down the highway at a hundred and twenty miles an hour in the back of a limo drinking whiskey straight from the bottle with our head sticking out of the tee top and our hair blowing through the wind while our best friend is sitting next to us sniffing coke off of some hot chicks naked ass (o.k. maybe a few more times....) but the question is .... now what? What the fuck do we do now?

Current Spin: Lakme by Delibes. Absolutely fucking beautiful. And Humbert, plant the trees closer together. Brilliant. this is what rock and roll is all about.