Rock On (23 page)

Available in 12- and 24-pack. Ink wipes away with damp cloth — just disappears without a trace. Like everything seems to, sooner or later.

The new 3-pack means you'll never find yourself without a stylus again.

Ironic, since you've certainly found yourself without a Palm Pilot to use them with. Keep a spare stylus at the office. Ouch. Sorry, you know what we mean, though — just saying you can have them in several places. Keep one in your car or at your house in the country. Ouch. Now we're just screwing with you — seriously, though, what the hell are you doing with your time since the layoffs?

Keep all of your important dates, meetings, and appointments in one convenient place. Ahhh, Ha Ha Ha, Ha Ha Ha Ha, Ha Ha Ha, Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha, Oh . . . ah . . . haha. Now we're just being plain cruel.

Genuine leather. Month, year, and three-year view. 8 1/2″ × 11″. For people with jobs.

First of all, don't be nervous. And don't stress out. I mean, Jesus, that's the first thing, goddammit! Do. Not. Stress. Out! Okay, breathing break, breathing break. You're already freaking out so let's take a little breathing break.

Take a deep breath.

Do it!

Okay, now count up to ten.

Or is it backward to ten? I think that might be it. Up to ten doesn't sound right. Because you can just race right through it, but backward you would . . . alright, you know what? Screw it. It's already been like fifteen seconds so let's get back to it, quitter.

Okay, so the first thing you want to do is go to your secret place or whatever. Okay . . . secret place. Fuck, apparently my secret place is right here in New York, a collage of the terrorist attacks, weird trash I've seen on the streets over the last ten years, images from that time I saw pigeons pecking at frozen vomit at seven in the morning in the West Village. Damn it! I can't meditate right. But they were eating it. Frozen. Vomit. Jesus. Okay, I'll just go with it. I think it's supposed to be a meadow with a stream, but fine, whatever.

No, forget this. I suck at this. This is not a good secret place. It's seriously supposed to be a meadow or field with horses or
something. Okay, the couch; that's my new secret place; I love sitting on the couch and checking my e-mail with my laptop and watching TV.

Bingo. Okay. It's not exactly a stream in a meadow, but at least it's not a terrorist attack or those pigeons. Couch, present-day, it is! Not super secret, this secret place, but visualizing being there is already making me feel better about things. Okay, so . . . picturing the couch . . . pictur . . . ing . . . it . . . okay, good.

We just let our thoughts drift by like they're in a stream. Happy thoughts, maybe. Or even not-so-happy thoughts. I guess that's the thing, if you're meditating right you can let any kind of thought drift by in the stream and be fine with it. Because you are lovingly detached and not needing to change what you think. Any thought can drift past: “Job is gone . . . severance money will be gone soon enough at this rate.” Ah, and here comes another lily pad floating by with another thought on it: “What about health insurance?” Just thoughts. True thoughts, granted. Frightening thoughts, sure. But we just notice the thoughts on the lily pads. We don't huck a big goddamn rock at the lily pads, or set them on fire and try to float them back upstream where the stupid thoughts came from, because apparently that's not good meditation. We just simply notice the goddamn thoughts on their stupid-ass lily pads. Okay, forget it. Clearly, this isn't working. Let's watch TV.

Jesus, Dr. Phil is a downer!

Alright, but I can't let this guy suck the life force out of me, there's a whole world out there to be seen and there are lives being lived. But he just kills me, this Dr. Phil. Today he's got these awesome fifteen-year-old kids on his show — these young people with hearts and heads still so brand-new and open to what's ahead of them — and he's doing his whole tough-love thing about how they need to have backup plans for their dreams, or how they have to perform academically or they can forget about playing music or sports and working at their dreams ever coming true, or some damn thing. And it's all hyped up for TV, of course, and these sweet kids are under lights with Doctor First Name getting them all worked up for good TV and it's just heartbreaking to watch.

I'm sitting here on the couch and I keep thinking about that play by Steve Martin called
Picasso at the Lapin Agile.
If Dr. Phil had ever shown up in Paris at the Lapin Agile in 1904 to have a drink with Einstein and Picasso, our twentieth century would've been screwed right then and there. Can you imagine?

PICASSO
: “So you're saying you dream the impossible and put it into effect?”

EINSTEIN
: “Exactly.”

DR. PHIL
: “I'll tell you what . . . you both better wake up and smell the coffee! Okay? Because I'll tell you something right
now: all the hoopla pipe-dream load of horse-malarkey too-dle-doodle will not fly in the real world, okay? Listen to me for a minute instead of talking about ‘Oh, the twentieth century has been handed to us so casually and it's staggering to believe that we have sketched it out with pencils on napkins . . .' Sharpen that pencil, real good . . . okay? Pick it up. And start working on your SAT scores.”

I see the tears welling up in this one teenager's eyes on screen. I'm sure some producer in the studio is really excited about this fact, and probably hoping for the cry that he thinks means good TV. At least we're lucky Dr. Phil didn't have a show when Wozniak, Jobs, Gates, and Allen were distracted from their homework and academic performance by dreams. Plus, the Dr. has a gut, and he wrote a diet book!
Hello?
If anything he should be honest and tell these kids, “Hey, I've got a forty-something-inch waist and a best-selling diet book, so obviously anything's possible. Just stay focused and out of trouble. You'll be fine, it's just a weird time any way you cut it, being sixteen.” Anyway, I've switched off the TV, and I'm packing a suitcase because Maria and I are taking off tomorrow night. Goddamn, he's got another one of these kids onstage and looking like he wants to give up. Way to go, Doc. Did Oprah give this guy his job? That seems ironic to me. Listen up teenagers of the world: stay away from Dr. Phil and keep your dream alive.

Alright, speaking of which, one week unemployed and I'm already sick of sitting around. I'm still alive, so I'm switching off the TV and packing a suitcase. There's a whole world outside, and I've bought a decent stack of tickets to see some of it. First stop London, then up to Sweden, then out west to Los Angeles, up to San Francisco, back to New York to
repack, and out west again and up into the Rocky Mountains. Then once winter starts, the last hurrah that's ticketed is the British Virgin Islands. Lest you think I'm another gazillionaire entertainment-industry fat cat or trust-fund brat, let me lay this interesting piece of accounting on you: How much do you spend partying with your friends after work at the local drinks-and-appetizers hole? Fifty bucks? A hundred? And how many nights a week? One? Three? Here's a trick: don't drink for eight years, put aside the drink tab money. Makes for a hell of a plane ticket and hotel fund. Anyway, the TV is off, the suitcase is packed, and life's clock is ticking away to time's cruel and indifferent little beat.

Hit it!

I'm trying to breathe very thin air while a team of twelve dogs is lurching, growling, barking, and pulling my jet-lagged body down a narrow, icy path at about nine thousand feet above sea level in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. While it feels like the type of lark that will certainly lead to personal injury or death, I am convinced I can somehow sell an article about dog sledding to a magazine somewhere down the line and pay my rent for a couple of months, so I am trying my best not to vomit or black out — as this will make for a better magazine article.

Behind the tether of haunches and fangs, Maria and I are crammed into a sled, and farther back, a man balances precariously on the sled's back rails, screaming commands in a language I can't understand, just inches behind and above my head. Words that might be Eskimo, for all I know. And at his loudest and most determined, it's as if he's afflicted with some kind of rash of tics, and he sounds something like a deaf man screaming a frustrated feeling at the top of his lungs. The commands show up in tight turns — strangely beautiful and loud, confident and discordant, these staccato stabs. The idea, I suppose, is that the dogs will hear that our man means business, and that'll keep them from heading straight for the ledge to my immediate right and plunging us to our deaths.

At the first slow part of the path, just after the initial downhill and hairpin turns, I get a chance to ask him how he found himself with this job, or, more accurately, without a nine-to-five office job. It turns out he has come by way of commercial fishing in Florida. He was in a shipwreck there, though, so he had a little downtime before he got here to Colorado. Lobster boat went down. Sank with full traps onboard, but he lived. Tore up his arm pretty good when it got stuck in some rigging, but nothing that didn't heal up with some injury pay and a week or two of rest. Still, the adventure of barely escaping a sinking boat — stacked full with a half ton of angry crustaceans — so he could come here and guide powerful dogs through the rocky Mountains — seems practically biblical in scale to me after my tame office job in the world of corporate rock and roll. He says he has a girlfriend. Hell yes, he would have to have a girlfriend! Who wouldn't, after that? You would walk into the first bar, order a stiff shot, and explain to the best-looking surfer girl there that you just escaped a sinking ship stuffed and stacked with savage, angry, clawing monsters. You would casually go on about how you were going to have a few drinks, rest up, then head to the Rockies and run dog-sledding trips with a team of mongrels across frozen tundra at ten thousand feet now that you've cheated death. Hell yes, you would leave that bar with a girlfriend! As a matter of fact, there would probably be two of them. And they would be there with their sexually advanced, open-minded best friend; the three of them hanging on your every word about how you weren't afraid to be on a sinking ship out there at sea that day.

He says that until the snow disappears in the spring thaw, he's here running dogs, and then it will be off to the Pacific
Northwest, first for some well-earned rest, and then some commercial fishing for salmon or crab.

I look straight up from where I sit in the sled to the huge hanging walls and quiet, gigantic, almost lunar summits of the Rocky Mountains, and all I can think of are the lyrics to the new owner's romantic slow jam. How could he have said all of that stuff?

“I'll be waiting for you? Here inside my heart?” And then all the stuff about how he wants to be the one to love the listener/me more than someone else can, and giving me everything I need. It's just not adding up.

Then my mind starts racing around the fact that I heard that one of the guys who used to run part of the label has a house somewhere around here, near Aspen. I actually crane my head around toward the back of the sled trying to get a better view of a huge house I thought I saw. My effort is noticed, probably for the pained grimaces and several loud grunts of determination that escape me when I try to turn my upper body and look behind us and way out to the other side of the canyon.