I'd Like To Be A Vowell

I'm reading Sarah Vowell's book Radio On: A Listener's Diary right now, a gift from my wife for Christmas. It was her first book, published in 1996. If you haven't read it, here is the quick rundown of what it's about. For the whole year in 1995 Vowell listened to the radio all the time and kept a diary of her observations about radio. She listened to everything from NPR to right-wing talk radio to "alternative" rock stations, with stops in between on classical, religious, oldies and a host of other types of stations on the dial.

I absolutely love the book so far. Well, I absolutely love Sarah Vowell in general. I've said it before, but my best example of what a screwed up country, or world, we live in is the fact that people like Britney Spears, the Simpson sisters, Lindsay Lohan, Clay Aitken are more well known and seemingly more beloved by the general populace than Sarah Vowell. Something is wrong with a universe where more people have seen a Johnny Knoxville movie than read one of Vowell's books.

Anyway, this is already one of the greatest books in the world and I'm not even done with it yet. I'm surprised I didn't read it years ago. But in a way I'm kind of glad. This is an interesting book to read ten years later. The year that she is listening to the radio is a time period that I listened to the radio the most, and don't really listen to it much anymore. The diary begins on New Years Eve 1994 with her listening to a year-end countdown on an alternative rock station and hearing a Nirvana song (from Unplugged in New York) at number 23. This was less than a year after Cobain killed himself (or was murdered by Courtney Love if you want to believe that weird guy on Seattle public access TV) and she waxes very poetic about the loss as a prologue to her year with radio. And what follows is a great comment on Radio in America in all it's glory or lack thereof. There are many great observations about right-wing radio, which had just become a major force by this time (The diary begins right before the new Congress takes over after the "Republican Revolution" of the '94 election. You know, Newt's Contract on America?). But by far my favorite stuff has been her comments about the music of the time. She certainly carries Nirvana in high regard, for good reason I believe, and wastes no time busting on the bands she can't stand, which turn out to be a lot of the same that I hate. I know this phrase is over used, but Vowell is the best when it comes to irreverent humor. My favorite bit in the book so far is this, after a song that she has been kind of digging turns into something else:

But whatever distilled pleasure I derive from it is spoiled by a segue into the lame-ass intro I instantly recognize as the Spin Doctors' "Little Miss Can't Do Wrong," which is your basic "Grateful Dead for the nineties" crap. Every time I hear this song, I picture one of those neohippie girls I went to college with dancing to it in a circular fashion, thus fanning her patchouli oil aroma into my already polluted world. "I hope you hear this song and it pissed you off" cracks the scraggly, smiling lead singer. Congratulations, man, you succeeded.

Pure gold stuff, that. And it's not just the stuff that makes me laugh hard that I love. When she says that if the Nirvana song "Lithium" had existed when she was fifteen, with its line "I'm so ugly, that's OK 'cause so are you" she "might not have cried myself to sleep every night until college," I totally understand the feeling.

It probably helps that I'm the same age as her, less than 8 months separate us. As a liberal, white, middle-class upbringing kid of the same generation and of generally the same music taste, I'm completely tuned into her. I think my wife is concerned about my love of Ms. Vowell. The other night when she was a guest on the Daily Show, my wife turned to me right before Vowell was introduced and said "Do you think you'll be able to keep from drooling" or something like that. My wife was the one who bought me my first book by her, so she has only herself to blame. But that's not my love of Sarah Vowell anyway. I love her the same way I love Billy Bragg or Robyn Hitchcock. I don't want to be with Sarah Vowell, I want to be her.

This is why, while reading her books makes me happy, they can also make me depressed. Everything she does with her life is something I would love to do. Now, I don't think of myself as some great writer, or even a good one. But I'd like to be. Specifically, I'd like to be one like Vowell. Snappy little observations with a bit of attitude and smugness and hopefully funny. Granted, I like using profanity a lot more than she does, especially the word "fuck," and the rest of my vocabulary isn't as extensive as hers. Which is probably why I like to use "fuck" so much, it fills in the gaps of my lack of word knowledge since you can kind of put it in the place of anything. People have told me that they think I'm a good writer before. But these have all been my friends (like all four people that read this blog) and could totally be blowing smoke up my ass. That feeling may be left over from years of doing theatre and lying to friends about how much you like their show is in itself an art form. How many times have I myself been in the lobby, three minutes after the end of a friend's show and they come walking out and I say "great show," when in fact I thought it was a total piece of shit? A good friend you eventually tell, maybe several months later at a party when the show comes up in conversation, what you really thought. But you can never do that right after a performance. Maybe people are being honest with me, I just always assume the worst. The best compliment I think I ever got about my writing was that, if you know me, you can hear me saying the stuff I write just as if I were there. So that's cool. It might suck, but at least it's coming across as honest.

And I really only decided in the last year or so that I'd like to be some sort of writer, so I'm way the hell behind Sarah Vowell. Which is why reading Radio On can be depressing. See, it's a great personal story about a time period that I remember very well. And it's in diary form, so every entry I can pretty much correlate to where I was and what I was doing at the time. Like I said, Sarah is the same age as me. We even graduated high school the same year. But she graduated a semester early and started college that January. I, on the other hand, almost didn't graduate (In fact, I shouldn't have. I was a semester short on science credit that no one caught and I certainly didn't tell them) and then worked in a warehouse for a year before I went to college. When Sarah Vowell starts writing Radio On, she is just leaving San Francisco, where she has been working at an art gallery and writing for art magazines, to go to Chicago to study modern art history at the Art Institute grad program. So in 1995 she's working toward a masters degree at a top art school and in her spare time writes a book that she gets published the next year. I was making big moves myself that year. In 1995, I moved from being a pizza cook at Pagliacci's at the corner of 40th St. and Stone Way in Seattle to working as a barista at the coffee cart in front of the Safeway kitty-cornered from the pizza place.

Ten years later, Sarah Vowell has gone on to publish several more awesome books, become a regular contributor to NPR's This American Life, voice a character in an animated movie and author regular Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times. And I, well, haven't. I've directed some plays, some of which were great and I made no money and some that were crap but I made a few bucks for selling my soul to do them. Like directing the musical State Fair with a cast of 40 kids in the 7-15 age range. Not exactly like working with Ira Glass or David Sedaris.

But I have gotten married since then, which is great. But that's not so much an accomplishment as much as it's a momentary lapse in sanity from an otherwise intelligent, accomplished and attractive woman. Luckily, her success is in a completely different field than I have an interest in doing, or I would want to be her too. And that would just be sad, being jealous of your wife.

I guess this all comes down to me judging my 25-year-old life through the eyes of my 35-year-old self. Which I really shouldn't do just because of what Ms. Vowell was doing when she was 25. It's probably pretty dumb to reevaluate your life like that ten years later. I loved my life in 1995. I was in my mid-twenties, living in Seattle at the height of it's pop-culture coolness and going out all the time seeing tons of bands. I pulled espresso drinks and read books during the day and went out most nights. And there are festivals almost every weekend all summer long in Seattle. I was having tons of fun back then and honestly, even though if I had accomplished more back then my professional life might be more where I want it now, I wouldn't go back and change a thing. My mid-twenties self didn't give a crap about my thirties, and that's why it was so much fun. My mid-thirties self should just accept that and stop being pissed about it.

Still, why couldn't Sarah have been more of a slacker too? Didn't she get that memo back in the early nineties that us Gen-Xers are the "do-nothing" generation?