The blacks, the blues & me

Even for someone as maniacally self-absorbed as myself, I recognize the thought as a delusional doozy: I’ve been feeling a soulful kinship with the old blacks who sing the blues.

This is odd because I’m white and don’t have the blues. If anything I’ve got the greens.

And by greens I’m referring to recycling and other environmental concerns. I try and eat a lot of leafy vegetables so that shades me green, too.

I’m certainly not green because of an abundance of currency. Money-wise, I guess I’m a white guy with the reds, red being the color associated with bleeding deficits.

But lately I can’t help but feeling I have a lot in common with Big Bill Broonzy, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and especially the great Buddy Guy.

And let’s pause for a moment to pay homage to the greatest name in the history of males. I have a lot of good buddies and know a lot of great guys, but wouldn’t it be cool to be friends with just one Buddy Guy?

He almost sounds like a beer-drinking superhero. “I was all alone and mopey the whole day then Buddy Guy showed up with a twelve pack to save the Happy Hour!”

His starring role on “Champagne & Reefer” with the Rolling Stones in the 2008 concert flick “Shine a Light” is as mesmerizing a performance as I’ve ever seen. His voice is such primal fury it practically blasts wispy Ron Wood off the stage.

He released a new collection of tried and true blues earlier this year. It’s called “Living Proof,” but it could as easily be called “Persevere,” -- maybe my favorite verb -- because the songs show he’s steadfast in his conviction nothing’s going to get him down.

I guess one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to the blues is because the men and women who sing them never seem to have them. It’s as if singing about suffering somehow inoculates you against wallowing in it.

We do share that. I’m rarely unhappy.

Often baffled, yes, but not unhappy.

I’m baffled a fresh majority of Republicans think Newt Gingrich can be president, that people are falling for Alec Baldwin’s latest publicity stunt and that anyone’s the least bit happy there will be an NBA season.

But what’s becoming most baffling is how I sense my perseverance in the face of failure is making me iconic among my peers. I’m hearing it more and more from writers far more accomplished than I.

They say they admire me for having never gotten a real job and maintaining a lively blog that earns readers, but not money. Those are, incidentally, the exact reasons that make my darling wife wonder why she didn’t marry a plumber instead of me.

They say it’s cool how I never sold out (I don’t bother telling them you can’t sell what no one’s buying).

They hint my perseverance has given me, an arhythmic white guy, something the old blues men always had: street cred.

It’s a stunning turn of events for a guy who’s often mocked for picking up and recycling gutter trash, which gives me, I guess, stoop cred.

Somehow without trying I’ve become Paul Newman in “Cool Hand Luke,” a man imprisoned for stupidity who just won’t quit even as the camp bully thumps him to within an inch of his life. Stunned by Luke’s pain tolerance, his enormous opponent advises, “Stay down, man. You’re beat.”

“You’re gonna have to kill me to beat me,” he mumbles through bloody lips.

Spoiler alert: They do, indeed, kill him.

It’s one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies so it’s neat to hear peers express admiration for me for showing the same sort of bone-headed determination that got Cool Hand killed.

And that brings us back to around to the blues greats. I believe they persevered through hardship and rejection to do what they loved. With them, succeeding was never as important as just doing.

That’s the way it is with me.

I’m not quitting until all the rejection, the heartache, the sleeplessness and editorial betrayal kills me dead.

Until that happens I’ll be right here in this swampy little corner of the internet, forever bloggin’ the blues.

Newt, the alien & me

I’m rooting for Newt Gingrich to overcome his myriad stumbles and do well in his run for the GOP nomination.

Gingrich and I share a natural affinity.

We both grew up in Pennsylvania. We both enjoy history. He loves zoos and I’m a party animal.

The Gingrich campaign is in the news today because a whole bunch of people I don’t know and certainly wouldn’t like have abandoned Newt.

Gingrich has vowed to press on. I hope he does.

The race for the GOP nomination promises to be one of the most odd, shrill and self-defeating political events any of us has ever witnessed and a bombastic gasbag like Gingrich only adds to the folly.

Really, in this race with no clear favorite, absolutely anything could happen.

An unknown might emerge. Strange alliances may be fostered. An alien endorsement could vault an underdog straight to the nomination.

And when I say alien, I’m not talking Sarah Palin.

Many people have forgotten the pivotal role a politically motivated extra-terrestrial named P’lod used to play in American politics.

That was back in the 1990s when the Weekly World News was still a supermarket staple setting brilliant new standards in news gathering.

“When a woman calls and tells me her toaster is talking to her, I don’t diagnose a mental health disorder. I tell her to put the toaster on the phone.”

To me, that may be the most succinct statement of journalistic purity ever uttered.

I heard it from an actual Weekly World News reporter in a tavern in Lantana, Florida, where both the Enquirer and the Weekly World News shared a building (it was the building that was poisoned in the surreal first anthrax attack in 2001).

I was an Enquirer correspondent from 1992-2000. It couldn’t have been more fun and every six months or so they’d fly me to Florida for two weeks. There may have been some practical reason for the junkets, but it wound up being purely social.

Each and every day reporters from all the various tabloids would gather at the same divey bar and try and outdo each other with stories from the world’s most raucous outlaw publications.

Hands down, the winners were always guys from the Weekly World News (sample headline: “Baby Born With Wooden Leg!”).

There was BatBoy, Bigfoot, and the alien P’lod and his uncanny ashtray-sized eye for picking presidential winners. For years, I had a WWN t-shirt featuring the 1992 cover of the one where P’lod correctly picked Bill Clinton who exalted, “I’m glad he saw through Bush and Perot!”

I always think of that wise alien anytime Gingrich’s name pops up.

It was 1995, just after Gingrich’s late mother Kathleen made headlines for whispering to Connie Chung that Newt thought Hillary Clinton was -- shhh! -- a “bitch.”

It ignited a huge controversy.

It was into this hornet’s nest I was thrust. The Enquirer had a tip that a family housekeeper was seducing Momma Gingrich with a wacky religion as a way to steal thousands of dollars.

It was one of the most hostile interview situations I’ve ever endured.

Not because of Kathleen, who was perfectly pleasant. No, it was because of Gingrich’s step-father, Robert, who’d become an impromptu media critic.

He kept glaring at me and asking insinuating questions about my background, my politics and who the utterly apolitical Enquirer’d endorsed the previous election.

I began to believe he’d never read a single newspaper when he asked if The Enquirer was the paper that had run the picture of Newt with an alien.

“No, sir,” I said. “That was The New York Times.”

The tip we had turned out to be untrue. We never wrote anything about the rumor.

Kathleen Gingrich died in 2007. I don’t know what happened to Robert, but Newt everyday does something to, well, alienate conservatives who for more than 25 years have been assuring us that Gingrich is a genius exemplar of the whole movement.

As for P’lod, who knows?

I hope he still has something to say. I hope he has guidance to offer. I hope there’s at least one journalist out there who’s not so cynical as to disregard the insights of a savvy old alien.

And I hope the talking toaster lets him get a word in edgewise.