The Beetle
I don't get much cause to drive my wife's car. My situation in life has chained me to my sleek, sexy minivan. It seats seven and draws chicks like flies draw honey. No, that's not right. Like honey draws vinegar. Wait wait. You can lead a vinegar to honey, but you can't make it fly. Something like that.

My main opportunity to drive it is for the brief jaunt (that's right I said "jaunt") to my semi-weekly (or is it bi-weekly? Which one means you go twice a week? That one) martial arts class which is still inside a health club. Even though it's shabby, always dirty, irrevocably stained and faded and has more miles on it than Madonna, it has one thing my minivan (or as I call it, "Eros' Chariot") does not: it has a CD player.

I think we all know what I mean when I say "CD player". It means music played too loudly to which I can badly sing along. Sure it's embarrassing from time to time, but it keeps my fingers out of my nose.

Like most people, I have a rotation of CDs I like to listen to as I learn new words to new songs and/or try desperately to recreate some aspect of my quickly fading youth. If I get bored with those, I can grab some dusty old thing buried deep in my collection from many, many rotations past. On my way out this evening I happened grabbed something that sparked an epiphany that I thought I just had to share with all of you lucky people:

It would really suck to be Julian Lennon.

Somehow a few years ago I had gotten it into my head that I had to buy his Photograph Smile album (damn you Conan O'Brien!). The lyrics are straight forgettable adult-contemporary cliché-fests, but damn if he didn't get the old man's ability to write a tune. I never once got the impulse to drive into oncoming traffic as I listened, which is more than I can say should Smashing Pumpkins befoul my radio (hence the CDs... safer).

Tragically, though, his obvious gifts are doomed to be forgotten because of his name, face and voice. Worse, they were destined to be forgotten before he was even born, from the first day someone said "Paul McCartney? This is John Lennon." A few years later "Please Please Me" came out and little Julian was in a 400 foot deep musical hole out of which he would never climb. He was the little baby down the well, only there was no candlelight vigil, no camera crew, no Weekly World News story claiming he was actually the survivor of a crashed spacecraft carrying well-hole sized aliens.

And still worse, he's got the face and the voice and the name to labor under forever. No one ever listens to any Julian Lennon except to pick out "Ooh, that sounds kind of like John." Even when Julian had that one hit back in the 80s when he still looked and sounded exactly like John had John been born a girl, what was the driving force behind that? "Looks just like his old dad, he does."

On top of all that, this loony Asian transsexual comes along and steals his dad right out from under his mom. Her nose I mean, out from under her nose.

And then on top of that they go and have a son who also looks and sounds like John, only if John had been born an Asian girl. And John writes all these songs about and has all these pictures taken with this new boy so that when people think of who John Lennon's son is, they first thing "Sean, innit?" Innit indeed.

So he's got all this going against him. But hey, at least he's go the old man around to build up some first rate father-son resentment, to torment and loathe for the rest of his life as the object of all his contempt and rage, the focal point around which every negative aspect of his life can coalesce and fester in a brilliant, healthy Freudian stew to be resolved at a later date in a world-class made-for-TV moment.

Ooooh, then some crazy fucker shoots the old man.

Jules still has the name and the face and the voice, though. No pressure there.

The crazy Asian transsexual keeps all the money too. Brilliant.

AND oh, I just thought of another one! McCartney writes "Hey Jules" for him, but they make him change it to "Hey Jude" for some reason, so the poor bastard get cut out of that action as well.

Nope. All things being equal, I'd rather be Stella McCartney. Then my dad would still be alive, I'd have a job outside the same field as him and I'd have boobs I could sit around and play with all day. Think how grand life would be then. At least I'd know I'd be in the fucking will.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 6.3


Pops


PS- Photograph Smile is actually pretty good. Not that you asked.

- posted by Pops @ 11:33 PM