I earned some pea-brain points my junior year on the swimmng team. Not that earning pea-brain points itself is an event or even something that happens rarely, because I can assure you that it isn't. I'm just presenting an example. We were competing in Bemidji for an invitational meet and I missed the bus, and so had to drive upstate in my broke-ass, rusted hull of a Ford Fermont. Jon Davis bought the farm playing 5 card draw and I got there just in time to see it. The point that's particularly worth mentioning is my baring it all for a procession of blue-haired society ladies, there for a school bake sale or something of some sort. It was after the meeet, in the showers, and Ian Besse had my shampoo so I walked back to the lockers to get it from him, being as it was mine. So I call across the showers for him to toss it at me, which he does, but everything involved is too slippery at this point, and so - because someone left the doors open to the locker room entrance, and the architect who designed the building hadn't planned on bake sales and swimming meets being held at the same time in such close vincity - Travis Barton, the team captain, yells at me from back in the locker rows, "Buermann! Put some freakin' clothes on will ya, you're gonna give somebody a heart attack." Hello bake sale.

The slogan was a misapplication if there was any sense of satire involved, as it's refrain was too much a testament to my youth, the stupid shit I did, which isn't to say that I've stopped. Maybe it wasn't really a satirical commentary so much as a transmission of symbolic weight, so that by wearing it I became an allegorical figurehead for my generation and all the youth behind me. Or hell, we could take this transmission of said symbolic weight to it's inevitable end and say that so much as I was representative of the human race the t-shirt thus represented a warning to any that should perhaps come in contact with us, "Warning: Trite ganglia evolving, occupied with own self-destruction." Reducto ad absurdism, of course, we can't really say anything about our value as a civilization without some concrete points of reference.

Oh wait, the dolphins, I always forget about the dolphins. Yeah, we are an evil evil species.

Or the banjo. The meaning it takes on when we consider the fact that I play the banjo. When you hit it right it's entirely transcendent, the proverbial becoming one with the universe or remembering the name of your orthodontist. When it's wrong on the other hand it's total butcher-funk ortho-hell. Shrill and painful. Brittle and destitute. I continue to play regardless. Beyond my penchant for massive amounts of beer lies my penchant for playing my banjo at 4 am, crooning my woes over an empty beer-fridge and playing "Who Says the Fiddle is the Devil's Only Box" on the Devil's other box. My roommates are not happy people.

I remember the first time I told my dad that I was going to be a poet (the presumptions involved in such a declaration I will not digress upon here); the reaction was something akin to his reaction when I got my first mohawk, which is to say, terrible. He refused to talk to me for five months when I got the mohawk; he questioned my qualifications to be his son when I started writing. "What are you, an idiot?" he asked, or might as well have asked. He's probably still wondering about it. The banjo was actually an avenue of atonement with him. He was pretty much 100% right about the idiot part, but I'd come a long way in accepting it since wearing the t-shirt, to the chargin of my mother, in my 3rd grade class pictures (I was like a trashy teenage girl on the Maury Povitch show, I hid the shirt under some classy sweater and snuck into the pictures no problem. I can wear what I want Maury!)

I bought the banjo three years ago during a road trip to Mexico with Rob McElrath, who since then has reasonably ceased communications, as I had started bringing my banjo to his place to croon over his empty beer-fridge. It was in a dirty little pawn shop north of Boulder, Colorado. I was rummaging around a darkened basement when I tripped over it, a german-made Horner. 350 bucks poorer I walked out a brand new man, with a used banjo.

And so, you can imagine how I felt when I sat down for coffee with Tony Trischka after a gig he played in Chicago. For obvious enough reasons famous banjo pickers usually require some introduction, e.g. one must note that they are, in smaller circles than do them justice, that they are first of all famous, and second of all that they play banjo particularly well. Tony Trischka is a famous banjo picker, along the lines of a Douglas Dillard or Earl Scruggs, without much monkeying around in the empty platitudes of folk fusion that all the jazzers are into these days. That is to say he's one of the best banjo pickers the human race has to offer, which was why Tony Trischka was playing to an audience of twelve in a dingy little bar in Rogers Park on a Sunday night. My Guinness came in a plastic cup.

We had a chance to sit down with him after the show. "So, what do you do?" he asked me, at some point.

I could have told him I was programming computers, which is an instant invitation to discussion about things that in ordinary conversation bore the fuck out of me. Or I could have told him I play banjo, obviously opening an avenue to common interests, but then I thought that it would probably bore the fuck out of him. So in the hopes of not sounding ostentatiously humble, I'll tell you that I muttered something about writing bad poetry.

"Oh. A poet. Good career choice." Sarcasm. He frowned at me. It was more a look of deep and sincere pity, but only for a second, then he brightened up a little, "At least you don't play banjo."

This, of course, lead to a conversation that bored the fuck out of him. I gave it a good shot. And now you're probably wondering where this is all going.