So I don't know if this gives you a peek into the American male consumer's psyche or just my own, but I've noticed that several products are being marketed on the basis of their (alleged) old-school masculine bona-fides.

Perhaps more troubling is that this appears to be working on me.

Consider a few months ago when I bought a stick of Mitchum deodorant because it had a sticker on it that said something like, "If you only go to the doctor when you think you're dying, you're a Mitchum man."

Or last week when I purchased a bottle of Old Spice body wash that included the following nugget of wisdom: "Old Spice — If your grandfather hadn't worn it, you wouldn't be here."

Or perhaps this Canadian Club whisky ad that I stumbled across today:

• One can Coke Zero Cherry
• One wild cherry Yoplait yogurt
• One cup of coffee
• One Chipotle BBQ Snack Wrap with grilled chicken
• One Honey Mustard Snack Wrap with grilled chicken
• One small order of French fries
• 20-oz Minute Maid diet lemonade
• One cup of hot tea
• Some cottage cheese with pineapples
• One delicious cupcake
• One can Diet Cherry Dr Pepper
• One peanut butter Gatorade nutrition bar

So I'm reading a really cool book right now called Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs by Chuck Klosterman. It's a bunch of semi-schizophrenic pop culture essays. Recommended for fans of The Average American Male and Lucky Wander Boy.

Here's an excerpt from the first chapter:

Chapter 1: This Is Emo 0:01

No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either.

Should I be writing such thoughts? Perhaps not. Perhaps it's a bad idea. I can definitely foresee a scenario where that first paragraph could come back to haunt me, especially if I somehow became marginally famous. If I become marginally famous, I will undoubtedly be interviewed by someone in the media, and the interviewer will inevitably ask, "Fifteen years ago, you wrote that no woman could ever satisfy you. Now that you've been married for almost five years, are those words still true?" And I will have to say, "Oh, God no. Those were the words of an entirely different person -- a person whom I can't even relate to anymore. Honestly, I can't image an existence without _____. She satisfies me in ways that I never even considered. She saved my life, really."

Now, I will be lying. I won't really feel that way. But I'll certainly say those words, and I'll deliver them with the utmost sincerity, even though those sentiments will not be there. So then the interviewer will undoubtedly quote lines from this particular paragraph, thereby reminding me that I swore I would publicly deny my true feelings, and I'll chuckle and say, "Come on, Mr. Rose. That was a literary device. You know I never really believed that."

But here's the thing: I do believe that. It's the truth now, and it will be in the future. And while I'm not exactly happy about that truth, it doesn't make me sad, either. I know it's not my fault.

It's no one's fault, really. Or maybe it's everyone's fault. It should be everyone's fault, because it's everyone's problem. Well, okay...not everyone. Not boring people, and not the profoundly retarded. But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), I'm going to blame John Cusack. [KEEP READING]

So at some point after my last post on the subject, I decided to go in for a closer look at Neko Case.

I knew I'd have to after my dear old friend Logan sent me the following message:

To: Ray
From: Logan
Subject: Neko Case

Highly recommend her. Disagree that "Teenage Feeling" is her best work though. It's a great song, don't get me wrong. But I don't think it's her best song. I don't even think it's her best song on that album. I would give that honor to the title track, "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood." Give it a listen, pay special attention to her voice on the last stanza:

WILL I EVER SEE YOU AGAIN?
WILL THERE BE NO ONE ABOVE ME TO PUT MY FAITH IN?

It will take your breath away.

As Logan's reccomendations tend to be spectuacular, I made a mental note to pick up not only Fox Confessor but also Blacklisted, which Logan named as Neko's best album.

However, being both forgetful and lazy, I didn't take any action for several days. But then I ran across an interview with Ms. Case on the Chicago version of Decider, a site whose scope of coverage and web design I would like to steal.

The interview is actually sort of uneven but this bit about her new album, Middle Cyclone, stuck out at me:

D: You’ve spoken a lot in interviews about the love songs on this record, but “People Got A Lotta Nerve,” “The Tigers Have Spoken,” even “Maybe Sparrow” all speak to the theme of taming what can’t be tamed.

NC: Or not taming what can’t be tamed.

D: Exactly, and a general empathy for animals. Why do you think you revisit that so much?

NC:I think I just have an empathy for nature in general, which I think is why I’ve kind of branched out into not just animals, but also weather. [Laughs.] Getting into weather these days, you know, tornadoes. I think that the more human you realize you are, the more of an animal you realize you are — meaning that it’s okay to not have all the answers. It’s a very Faustian kind of thing — like when Faust asks the minion of the devil to tell him the meaning of life and love, and the devil and the minion go, “Well, Faust, I could tell you that, but your human brain is so small that you wouldn’t get it, so I’m not going to waste my time.” That seems like a really terrible thing, but it’s actually a huge relief. It makes you more forgiving of mankind, and I think it really opens the floodgates of compassion.

Hmmm, alright. Interesting enough. But what really did me in was watching this video (included in the interview) for "Maybe Sparrow" and keeping in mind the above and what Logan had told me in another email about the "haunting echo-y quality" of the production Neko uses and how it "compliments that otherworldly voice she has."

Ah, now I was on to something! I needed more ... but how to procure this music? For some reason (probably convenience), I actually elected to buy Blacklisted from iTunes rather than pirate it. (I'm pretty sure that's a sign of the apycalypse.)

Jumping back and forth across the album, a few tracks stood out — the Aretha Franklin cover "Runnin' Out of Fools," a skeptical screed about finally getting a call from someone who has made you a low priority; "Look for Me (I'll Be Around)," a sombre song about dissolving from someone's life but knowing you'll never be far away; and "I Wish I Was The Moon," a lonesome yeaner I swear I've heard somewhere before.

But it was the short, evocative "Outro With Bees" that fascinated me most. Like "That Teenage Feeling," this song is over before it even really starts. But before it flutters off, it gives us a brief, beautiful glimpse at a relationship that never comes in for a landing, lest the narrator fuck it up. "So it's better, my sweet," Case sings, "that we hover like bees / 'cause there's no sure footing / no love, I believe."

Next I procured Fox Confessor Brings The Flood by actually buying a physical CD from a store, if you can imagine that.

This album felt more personal than Blacklisted — which makes sense since Case wrote or co-wrote all the songs on Fox Confessor. Stand-outs include the title track, which closes without resolution to either of those big spiritual questions Logan pointed out; the aforementioned "Maybe Sparrow," which features lines like, "You'll never pass beyond the gate"; and the closer "The Needle Has Landed" in which Case's narrator delcares, "And if I knew then what's so obvious now, you'd still be here."

But the most important track, the key to unlocking it all, has to be "Hold On, Hold On," a song Neko has been quoted as saying is "actually about me. It's not metaphorical about other people. It's not little pieces of my life made into a story about someone else or someone fictitious." It begins with these lines:

The most tender place in my heart is for strangers

I know it's unkind but my own blood is much too dangerous

And so the other night I was driving around listening to these songs with my windows down and wanderlust in my heart, and that's when it hit me: this is the music of a human being who can't let anyone get close to her, at least not for very long.