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53!

Happy Birthday, Paul.

The Jam - The Bitterest Pill by scootaway

Gotdayum!

$239.99, and only available 'til October 2011?  It would take me at least until December 2011 to pay it off, if I bought it today ...

Happy Birthday!

Facebook told me it was Lurker's birthday today. Have a happy, and many more!

Back to Shcool...

School starts today here in Nashville. My commute to work will resume being a nightmare, and now I have a third grader. How did I get here?

50!

Happy Birthday, Paul

Again with the birthdays!

Lurker turns 65! Or at least that's what the card says! Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday, John

Happy Birthday, Joe

Hope it's a good one. Dickhead.

My Mustang

This, my friends, was my first car. Not the same kind of car as my first car, but the actual one -- we sold our '66 Mustang convertible to the man in the driver's seat.

Damn, she was sweet, and oh, how I abused her! We would go out biscuit doughing* in this car, just to get angry people to chase us. This car had a Pioneer sound system that disturbed neighborhoods I wasn't even driving through, and had a modified 289 engine that would fly. It's where I first jammed The Sex Pistols, Killing Joke, Oingo Boingo, The Smiths, Gen X, Billy Idol, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cramps, King Crimson, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Flock of Seagulls and many others.

Its windshield was once smashed by a redneck with a tire tool who I had fucked with on the hallowed grounds of Harding Academy. And one perfect night in late summer of 1985, I was driving around with the top down, listening to ZZ Top with an adult friend who tried to impress upon me the specialness of what we were doing. I didn't get it then, but now I do.

Ah, youth is wasted on the young!

*An activity that involved throwing biscuit dough at the windshields of cars driving in the opposite direction, to invoke outrage that would cause targeted cars to try to catch us. Some chased, but never did catch us, not even the cop car we once inadvertently hit.

Happy Birthday, Dave!

Hope it's a good big one.

Catchy Friday: Middle Aged Man Edition

A little Weezer to remind us of the good old days:

When I look in the mirror, I can't believe what I see
Tell me, who's that funky dude, staring back at me?
Broken, beaten down can't even get around
Without an old-man cane, I fall and hit the ground
Shivering in the cold, I'm bitter and alone

Excuse the bitchin, I shouldn't complain
I should have no feeling, 'cause feeling is pain
As everything I need, is denied me
And everything i want, is taken away from me
But who do I got to blame? Nobody but me

…And I don't wanna be an old man anymore
It's been a year or two since I was out on the floor
Shakin' booty, makin' sweet love all the night
It's time I got back to the Good Life
It's time i got back, it's time i got back
And I don't even know how I got off the track
I wanna go back…Yeah!

Screw this crap, I've had it! I ain't no Mr. Cool
I'm a pig, I'm a dog, so 'scuse me if I drool
I ain't gonna hurt nobody, ain't gonna 'cause a scene
I just need to admit that I want sugar in my tea
Hear me? Hear me? I want sugar in my tea!

…And I don't wanna be an old man anymore
It's been a year or two since I was out on the floor
Shakin' booty, makin' sweet love all the night
It's time I got back to the Good Life
It's time i got back, it's time i got back
And I don't even know how I got off the track
I wanna go back…Yeah!

Beastie

There's just something funny to me about gray-haired men rapping like guys half their age. Good song, though.

Belfegore

Searching for this song online has been something I've done periodically since Gore invented the internets. It was one of my very favorite songs in HS (kudos to Rob White) and I would listen to it at eardrum-damaging volume in my car. Inspired by Planet P, I went searching again and found that I'd always spelled the band's name wrong. God bless the Google and God bless the USA.

I think it still kicks, but it's much to dear to me for objectivity. Listening to it for the first time in about 20 years, suddenly it didn't seem so Thursday.

Planet P

I guess I've gotten to the age where I completely forget certain things until I stumble across them. Here's a perfect example.

Tonto Tonto

Funny story:

I had known Joe approximately two days when we were watching The Tonight Show at stately Drago Manor. All of a sudden, this band came on, and Joe yelped, "Holy shit! I know that guy!" This lead singer is that guy.

Anyface Live at Tip's

On Wednesday, March 11 Anyface will reunite at Tipitina's for one night only. For any bastards who are interested, the show will be streamed on Tipitina's webcast site. In addition, they will be recording an audio and video tape which I should be able to share around. Unless it sucks. In which case, your only chance to hear the suckage will be during the simulcast. Man I wish that was still my chest.

What Are You Listening To?

Lord, I'm musically constipated. I could probably find some undigested hunk of something in my musical intestines, but in my laziness, I've been falling back on comfort food: The Hold Steady, Green Day, Nirvana. Anyone listening to anything bristling with fresh life these days? I went back to Guided by Voices for a bit, but it didn't last. All suggestions welcomed.

Maybe the musical malaise goes with the time of year: gray, cold, wet, and uninspiring. Great time for Mardi Gras, to rouse you out of it. Why are all the best excuses for public drunkenness related to religious holidays?

Work Travel Bad

The term "unbelievably bad" can no longer be used to describe air travel, because no matter how bad it is, it's all too believable. I mean, we got planes landing in fucking Hudson Rivers, for chrissakes. So my trip to Vermont was simply bad. Canceled flight bad, 10-hour layover bad, checking in to an Indian-run motel at 2 a.m. and having to stand outside in 10 degree weather at the after-hours check-in window bad. And 10 degrees is plenty damn cold for a Tennessee wuss. Kept fucking thinking about fucking Joe's last fucking work fucking travel fucking post.

I did get to spend a few not-horrid hours in historic Philadeathia and learned some interesting facts about the Liberty Bell (it didn't have crack in it, but "A" crack, a literal crack in it, go figure).

Just got home sweet home and the old place feels like Christmas in heaven.

Best Description Of Nostalgia Ever

Yep, it's another quote from Truck. The set-up: Michael Perry travels to New York to meet with editors and publishers. While there, he makes a pilgrimage to the Whitney Museum of American Art to see Edward Hopper's Seven A.M., a painting that makes Perry ache with nostalgia. A photo from a truck brochure from 1950 has a similar effect, which is where today's reading picks up:

Not all the neural paths fire in such obvious sequence. The first time I saw those sun-blasted palms backdropping the yellow International, I thought immediately of chase scenes in The Rockford Files ... The theme music, ongoing answering machine joke, Jim's put-upon wit, the way he ran like a stove-up ex-jock, I am fond of the whole package. But whenever he is in flight or in pursuit, my eye is drawn past the Pontiac Firebird into the background where California lies apparently lazy and hot beneath a sun whiter than the one we know here in Wisconsin, and beyond the set I see the new highways and the bare hillsides and I think of the subdivisions and teeming engines to come, and I become petulant over the fact that I can't wander in there. Never mind that the series was shot between 1974 and 1980 and we're hardly talking about garden of Hesperides. It's not about the preservation or the loss. It is that I have been cheated of that place in that moment. This is something beyond nostalgia and verging on saudade, a Portuguese word I first encountered in a Jim Harrison essay in which he spoke of obtuse sentimentality, childish melancholy, and a sense of life irretrievably lost.