Monthly Archives: May 2005

A brief musical rant

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I’m hanging at Roma, feeling my life return to normal. fuego was here earlier, but he needs a little more decompression time before he is able to breathe normally again. So now it’s just me, and I’m doing all right, as long as I have the cash to cover the tab.

So over here MTV plays music, and that’s what’s on the tube right now. The TV is at 5 o’clock high, back over my right shoulder, where the glittering lights can’t eat through my optic nerve and into my brain.

One thing I have noticed however, is that much of the music they’re playing I have heard before. A few minutes ago there was a quartet of singers, two male, two female, covering Super Trouper by Abba. For part of the time I thought they were merely lip-synching to the original tune, only taking the trouble to superimpose a tiresome disco beat. In the end they were so shamelessly self-promoting (finding any excuse to get the name of the band into the video – “We’re not ABBA!”) that I had to conclude that however misguided the project was, no matter how shamelessly exploitative the marketing, these people really did wish they had talent that even approaches the annoying band they are trying to emulate.

Which brings me to my little rant. My rantito. My rantček. If your goal is to make music that sounds exactly like someone else, why bother? I’m still not sure the group I saw tonight wasn’t just playing the original record and wagging their lips. The whole thing lacks courage. It’s ruled by cowardly record executives who get paid piles of money to do the same shit over and over. The sad part is people still buy the crap they’re dishing up.

Just say no, kids. Save your music-buying dollar for musicians.

Thanks!

My Mom can kick your mom’s sorry ass

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First, let’s get comfy with the facts. Maybe you think you’ve got a pretty good mom, but mine is better. (Sorry, mom, don’t mean to embarrass you, but facts are facts. You can’t argue with Science.) I grew up in one of those bizarre stable households where the children are loved and supported by both parents. Maybe you’ve read about something like that. I lived it. I still live it, but from a safe distance.

Because Mom is so great, there are three important lessons I did not learn.

Mom takes good care of us. Almost every meal I ate as a child was a home-cooked masterpiece. As the Pickiest Eater On Earth, I did not fully appreciate how much toil went into each dish I pushed away. Years later, at a dinner with mom’s side of the family, I watched Dupes push a plate back that still had squash casserole on it (he feels the same way about that stuff I do), and say, “Thank you, Munzy, that was a wonderful meal.” I realized he never, ever got up from the table without thanking the cook. I, on the other hand, had never given the wonderful meals I had been served my whole life a second thought. I try now to always thank the cook, but I’m sure I miss sometimes.

There are a lot of things I’ve probably forgotten to say thank you for. Big things like plane tickets, little things like, well, all those thousands of tolerances and smiles that made me who I am now. It’s impossible to say thank you for each and every one, there’d be no time for anything else. For all those little things my only way to say thank you is to crash ahead with this big dumb experiment called life and do the best I can. For the big things, though, the numerable things, specific thanks are in order. Thanks, Mom.

Now, forty years later, I’m pretty good at please and thank you. Better than some, not as good as others, but ahead of the curve. I’m a nice guy, polite out the wazoo. (Mom may beg to differ.) But that leads me to the third thing I didn’t learn so well. The thing that’s going to decide whether I’m hanging out with the sheep or the goats when the final horn blows. Please and Thank You are phrases to show appreciation for something someone else has done. More powerful than either of those, and the lesson I have yet to master, is the phrase “Let me do that.”

There are lots of permutations of that phrase, but it comes down to pulling your ass out of the comfy chair after the Thanksgiving dinner and helping with the dishes. It’s about running to the store when you’re tired, or folding someone else’s laundry. There could be a lot more ‘Let me to that’ in my family, but after all these years it is a lesson I’m still working on. Living alone is good practice for that.

I guess. like the rest of humanity, I am a work in progress. Overall, however, things are going well for me. I’m on a good road, and it was Mom who pointed the way.

Thanks!

Almost Midnight

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It was two weeks ago that my clock stopped. Two weeks ago, two minutes until midnight. The second hand was on the upsweep, challenging the gods of time in the way that second hands do, impatient and self-important, when it was forced to yield to influences it knew nothing of: Gravity, friction, and the inevitable.

It’s the only clock in the place. Out of habit I look at it several times a day, and it is always two minutes before midnight. How quickly I became accustomed to its presence over the door, ticking loudly. The clock stopped once before and I put in a new AA, but that didn’t last long at all and like hell I’m putting in another one.

It is not, and never will be, two minutes before noon. The clock stopped at night, just before the moment, and it hovers there yet, the hands waiting patiently for the impetus to sweep the final two minutes. I look that way and I wonder what I would do if that hands moved again. It’s two minutes until something big, but the clock is not ticking. Not that I can hear, anyway.

Thanks!

Googleday, bloody Googleday

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It’s been a while, so I climbed into the way-back machine to see what’s been bringing people here. Some are interesting, others, not, but hell, it gets an episode out without making any demands on my creativity.

  • saturday has a morning shirt – linked to a crappy episode
  • Tomas pronounced Tomash – linked to an old story about a czech road trip
  • “no squirrel” – I don’t have to tell you where that one led.
  • pictures “girl drinking beer” – went to the bars of the world category page.
  • the best cool games and racing games shooting games in the whole wold –
  • Death by Squirrel – the usual connection
  • “I love amy”-lee 2004 – I guess lee loves amy, too!
  • short stories on disguise, anonymity and behaviour – linked to the stories category page, where thiere might even have been something appropriate. Probably not, though.
  • hwy 60 in chile – Chile, New Mexico – they’re pretty similar
  • INTERSTATE 60: EPISODES OF THE ROAD (2004) – came within seconds of the search above, but from halfway around the world.
  • boy gets haircut in czech prison – linked to my episode about my landlord
  • explanation of edward gorey style – linked to an old, old episode about the books I had with me at the moment
  • Roma+time – top match discusses the strange way time works at one of my favorite hangouts
  • “reusable space vehicle” – one of my more outrageous get poor quick schemes.
  • dog injuries thorn in leg from cactus – I hope they found something more useful than this.
  • zepter vacuum cleaner – just ask. I know all about that stuff. fuego and I practically invented the damn thing.
  • roma pizzeria mac road – links to the same episode as the last one. Such an odd combination of things they may actually have been looking for this site.
  • czechs reserved people – linked to a story about how czechs may be standoffish, but at least they’re not New Yorkers.
  • “the open bar” san diego – the episode really doesn’t express what a crappy bar that is, but I like the way it flows.
  • “plastic miniskirt” – the other top contenders were muck more enticing than my Bulwer-Lytton episode.
  • poems about mr.little – went to the Idle Chit-Chat category page and nowhere else.
  • googles+x-ray+power – I love bad spelling. Went to an episode like this one.
  • get you drunk quick – my classic episode isn’t scoring as high anymore.
  • “pacific beach” shorts men’s -“beach boy” -“san diego” – back to my pants.
  • m o j a v e r o s e b o o b s – if this is not the perfect three-word summation of my life, I don’t know what is. Lead the searcher to Bobbi.
  • things to write in y e a r b o o k s – this is a seasonal one; I’ve gotten quite a few lately. Links to this episode about y e a r b o o k s
  • alpha romeo 1985 – linked to the much-loved episode about H i g h w a y 60, which is particularly interesting for the comments.
  • b u d v a r bar – Gotta love them b u d v a r bars.
  • Sunday Bloody Sunday – I rated surprisingly high on that search on Yahoo Japan. Linked to an episode about the day after a big night.
  • toast plate thermodynamics – not the usual way people reach the egg pages, but in interesting one.
  • small google pictures on old faithful – linked to one of the Y e l l o w s t o n e episodes.
  • bacteria mats – linked to the same episode, where there is actually a picture of bacteria mats.
  • “bare legs” japan|japanese|sapporo|hokkaido winter|freezing – linked to an episode that has nothing to do with Japan.

And, of course, the usual suspects.

I got a link from babelfish translating the main page into German. I looked at how it handled the bit I wrote in czech a few days ago, and apparently it assumed it was just some dialect of English it could not deal with. Which is how that writing probably looks to the Czechs, as well.

Thanks!

A quiet week in blogville

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fuego is getting married this week, and I have been swept up in the activity, the non-stop go-go-go of preparation and hanging out with a bunch of people who are on vacation in a foreign country. I’m not even sure when I’ll be able to post this notification that I won’t be posting much.

Episodes should return to their irregular schedule around May 7th.

Thanks!